Contradictions, Double Standards, Counterintuitive Design

[Liam_Harper]

What if I told you...

if they actually designed the healer kits well, nothing's stopping you from spamming Glare and Medica a gazillion times and having "fun" while the rest of us play a game that isn't Cookie Clicker. Just like nothing's stopping Paladin mains from spamming Fast Blade over and over again if they don't want to touch the rest of their rotation.

I think the biggest problem is that while Sylphies say they just want to play their way, play for fun and aren't evil elitist tryhards ...they actually do care about their performance in a way. They read these posts and don't like that thought at the back of their mind that they're actually perceived as playing badly. They resent it.

However, Sylphies also don't want to put effort in. So instead of learning their job and becoming a better player, they literally want the entire role to be destroyed and simplified to the point where spamming 1 button and Medica II is seen as optimal. Then in their bubble they can imagine they're perceived as a good player without changing their zero effort playstyle.

The Devs cater to this and protect it. Simplification is done so the bad player can feel like a good one, without being asked to play their job well. Even the anti-parser policy plays into this, shielding the bad player from potential proof that they're even playing the simple version badly and making it so other party members have nothing to gauge them on other than "is my health bar full?".

Healer is basically the role SE has assigned to bad players who can't even handle dps, as an easy mode option to carry them through content while making them feel like a piece of the team. Which is why when we come along with logic, threatening to burst that imaginary bubble and asking for change, they aggressively defend that "simple" playstyle at all costs and will go through every hoop possible to cling to it. They don't want to just be the Glare and Medica II spammer in the corner while we get new buttons and master them. They'd rather everyone was forced to be a Glare and Medica II spammer too and dragged down to their level to keep it equal. It's not healthy and it's incredibly poor design to cater to it.

[ThorneDynasty]

It's even more dumb than that, since every time there is a self-identifying sylphie and people are actually able to pull up their logs, they are in fact DPSing 80% of the time just like everyone else. So in practice they are the exact same green DPS elitists they rail against. They just don't want the green DPSing to be any kind of fun out of some weird hang up on a "healers should heal" principle, even though they themselves are an example of why it has never been true. Or spamming that 1 button 30 seconds straight doing nothing else is apparently something they've just convinced themselves is fun.

[SenzorialBoundries]

It's even more dumb than that, since every time there is a self-identifying sylphie and people are actually able to pull up their logs, they are in fact DPSing 80% of the time just like everyone else. So in practice they are the exact same green DPS elitists they rail against. They just don't want the green DPSing to be any kind of fun out of some weird hang up on a "healers should heal" principle, even though they themselves are an example of why it has never been true. Or spamming that 1 button 30 seconds straight doing nothing else is apparently something they've just convinced themselves is fun.

"Healers should heal" has been true to some extent in ARR coils and extremes until they started to add the ridiculous echo buff stripping any semblence of difficulty.

[Teno]

"Healers should heal" has been true to some extent in ARR coils and extremes until they started to add the ridiculous echo buff stripping any semblence of difficulty.

Even in ARR and coils healers were first and foremost green dps (even more true for scholar). It's just that the lack of oGCDs and mitigation tools meant that you sometimes cast GCDs, especially when new on a fight.

[Sebazy]

Even in ARR and coils healers were first and foremost green dps (even more true for scholar). It's just that the lack of oGCDs and mitigation tools meant that you sometimes cast GCDs, especially when new on a fight.

In fairness, that kind of depends on the content.

Dungeons? Absolutely, in 2.0 I actually used to make double WHM parties for the fastest WP grind before we figured out the whole locking mobs out of the boss area with the barrier thing.

Savage and Trials? Not so much, not because we didn't have opportunities to DPS, high tier healers would generally be maintaining dots where possible, but because resources were much scarcer than they are now, and that includes GCDs themselves. Tanks could potentially get wiped out in the span of a couple of GCDs with bad crit luck, MP evaporated if you started spamming much of anything and falling behind was risky because we just didn't have the same kind of ability to catch back up like we do now.

You used to see a lot of standing around canceling casts and hard MP conservation in harder content.

[Teno]

In fairness, that kind of depends on the content.

Dungeons? Absolutely, in 2.0 I actually used to make double WHM parties for the fastest WP grind before we figured out the whole locking mobs out of the boss area with the barrier thing.

Savage and Trials? Not so much, not because we didn't have opportunities to DPS, high tier healers would generally be maintaining dots where possible, but because resources were much scarcer than they are now, and that includes GCDs themselves. Tanks could potentially get wiped out in the span of a couple of GCDs with bad crit luck, MP evaporated if you started spamming much of anything and falling behind was risky because we just didn't have the same kind of ability to catch back up like we do now.

You used to see a lot of standing around canceling casts and hard MP conservation in harder content.

Don't say all that, all these little nuances make me miss it even more now.