What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[Renathras]

I'll start with the last one first, since I have a more ready answer:

A) If we were to, say, add 1 additional DPS action (as a given/baseline), what in addition, if anything, would I be willing to add to that?

Unsatisfying as it is, there's not a direct answer to that. Not trying to waft, so let me explain some:

It largely depends on the rest of the kit, how much button bloat the kit has, interactivity with the kit (none makes it pointless to add, too much can make it...well, too much; an extreme example would be a DoT that ticks every 1 sec and procs a free Energy Drain at a 50% rate - this would make the Job insanely hectic and probably few people would find it really fun to actually play since you'd conceivably be needing to double-weave ED with a pretty high rate of probability and not even know about it in the middle of your casts, etc). It also depends on whether we're talking new abilities or not - existing abilities getting additional functionality (e.g. 3x Glare -> empowered Holy) can be done in ways that add some depth to the rotation without over complicating things or bloating the Job. On the other hand, having Presence of Mind proc "Quake Ready", and WHM having Quake, Tornado, and Flood as three distinct buttons that are used in a 1-2-3 combo but only once every 2 minutes? That's not complicated per se, but it's just bloaty.

Likewise, upkeep buffs can be annoying at the best of times, and whether they're easy or hard to keep up entirely depends on the UI - contrast Dia, Storm's Eye, and Huton. Dia you can have on multiple targets and track, at most, two of them (target and focus target), easily, and with all the debuffs on enemies, it can be hard to see it drop off. While you can get the game to show you only your buffs, then you may be missing important information like whether or not Mug, Chain Strat, etc are up, which is something you kind of need to know. Storm's Eye is likewise not well displayed, being a tiny icon on the party list or somewhere at the top of the screen above the boss health bar, both of which are easy to miss dropping off and give no information when they do. (Contrast when a SGE shield is broken and it gives an audible que to alert the player they just gained a Toxicon stack). And then you have Huton, which is on the Job gauge in the form of a pinwheel of kunei, but is visibly very easy to tell at a glance how much time you have left on it.

Finally, it depends on the Job's existing kit. In a vacuum, all the Jobs already have full hotbars. I know everyone else's definition is different, but mine is "more than 29 buttons is probably too many. The controller hotbar thing I've explained before is one reason for it, but it's also a way of saying "Is thirty (30) buttons really not enough??" Even WHM and SGE have exactly 1 too many buttons by that metric. RDM or SMN or MCH have a few free for additions, but none of the Healers really do. But AST and SCH are the worst offenders here. So adding new buttons (and by this I mean "not existing abilities with additional effects nor new abilities but which share an actionbar spot like Summon Seraph/Consolation do") is kind of an issue already.

That said, there are a few ways around this, like SGE can get more use out of Eukrasia. The name being stupid aside, they could give SGE "Eukrasia Dyskrasia" that is an AOE DoT like Eu Dosis is for Dosis.

So this depends a lot on specifically what it is.

I'm sorry there's not a...straightforward?...answer, but there just isn't. I'd be like asking "What one button would you add to a DPS Job?", the pertinent question might be "Uh...which DPS Job?", since your answer would be pretty different if you were talking about DRG vs if you were talking about BLM.


B) "I cannot agree that WHM with 2-3 additional attack spells makes it jump from a 1 to a 7" - I'd argue that depends on what spells you add. How many is less important than what they do.

Let's say you just added "Water -> Banish" as a 2 charge Plegma-type thing and "Quake -> Tornado -> Flood" as three buttons used with PoM as I described above. That's not too bad, would probably move WHM up to a 4 or so. Kind of a super lax version of RDM's burst which automatically lines up with burst windows as long s you don't drift PoM. And that as adding 4 new spells and a new trigger off of PoM.

But lets say you add one DoT and this DoT has a chance to Diacloud proc Dia. And Dia has a chance to DoTcloud the new DoT. And each of them, when the proc is used, has a chance to make Holy instant cast and cost no mana, and it has a chance to proc the refresh on Assize, and if it does, using that Assize will empower your next Glare. Suddenly this is getting a lot more complicated, and that was just adding ONE new button. Now you have a BRD branching opener based on what procs and what doesn't, and your likewise your burst window, optimizations around when to burn the procs and when to hold them based on how far you are from burst or different boss phases, etc. I'd say that takes it up to a 7 or possibly 8 just because there's a high probability of needing to alter your rotation on the fly based on what happens and you needing to know when it is and isn't optimal to burn the procs vs hold them, as well as needing more fight knowledge to decide if you should push with them or pocket them for movement tools. This would make WHM a bit more like BLM and also have all kinds of complaints about RNG variation and so on. But again, that's just adding one button and getting WHM up to a 7. You an argue the Dia and Holy and Assize changes count as 4 separate things, but it's only one additional attack spell being added.

As for your spread - respectfully (sorry if that's getting annoying, I just want to keep things...civil; it's not meant to be condescending, just a que of "I don't mean this as an attack or anything") - 4-6 or 4-8 are still narrower than 1-10.

I'm trying to think where I would actually rank the Healers at right now. I'm not quite sure. Because I factor in healing needs (which is encounter, gear, and party specific). But if 0 is "plays itself" (my "0" is "Absolute Zero", recall), and 1 is "a dipping bird on the keyboard can do this" (e.g. imagine if WHM had just Glare. No Holy, Dia, Lilies/Misery, or Assize), possibly with a second "dummy proof" button or something. If that, then WHM would sit around a 2 right now. SGE is kind of a side-grade from that. AST and SCH are each a step up a smidge in different directions, so this depends on the player, as most people I think would find one or the other a bit easier and the other harder. So like an AST player might think of AST as a 3 and SCH as a 4, a SCH player might think of SCH as a 3 and AST as the 4, etc. Probably both 3.5s, we'll say. SMN is probably, by comparison, a 3-4. If it was a Healer and managing party health, it would be a 4, but without having to worry about that, it's probably a 2.5-3. (yes, yes, 2.5 would be a scale of 20, it's more than a 2. I suppose 3.5 would as well...)

So in my book, a smidge more to either AST or SCH (like my proposed SCH changes) would put them comfortably in the 4-5 range, as neither needs to go really far to get there. My SCH proposal might actually be 4.5-5 since there's a fair amount of optimization around Energy Drain and Miasma in it.

Hm...maybe I need to just think through all the Jobs in the game and assign them a value to actually attempt to quantify this. like if SMN is a 3, what would I call RDM? In ShB I'd have called it a 5, but now I'm thinking more like 7-8 - you might laugh, but look at some of the optimization high end RDMs are doing in stuff like TOP. Knowing down to a value what their Black/White Mana need to be, the specific number or range, for different phases in a fight? That's near BLM levels of precision fight knowledge to get that Pink. How much you need to stuff into the burst window to go from 50% to 85% as a player. There was some optimization in ShB, but I'm not sure there was anything nearly that precise or demanding. Now, "passable" level of RDM? Sure, 3-4. But the Job's top end isn't low, and I think a lot of people misunderstand that now.

C) So we come at last to the beginning.

Just for the sake of certainty on my part - you read those two posts I linked, right?

Because they kind of addressed "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" and why that isn't a good argument. I'm going to assume you did, so I'm more just posting this here as a way of review:

I think that most people simply do not want to be told, "Well, you're doing it wrong, but your performance is still adequate enough to not fail completely" — which is what most of the backhanded assurances given by Discords, etc, tend to sound like to players who are trying to gauge whether they're playing correctly.

This creates a general atmosphere where, regardless of how true it is, most players tend to see the game's Jobs as having only two outcomes: "failing" (non-optimal) and "succeeding" (optimal).

And I think a lot of players just do not like the idea that they're "failing" compared to the "ideal" rotation, even if the ideal rotation is not objectively necessary just to clear content.

This is why I think it's not as simple as a lot "skill-focused" players try to make it seem — the argument, "Well, let's just make the Job harder, because you'll still be able to clear content with the easier rotation".

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And second of all, "good enough" is just not what most people actually want.

Players don't want to think, "I'm playing the crappy version of my rotation, because it's easy, and that's what I can handle!"

They want to think, "I'm playing my rotation correctly, and I'm doing well as a result!"

The first perspective may be more realistic, but the second perspective feels far better to someone in terms of having emotional fun while playing a game.

This is why players will gravitate towards Jobs that they feel that they can intuitively play "correctly", and become averse to Jobs that they feel like they "fail" too frequently or too easily.

Let's say there's two Jobs, "Job A" and "Job B".

Job A is easy to play optimally, but has a low damage ceiling.

Job B is hard to play optimally, but has a high damage ceiling.

Let's also say that Job B played poorly ends up doing about as much damage as Job A played optimally.

I think most players will gravitate towards Job A, by a significant margin — because they don't care about their actual raw numbers nearly as much as they care about their parse colour (which has been conditioned by the community using things like "gray" and "green" as potent insults), as well as just not feeling like they're constantly messing up and failing... because that's psychologically-unpleasant.

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This is something that I think the argument, "Just make it more complex — if you don't like it, you don't need to do it", fails to take into account: people would rather decisively-succeed, than struggle and fail constantly, even if the numerical outcome is identical in both cases.

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.

People often pull out the "haha ice mages" type exaggerated extremes, but I think that most players don't actually fall into those edge cases — in my experience, at least (anecdotal though it all is), most players do at least try to understand what their Job "wants" them to do, and they become frustrated and discouraged if they feel like they can't pull it off consistently.

As strange as it may seem from the perspective of someone who's seriously-dedicated to the game, a lot of players also just do not seek external resources — they will try to figure things out, but if they can't figure it out "on their own", they either stop worrying about it, or become frustrated and pick a different Job.

I want to stress that I'm not arguing "right" or "wrong" here, and I'm not saying you're "wrong" for enjoying a game that rewards you for thinking about things in a depthy, complicated, or extensive way. I'm just trying to clarify that a vast amount of the playerbase neither enjoys that, nor sees it as a valuable design pursuit, and that causes the friction you're seeing here.

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".

Note the bolded section.

It's not about "play poorly". It's "If you play what is comfortable to you, it's not optimal; you can still do things passably, but you aren't doing them optimally" that is a problematic argument, because people don't want to do things "passably". People don't want "You did good...enough... /headpat".

I think you might have a mindset similar to the user she's replying to there - and I don't mean this as an insult - as a player driven to do what you do. It's not bad to be driven and competitive, per se. The issue is when you lose the realization that a lot of people aren't, and thus why your offers to them fall flat, since they don't really offer them what they want.

What they want is a Job they can pick up, read the tooltips, and intuitively perform at a high level of the Job's capacity, perhaps even optimally or close enough as to be irrelevant, without knowing that The Balance or etc even exist. There are two Jobs in the game right now that come close to that: PLD and SMN (bet you thought I'd mention different ones. )

Yeah, they still require you to know what an oGCD is, which the game does not describe or explain, but the concept of "This thing increases my damage, and these are big damage spells, oh, that first thing can only be used so often, and lines up with these other things. So I guess I should use them together. And using this unlocks these, so I use this then these". That equally describes both PLD (FoF, Req; Goring, Confetti/Swords, and Royal for Atonement and Holy Spirit) and SMN (Searing Light; Bahamut; and Primals + Gemshine/Astral Flow, Energy Drain/Fester and Ruin 4, and arguably Phoenix since it doesn't at all come close to Searing but Bahamut does). Sure, there's a little wiggle there in PLD ideally wanting to get certain attacks in the damage window and SMN wanting to slightly drift Baha/Phoenix by casting a Ruin 3 per cycle. And there's a little big brain like drifting Energy drain into the second buff window slightly so you can hold the two Festers from Phoenix for the 2 min buff window, Energy Drain, then use the two more, from then on getting 4 Festers into even minute burst windows by holding them from the odd minute bursts. But the gains from all of these are pretty marginal. There's a bit of skill expression, but the "read your tooltips and try it out" can get you 80-90% of the way there.

I don't - at all - believe every Job needs to be this way.

I don't believe most should be this way.

I very much believe there is value in having high complexity Jobs and medium complexity Jobs, and even super high complexity Jobs that are gigabrain Transpose Lines Infinite Paradox insanity.

I just believe there's value in having the other end of that scale represented as well.

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I guess my continued question is: I'm not arguing against several takes on more complex healers. Ones that spend GCDs setting up and activating buffs, could be one of them.

But what I can't figure out how to explain or convince you of is that I don't think you understand what people like me want.

"...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..."

Read the quotes above again and try to understand, "master and perfect" is not a universal motivation.

What you're offering here in this specific instance is "Here is a complex Healer for people who don't want to DPS so they can play a complex Healer that buffs instead". This is rooted in the idea that there are Slyphies out there who aren't exactly Sylphies (because they don't "just want to heal", they want to heal and support), but offering them a complex Job that doesn't deal damage should make them happy, right?

Note what that's not "Here is a simple Healer for people who want simple and straightforward Jobs so they can play a simple and straightforward Healer".

I don't disagree - there are...at the risk of inventing a new insult, let's call them (as a descriptor, not as an insult) "Support Sylphies" who just genuinely hate attacking buttons no matter what, but they don't want to only fill health bars, as they want to buff their allies as well, and they are super competitive players who do want to research and perfect and master and squeeze everything they can out of their Job - I absolutely believe such people exist, and I agree we should have an option for them, probably AST.

That is, I absolutely agree we should have a support/buff Healer Job, again, probably AST...but that isn't addressing the needs of the people who want a SMN-like Healer. It's meeting the needs of the skill expression competitive "Support Sylphies"...

...but that isn't the people who want a simple Healer Job. That's a different group of people. That's why this answer doesn't address the need.

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I also would note that there's a bit of a disconnect in saying that we aren't allowed to have a simple Healer, because "what about the people who like that Job's aesthetic but what a Job with depth?", but we are for some reason allowing a buff Healer that is limited to one Job. What about the people who like AST's aesthetic but not buffing? What about the people who like buffing but like SCH or SGE or WHM's aesthetic?

It seems odd to me that this form of Job differentiation is acceptable - "If you like buffing, play AST, if you don't like buffing, play something else" - but doing so with simple vs complex is unacceptable. It seems to me both should be violations of the same principle, does it not?

And sure, one could counter that by saying "But AST is and always has been all about buffs as its identity, and everyone who picks up AST knows that", but by that token, SGE has always been about simple DPS kit and healing since it was introduced, and honestly, so has WHM - even when it had all of one more DoT than it has now in SB or had two and Cleric in HW and ARR, it was still "the simple Healer" even then...

Not trying to start a fight over it, it just seems the principle is only being applied in one of those cases when it should be applied in both...