Mods and cheat engine

[Packetdancer]

This is not at all comparable to a human shotcaller, who cannot do many of those things, and also has to spend prog time practicing to be able to do the ones they can. It fundamentally automates an aspect of fight execution that was not intended to be automated.

So, I've said often in the past -- including in this thread -- that I consider Cactbot (or, specifically Cactbot's "Raidboss" module, the one that actually does callouts) little different than a human shot-caller; that I thought it was a huge problem if someone cannot do a fight without Cactbot calling for them, but was not sure it's a fundamentally different problem than if someone cannot do a fight without my callouts on Discord.

But I will admit that the only Cactbot modules I'd previously had personal experience with were "Oopsy Raidsy" (the one that provides a post-wipe breakdown of vuln stacks, missed heals, etc.) and the module that pops up an overlay in Eureka or Bozja that just has the countdown trackers a'la the Eureka tracker websites, so you know whether or not an NM or critical engagement can be spawned again yet.

So I finally decided I ought to at least see what Raidboss looks like, so that my "I'm not sure if it's a fundamentally different problem" statement could be made in a more informed manner, with some personal experience.

From what I've now seen, in the vast majority of cases, the callouts were still not hugely faster than I-as-a-human-shot-caller could make them -- stuff like P4S phase 2, with North/South or East/West for the first safe sides, it was maybe half a second faster.

There were definitely notable outliers, though -- it can absolutely call P3S Fireplume way before I would have any hope of calling whether it's a stay-centered-and-move baited giant AoE, versus a move-to-second-blast rotating one. Like, I was actually alarmed by how early it could call that one; I knew it could call it earlier than I would, but not by that much.

And I will grant that Raidboss does callouts for a lot more things than I expected; I guess I knew it could do personalized callouts, but I also didn't realize precisely how many it did. That was a bit of an eye-opener; it actually did it to a degree that I would personally find actively distracting rather than helpful.

That said, I'm still not sure it's a fundamentally different problem if someone relies on Cactbot callouts than if they rely on my callouts. Yes, Cactbot can do more callouts -- and more than I expected -- but if you rely on any external thing, be it a robot or a human, in order to be able to do mechanics, you are doing yourself no favors.

For those who wouldn't find it distracting, if they only use it as a sanity-check on their own read of mechanics -- the same way they should with my callouts -- I'm still not sure there's a huge difference between it and a human shot caller, even if it would provide sanity-check on considerably more mechanics than I expected.

And for some people -- like a colorblind friend who could not tell the difference between the chain colors in P1S to know if they needed to be near/far -- I could see it being of great use for certain mechanics; I actually think there might be value in a version of it that could be set to only do callouts for certain specific mechanics, as that could be incredibly useful for colorblind folks, vision-impaired, or hard-of-hearing folks to provide cues ("Far chain" / "Near chain") that they are capable of acting on but not easily capable of perceiving in the way the game communicates them.

I will grant that if you are determined to let it play for you, though, yeah, you can be considerably lazier than if you're just determined to make me as human shot-caller solve as many mechanics for you as you possibly can; I had not realized quite the degree to which that is true here. So I'll own that part.

But as I said, I'm still not sure quantity changes the fundamental nature of it.

(Though I do now know why in some P3S parties, I watched people see "Left Cinderwing" and scoot out of safety right smack into the blast; this thing apparently calls those assuming you are behind Phoinix, when nearly every party I've ever been in resolves Cinderwing with Phoinix facing them. So, this at least answered one long-standing PF question I've had!)

That aside... as I mentioned, I think that this thing would drive me absolutely stark raving crazy to run, though. It looks to call a lot of things which, rationally, I don't think need to be called, and which I would find distracting enough to be actively detrimental to my performance to have it throw up hints for.