Mods and cheat engine

[Packetdancer]

C'mon, let's try to keep it civil. Even if folks don't agree, we don't need to go into personal attacks; it does no favors to the way your side of the debate comes across, for one thing.

I don't care personally if another player uses Cactbot to help them; there are mechanics that are painful for colorblind folks, there are folks who are trying to learn the fight and want guidance without having to ask someone to raid call, etc. I'm not going to begrudge them that.

Where it becomes an issue for me is when their use of Cactbot negatively impacts my experience. And whether or not folks in this thread agree on the matter of Cactbot itself, I hope we can all agree that "a member of my static refused to raid on patch day because Cactbot wouldn't work, thus inconveniencing seven other players" would count as one of those situations.

When you join a static you commit to showing up at a specific time regularly. And sometimes RL happens, sure, but if you bail on the group and leave seven other people in the lurch consistently, that's a problem.

When someone becomes reliant on an external guide—whether an automated one like Cactbot, or an organic non-bot (so far as you can prove, fleshlings) raid-caller like me—that can become a problem. But I'd argue the root of that problem isn't Cactbot (or the raid-caller), rather how the person uses them.

It merely becomes an issue more often with Cactbot because of the fact that it stops working on patch days.

If you use Cactbot as a sanity check on your own read of mechanics, and can raid on patch days just fine, no issue. If you rely on Cactbot but are doing the tier in PF and just choose not to raid when it doesn't work... well, I think you're using it wrong, but if you aren't causing problems for others it doesn't matter.

But if you are part of a static, and demand others deviate from your agreed-upon schedule when Cactbot doesn't work, I would hope we can all agree that actually does count as a problem.

[-BlueGreen-]

Outside of ACT, I wasn't particularly aware of much outside of graphics mods until more recently.

I'm not about to start running anything beyond ACT myself, simply because even of some of those might be rather helpful (especially those which help with button bloat), I figure it's better to play without than deal with having my controls busted with each patch. It's pretty easy to go "oh, ACT's not updated yet" and just play without it. Relying on something that messes with hotbars breaking on patch day? No thanks.

There are some, judging from the plugin descriptions, that appear to be exploiting details between the client and the server that could potentially allow for things that you couldn't do without that plugin. In particular, the glamour plates one comes to mind (probably better to not dive into specifics).

That said, I really do wish SE would consider doing something about the button bloat. Some classes are really streamlined, and others just barely fit the class/role skills on 2 full pages of the cross hotbar (that's 32 unique button sequences).

I recently tried setting up my PLD on my PS4 to see if I could put up with that until the PC sound issue is fixed, and although SE has done a wonderful job of creating a basic setup for controller play, I was rather annoyed to figure out that I needed all 32 combinations just for each unique class/role skill, and then still needed the double-tap L2/R2 features to add things like sprint, LB, teleport, return, and mount.

Without completely dropping skills from my hotbar, it left no real wiggle room to group related skills together the way I'd like leading to some awkward button combinations required for certain scenarios in order to favor more common scenarios. Overall, I felt like I couldn't come close to the level of play I'm used to. I know a good deal of that comes down to practice, but when each action potentially requires 3 ordered key presses, having situations where you're trying to weave some OGCD in between two GCDs that differ in one of the first two key presses leads to a need to press buttons very quickly. If that happens during a GCD where you would ideally double-weave, you're suddenly needing to do somewhere in the ballpark of 3+ ordered button presses per second to avoid clipping your GCD. What if you're tying do that and switch targets in between? I hope your controller has a solid retirement plan.

It's why, the few times I've tried to set up controllers, that I'll duplicate some OGCDs to different places so that I can hit them easily between whatever GCDs I happen to without having to release L2/R2 or do no more than add the other to the single I'm already holding.

Making PvE combos work more along the lines of how they work in PvP would go a long way to making things more flexible on controller.

If anything, I'm somewhat hopeful that things like that will get the console players to cry foul to the point where SE just incorporates QoL tweaks into the base game so everyone enjoys it without it being PC-specific or break with every patch.

It'd be nice if plugins could be officially supported, but I'm pretty sure Sony would be the biggest hurdle even if SE was all for it otherwise. Sure, SE could just ignore that problem and provide it to PC users, but that wouldn't be very fair.