Healer role design change?

[Renathras]

Unironically, skill issue. You have, or had, an annoying habit of trying to shortcut people into agreeing with your conclusions once they agree with you on minutiae, so now everyone avoids agreeing with you on minutiae the same way a wolf won't step into a snare twice.

First, no.

The argument style you're referring to is when you build up from a set of axioms to a conclusion, checking to see if people agree with the steps along the way. If the steps logically dictate the conclusion, this is a pretty valid way to outline a problem/solution to get agreement. "We agree on X. We agree on Y. We agree on Z. X + Y + Z = A, therefore we should reasonably agree on A." Sometimes people don't like this because they actually hold incongruent beliefs vs the axioms they accept, other times they disagree with the link - in which case the proper solution there is to argue whether the link is valid, which is a discussion worth having.

It's not a shortcut or a cheat. If one believes, for example, that taxes are too high but also wants government programs that require those taxes, it's fair to point out to them that they should be willing to accept cuts to services in order to achieve the cuts to taxes they desire, or alternatively, to accept the higher taxes for those services they enjoy. And it's fair to them to suggest a workaround if they can think of one, such as taxing only segments of the population or cutting some services they don't enjoy to make up the shortfall, at which point it's fair to counter that by asking why those services and not the others or why tax those people and not others, and so on.

There's no cheat or fallacy there, some people just don't like it because when arguments are broken down into steps, it often lays bare glaring errors in logic that someone may have used to reach their conclusion.

But, in either case, I haven't had that "annoying" habit. If I lay out such an argument, it's generally to try and see what all points we actually agree on so I know where we can find further points of agreement. Some people say they hold a position they actually do not, but if you can drill down to what they actually do believe, then it allows actual compromise and progress.

I hope it's the first one. Trying to shoehorn a 'magical spellcaster healer' into an action RPG framework with constant movement is conceptually loathsome.

Thing is, FFXIV wasn't designed as an ARPG and doesn't work well as one. The netcode is pretty atrocious for it (just jump in a Frontline if you doubt that). Not only would such a change alienate the people who have been playing the game long enough they didn't sign up for that, it doesn't even work well anyway. Ultimately resulting in a situation that alienates many and satisfies few, even of they who advocate for it.

I agree it's conceptually loathsome, but you have the causality backwards:

FFXIV isn't trying to shoehorn a magical spellcaster healer into an action RPG framework with constant movement.

FFXIV is trying to shoehorn an action RPG framework with constant movement onto a traditional tab targeting framework, netcode and class design.

Thus the problem isn't with the spellcaster healers, since that was the design of the game. The problem is trying to upend that entire system and impose an ARPG framework on it that it cannot support and that hasn't been the identity of the game.

Basically, more incoming damage coupled with less predictability. The sooner SE drop the weird esports mentality and stop trying to design both fights and jobs to be 'logs friendly' the better. I genuinely think it's sterilised the enjoyment out of Savage at this point.

Hear hear.

If agreement on particulars is coincidental to disagreement on the warrants themselves, then no, it's not an overall agreement.

Okay, I'm done taking your troll bait:

Do you or do you not agree that encounter design and healer kits seem to not be designed to work with one another?

If you disagree, you're not disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with most of the people posting in this thread, including Semi who brought the point up in the first place specifically regarding WHM. It's not a you vs me thing, which you seem to love. It's a you vs everyone else thing. I'm not going to be your punching bag because you disagree with everyone else and are using me as your proxy to beat on because you enjoy beating on me, and/or you want to use me as a punching bag even when you agree with me on the basic point. So let's see if you agree with me and everyone else, or if you're the island here. The question is there and it's a simple question to answer, restated so you can't miss it:

Do you or do you not agree that encounter design and healer kits seem to not be designed to work with one another?

And since you've frequently...

HAVE.
NOT.

And I'm not going to engage with people openly engaging in such bad faith. Two of you now. "Well, you did this thing (we're going to accuse you of even though you don't have a frequent habit of doing it, actually), so we can defend attacking you because we felt like it even though you're acting in good faith and trying to have a serious discussion on a topic that everyone kind of agrees on overall." No, not today.

If someone is engaging you in good faith, you should do the same, even if they HAD a history of bad faith. I actually do not, and it's been discussed to death that the cases people perceived that was due to them assuming things about what I was saying rather than asking to get clarification, and often taking part in dogpiles and stupid cliquish vendettas against people (me specifically) regardless of the topic, good faith, good will on my part, or anything that I do or have done other than whatever initially alienated you, which was a misconception on your part in most cases.

Case.
In.
Point:

"('PLD changes were largely considered a net positive, so everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes, thus they must have hated DoTs on PLD, which implies that the SMN changes also were an unmitigated good')"???

What?

I have NEVER to my awareness said "everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes". PROVE IT. Quote a post of mine where I said that. Because there isn't one and we both know it. You literally made that up. I have, since the changes in 6.3, described the response as "mixed". And even if I hadn't, I can't think of a time I've EVER said of ANY change that "everyone must surely like ever part of" it. Even changes that I like and think most people do, I'm quick to acknowledge not everyone likes the same things and it isn't universal. Indeed, I'm the most frequent poster HERE to say such things, and almost always the first to bring up that there is no universality. I even avoid using the term majority, even when I'm pretty sure there is one and what data we have backs up that there is one, instead opting for "some/many" instead of "most/majority". And where - again PROVE IT with a quote - did I say everyone hated DoTs on PLD and that implies SMN changes were an unmitigated good?

I want a QUOTE, because you made that BS up wholesale.

Not one person here will call you on it, mind you, but we all know it's a lie. Considering how often I hedge what I say and how even when I was invoking majority, I was still quick to point out there was dissent proves that's a lie, but the onus is on you to prove it's true.

QUOTE, please.

Oh, you don't have one?

Of course you don't: Because you made it up.

You either misinterpreted something, misremember something, or flat out made something up, and then used this to justify a completely separate argument and your attacks on someone, when your attacks are based on something that never even happened in the first place.

People tell me just to stop engaging with you guys when you do it. No one ever calls you out, so I don't expect anyone to this time. But I'm starting to take the advice of those like PetLalas to just not engage with you bad faith people.

You can answer the question above, or you can not. That's up to you.

If you don't, it proves my point.

If you do, then we can get back on topic, which is what we should be doing anyway.

If you just want to keep attacking me irrationally and in bad faith, then I'm not going to be a party to that childish vendetta.

[Shurrikhan]

There's no cheat or fallacy there, some people just don't like it because when arguments are broken down into steps, it often lays bare glaring errors in logic that someone may have used to reach their conclusion.

The problem is when you frame things into false ultimatums in order to try to force out your next "logical step" towards a conclusion you clearly started from.

Belabor transitive properties all you like; when those steps individually rely on reductivism or conflations, their conclusions are not going to be soundly arrived at.

Do you or do you not agree that encounter design and healer kits seem to not be designed to work with one another?

Yes.

WHICH IS NOT, HOWEVER, despite whatever you may imply, AGREEMENT THAT... fight design needs to have its mobility requirements significantly reduced (or even any amount greater than between 'not at all' and 'slightly'). I am just fine with casters and melee both having a deeper fight-specific learning curve for their movement/uptime optimization required, so long as they're compensated accordingly, and I'm just fine with movement optimizations increasing with expansions, provided we just as much toolage as we need to perform them.

I do not want to see those layers of optimization removed from jobs -- neither by homogenizing/fool-proofing their kits in regard to uptime management nor by providing significantly less challenge around which to interact in any given fight; it is perfectly fine for a level span that provides additional mobility tools to also carry additional mobility requirements. Moreover, I don't see how one could call Endwalker a sudden change into "an ARPG" except in obvious hyperbole.


Our agreement goes as far as "The current situation is not good." Beyond that incredibly nebulous point, though, we have largely disagreed:

• on the extent to which it is "not good",
• on all but one reason for why it's "not good", and
• on all but one part of reasonable solutions for the problem.

And those components are important. That we would, for instance, agree that a problem (of some extent, for some reason), on the other hand, is barely a starting point. So just, please, do not pretend that my simply agreeing that "A exists" necessitates your B, C, and D. It doesn't.

[Aravell]

Case.
In.
Point:

"('PLD changes were largely considered a net positive, so everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes, thus they must have hated DoTs on PLD, which implies that the SMN changes also were an unmitigated good')"???

What?

I have NEVER to my awareness said "everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes".

Ren says no one will defend him here, but I don't think I've ever seen him conflate all of those points together to form the conclusion you pointed out. He has said he prefers the new PLD, he has said he dislikes DoTs and he has said he likes the new SMN. But I don't think I've ever seen him add all this together and say new SMN is unmitigated good.

As for the topic, I'd say both fight design and job kits need some changing. The argument that fight design doesn't fit the job kits is partially flawed, if you want fights designed in such a way that uses the full kit that we have, you'd have to do some serious fight redesigning because we have way too much redundancies in the current kit. Although, purely just changing the kit will also not change that healers can be dropped in higher organised groups.

My opinion is that they need to change both. Cut out the redundancies in our kit, add more options to support the party or debuff the enemy. Also change fight design, bring back random targetted damage, bring back crit autos, give healers a reason to exist again, make it so tanks and DPS cannot keep up with the incoming damage.

[vetch]

There's no cheat or fallacy there, some people just don't like it because when arguments are broken down into steps, it often lays bare glaring errors in logic that someone may have used to reach their conclusion.

But, in either case, I haven't had that "annoying" habit. If I lay out such an argument, it's generally to try and see what all points we actually agree on so I know where we can find further points of agreement. Some people say they hold a position they actually do not, but if you can drill down to what they actually do believe, then it allows actual compromise and progress.

I don't agree that this is what you're doing. I believe that you think it's what you're doing, that it's a worthy standard you're trying to live up to, but for the moment, I stand by my impression that you're skipping conversational steps without noticing, or that you're misidentifying the character of discussions in some other fundamental way that causes your method to misfire. If I'm wrong, just keep being yourself and I'll notice over time.

That said, I want to add an observation that this argument style wouldn't make you well-liked even if you were employing it with perfect form. People having ordinary conversations don't like being bullied into debates. Hell, sometimes they don't even like being forced to stake out a position before they're ready to. It's inherently tiresome, which is not a word you want applied to your conversational style if you're looking to have nice chats. The result of doing it anyway is precisely as you see -- either people ghost you or they embrace the junior debate club flavor you bring to the conversation and start picking apart your arguments like they're going to score points doing it.

Normal people who haven't consented to debate are better engaged, befriended, and convinced with smaller comments, repeated over time, regardless of any logical fallacies contained therein. This is a normal facet of human, non-debate interaction. If you want to pick apart someone's logical lacunae (because you just can't help yourself from doing so) while remaining well-liked enough that people don't avoid you on sight, then you have to exercise either a whole lot more tact and warmth that you currently do, or a whole lot less and just start butting heads openly.

I agree it's conceptually loathsome, but you have the causality backwards: FFXIV isn't trying to shoehorn a magical spellcaster healer into an action RPG framework with constant movement. FFXIV is trying to shoehorn an action RPG framework with constant movement onto a traditional tab targeting framework, netcode and class design.

I didn't mention any causality and I wasn't looking to have that particular conversation. But sticking to the point, note that you can draw a straight line through CBU3's recent offerings that points to them continuing down this ill-advised road of trying to turn FF14 into a clunky ARPG MMO, which means that healer kits will be chopped and shaped to fit, regardless of what predates what.

And that will make me very sad.

And I'm not going to engage with people openly engaging in such bad faith. Two of you now. "Well, you did this thing (we're going to accuse you of even though you don't have a frequent habit of doing it, actually), so we can defend attacking you because we felt like it even though you're acting in good faith and trying to have a serious discussion on a topic that everyone kind of agrees on overall." No, not today.

And there it is. The problem plaguing modern discussion of any topic, no matter how inconsequential: if someone doesn't find my argument well-formed and convincing, it must be that they're either trolling, or a bad-faith actor, or simply stupid, or some other problem inherent to them. It can't be that my arguments aren't as good and efficacious as I think they are, or that they're just plain mistaken about some stuff in an honest, understandable way. Therefore, the proper response is to publicly pathologize them, so everyone knows it's their problem and that they're a toxic element who is unwilling to engage with my good arguments.

If someone is engaging you in good faith, you should do the same, even if they HAD a history of bad faith.

I, and everyone else on every internet discussion forum that exists or ever will exist, reserve the right to stop talking and refuse engagement with someone who becomes annoying and pushy, regardless of whether they do so in good faith. As should you.

[Sebazy]

Perhaps a good thing would be to clarify what's changed and the manner in which it's driven current day healing off the rails.

IMHO it's really quite simple and most of the solutions have already been dropped piecemeal in various discussions here over the years.

SE don't really need to go back to ARR style encounter designs, but rather they need to look at what made those otherwise really rather basic bosses such good fun when the modern day equivalents like Alte Roite are almost universally derived.

Ramping up the damage on tanks, allowing bosses to keep auto attacking through casts, allowing those auto attacks to crit, bringing back non telegraphed mini tank busters and additional aoe procs with normalised RNG chances to really keep the healers on their toes. Make us sweat, make us have to keep an eye on the tanks, make us have to keep an eye on the melee. Stop allowing us to let someone sit at 100hp safe in the knowledge that the next AoE is clearly indicated on our spreadsheet and Assize/Asylum/Eos will get them topped long before anything else comes along.

Basically, more incoming damage coupled with less predictability. The sooner SE drop the weird esports mentality and stop trying to design both fights and jobs to be 'logs friendly' the better. I genuinely think it's sterilised the enjoyment out of Savage at this point.

[Aravell]

Ramping up the damage on tanks, allowing bosses to keep auto attacking through casts, allowing those auto attacks to crit, bringing back non telegraphed mini tank busters and additional aoe procs with normalised RNG chances to really keep the healers on their toes. Make us sweat, make us have to keep an eye on the tanks, make us have to keep an eye on the melee. Stop allowing us to let someone sit at 100hp safe in the knowledge that the next AoE is clearly indicated on our spreadsheet and Assize/Asylum/Eos will get them topped long before anything else comes along.

Basically, more incoming damage coupled with less predictability. The sooner SE drop the weird esports mentality and stop trying to design both fights and jobs to be 'logs friendly' the better. I genuinely think it's sterilised the enjoyment out of Savage at this point.

I miss when I had to toss a Regen on the main tank during Trines in O8S or they die to autos. I don't think I've needed to press Regen once in most modern fights. Also the part about them designing fights to be log-friendly, that would explain why they stopped doing mechanics that give people a damage down for doing it correctly (Digititis) or mechanics that lock down a specific person in the fight (Hand phase in A3S and Titan gaols in E4S).

[ForsakenRoe]

I miss when I had to toss a Regen on the main tank during Trines in O8S or they die to autos. I don't think I've needed to press Regen once in most modern fights.

I threw one on each of the purpleboys in High Concept in like, week 1 prog, but once people had some gear the threat of the DOT fell off a cliff. Can't really check too many fights this tier (I was SCH for half of them), but I used Regens on the tanks when they got flung about in P10, and for the doorboss, my first 3 kills (which were all on the same day), only one of those kills had one lonely Regen in it, and looking at the log, I cannot even tell why I used it, but it was used right after Limit Cut, so it might have been in downtime anyway, I can't really tell.

P12S phase 2 first kill also has a Regen cast count of... zero, surprising I know. 7 Medica 2's, but no Regen. So yeh, there's occasions where I use the button but, let's be real, I wouldn't be pressing Aspected Benefic in those situations (it is because AST has like 3x as much OGCD game as WHM)

[Aravell]

I threw one on each of the purpleboys in High Concept in like, week 1 prog, but once people had some gear the threat of the DOT fell off a cliff. Can't really check too many fights this tier (I was SCH for half of them), but I used Regens on the tanks when they got flung about in P10, and for the doorboss, my first 3 kills (which were all on the same day), only one of those kills had one lonely Regen in it, and looking at the log, I cannot even tell why I used it, but it was used right after Limit Cut, so it might have been in downtime anyway, I can't really tell.

P12S phase 2 first kill also has a Regen cast count of... zero, surprising I know. 7 Medica 2's, but no Regen. So yeh, there's occasions where I use the button but, let's be real, I wouldn't be pressing Aspected Benefic in those situations (it is because AST has like 3x as much OGCD game as WHM)

That's true, I forgot about P8S, early weeks was Regen on each purple, later weeks was just 1 Medica 2. I didn't prog P10S on WHM, but I think Regen there is just more of a safety net, I did have a WHM cohealer that didn't use Regen, I tossed an Excog on one tank and a tether on the other and they came out fine. I now recall that I did Regen both tanks in P3S adds phase though, those baby birds hit hard.

I'm still casually progging P12S so I can't speak for healing in phase 2, but the healing requirement in phase 1 is looking rather lacking so far, since I can soloheal through Superchain Theory I when my cohealer died at the start of it.

[ForsakenRoe]

I'm still casually progging P12S so I can't speak for healing in phase 2, but the healing requirement in phase 1 is looking rather lacking so far, since I can soloheal through Superchain Theory I when my cohealer died at the start of it.

The only bits I'd consider 'hard to heal' are paradeigma 3 (platforms) and Limit Cut, and both are because of range. I actually use Medica 2 in LC specifically because of it's 5y extra range compared to Medica 1, hilariously. Rapture is also 20, so that's handy. But yeh Para3 can be a little wonky on healing if you end up with the 'bugger off to Narnia' debuff

phase 2's healing issues are kinda the same thing really, just 'people are out of range, get mid to heal up before the next Ultima cast goes off'. That and certain named raidwides hit pretty hard so again, mit check rather than actual heal check (sadly)