The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

[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.