Quote Originally Posted by moroarda View Post
I think this feels a bit like saying if you build the foundation of your house on wooden stilts and then slap a bunch of concrete up there and the stilts break under the weight that the stilts weren't a bad idea.

Well, perhaps stilts aren't a bad idea inherently, but if you plan to slap giant concrete slabs atop them then in this context... yeah, that's a bad idea.

The current damage model is stilts. The current healer gameplay model is a giant slab of concrete. The stilts aren't cutting it, and in that way... yeah, it's poor design. Maybe stilts work in some games, but in this one they don't. It's all about context.

You could have either or, but together they fail. This means that together they're poorly designed.
It's the other way around--it's the concrete that's the bad idea.

When you begin to build your foundation, there isn't a "wrong" answer (technically there is depending on the plot you're trying to build on, like that concrete floor is probably still terrible if you're building your home in wetlands, but let's ignore that reality for the purpose of this comparison). You, as the builder, when nothing is built, have the freedom to take any direction you want. A house on wooden stills is a perfectly valid starting point if you're trying to build something like a beach house. This isn't a bad design. Now, if after you've finished constructing the foundation, you've decided, actually, you want an industrial loft with concrete floors instead, well now you've fucked up your project. It's true that the wooden foundation can't support that concrete floor, but if you wanted he concrete floor, then why did you begin your design with a foundation of wooden stilts?

The wooden stilt foundation is not bad design, starting with that and then deciding you wanted concrete floors is bad design. There is also nothing wrong with having a game designed for combat healers who are active DPS that also must manage party HP. Maybe you (general you) don't like that, but then again, maybe you don't like beach houses. That doesn't mean beach houses are bad houses, it's just not your taste, but a game is not obligated to provide you with an industrial loft if it wants to build beach houses, and if you aren't in the market for buying beach houses, then don't buy a beach house. Inversely, if you're someone who loves beach houses but hates industrial lofts, then don't buy an industrial loft.

Now the issue is that SE started building a beach house, but somewhere down the road, they felt that they didn't want to alienate players that prefer industrial lofts, and what you're left with is a beach house that has none of the finishings that a beach house lover wants and is designed as if it were an industrial loft, enough to appease industrial loft lovers but is done in a very shoddy way that doesn't truly feel like an industrial loft.

As has been brought up ad nauseum, SE needs to either tear down the industrial loft finishings or tear down the entire house and rebuild the foundation. One of this is astronomically more challenging to accomplish since you basically need to rebuild the entire house from the ground up in order to create a true industrial loft, so it makes so much more sense to just redo the finishings to create a beautifully designed beach house. Sure, the industrial loft lovers may hate that, but it's what this game is built to support.