What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[Renathras]

To play devil's advocate, he did do this, I don't remember exactly which thread, but I remember us coming to an agreed position that 'something following the design choices of 4.0' would potentially be the way forward for WHM, to keep it simple yet adding something to it. It was where the idea of 'Protect as a 60s mit for WHM, which evolves into PI' was born, so that's how I remember it happened

Also did it with SCH, which was generally well received despite being not much more complex than the current one, and arguably simplifying some elements - a few simplifications and a few combinations - of its healing kit, while smoothing some of the clunk and dissonances in the kit - Dissipation and shifting Energy Drain over to using Faerie Gauge as well as retooling Aetherpact into a mini-Lustrate - while slightly increasing its DPS kit in both rotation complexity and things to track/manage, and making DPS uptime more rewarding with Energy Drains: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...e-Proposal-SCH

Above all though,

if you don't want hostility, don't stoop to it yourself. That's the key.

I do try. There is a lot I don't respond to, and some stuff I get a lot more emotional about that I just choose not to reply to or come back some other time to reply to. As I said, there's a lot of flack and harassment I get here. Even in entirely neutral posts or entirely neutral things. Even when people agree with me, they do it grudgingly in a "hell has frozen over, for once I agree" way.

The problem with this is, when people attack me like that, they don't go away or calm down if I don't contest them. They just keep doing it well after I've signaled I'm not going to respond in-kind and that I want to disengage from the topic. They will keep doing it until they can get a rise out of me. The only ways to stop this are either to give them the rise OR for other community members to come to my defense. The latter never happens, so it's either I respond in-kind, or I just have to deal with constant harassment that doesn't stop.

Perhaps you can see why that isn't a very viable option?

I should also note, I'm generally not the one who starts throwing the stones, either. I don't like calling people out as liars, so I only do it after repeated and egregious lies. I don't like calling people names or stooping to their level, so same thing. If the forum members aren't self-policing and aren't willing to help out with this, it just doesn't work. When people are openly lying about someone, and no one contests the lie, then that makes the lie stand as if it were truth. And the worst is when I point out using evidence the lie and don't call the person any names, their post still is the one that gets upvotes and quotes in support of it.

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As for your third point: The problem is, people here aren't willing to let things go, most won't admit they were wrong, people seem to like going over my posts with a fine toothed comb to find some i not dotted or t not crossed, and then use that as a cudgel to beat me with and demand I say I was wrong. Beating someone and demanding they admit defeat isn't a good way to get them to do so, and it's certainly not cordial, especially if the mistakes were not intended/bad faith, and double-especially if the person wasn't actually wrong about a thing, they just didn't explain it well enough or estimate something correctly.

There are people who want to discredit everything a person says, meaning if that person admits wrong even once, they will never let it go. I still get people posting from time to time about the 1T/3D thing and trying to say nothing I say can ever be believed and I don't know anything I'm talking about, even though I corrected that post like 4 times to try and get it right, and even if it has literally nothing to do with the current topic of discussion - like housing availability or whatever. Making changes to try to get correct wasn't seen as admirable, it was seen as showing weakness that should and would be exploited from now on.

In general, I do hold the position in life it's better to fear being wrong than fear being perceived as being wrong, and I do try to abandon positions that are untenable. But here, admitting even once you're wrong isn't met with respect, it's met with scorn and abuse.

In that same thread (the Mods do exist, I suppose?), I pointed out to Semi that my quote was clipped to remove me saying the correct thing (well, something passingly correct), and she instead redoubled her efforts to justify her position against me, as die another poster who has followed me through three threads to attack me on that point, despite me, in all three, saying I want to disengage and not participate in her feud with me.

What you're saying does sound nice...but it doesn't seem to actually work very well here...

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Oh, and as for the data - not that I always get it right (the 1T/3D thread with FFL weirdness, for example) but I do try to use data. I have done it a lot less of late, though. Care to guess why?

Because every time I would do so, someone would attack the data, even if they had no alternate data available. People still side-attack the Wayback Machine Healer numbers data, despite proposing no alternative and not actually proving the data's wrong itself. When I use Lucky Bnacho numbers, those aren't good enough. When I do a survey on Reddit, that's not good enough (Ty's is, though; it showed the "right" result, of course).

It's hard for me to justify spending hours looking for and presenting data if it's going to just be dismissed out of hand.

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The problem ultimately comes back to how other people are behaving, not just me, and that other people's bad behavior isn't called out, nor my defense not come to. Instead, other people's bad behavior is upvoted and quoted with agreeable support. People can say in posts now and again "I don't think it's right when people dogpile on you, Ren", but the problem is, they aren't saying that when the dogpiles are happening, and to the people doing the dogpiles. So it's like seeing someone be raped in a mall, not doing anything about it (the bystander effect), seeing it happen multiple times, still not doing anything about it, occasionally commenting on how the rape victim shouldn't dress the way they are, but coming to the victim years later and saying "I don't think it was right that you were raped in the mall"...but you really shouldn't be dressed that way. Especially when other people were taking pictures and posting them to social media of the rape and getting likes and retweets on the pictures.

Not to make light of rape victims, but the point, I hope, is clear; good behavior cannot be demanded of only one person. A forum is kinda like a society, and when the society isn't policing its bad actors and is only policing the people who start swinging after they've been hit several times, saying to the person being hit "You could just not throw any punches" isn't really the best answer.

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Going to try...

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1) There's a fantastic post in a General Discussion thread (a couple of them) I'd like you to read:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...76#post6275276
And:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6276018

I'd encourage you to not read them as something that needs to be argued against, but just sit and read them and think about what they're saying and how people feel. The particularly salient part, if you can only read it and nothing else, is this:

It's really not about just "able to clear normal content" vs. "not able to clear normal content"; that's oversimplifying the issue. People want to feel like they're playing "correctly", not "scraping by because it doesn't matter anyway".

I think this is something you fundamentally misunderstand about your solutions that are "you can just play badly and still manage" and why that really isn't a non-rigid, flexible, accommodating solution.

Note: The second is responding to this post with this TOP example - https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...12#post6275212 - but the post itself is good in its own right, pointing out that not everyone enjoys that kind of thinking/gameplay, and particularly this line that:

I really need to stress that "Oh, it's okay, you can suck and still clear content!" is actually not a satisfying "compromise" to a lot of players.

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2) I assume you mean DoTs on the potencies? The problem is that rewards DoT upkeep, which isn't a skill a lot of people are good with. Some people are very good with it, mind you, but some people are not. And as I've pointed out, the UI is pretty terrible about helping with this, especially since I can't seem to find a way to have my Focus Target show only my debuffs on the boss. If you let Dia fall off for 15 seconds, was that a gain or loss over a Glare cast? It's technically a bigger loss. And what if you have two DoTs? What's the single worst feeling thing to do on a BRD? Realize too late you didn't refresh your DoTs with Iron Jaws. Even if they're only down for a second, it's a pretty terrible feeling.

So this is a case of perception vs reality, but what you're saying is mathematically correct...but in perception, it feels terrible.

When when it comes to Job design and enjoyment, feeling is extremely important. It's like the person in the posts I linked said, if you have two Jobs where one has a lower damage cap but people can consistently reach it, people will probably tend to play that class more because it feels better to do well on a Job and reach its cap (to many people) than it does to do higher damage while doing the rotation imperfectly. Especially since many people don't run DPS meters and so can't really tell if they're doing 5% more damage than the lower cap Job anyway.

Note that I have pointed to abilities like Plegma (if not in melee range) as things that I support and prefer.

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3) As to Cleric - when encounters were tuned both officially and unofficially to assume 0 Healer DPS, something were all pretty sure is no longer true. Recall that many ARR fights didn't even have Enrage timers, meaning they weren't exactly tuned to require DPS at all other than the soft enrage mechanics. Can you imagine 7.X where no Extreme fight had an Enrage? Content and encounters would have go be designed and tuned differently, something you have opposed when I've suggested a far less radical redesign (having more frequent, but smaller in magnitude, unavoidable damage to heal), so would I be right in assuming you'd oppose elimination of Enrages, which is a far more radical change? And recall that in ARR, there was only one tier of Savage, and a very small sliver of the community actually did it. (Of course, the argument goes that the normals were Savage level difficulty and the one Savage was basically an Ultimate, but...)

[I think this may be an aside since neither of us are asking for Cleric to come back, but that's more what would need to be done to make that level of distinction Healer play viable.]

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4) I know you aren't asking for every healer to be a level 90 NIN. But what I seem unable to explain to you is that your argument is asking for none to be level 90 WHM. And I happen to like level 90 WHM. And see (1) for why "you can still play like you can and be suboptimal" isn't a great compromise.

What I can't understand is what's so wrong with having a gradient across the four Jobs. On a scale of 0-10, you're willing to allow 7s, 8s, and 9s in addition to 10s, but not 1s or even 3s or 4s. So you'll allow a gradient, but only one that is on the high end. It's like a food place that only has Large and Extra Large drinks when someone wants a Medium for themselves, a Small for their partner, and a Child size/Extra Small for their toddler. To my way of thinking, we have 4 and arguably could have 5 Healer Jobs (AST stances). To me, a system that has, say, SGE as a 9 or 10 with a BLM-like rotation that just happens to heal as you go, Nocturnal AST at a 7-8 with preplanning, spreading, and altering duration of abilities, SCH at a 4-6 with basically the redesign I proposed, Diurnal AST at a 2-4 still being AST but with a more accessible and reactive kit, and WHM being a 1 where it is right now. And nothing is a 0 (theoretical 0 would be "legitimate autoplay", like if SCH had two Faeires you summoned at once, one healed the party completely on its own and one did optimal damage completely on its own, and your only buttons were "Summon Eos" and "Summon Selene" and they were automatically summoned when you entered the Job so you'd have to actively dismiss them to get rid of them and the Faeries persist and do their thing even if the player is KOd, so you could just die at the start of the fight and still contribute full optimal damage and healing - a 0 is "literally, not figuratively, plays itself", since that's how I'd define "literally 0 skill or interaction required" in the most extreme case possible. Compared to that, btw, WHM is probably a 3 as it stands currently...)

To me, that doesn't sound very rigid, as it sounds the opposite of rigid. It sounds far less unyielding to me than "7, 8, 9, and 10 only; you can play as a 4, but you'll be doing poorly" does.

Maybe it's because you think what I'd call 5 is 1 and so to you, you're saying 1 5 and 10 or something, but clearly we disagree on what the low end of the scale is. It's like you're measuring in Celcius and I'm measuring in Kelvin, and you're insisting that 0 C is the lowest temperature a scale should read while I'm pointing out there are another 273 degrees that you're ignoring, and you retort that Absolute Zero is braindead and no one should want it anyway, and that the boiling point of liquid nitrogen should be sufficiently cool for anyone who wants something colder than 0C, but they also don't get to use it anywhere but in a laboratory.

Okay, tortured attempt at a comparison aside, that probably is it: We're measuring with different scales, with mine extending farther on the bottom end than yours (and possibly on the top end, as I haven't seen you support a BLM level of play). But either way, I just can't understand why my scale is seen by you as more rigid and unyielding when, as far as I can tell, mine's even wider than yours. Where your scale from 1-10 (expanded) is probably that you want Jobs to be a 6-7-8-9, Mine goes from 1 (WHM) to 10 (BLM-like SGE), and I just don't understand how that's more rigid and unyielding by any definition.

Maybe another part is you think that "you're allowed to play poorly" adds flexibility, but, again, see (1). It does not.

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5) My position isn't that what we have now is the only way a simple Job can exist, though.

What my position is, is that what we have now is a good level for the simpliest Job of the new paradigm spectrum. What WHM is now, for example, is a good "1", or what a "1" would make sense to be. I'm not saying there can't be a "2" or "3" as well. I'm not saying there can't be other things that are still simple - my SCH rework, as I said in that thread, is still fairly simple while still being more complex than current SCH and, indeed, than any of the current Healers are, DPS rotation-wise. I would rate it as a "3" from 1-5 or as a "4" from 0-10.

That is, I'm not saying "WHM is the only way a simple Job can exist". I'm saying "WHM makes sense to me as the simplest Job of the post-change system". Those are two pretty different statements. I...also want to point out - respectfully and cordially - that it's a bit hyperbole on your part - respectfully - to say that I think that "one water droplet more of interactivity" will make things completely unplayable. Again, my SCH rework adds at least several "water droplets" of more interactivity, and even my WHM suggestions (I've had several, but offhand, one was to make Dia get Thundercloud procs, and another was to make the main rotation mirror PLD sorta in that every 1-2-3 [1-1-1] of Glare casts, you get a Holy cast like how PLD does its main 1-2-3 combo and then gets a Holy Spirit), which are also at least one droplet more, if not several droplets more.

So - respectfully - that isn't a...fair...representation of my position.

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6) I didn't sate that leaving 1 alone would result in that. I believe that was Roe's argument. I was only countering that by saying if that was true, all it would indicate is that making Jobs more complex doesn't work. And that even in this hypothetical, that would only result if the playerbase complained about "having to do more work and not do more damage" (I still contend that was happening in SB and was at least part of the reason for the ShB changes - as I've said before, players said "We shouldn't have to do more work and not be rewarded with more damage!" and SE pulled out the Monkey's Paw and said "Ohhhh, you want to lighten the load, do you?" <monkey's paw curls> "Excellent idea!" <throws out DPS abilities> "Now you don't have to do more work and not be rewarded any more!") [And yes, that was a Great Mouse Detective quote of Rattagan before he throws the bat off the little dirigible.]

It was a hypothetical and countering another hypothetical, and based on assumption of if the playerbase complains loudly and long enough.

...to be fair, that last point probably is a pretty good assumption. But in any case, it wasn't me stating something inevitable. And even if it was: Again, that would just suggest we shouldn't be changing any, not the opposite.

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7) As Roe pointed out: I have.

I think I have with WHM several times, SCH once which was well received generally, and I'm pretty sure I've thrown out at least one semi-simple SGE suggestion, and probably several, as well as a medium difficulty SGE suggestion that was based on RDM.

And even though I don't feel qualified to do so since I play it so little and don't have the mindset of people who enjoy it - which is a big deal, I don't want to step on the toes of people who love AST, and it is the one Healer Job I don't consistently play and hold a "Ask those people what they want because I'm genuinely not a player that enjoys AST's gameplay but don't want to take away from it from those who do" - I still tried my hand on at least one AST rework, namely making Cards GCDs and damage neutral, as well as proposing changes to make them more enjoyable in different kind of gameplay, like increasing card effects when used on themselves or agreeing with whoever suggested that they should be able to stack on themselves, etc.

So...I feel like I have done what you asked. One case it was decently received, the rest were all rebuffed outright.

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8) I prefer vanilla ice cream to milk flavored ice cream.

A 1, not a 0.

[ty_taurus]

I think this is something you fundamentally misunderstand about your solutions that are "you can just play badly and still manage" and why that really isn't a non-rigid, flexible, accommodating solution.

But I'm not actually arguing that the average player intentionally play poorly. I'm saying that players can do what is comfortable for them, whether that's optimal or not. The average player doesn't do things like drop their GCD or sit on cooldowns and think "dammit! I'm losing damage." That's not how I looked at my own performance back during ARR and HW when I was not a midcore player and would regularly stop casting altogether to play my cards, or might not reapply DoTs until I needed to reapply all of them as SCH. I wasn't measuring my performance up to what is possible of my job, I was just doing my best and enjoying beating content like extremes or some of the coils. Whether or not the average player is able to use 2 or 3 new DPS spells as optimally as humanly possible is not going to make or break a community of players. The only reason intentionally not using DPS ever came up was as a bargaining chip specifically for you and select few who seem repulsed by the prospect of additional DPS buttons at all, regardless of how easy or challenging they are to use.

I've also tried before to argue the concept of a healer that spends their GCDs setting up and activating party-wide buffs instead of attacking, and in order to stay competitive with the other healers, generates personal damage indirectly as a consequence of setting up your buffs. That way there could be a healer whos engagement stemmed from the experience of supporting most of the time and attacking as little as possible, and that seems to me like a great way to create a healer specifically for players who want to master and perfect their job without having that optimization having to come from attacking enemies, but as you mention at the bottom, was pretty much rejected outright.

To me, that doesn't sound very rigid, as it sounds the opposite of rigid. It sounds far less unyielding to me than "7, 8, 9, and 10 only; you can play as a 4, but you'll be doing poorly" does.

If we say that Ninja is a 10 in this example, I cannot agree that WHM with 2-3 additional attack spells makes it jump from a 1 to a 7. I would generously describe 2-3 extra spells as a 4. It would be more accurate to say that what I'd like to see would be something around a 4|5|5|6 spread to a 4|6|6|8 spread. The 4 should still bring value that the other healers do not have, and the DPS should still offer some opportunities to get extra damage out of using the right things at the right time, but it's overall straightforward and forgiving on the healing side.

7) As Roe pointed out: I have

That's fair; however, the reason why I don't recall this very well is you've made several posts in the past about different interpretations of each of the healers, often with different "what if"s attached, including "what if we make WHM complex and leave [this healer] in a state like this instead?" There's nothing wrong with making theorycrafts like that, but because the reasoning behind those different takes would change based on the topic, I don't feel that I have a strong understanding of what you'd collectively be content with or what was just experimental to see what people respond to. Something like having Holy buffed after every third Glare is certainly a fine step in a better direction, and I am always on board to give uses to buttons that are currently restricted to AoE only.

If we were to say that is 1 additional action of DPS variety, what if anything would you be willing to add to that?