!! Fix Healer Rescue

[Miracle_Diva]

Dying is better for me because it helps me learn which AoEs I can DPS through.

Or you can stay with your group so you could get shielded and healed and no one would need to Rescue you. I am very sorry, but after that I just can't take you seriously anymore.
I thought you're legitimately being targeted by troll healers, but you just stay out of position on purpose and then cry about being pulled to your healers so they would have easier time to heal EVERYONE.

[Goji1639]

Or you can stay with your group so you could get shielded and healed and no one would need to Rescue you. I am very sorry, but after that I just can't take you seriously anymore.
I thought you're legitimately being targeted by troll healers, but you just stay out of position on purpose and then cry about being pulled to your healers so they would have easier time to heal EVERYONE.

Healers can heal me fine, I'm always in heal/shield range. They just pull me out of AoEs because apparently they don't realize that we're all overscaled by like 50 ilvls for everything we do and AoEs do virtually no damage.

Most Healers are just really bad at using Rescue.

[Miracle_Diva]

Healers can heal me fine, I'm always in heal/shield range. They just pull me out of AoEs because apparently they don't realize that we're all overscaled by like 50 ilvls for everything we do and AoEs do virtually no damage.

Most Healers are just really bad at using Rescue.

I think it's time to actually take a hint and stop standing in AOEs. All this time healers were adjusting to you, time to adjust to healers and you will stop being pulled *by everyone*.

[Goji1639]

I think it's time to actually take a hint and stop standing in AOEs. All this time healers were adjusting to you, time to adjust to healers and you will stop being pulled *by everyone*.

Nah, why would I intentionally play sub optimal just because random people in my party don't know what they're doing? Besides, every time a Healer annoys someone by using Rescue poorly we're that much closer to getting the community consensus we need to get rid of the ability all together. So, keep doing your thing.

[Miracle_Diva]

Nah, why would I intentionally play sub optimal just because random people in my party don't know what they're doing?

Said someone who needs to get rescued every time. Keep trying.

[Packetdancer]

Is there a reason why there shouldn't be a toggle? It's incredibly easy to code and would take virtually no effort for SE. World of Warcraft added a toggle to the same ability for the same reasons.

As many, many, many healers have said in this thread, a toggle would simply prevent Rescue from being used, as healers already track enough things; buffs, debuffs, whether the other AST gave that particular DPS a card yet or not, has the other AST popped Divination recently and so it's a good time to pop yours, or is there a risk they're about to do the same and it'll overwrite. Moreover, in higher-end content people can have enough buffs and debuffs going at once that they actually vanish off the side of the party list, forcing you to select the player to check their full buffs and debuffs.

Rescue's timing is incredibly weird (which is why it is hit-or-miss whether it works or not); in order to have even a chance that it fires properly you need to pop it almost immediately when it becomes clear it'll save someone. If there was a debuff buried somewhere in that list which said "Rescue will not work on this person, just let them die when they stand in the AoE", by the time you could find it and confirm someone had it, it would already be too late to use Rescue.

So—as many, many, many healers in this thread have said—if there was a toggle that meant there was a solid chance that our Rescue ability just arbitrarily wouldn't work based on someone else's decision, rather than seeking the indicator that this DPS has disabled our ability to save them, the majority of us would just assume that they had, remove Rescue from our bars, and use that casting window to do other things.

At which point you would've spent a lot of time and development energy coding a toggle for one ability which would, functionally, have the same effect as just removing the ability would've. Thus, if Rescue is enough of a problem to warrant a toggle, then it makes more sense to just remove it and give healers something else to fill that slot. (Ideally something unique to the role, since literally every healer utility other than the instant reposition of Rescue is shared with some other job.)

This is why I argue that if you want to take the toggle path (solely to allow Rescue to be used in uptime with pre-discussion with others), rather than adding special case code just for Rescue, it makes more sense to examine the toggle functionality more generally and see where else can benefit. That way, the dev time isn't wasted on just one niche situation; Rescue is, after all, far from the only ability in this game that can be used to troll.

(I mean, I think a lot of us could make a solid argument for why RDM LB3 should be able to be disabled in PUG runs of anything involving floor mechanics. It might be a ridiculous argument, but I've died to RDMs trolling by making all floor mechanics invisible with LB3 more often than I've died to someone misusing Rescue.)

Nope, but I do code and I do know that SE already has the functionality coded in this game to disable pull in effects. They only have to flip a switch to turn it on under the right conditions. This isn't complex or layered.

This is an oversimplification. While you're right that knockback immunity status effects exist in game, and so you could hypothetically just make this toggle to that, you're leaving out how those effects are actually implemented and the results this would have on gameplay.

The current effect nullifies far more than Rescue; using knockback immunity makes you immune to many boss knockback and draw-in mechanics. If you just had a toggle to turn the knockback prevention effect on constantly, you're now giving someone 100% immunity to all knockbacks and draw-ins that can be nullified; they only need to disable Rescue to turn that on. Obviously, that's no good; it would be cheesed to the moon and back, as people would just toggle it regardless to prevent all knockbacks.

So let's say you just make it so that when you hit someone with Rescue who has that toggle on, it turns on the effect for, say, five seconds (to avoid the Rescue effect from acting on the person). This is better, right? But you would absolutely have people cheese that, too. After all, it would effectively let you give someone an extra knockback immunity. Have someone disable Rescue, then the healer casts Rescue on them right before a knockback where they want to keep uptime, et voila, they get the anti-Rescue knockback immunity and stay in place without having to eat their Arm's Length; now they have that cooldown still available for a different mechanic later.

(And if you don't think people would cheese things that way with it, your experiences in high-end content are extremely different than mine.)

So, really, for the toggle to function the way you intend specifically, you'd need to make a new status effect which specifically granted immunity to Rescue (say, grants a 100% dodge chance to that one specific ability) rather than having Rescue fire and just blocking the knockback effect. Which is fine, but means you can't use the existing knockback/draw-in immunity code... which means the existence of said effect is sort of irrelevant to implementing this.

You have to write a new method of preventing it anyway.

[Goji1639]

Snip

As I've answered "many many times," an icon can be placed on the actual character plate. If you can see where he's standing you can see whether or not Rescue will work, no additional thinking required.

If some Healers will abandon Rescue if it's a toggle then whatever, it's their choice. There's really no reason to, though.

As for the coding, all the switch has to do is make a differentiation between friendly and enemy units, which we also know the game can already do. Pop an Arms Length type effect when a friendly unit attempts to reposition you via pull in or knock back. There's only one way friendly units can reposition you, so done and done.

I admit I'm also bewildered. I think I have probably been Rescued less than 10 times in this game total (whether playing healer or not), and as a healer I find myself using Rescue maybe once every other month, usually on sprouts in Crystal Tower raids who don't know the mechanics and are about to die.

This thread makes it sound like Rescue is used constantly, to the point that Goji's describing other players as "the enemy", which seems incredibly extreme.

Yes, other players can be a hindrance or a hazard; I've had plenty of people run around in a panic and drop an AoE on me, drag the trailing-exoflare mechanics across where I'm standing during Dun Scaith, Orbonne Monastery or Copied Factory. I've seen people not interrupt the adds in Puppets' Bunker more times than I want to think (thus inflicting paralysis on me). I've had people run across landmines and obliterate the entire party in Palace of the Dead or Heaven-on-High... sometimes near the end of the deep dungeon.

Heck, I've seen DPS greed more than a few times on E9S, die, and then taken their portion of a spread-or-stack mechanic in addition to my own since they're down, thus instantly dying.

In short, I have racked up quite a few deaths and wipes in this game which stem from someone else doing a thing wrong. But that doesn't mean the other players are "the enemy"; this is a collaborative game, and I'm still trying to work with them to solve things. (Even when sometimes the other players might make me want to tear out my own hair.)

You all get too worked up over my use of the word "enemy." I'm basically just using it interchangeably with the word obstacle; which is what Healers are in this situation.

Asking for a toggle is hardly extreme, and there have been no compelling points made against the idea; so I'm continuing to promote it. That's all that's happening with me here.

[Packetdancer]

I admit I'm also bewildered. I think I have probably been Rescued less than 10 times in this game total (whether playing healer or not), and as a healer I find myself using Rescue maybe once every other month, usually on sprouts in Crystal Tower raids who don't know the mechanics and are about to die.

This thread makes it sound like Rescue is used constantly, to the point that Goji's describing other players as "the enemy", which seems incredibly extreme.

Yes, other players can be a hindrance or a hazard; I've had plenty of people run around in a panic and drop an AoE on me, drag the trailing-exoflare mechanics across where I'm standing during Dun Scaith, Orbonne Monastery or Copied Factory. I've seen people not interrupt the adds in Puppets' Bunker more times than I want to think (thus inflicting paralysis on me). I've had people run across landmines and obliterate the entire party in Palace of the Dead or Heaven-on-High... sometimes near the end of the deep dungeon.

Heck, I've seen DPS greed more than a few times on E9S, die, and then taken their portion of a spread-or-stack mechanic in addition to my own since they're down, thus instantly dying.

In short, I have racked up quite a few deaths and wipes in this game which stem from someone else doing a thing wrong. But that doesn't mean the other players are "the enemy"; this is a collaborative game, and I'm still trying to work with them to solve things. (Even when sometimes the other players might make me want to tear out my own hair.)

[Packetdancer]

As I've answered "many many times," an icon can be placed on the actual character plate. If you can see where he's standing you can see whether or not Rescue will work, no additional thinking required.

Then you have to replace the status icon on the nameplate (i.e., the 'in party' or 'mentor' status stuff), which would require obscuring the mentor crown; something which, regardless of what the NA/EU opinion of mentors may be, Square-Enix demonstrably doesn't want to do. Otherwise they would not force the mentor crown on when you run mentor roulette; they want it there to indicate "you can ask this person for help on mechanics or how this duty works", and even make you click through a "Yes, I understand this is what the crown means" screen when turning your mentor crown on outside of mentor roulette.

(Whether or not the crown actually serves that purpose is a whole other—probably lengthy—discussion, but that's immaterial here to what Square-Enix's demonstrated intent is.)

So now either the "I cannot be rescued" status hides the mentor crown (something the devs probably don't want), or the mentor crown hides the "I cannot be rescued" status (thus meaning healers have no way of knowing who can or cannot be rescued).

The alternative is to write new nameplate code that has a second status slot specifically for showing this one effect (which seems like a lot of effort for one specific use case), OR using the existing status effect buff/debuff system that already exists in game (which does not involve much development effort, but has been pointed out to be a flawed way of communicating something as vital as "I have disabled your capability to use certain of your abillities").

Moreover, many, many players disable other-player nameplates to avoid visual clutter, especially during alliance raids. If you only see the HP bar, the status icon will be missing entirely anyway, so it's quite possible to see where someone is standing and still not have this communicated, thus making the entire proposed solution moot in that case to start with.

If you grant Player A the power to disable Player B's abilities, it is good to communicate that to Player B in a clear manner. The issues with communicating that in a clear and reliable manner have been reiterated in this thread, multiple times and sometimes (admittedly, probably most often by me) in potentially-exhausting detail. There is not a good quick and dirty solution which addresses those.

Either you have a hackish half-assed solution which causes most healers not to want to bother with the ability because they have no idea if it'll work or not, and—since we're discussing optimal battle performance and not wasting GCDs that could be otherwise used to damage and such—just use that time for something guaranteed to work and more efficient instead, or you come up with a more detailed and in-depth solution to communicate "I am disabling these abilities of yours" and look at whether it's something more generally applicable to other skills.

Or—as a number of healers have proposed in this thread—you just say "Rescue is causing too much trouble, remove it entirely, give healers something new and cool, bid farewell to the situations where Rescue does benefit in the name of having DPS not resent being pulled to safety."

I'm going to be a little blunt, Goji: you're coming across right now as though you really want Rescue out of the game, but you don't want to actually be in the position of saying "I don't want you other players to have this ability anymore". Which I understand; saying "I want to take away this thing from other people" isn't a comfortable position to be in, and it's more comfortable to frame it as "I don't want to have this particular mechanic able to affect me". But you keep throwing out there that this is a "simple" solution because one game did it another way.

But the two games are not the same; even you note that, saying that you prefer FFXIV to WoW for other reasons. Solutions are not interchangeable, especially in high-end content, because high-end content differs even more than casual content between the two games.

And there are more than 20 pages of people explaining why the hypothetical "simple" solutions cause other problems. Just reiterating that you think it's simple to solve does not actually do away with the complications being brought up, and you reiterating that no, no, really, it's simple doesn't actually feel like you're moving the discussion forward. It instead feels dismissive of the various flaws and concerns that the various healers in this thread have pointed out. Which comes across as though you don't actually want a solution to the problem... you just want it to go away without having to actually consider the implications of doing so.

Which, I suppose, isn't too surprising; referring to your fellow players—particularly healers—as 'the enemy" doesn't really make it feel like you want to find a collaborative solution. Whether I'm reading 'too much' into that term or not, it is a term that frames the entire discussion in an adversarial light; whether healers are "the enemy" or "an obstacle" or "a hindrance" or whatever, it frames them as something you strive against, rather than as fellow players who you want to work with.

Asking for a toggle is hardly extreme, and there have been no compelling points made against the idea; so I'm continuing to promote it. That's all that's happening with me here.

"Compelling" is in the eye of the beholder here. I find many of the arguments being made by the other healers in this thread quite compelling, both as to why Rescue can be useful right now, and why your proposed methods of dealing with it are flawed.

You may consider all of the issues and concerns brought up irrelevant; that's fine, as everyone can have an opinion. But if party A says "I want party B to no longer be able to do X" and absolutely every response from party B earns "Yeah, I don't find that compelling", then it's not a discussion; it's just party A insisting on something.

And at that point, it doesn't matter if party B says anything or not; it will have no effect on party A, so party B might as well just shrug and walk away.

(And, honestly... that's probably what I ought to do here.)

[van_arn]

Dunno, if I noticed a DPS intentionally stacking vuln I'd rescue them too.

If they flipped out I'd make sure to use it on cooldown.

This assumes I didn't just kick them for intentionally stacking vuln.