Please implement something to teach players how to play

[Shurrikhan]

Anyone that doesn't take hobbies seriously enough to want to get decent at them should maybe find something else. It just boggles my mind. How can anyone not want to be good at things they enjoy?

"Don't you dare read a single book unless you're committing to reading 20 this week!"

People engage with their hobbies at a variety of levels. That's why they are hobbies, not jobs.

A more apt analogy would be to read a good psychological drama by skimming through it haphazardly, noting by its end only that you, "Heh, got some chuckles, at least," and then asking that the author better milk their comedic aspects, even if at the expense of all else... despite those aspects being the least of what was great about the book to anyone who read the whole thing.

Or, say, calling yourself a "drone enthusiast", but your only actual involvement in that is saving up several grand, buying a high-end drone, and seeing if you can fly it more than a hundred feet before wrecking it, for a change. No actual learning how to fly, no actual knowledge about or interest in the drone itself, just spending and crashing, because the thrill of potentially not destroying your hard-earned money is, for you, entertaining enough in and of itself.

By experiencing the entertainment so differently from was intended, one inevitably ends up split from everyone else and ends up having interests and preferences at odds with anyone who experienced the subject area as intended. Expect backlash.

Nope. Relatively new phenomenon in MMOs, and an atrocity.

And a reason your DPS queues get longer.

Literally present from the start, and across DnD before that. "Healer" as some mutually exclusive task set is the far newer idea -- albeit one that doesn't actually exist in the class designs themselves, but simply in the minds of those who want an excuse for time spent idle.

[TaleraRistain]

Literally present from the start, and across DnD before that. "Healer" as some mutually exclusive task set is the far newer idea -- albeit one that doesn't actually exist in the class designs themselves, but simply in the minds of those who want an excuse for time spent idle.

Not even remotely true. My friend got all kinds of shit in EverQuest on his dwarven cleric because he would put Yaulp on himself and go up to hit things. You were there to heal and shield and gods help you if you did anything else.

[Shurrikhan]

Not even remotely true. My friend got all kinds of shit in EverQuest on his dwarven cleric because he would put Yaulp on himself and go up to hit things. You were there to heal and shield and gods help you if you did anything else.

EverQuest is not the first, and that has more to do with spell schools, ability balance, and, above all, little patience for people to learn how to juggle their spells due to just how punishing a wipe would be.

But let me guess, they also gave him shit over using Hammer of Wrath/Striking/etc. on undead and before one's party has access yet to enchanted weapons, or Holy Might/Aweflash/etc when the stun could prevent more damage than Healing/Sincere Remedy/etc., respectively, could heal? Told him he should never use Blessing of Piety or the like because it costs too much mana that should be reserved for spamming , even when he had plenty?

...They were being selfishly reductive, likely to the disbenefit of the run, on the off-chance their Cleric hadn't yet learned to juggle their skills appropriately. But, that's what happens when literally everything is slow af -- as any actual failure, above all else, wastes even more inordinate amounts of time. That, however, has little bearing on design since.

What you're describing has at least as much to do, in core RPG terms, with the tendency to Rest after every fight on the off-chance you might need your fifth Minor Healing charge as it does actual intended design on classes capable of healing. It's a matter of (excessive) caution, over taking the time and chances to become, ultimately, more efficient. Cleric was a flex support. Reducing it to a healer hardly seems "intended" if it thereby wastes 3/4s of the kit.

[TaleraRistain]

EverQuest is not the first, and that has more to do with spell schools, ability balance, and, above all, little patience for people to learn how to juggle their spells due to just how punishing a wipe would be.

But let me guess, they also gave him shit over using Hammer of Wrath/Striking/etc. on undead and before one's party has access yet to enchanted weapons, or Holy Might/Aweflash/etc when the stun could prevent more damage than Healing/Sincere Remedy/etc., respectively, could heal? Told him he should never use Blessing of Piety or the like because it costs too much mana that should be reserved for spamming , even when he had plenty?

...They were being selfishly reductive, likely to the disbenefit of the run, on the off-chance their Cleric hadn't yet learned to juggle their skills appropriately. But, that's what happens when literally everything is slow af -- as any actual failure, above all else, wastes even more inordinate amounts of time. That, however, has little bearing on design since.

What you're describing has at least as much to do, in core RPG terms, with the tendency to Rest after every fight on the off-chance you might need your fifth Minor Healing charge as it does actual intended design on classes capable of healing. It's a matter of (excessive) caution, over taking the time and chances to become, ultimately, more efficient. Cleric was a flex support. Reducing it to a healer hardly seems "intended" if it thereby wastes 3/4s of the kit.

EQ had a lot more set in stone roles. When we were raiding, clerics had a channel where they coordinated their chain heals. Enchanters like me had a channel where we coordinated our mezzes. I kept the haste and the mana regen going otherwise because dropping my pitiful DoT or doing my DD on anything really was a waste of mana because the devs didn't design us with high damage in mind. Same with my cleric friend. He did that because he was a dwarf and wanted to behave like a Tolkien dwarf, not because the design made it more than slapping the mob. The actual direct damage classes handled whittling everything down. I quit after Depths, so maybe things changed up a bit after that point.

This was also the case in early WoW and early EQII though since everyone was supposed to be able to solo the solo content it wasn't as rigid until you got into more grouping content. And in WoW it could depend on your build. But to claim this the idea of set roles was never the norm is not true. When a true support role was still a thing, it was very much heavily baked into game design.

[Shurrikhan]

But to claim this the idea of set roles was never the norm is not true.

I never made that claim. I only said that there was no point at which having the capacity for healing was wholly mutually exclusive with all other actions or capacities.

In EQII, I dealt damage in downtime. In WoW, I dealt damage in downtime. In NWN, I dealt damage in downtime. Etc., etc.

At no point did dealing damage when there was nothing better to do seem contradictory or unintuitive just because of my being a healer, and in most cases there were even situations by which it was clearly worth timing healing around opportunities for other means of beneficial throughput.

[SniperCT]

Not even remotely true. My friend got all kinds of shit in EverQuest on his dwarven cleric because he would put Yaulp on himself and go up to hit things. You were there to heal and shield and gods help you if you did anything else.

Back in the day if you so much as suggested a druid could dps or a paladin tank in WoW you got called a heathen. I think for a lot of players there's this ingrained sense of how things are that has to be unlearned for FF14

It's not that the classes didn't have a toolkit to allow dps, but players set an expectation early on. Plus some of these games the content required healers to spend most of their time healing and any attempts to DPS could lead to a wipe.

It's a really hard mindset to shake off.

[TaleraRistain]

Back in the day if you so much as suggested a druid could dps or a paladin tank in WoW you got called a heathen. I think for a lot of players there's this ingrained sense of how things are that has to be unlearned for FF14

It's not that the classes didn't have a toolkit to allow dps, but players set an expectation early on. Plus some of these games the content required healers to spend most of their time healing and any attempts to DPS could lead to a wipe.

It's a really hard mindset to shake off.

It was a situation where classes didn't have a toolkit for dps in EQ. My DoT and direct damage as an enchanter was pretty much pointless. I didn't even use them charm soloing. That's because my kit revolved around support. I was keeping the group hasted, keeping up mana regen, slowing the mob we were focused on, and making these 7 mobs drool on themselves while I mind-controlled an 8th into fighting for us. If I felt froggy, I got my pet Shiny Bob out and let him do his pitiful damage on the focused mob. The game was designed with the idea that certain classes kept to specific roles. We could work outside the box sometimes, like the night a party couldn't find a tank so we let a troll shaman kite mobs around in a circle while our rangers and mages plunked away and I kept things slowed, but it was incredibly slow going because that group was missing a key role that made normal camping groups work. So, yes, in early MMO times it was a case where tank and support classes didn't have the tools for dps because the game expected they would fulfill a certain role and made that role necessary.

If XIV required the same amount of support to a party and had dps skills that were less effective, then we'd see a game design that supported a similar mentality. The difference is that XIV does provide an adequate toolkit for dps and fights aren't designed in such a way that they expect certain classes will always be busy with certain roles. It's a shame, really. I rather enjoyed early in this game when we still did things like Sleep/Repose the big guy in the second Brayflox fight, because the team needed to focus the little guy down. And you would bring slightly different things to the table depending on which other classes you had leveled up to get cross class skills from. But that's a place where player expectation bit us on the ass, ie every healer *must* level a THM for Swiftcast. I'd have loved if our choice as healers to dps really was a balancing act but it's turned into just a default we do because the game doesn't make us responsible for anything else and doesn't even make healing something we always need to be doing.