The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ty_taurus]

Shurrikhan - Since this discussion is happening in other places (here and on ffxivdiscussion) related to another Job; extra niche buttons aren't a problem. PLD has Shield Bash, which actually has a use in Deep Dungeons. If you were asking for extra buttons that people legitimately don't have to interact with if they don't want to, this would be a different discussion.

WHM getting an expansion of DPS actions are also actions that you legitimately don't have to interact with if you don't want to. If we use Mario as a reference as you did prior, a common criticism of Super Mario Sunshine was the removal of the long jump introduced in Super Mario 64. The long jump was a very well-utilized tool for many speed runners, and the addition of FLUDD, while nice in its own ways, didn't supplement the loss of that flexible mobility. Our arguments are akin to that of the players who criticized that and wanted the restoration of the long jump, or the addition of new tools that filled that void. But you've interpreted these arguments as demanding official Mario games become Kaizo Mario, where high-skill precision and platforming are requirements to progress through the game.

Having the option to improve your gameplay is not an expectation that you will perform to that level or fail content. The only environments where the refusal to engage with those additional components would threaten you with failure would be savage and ultimate difficulty content--content that is designed to be a challenge for players to surmount, and even that's not entirely true as savage and ultimate do not require 99% optimization or greater. There is room for error. The more your team gears, the more you can comfortably get away with. 95% of the rest of the game barely cares that you're breathing.

Ty - I'm trying not to respond to you until you stop the sniping, but when someone says I just want carries, yes, that is a personal attack on my character, not a reasoned rebuttal to my arguments or a cordial statement on healer overall gameplay. Can you admit that?

EDIT: Indeed, re-read your own post! Those aren't reasoned arguments or cordial comments on the state of healer play.

"becomes a novel on how everyone else in the room is crazy"
"No one understands that you're the hero here"
"No one else can see the light, but you can."
"ultimately, a tantrum of someone who is unwilling to yield an inch."

An attack of your character would be me saying things like "you're stupid!" "you're an asshole" "you're the worst gamer I've ever met" which to clarify are not things I think. If I'm being honest, I do find you frustrating to speak with, but you probably find me frustrating to speak with. And that's fine.

That first paragraph is a summarization of your actions throughout this thread. It's not me attacking you, it's me explaining the behavior you've displayed here. That's not an attack. It's not an attack to say that someone's throwing a tantrum when they're throwing a tantrum. If you don't like that, well I'm sorry to say but it's a result of your own actions. If you don't want people telling you that you've thrown a tantrum, then don't throw a tantrum.

Saying you just want carries is not an attack. As I said, it's deductive reasoning. I said it before: if you didn't want to be carried, then you'd be fine with these suggestions. The gameplay you want would still be there. What upsets you is that it no longer becomes the best way to play even though that doesn't actually matter in almost every aspect of this game. Going back to that Mario example, what reason could you have to be upset about others wanting the long jump if you don't want to use it? Just don't use the long jump if you don't like the long jump. You can still beat the game.

I could go on, but tell me which of those is a cordial comment on the state of healer play and not an attack on me?

All of it. I've done nothing but describe your behavior and explain what I and several others have deduced is your intention based on how you respond when people tell you that your playstyle would still exist and you could still play the way you want to play. If you find any of this as an attack, it's because you are unhappy with your own actions, whether you recognize that or not.

You cannot use "deductive reasoning" to determine people's positions when people are outright telling you what their positions are, and they do not agree with your supposed deduction. When people tell you what they believe, believe them. Further, deductive reasoning does not, in fact, support or dictate that conclusion.

If this is true, then it must really suck to be a detective.

"We believe you have probably cause for killing Mrs. Stanson."
"No I don't."
"Okay, I guess you're free to go."

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

If you read any of my posts at all, you'd see me repeatedly propose that there be changes made to healers to accommodate people that want a different playstyle. Because unlike the people I'm arguing against, I understand that other people like things I don't like, and I want them to be happy, too.

You do certainly despise the idea about WHM's skill ceiling being expanded, potentially brought up to their healer siblings' level out of concern that it'll badly upset this 'hypothetical majority of healers' that you speak of because Glarespam will no longer be the necessary optimum downtime options, even though there have been multiple times it's been discussed how to not upset the skill floor. That's essentially ignoring the WHMs who wants to be a WHM and have more choice to improve as a WHM just because "It's supposed to be simple" (paraphrase).

A gross simplification perhaps, but that's just the start.

There's merit in trying to reason with me - yet you aren't. Instead you're insulting.

Making a top-down reasoning based on your interaction(s) isn't an insult, but go ahead & believe what you want, you're entitled to your own opinion as I do to mine. If you think even that is accusatory & frustrating, then do heed your own advice and step away from the forum (How many times you've wrote this yourself?). Enjoy the healer in-game instead.

Like you've said, devs probably won't even read all of these dumpster fire and you get to keep your favorite healer the way they are till 9.0, probably! (Devs reading healer forum? What even is this madness?! )

[Renathras]

Ty - Yeah, no.

While I would love to hit your post and rip it to shreds (you were not making some objective recounting of my posts, you were making extremely pointed and disparaging biased attacks on them, maybe you're having trouble suppressing your own bias enough to see the difference...), I've also already countered essentially all of them before, and instead of conceding that, you simply state the same attacks again with different words. The exercise is entirely pointless as you're more akin to a brick wall at this point.

But, as I'm the only one that ever gets attacked for it by spectators, I won't engage in a tit-for-tat with you further.

...you keep trying to goad me into it, and I'm going to keep saying no. So you can save us both some headache and stop doing it. Not to mention psychoanalysis of people (especially WRONG psychoanalysis) is pretty rude. Be better.

And yes, you are trying to devolve the conversation by goading me into a tit-for-tat. As many times as I've refused, you keep quoting my posts and replying to them, even when I go stretches without replying to you. Moreover, you often are insulting or disparaging - despite you saying otherwise, accusing people of throwing tantrums is hardly an objective position; that's a charged accusation, not some aloof neutral arbiter's analysis, no matter how much you try to style yourself as such. You keep trying to goad me into derailing the thread this way, and then you (and others) attack me for the thread being derailed, even if I'm the one that keeps trying to drag you collectively back to the base topic.

Instead of acknowledging what you're doing are personal attacks or are questioning my motives rather than any arguments presented (an ad hominem fallacy), you keep doing it, even as I keep refusing to entertain you. You keep trying to derail the thread so you can then attack me for derailing the thread when you're the one doing it.

But, as I say, this is pointless.

.

Instead, a different thing to consider:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn6FHt2RCV0
"Analysis: The Three Types of Fighting Gamers (Laugh's Theory)"

Give this video a quick watch (if you've never seen it). In short, it is an idea that in fighting games, there are three kinds of archetypes of players. Every player will be some measure in each category, so they aren't mutually exclusive, but often, players will tend to lean more strongly into one of the three as their dominant personality type and playstyle lends itself to. In brief, they are:

Brains - People that like to analyze and theory craft. They like to know their stuff in-depth and have a deep technical knowledge of the game and its mechanics and their (and other) characters, classes, and so on. This doesn't necessarily mean they're the best at executing it, mind you. These types of players often like to "play it safe", and can have difficulty if faced with mechanics that don't give them time to think things through or situations where they can't really plan out in advance a strategy. For example, Zodiark Ex would be hell on these kinds of players because of the relatively short time to see the animals/glyphs, figure out the safe spots, and move into them.

Hearts - People like this are often into the metagame and the game community as a whole. In a fighting game, they function by trying to read other players and goad them into traps or psych them out. In a more general sense, and applicable to an MMO and boss fights like FFXIV, these people work more on intuition and prediction. These are the people that tend to get boss mechanics right the first or second time because they're good at spot analyzing and reacting to things with predictions. But it can be risky, too, as if their predictions are wrong, they tend to blow up in their faces, and these kinds of people, due to that nature, tend to play more risky.

Bodies - People like this are physically capable irl, and this translates into games as having quick action and reaction times and consistent physical input. In other words, these people are the ones that never flub a Dragon Punch into a Fireball by accident, and that can usee whatever kind of "counter" mechanic fighting games have nearly 100% of the time. These people, in MMOs, are usually very good at keeping their rotation up while dealing with boss mechanics, and once they know a mechanic, while executing it. They're good with timings on things, with how their rotation should feel. This is the kind of person that can tell you when their DoT is about to fall off and need refreshed without needing to look at the time remaining on the debuff icon.

.

If you had to guess which of the three you probably are most dominant in - which would you self-evaluate as?

...and I'm not saying this as if there's a "right" or "wrong" answer. I'm still not sure which I would fall under. Probably one of the first two and not the third (my reflexes irl and in games are good, but I never trust them, and they aren't nearly perfect). I wonder if our preferred gameplay styles could at all be associated with things like that.

For example, one reason I don't like playing DPS is because I'm not half-bad at it. This sounds counter intuitive, but in simple terms, I read about the nuanced depth of Jobs I consider playing. I read the tooltips, the stat tooltips (there are tooltip help windows for each stat on your character sheet), The Balance, and so on. But since I'm not 3, I often get frustrated in executing them because I notice each and every input error and beat myself up a lot over them.

...I don't find mentally beating myself up to be fun.

I prefer more methodical combat forms and sometimes (e.g. GNB) more rigid, controlled rotations or, alternatively, relatively simple ones. I don't enjoy ones that require a lot of reactions (BRD for example) or plate spinning/juggling unless the UI makes those things very clear (as I said before, I prefer NIN's damage buff to WAR's just because the NIN Job gauge makes it easy to see while WAR has that tiny little debuff with the even tinier little time remaining number). Conversely, I like more methodical and contemplative gameplay, like healers with simple rotations so I can survey the battlefield and mechanics and pre-plan my healing plan in response to it while executing it in a less time sensitive manner than things like "OMG DUMP ALL THE THINGS IN THE BURST WINDOW" damage Jobs. I also like Jobs like SCH or SGE because of the way they setup things somewhat in advance - proactive rather than reactive healing - for a similar reason. I love SCH's many abilities, but particularly the modifiers like Emergency Tactics, Recitation, and Deployment Tactics.

I'd say I lean most heavily to the first, though I have some bits of the second. I'm least inclined towards the third, even though I'm not TERRIBLE at it, I just don't naturally lean most into it.

.

Anyway, it may be fruitless, but I'm kind of curious how you guys would self-evaluate your own selves in terms of that three types of player paradigm.

.

EDIT:

Rein_eon_Osborne - I could contest your post...but you're doing the same thing. Funny you accused me earlier of being in the tit-for-tat, yet here you are, doing it. Don't live up to your own standards so well, it seems.

Regardless, I'm going to try declining your...invitation...into a back and forth of personal attacks. You guys are collectively trying really hard to make this about personal attacks and goad me into responding rather than about the topic or any of my arguments. How quickly you do the thing you decry. Yet, as I'm the only one attacked for it, I'll decline doing it here, I think.

[Shurrikhan]

Shurrikhan - Since this discussion is happening in other places (here and on ffxivdiscussion) related to another Job; extra niche buttons aren't a problem. PLD has Shield Bash, which actually has a use in Deep Dungeons. If you were asking for extra buttons that people legitimately don't have to interact with if they don't want to, this would be a different discussion.

I'm not asking for something that most people won't even put on their bars, no. My point was, again, you wouldn't need it to do even the vast majority of Savage, just like you could technically drop most of your oGCDs and still get through it, just with lower damage.

If you're not expected to eek out every possible Glare you can for a given Savage run now (historically, anything tuned that strictly has been explicitly unintended and gets nerfed), neither would you be expected to interact with that added skill ceiling. I think Taurus and Forsaken, too, have pointed out that they want those optimizations to have diminishing returns — such that complete mastery vs. near-complete mastery would be obvious between two people fighting for a top parse, but a degree of difference irrelevant to your average player.


Though, among suggestions for utility, Shield Bash in ARR and pre-nerfs Clemency¹ might be close to some of what I'm looking for there — situationally useful tools that people often forget about but nonetheless have some pretty decent effect.

¹ Clemency went from having mechanics that actually allowed it to be useful... to having no such encounter interactions and greatly devalued spot-healing, and from itself doing ~200% of a Cure II's potency affectable by Requiescat for +50% healing... to ~125% potency and using up Req stacks solely to avoid the sub-GCD cast time (no healing bonus). It was situationally and featurally useful; it's now just a wash.

If you want to have any shot at such changes, you have to be willing to yield and compromise and embrace solutions like mine as ways to get at least something you want.

Okay, again...

Towns A and B are broke. They've recently been giving the opportunity, no string attached, to not be.

Town A: We actually like living simply.
Town B: We'd rather not have to live simply.

The obvious overlap: Have money and still live simply. You... can still do that.

"Ye Great Compromiser": Ahh, well then keep one town in poverty. Then there will be choice!

......

This is the way FFXIV is. You guys aren't getting what you want.

Viewpoint A wants to see each healer job improved according to a few criteria (especially, more engaging downtime and for healing tools not to make each other so redundant while still maintaining about as low a skill floor -- ideally with further value moved towards more integral and iconic features unique to each job).

Viewpoint B wants to see all but a quarter of healer jobs improved (though perhaps by different criteria; I do not know).

You're really going to tell me that the feasibility of any of this revolves around limiting this wave of changes to just 75% of the roster? As if they couldn't predict the massive backlash that'd have from whichever job is left out?

[Renathras]

Towns A and B are broke. They've recently been giving the opportunity, no string attached, to not be.

Town A and Town B are not broke.

They also have been given no opportunity to change. Town A simply thinks there's an implied opportunity where none has been made. BUT, Towns A and B are both rural towns.

Town A wants to be more cosmopolitan and Town B wants to be remain as rural as it is today.

You want to force them to both be more cosmopolitan, regardless of the will of the local people, while I suggest allowing each to be what they want at the same time.

Viewpoint...

Viewpoint A wants to see each healer made more complex because that is what they like.

Viewpoint B would like to see each healer stay simple because that is what they like, but as a compromise, they suggest giving Viewpoint A 3/4ths of them so Viewpoint A will be happy.

Viewpoint A insists they will not be happy unless they get them all, and Viewpoint B can either accepted it and change or can go pound sand, and either way, Viewpoint A will not be happy unless it gets everything it wants and Viewpoint B gets nothing it wants.

.

Maybe if you actually had accurate allegories, it might help your understanding of the situation.

[ASkellington]

Viewpoint A wants to see each healer made more complex because that is what they like.

Viewpoint B would like to see each healer stay simple because that is what they like, but as a compromise, they suggest giving Viewpoint A 3/4ths of them so Viewpoint A will be happy.

Viewpoint A insists they will not be happy unless they get them all, and Viewpoint B can either accepted it and change or can go pound sand, and either way, Viewpoint A will not be happy unless it gets everything it wants and Viewpoint B gets nothing it wants.

Say SE does as you say and changes only SGE, AST and SCH to have 2 more dps buttons. WHMs who want higher depth will complain and rightfully so. For simple fact if:

AST who has more to juggle can also have 2 extra dps options then WHM who does not can as well because it is simple.

On top of SGE who is the direct shield comparison to WHM can also have 2 extra dps buttons despite also being as simple as WHM.

Once again - all tanks have a 1-2-3 combo on top of what makes them different: their extra dps. Just because WAR is more simple than GNB doesn't mean WAR doesn't have it. If tank can have that, healers can have a similar build.

To make a comparison, you're literally saying that since WAR is to be the simple tank if it had lost Fell Cleave in Shb, and all the other tanks had extra burst, it shouldn't get it because it's to be the only tank with a 1-2-3 combo. No tank would agree to that. They'd want WAR to get it.

And YES WHM lost Areo 3 and since it is a separate DoT on its own timer and CD you would be expected to use it and Dia in savage. You're arguing against getting it back and another button all because you believe people shouldn't have to adapt their class and stay with all that they knew for an expansion and never grow.

They're gonna relearn how to play their class in 7.0 anyway. I don't see the problem.

Especially considering that both old and new players adapted to SB -> Shb changes of AST and Shb -> EW's changes the latter of which I did.

[ty_taurus]

Literally nothing other than people who don't like it can "be bad". When you aren't outright telling them to quit the game, that is.

Briefly, I never told anyone to quit. What I said was, if some doesn't enjoy the way content is structured for healers in this game, how infrequent damage taken is, then there are other games that may satisfy them far better.

But regardless, I want to mention the "be bad." part for a moment, because I have to ask, why do you think that choosing to play the way you want makes you "bad?" Because you're not playing perfectly? So what? Almost no one plays perfectly. I certainly don't. As DNC, it's technically optimal to use dance partner on a DRK early because their burst is extremely powerful, let Closed Position's CD count down before pulling, and swap to a DPS after their burst concludes, but I don't do that. I don't even try. Without really knowing the DRK's playstyle intimately, it may not always work out well, and it just seems like a hassle.

I don't think people who play dragon kick monk are "bad." They're able to get most of their DPS out with far more consistency. If you feel like fully optimizing your theoretical healer rotation is too much of a hassle/too frustrating, and you can get most of that by doing something simpler and be more consistent, then do it. I think it's worse to see SCH and SGE players who spam Succor/E. Prognosis and try to keep a barrier up on the party at all times.

And the thing is, even if we want to set the maximum output of a specific job as "perfect play," and anything less is "bad," why stop there? Why not say playing WHM instead of AST is "bad" because AST outperforms WHM in every way? You could theoretically fall down this rabbit hole of obsessing over perfection in literally every game. In Mario, are you a speed runner? If not, does that make you "bad" that you can't beat the game as fast as they can? In FFVII Remake, can you clear all bosses with no items while taking no damage? If not, does that make you "bad?" There's not a defined line of what is "good" and what is "bad." As long as you get the clear, anything else is a metric you set for yourself. There are parse chasing players who want to try and beat effectively the "highest score" for their job, but that's not the standard of gameplay in this game. I know our community has a habit of pretending it is, but ultimately, a clear's a clear.

Anyway, it may be fruitless, but I'm kind of curious how you guys would self-evaluate your own selves in terms of that three types of player paradigm.

Brain and Heart. I'm an analyzer and a theorycrafter. I build theorycrafts of gameplay elements I want to see for games for fun, and in gameplay, a big part in what helps me learn savage fights is seeing where I am in my rotation as certain mechanics come about and storing that information for later. "Oh, I'm coming up on my 3rd Technical Step in P6S, that means I have to Samba before I begin Technical because that's the raidwide that happens in the middle of me dancing, and I won't be able to mitigate it if I don't use it early." Though apparently now I can Samba during Technical. But I also love elements of chance and risk. I like DNC's procs as it keeps my gameplay fluid. In Tales of Vesperia, I primarily played as Patty the gambling pirate who can be a healer. Her healing ability randomly restores a little HP, a lot of HP, a little SP, a lot of SP, all your HP and SP, or may reduce everyone's HP and SP by 75%, or you have a few spells that will randomly cast any magic spell of specific ranks, and you can force it to choose either offensive or healing spells. Obviously something like that wouldn't work in FFXIV, but chance keeps things from getting stale. I also tend to pick up on mechanics quickly, and I resonate with the idea of psyching out my opponents and controlling the state of battle. My favorite archetype in RPGs are debuffing healers, or harassing poke healers who can chip away at opponents to allow their allies to get an easy kill.

[Shurrikhan]

Viewpoint A insists they will not be happy unless they get them all, and Viewpoint B can either accepted it and change or can go pound sand, and either way, Viewpoint A will not be happy unless it gets everything it wants and Viewpoint B gets nothing it wants.

Your warrants here rely on a certain point of obsession, though -- the idea that unless you specifically truncate a job (or, keep knee-high, however you want to put it), affecting everyone who may like that job for whatever reason (which will not be limited simply to its being knee-high), AND get perfect parity with far higher ceilings elsewhere, you cannot (be permitted to) play in peace at a simpler level.

But that's just not the case.

First, you can get by on less than full interaction. We do this already. No, it won't necessarily be optimal; your doing less may not equate to others doing far more. But neither would it need to. It's enough. And if engaging less with that excess of tools keep tighter on the mechanics and the core to the point you're doing better than you otherwise would... so what if there's more to explore as you grow more comfortable?

Second, why should the game have to pander, let alone at broader expense to others in balance, to someone wanting to take the easy way out in competitive group content?

You want something that you can easily sub into Savage groups with without needing to particularly know or practice your job? Okay, I can get that. That may sound great to/for you. But why would that be better for the game to let you do so? So long as the game's checks are lenient enough that you don't to have to bother with the excess, why should the game prune away or cap the excess of tools that others would enjoy just so that you don't have to see it?

Moreover if expectations were so tight as to require every player to well engage with every tool at their disposal, you do realize also that any job which can hit the same peaks more reliably and with less effort would start becoming obligatory, no? If the situation is tight enough that you'd be harassed into engaging with more than you like, so too would players be harassed into picking easier, less "egotistic" picks.

If even a first time clear group of randoms will be held to such high standards that excess is essentially impossible (the guy who can't even dodge will somehow be yelling at you for not using Soteria on cooldown or letting EuDiag fall off for a few seconds), the imbalance your asking for (to do the same for less) will be a problem (one that will essentially relegate us from 4 rather simple and kind of wonky healers to effectively just 1 mainstay healer, which happens to be rather simple and kind of wonky). And if not, then what is possibly the problem with using just some 70% of a kit (for some 85% of your potential value) on a fight that only requires some 60% of your max potential in order to clear?

[Venur]

I'd say their is two side of the problem, one due to healing in single group content right now and the second due to the need to DPS or not.

1) Healing: FF online lack casual content for better then average player.

If you are a casual player interested into healing to the level of having a challenge while sitting at over the 60% parsing mark. You are just screwed. Yoshi seems to think that every good player will raid and the ones who just want to have fun while relaxing will do dungeon or solo.

I am not a fan of World of Warcraft but they nailed it as far as single grouping content challange. Regular dungeon can be easely cleared by a full group of noob/bad players/ players with disabilities or people that just want to relaxe and chat.

Then their is several layers of difficulties in dungeon that will lead you all the way up to requiring the skill and dedication of players in the 99% mark. 5 man dungeons in WoW can be harder then the hardest raiding content at some point. So you have something for everyone.

2) DPS requirement or not.

This is the part where not everyone can be pleased. Cuz if the game give you the room for dealing damage a sa healer, it does mean that you will have waiting time if you don't. Sure you can complet every single group content FFO while doing zero DPS as a healer but you'll be staring at your screen doing nothing for long period of time. And if your the kind that want damage dealing healers, well you probably think healers are boring cuz ti has no dept. Its like if Yoshi wants healer to deal damage but he also want it to be so easy that everyone can do it.So it is not fun for those who wish to do both jobs (healing and dealing damage).

So right now, grouping in FFO as a healer is just fun for 1 type of players. The noob/disable/bad players and/or people that want to relaxe.

P.S. English isn't my usual language so I hope the therm "disable" isn't something offencive. If it is I am sorry.

Also, I don't use the word "noob" to be mean or to bash on anyone, its just to point out players that are new to the MMO genre.

[ForsakenRoe]

damn i should have just stayed in bed huh

just re-mentioning that my WHM rework, with the Banish and the 'deal damage, charge gauge, get big aoe heal, refunds itself via cool looking Quake/Flood/Tornado' has the option of 'spam glare, refresh Dia every 12s' (mimicking current rotation, but adjusted for Dia duration change) at 98% effectiveness of current WHM rotation. Suboptimal gamers would be able to just 'press Glare, no care', people who want to push limits would be able to use Banish for movement, use new big heal to remove more lossyGCDs, even use it to heal right before burst window, so that Quake Tornado Flood fall inside raidbuffs for slight gain. Too hard for players to understand though, cos it involves an extra (partially ignoreable) damage button. But if the Big Heal (tm) was added on it's own, with the gauge filling naturally overtime, somehow that'd be fine, nobody would get confused by it. Seems it's specifically when 'do damage' is the gauge charge method that it becomes a problem. I wonder why.

My first clears of fights are unoptimized as hell. My first clear of P8S P1 as SGE (my second clear, first was WHM) has me using 14 Eukrasian Prognosis. This was back when the HP was 'broken' too. You don't need to play anywhere near 'optimally' on DPS output to beat most enrages in this game. People who are asking for 'WHM to have at least something more' have been keeping the 'casual player' in mind. What we seem to agree on with that, is that the healing side of things should stay accessible and simple to understand. Nobody wants to have every healer require an engineering degree just to cast Medica2. But what we (more engagement crowd) also all seem to agree on is that DPS side of things does not NEED to be left in the state it's in, for the sake of some hypothetical player who will be 'too confused' by even the slightest change to their DPS rotation. Or 'won't enjoy it', which is pretty laughable as 'enjoyment' is subjective. Who knows, maybe the changes happen and the 'they won't enjoy it' players actually turn around and say 'hang on this is better and more fun actually', we wouldn't know until it's implemented. Or, we would, if we had patch notes at least. We could see that healing was gonna take a nosedive in terms of 'engagement' when the SHB notes came out and we could see that each healer had been pruned down to 1 dot.

WHM getting an expansion of DPS actions are also actions that you legitimately don't have to interact with if you don't want to. If we use Mario as a reference as you did prior, a common criticism of Super Mario Sunshine was the removal of the long jump introduced in Super Mario 64. The long jump was a very well-utilized tool for many speed runners, and the addition of FLUDD, while nice in its own ways, didn't supplement the loss of that flexible mobility. Our arguments are akin to that of the players who criticized that and wanted the restoration of the long jump, or the addition of new tools that filled that void. But you've interpreted these arguments as demanding official Mario games become Kaizo Mario, where high-skill precision and platforming are requirements to progress through the game.

My favorite levels in SMS were the ones where FLUDD gets stolen, with the acapella BGM Not that one with the chuckster at the end though, he's off my christmas list after last time

Its like if Yoshi wants healer to deal damage but he also want it to be so easy that everyone can do it.So it is not fun for those who wish to do both jobs (healing and dealing damage).

It's because he has to constantly walk on eggshells on the topic. He can't say with a cast iron declaration 'You should do damage if you have no damage to heal', because the 'healers should only heal' players would all rage that they're expected to actually play the game, and quit (loss of revenue for SE). Conversely, he can't say with a cast iron declaration 'healers should NOT be needed to do damage, as that is not their role, and content will be tuned around the assumption that healers will NOT do any damage', because then the more skilled/hardcore players will see 'this game will never truly challenge us, if we do damage as healers it'll just trivialise the enrages, so we should go find a different game that satisfies our hunger for challenge as healers' (loss of revenue for SE). So they have this weird middleground stance, where it's accepted that, yes, in harder content, healers should do damage. But at the same time, it has to be easy for the healer to do damage so the casual's don't get scared of the complexity of 'press two different DOTs, at different times'. Result, nobody's truly happy. The hardcores have very little to optimize, the casuals have no room to grow, and the 'healers should only heal' crowd STILL refuses to press their damage buttons, even though there's so few left.

At this point they could make it so that when you use a heal spell, 50% of the potency of that heal is done as damage in an AOE around the recipient, and some players would stop healing people who are too close to the mob, in case it does damage to the enemy. I've even seen some run out to Assize, so it hits people but not enemies, that's how much they don't want to do damage. Like 0DPS is an accomplishment of its own. Which, it is I guess, but not one you proudly brag about.