Tanking

I find that you all are still arguing in a binary way for something that involves 'degrees'.

A group can do content where damage is spread out, let's say fighting a plant monster that does constant AoE and has a passive DoT aura.

In this fight, augments are probably enough and you probably don't need a Cleric/X.

A group can try to do content against a dragon who stacks debuffs and hits fairly hard single target with little chance of the target running out of range to heal naturally.

In this content 'augments will not be sufficient to replace a Cleric archetype'.

It's a Role Playing Game. I feel like philosphically @Dygz is leaving out whether or not the discussion here is 'can do X in raid level content/deep dungeon boss fight ' so it devolves into semantics unnecessarily.

How much content requires a Cleric, and how much content requires a Tank/X, is dependent on content much more than on class design.

@Dygz - either stick to talking about 'raid' level content or explain why you're a reactive ball that constantly posts stuff that has no determined merit to a real discussion. Are you unable to see the perspectives of others, or trolling? You've claimed in other threads that you have been involved in game development (or design?) yet nearly every post you make treats other people's perspective as nothing more than 'contrary to the design spec document', which, itself, is (unfortunately) pretty mutable still.

I guess that's how some developers that don't really do the 'design' part are trained to act, so, is that it? Have you been 'the implementation person' following the spec for your 10 years?

That'd be incredibly boring overall though, and limiting in terms of what PvE experiences could be like.

There's so much potential here, that doesn't mess with the overall feel of the game, I just don't want to keep doing what Dygz does and writing a whole essay every time to explain why/nuance.

And I bet the devs don't either. I can't speak for them with surety, but in my career we'd make sure never to spend too much time explaining nitty gritty details or underlying functionality to the clients. It led to confusion and nitpicking even with the Customer Relationship Managers assigned to the clients, since they weren't as technical.

I'm trying not to act like 'the dev translator' here since I don't know them, but I can see the signs of 'minimizing clarity in spec' littered throughout their communications.

I can give a massive dissertation on why the thing the Devs said is probably not to be taken literally, and that's even without a full consensus on what 'group content' means.

I didn't mean to say that. Technically my 'you all' didn't actually include you, though that wasn't clear since more of my post did. Sorry, I'm a little 'triggered' by your style of communication reminding me of a specific subordinate. I'll try to focus more.

What I can say is that I feel like you're not adequately communicating that type of thing, or you're 'arguing with people who might not be understanding what you meant, without reminding them of that'.

For example, you say it's a matter of degrees, that they can off tank, but what is your definition of that? If an X/Tank goes into a dungeon full of bears and raptors, and for whatever reason their build is good at tanking bears and raptors, then you might just not need a Tank/X for that content.

At that point, some would argue that the Augments have changed the character enough for it to be 'A tank'. Depends on if you define tank as 'can tank most things, not just bears and raptors'.

When someone hears 'you can probably offtank' they don't necessarily hear what they want to hear, even if what they want to hear is a thing you can do in the game . You have specifically communicated before, these things, but your communication style once you feel you need to clarify something is generally 'using the design spec' which is bad for people who are concerned because they can't read between the lines of everything and were apprehensive about the design spec in the first place.

As one experienced developer to another, therefore... can you tone it down a bit with that? Whenever you post a set of quotes, it starts the whole thing over precisely because the language used is exactly the original language that causes the friction, and the nuance is not necessarily easy for everyone.

That's what caused me to say that it had no determined merit. If someone is 'concerned that they won't get what they want' because the quotes from Steven and Jeff were unclear, mild rewording explanations don't help?

I think I'll stand by that concept. The question of whether or not you're actually doing that or I'm just triggered, is a different matter.