A Modest SCH Adjustment Suggestion - Chain Stratagem

[Aword3213]

Ahh…I’ve only played the game for a few months, but I was told that this game had amazing developers. I guess that’s a lie then. I came from…a game…that had disingenuous developers and would like to not invest time into something like that again.

Also have some friends who were intrigued I was playing and were thinking of jumping in, but I guess I’ll warn them to save their time/money and we’ll find something else to play together.

You'll find most people on job sections of forum are usually for venting. Always take their criticisms with a grain of salt. People who are enjoying the game or who are happy about EW are usually the ones not vocal about it. You'll find surveys work in similar ways.

if you read enough replies, you'll know lots of people are angry because

-the game is not taking the direction they want it to take.

-they hate holy trinity, the core design of the game, to begin with. They want healers to be able to outmatch damage dealers, and even tank the boss with shields and mitigation

-They like old design that got changed overtime

Not saying their criticisms are not without merit though. Some people do make good points in their complaints and I 100% support them. But there're also some people who only want the exact thing they have in mind. They are quick to dismiss other people when those ideas and feedback don't suit their agenda.

Also do note people tend to over exaggerate when they are complaining. Once you have enough experience in the game, you'll find lots criticism people keep making are simply not true at all, at least not 100% true. In short, don't trust everything on the internet.

[Shurrikhan]

Also do note people tend to over exaggerate when they are complaining.

They want healers to be able to outmatch damage dealers, and even tank the boss with shields and mitigation

Irony intended?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

-they hate holy trinity, the core design of the game, to begin with. They want healers to be able to outmatch damage dealers, and even tank the boss with shields and mitigation.

The kind of mental gymnastic performed to end up with this conclusion is beyond my comprehension …

Just how? Where do you specifically read about this?

[Aword3213]

Irony intended?

Yes, I'm not afraid to admit I was over exaggerating.

Some people do complain about Holy Trinity thing, not just healers though. It's hard to conclude what they really want about this game. I can only surmise those people want to reduce the cooperative element from the game, which might result every job can do everything once players have enough skills for it

[Shurrikhan]

Some people do complain about Holy Trinity thing, not just healers though. It's hard to conclude what they really want about this game.

...Why should people's complaints be limited solely to a single thing?

You may as well have said their positions are muddied because they also want more to do on tanks, not just healers.

I can only surmise those people want to reduce the cooperative element from the game, which might result every job can do everything once players have enough skills for it.

That being said, the historical purpose of a "trinity" system has generally been to reduce the breadth of tasks expected of a player -- essentially replacing, say, a large portion of the actual efforts involved in "tanking" with merely being "a tank" (doing, for the most part, what a DPS does, but simply slapping a massive threat modifier atop that so that you're made a meat-shield by default). There is a tremendous difference between having more to do, as commonly asked for by those you consider as against the "holy trinity" and everyone being equally able to do everything.

[Aword3213]

...Why should people's complaints be limited solely to a single thing?

You may as well have said their positions are muddied because they also want more to do on tanks, not just healers.

That being said, the historical purpose of a "trinity" system has generally been to reduce the breadth of tasks expected of a player -- essentially replacing, say, a large portion of the actual efforts involved in "tanking" with merely being "a tank" (doing, for the most part, what a DPS does, but simply slapping a massive threat modifier atop that so that you're made a meat-shield by default). There is a tremendous difference between having more to do, as commonly asked for by those you consider as against the "holy trinity" and everyone being equally able to do everything.

Maybe yours is the right word for it if we're talking about the same group of people. I brought this up because there was a reply that directly complained about it from the Tank forum, which reminds me of some replies here talking about it, albeit very indirectly.

To be honest, I very much hate the "Holy Trinity", the Damager-Healer-Tank Trifecta... A combat system that encourages homogenization

The ones I read were a long time ago. I would definitely made replies towards them had I registered in this forum earlier. But their sentiment impressed me. Like asking to deal higher damage as healer, to be able to outdps a true damage dealer if performed optimally. make shields stack so we can take busters when tank died. To bad I couldn't remember the name of the thread nor the quote.

but the sentiment was close to this one

Why not balance the game so that every dungeon would require a DPS with healing abilities? Maybe let one more DPS join and add a few basic healing spells. And give healers more attack powers. If you're making all classes feel the same, might as well fix this mess by making all roles feel the same. At least this way healer wouldn't be so pressured with "healing right" and you would eliminate awkward situations of loss when healer goes down in a dungeon.

[Roeshel]

They're not taking baby steps, they just have no clue what they are doing, and have admitted to it even!

They do not want to fix healers, because it is a zero issue for them.

THEY. DO. NOT. CARE.

I am pretty sure that Holy 2 is available only while you are under some buff like Thin Air. Same goes for Ast's Gravity 2 and their own version of a self-buff.

They do care about the healer's gameplay. They are making optimal HPS output more and more reliant on optimal DPS output and we can clearly see that with Sage.

As much as some people love the old cleric stance or emnity & mp management, those things were basically preventing you from having fluid gameplay. Didn't someone tell me that healers were interrupting casts because they couldn't afford the mp cost or something like that? How is that a good thing?

[bundythenoob]

a couple of things to note:

not only have the devs stated in the past that they DO NOT LIKE PLAYING TANKS OR HEALERS, and instead of HIRING A DEV THAT LIKES TANKS and HIRING A DEV THAT LIKES HEALERS in order to FURTHER DEVELOP THE JOBS THAT THEIR RESPECTIVE PLAYERBASES ENJOY, those very same devs have been made to """rework""" jobs WHICH THEY NEITHER LIKE NOR UNDERSTAND for a playerbase that will most likely abandon said jobs after they realise that those roles come with inherit responsibility and the need to pay attention to more than just the glowing buttons on their hotbar or the netflix tab they have open on their other monitor

which brings the big question... if this game is truly growing at the exponential rate that it is, WHERE IS THAT MONEY GOING if not back into making the GAMEPLAY experience better for the PEOPLE WHO PAY FOR THE GAME

it's sure as hell NOT going to hiring some devs to fix the 1.0 spaghetti code that prevents encounter design from changing
it's sure as hell NOT going to hiring DEDICATED DEVS that can help fix issues with the jobs people enjoy, so that the current DPS devs can focus on all DPS jobs equally

but it sure as hell IS going towards marketing, glamour shoppe, designing mounts, and whatever else maximises profits over the enjoyment of the mid-core and veteran playerbase. and yes, while there may be a lot of newcomers, those newcomers will eventually crave a challenge after getting a feel for their jobs; however, if their job only takes about 20 minutes in front of a training dummy to master...then what is there to look forward to? Estinien haircut and outfit? Alphinaud's carbuncle mount? there will always be a way to lower the skill floor without completely destroying the skill ceiling, hell the devs already lowered the floor by changing aggro to be friendlier to new tanks and healers, so why bust the ceiling down when lazy entitled people won't ever even consider it exists?

there's like 19 jobs in the game, you're telling me that EVERY healer has to have the same brainded set of DPS tools and a lack of meaningful buffs/debuffs to weave in between their already ludicrously strong OGCD heals? EVERY tank has to have the same generic tank mastery perk and tank stance, the same "spam one button 5x burst window" playstyle, and a lack of any complex mitigation tools outside of "press cooldown during tankbuster cast time"? you see much more gameplay variety in (some) DPS jobs BECAUSE THE DEVS LIKE TO DESIGN THEM. there's obviously love and effort put into designing (some) DPS jobs, so why can't the other roles receive the same treatment? weren't they supposed to BUILD UP on the SHB jobs? cuz it sure seems like certain jobs were left to rot while others got a nice shiny coat of paint and a tune up. hell, SMN even got a new engine (despite the apparent downgrade in the eyes of some of the LONG TIME SMN PLAYERS)

either way the decisions taken since STB have led to the erosion of job and encounter complexity for the sake of bringing in maximum short term profits at the expense of investing in a long term loyal playerbase. WoW has done this before, so why hasn't YoshiP, the "self-proclaimed wow lover" realised that he and his team are making the exact same mistakes that brought the once incredible game into ruin in the eyes of its old loyal playerbase?


"there wasnt much we could do with drk/sch/mch/brd/pld/drg/sam/dnc"

[Semirhage]

As much as some people love the old cleric stance or emnity & mp management, those things were basically preventing you from having fluid gameplay. Didn't someone tell me that healers were interrupting casts because they couldn't afford the mp cost or something like that? How is that a good thing?

Thing is, older design with a bunch of noninteractive dots was also not great. Cleric stance was goofy and sticky. All of this is true. The reason people pine for older design is because, compared to Shadowbringers, that design at least provided busywork. Before the kits were clunky and (arguably) badly-designed. Now they're clunky, badly-designed, and boring. Juggling a bunch of dots may not have been a pulse pounding thrill, but this expansion's design took that clunky bad system away and replaced it with....nothing!

Spamming one button over and over again is boring. It's even more boring than juggling dots. This is a game, something presumably for entertainment. The worst thing your entertainment can be is boring.

[Grimoire-M]

I am pretty sure that Holy 2 is available only while you are under some buff like Thin Air. Same goes for Ast's Gravity 2 and their own version of a self-buff.

They do care about the healer's gameplay. They are making optimal HPS output more and more reliant on optimal DPS output and we can clearly see that with Sage.

As much as some people love the old cleric stance or emnity & mp management, those things were basically preventing you from having fluid gameplay. Didn't someone tell me that healers were interrupting casts because they couldn't afford the mp cost or something like that? How is that a good thing?

Well in regards to the MP cost issue: It gave Ranged DPS a reason to exist in a support capacity. This arguably applied to TP as well, but I don’t consider that as big of a loss as MP given how dependent healers really were on it back then. It was never an issue in dungeons. Only in harder raiding content. But the larger part of why that worked was the absolute lack of oGCD cooldowns, focus on tank/prey damage, and limited AoE healing in general. We had Lustrate and Benediction for single target burst and Whispering Dawn for an AoE regen. Scholar had way more MP regeneration and passive healing than WHM but Succor was bad and their only ‘burst’ heal. And this was on top of the dots and stance dancing as Semirhage noted above. We had more to do in both respects.