IDDALAI'S PROFILE

author=Roden
There's no lack of skill promoted by digital art platforms. You still have to make the decisions, to learn and refine your abilities and understand the methods to create work through it.

Please, don't take this the wrong way.

The ease of using a digital medium (filters, algorithms, unlimited undos, etc) does cause a lack of skill. Not having to worry about making mistakes means that more mistakes are made since they can be easily solved. That's skill loss right there.

Digital lowers the entry level so that basic necessary foundation skills aren't necessary, which harms the long term skill, learning and development.

You cannot compare the skill of an artist from a century ago with the skill of a modern digital artist. I know it hurts the ego, but digital artists have less skill. That doesn't mean digital artists are bad artists, only that they have less skill when compared with old school non-digital artists. I don't mean to offend, I'm simply stating facts.

author=Roden
Nor did it make traditional art "extinct", That's a ridiculous claim to make, and frankly an insulting one- if someone choose to use digital art tools they are no less of an artist. They share the same craft in a different workstation/medium, they still practise it.

Nothing ridiculous about that claim. Nearly all art made today is digital. It's rare to see any art made in a traditional physical medium. Movies, cartoons, images, drawings, painting and even videogame art. All of it is made digital today.

Nothing insulting about what I said, one should be aware of its own limitations. Digital art medium is popular because it's easier to produce than traditional art. The ease of use is indeed a sign that less skill is involved.
Again, I mean no offence, and you shouldn't feel offended by this. I can appreciate that you, as a digital artists, don't like to hear this, but it's the truth.

I would like to reinforce that I don't mean to say that digital artists aren't artists or that they are bad artists, but it's undeniable that digital art requires less skill than traditional physical art.

author=Roden
Not to say it's a 1:1 there, but. It's something that feels like a deliberate ignorance, self-deprivation from learning or understanding, and the end creation is hollow because there's no human emotion in it. You can almost tell when you're looking at something an AI made because of that. Then when you deprive yourself of it, you deprive others from feeling that humanity in art, that soul that makes you want to create for yourself. It becomes nothing more than a cheap ready-meal you throw in the microwave to satiate an urge. It becomes meaningless.

I completely agree.

Thanks for your input! I love hearing these stories.

This was just precious!

author=Red_Nova
I think I found the answer! I was going to respond to a lot of the good points that were brought up, but they've all given me so much to think about that responding to them all would take a novel. That's on me for not replying to this topic sooner. Oops.

I've been playing Etrian Odyssey Nexus, and I can point to the Arcanist class and say "Do this. This is cool!" Arcanist class is not a dedicated healer, but they can be built to both contribute to damage and supporting the party at the same time. See, the main function of the Arcanist is to drop one of a variety of magic Circles down on the field. At the end of each turn, the Circle will attempt to inflict a status ailment like paralysis or poison on all enemies and provide decent healing to the party until it wears out or is replaced by another Circle. For added flexibility, the Arcanist has skills that consume the Circle prematurely to either damage enemies or heal allies.

The Circle solution solves just about every problem I had with white mages listed in the original post. Not only will the Circle take care of healing automatically, but they can still contribute to the fight directly by applying status ailments and damaging enemies by consuming the circle if it isn't needed anymore. This extra step not only requires just enough thought from the player to keep them from falling into a monotonous slog without requiring battles to be overly challenging, but gives the class breathing room to have more utility in battle without sacrificing their role as the healer. In my mind, this makes the healer architype an interesting and fun class to use.

In addition to the Arcanist, there are a surprising number of classes in Nexus that can perform healing as a sub function without sacrificing their primary roles. I picked out Arcanist specifically because it's the next closest thing to a white mage other than the actual white mage class, but I highly recommend looking at Etrian Odyssey Nexus in general because there is a lot of cool ideas condensed into one game.

I'm glad you found your answer, but I admit I'm a bit miffed about this reply.

I know you didn't do it on purpose but it makes it sound like you just dismissed all the posts because you found the justification for your "white-mage-hate™" elsewhere :D

While at the same time justifying the death of old school forums in favor of discord, due to the ephemeral nature of its discussions.

Not a big deal though, just wanted to put this out there.

author=Red_Nova
For one thing, the idea that you need a dedicated party member just to heal feels like a waste of a member slot to me. Most RPGs already have items that can fulfil that purpose, and they can be used by anyone, not just white mages. Taking dedicated healers out of the party forces the player to think about which offensive unit should give up their action to use the item to heal themselves or the party, creating interesting micro choices throughout an entire dungeon crawl. If you're just hoarding your recovery items and instead using your white mage to heal, that costs MP that can only be restored via ether or other mp-restoring items. Either way, you're using items, so why not just skip the middleman and use the healing items instead? Ethers, from my experience, are generally rarer and more expensive than potions, so it's wild to me that white mages have somehow tricked players into consuming more ethers to restore a white mage's MP than using the healing items to restore HP.

I just wanted to reply to this part in specific because I don't have time for more today, sorry if anyone already brought these points up, I haven't read everything.

Most of these points make an assumption that the game is balanced in a certain way.

A White Mage is only a wasted party slot depending on how that class functions in that game.

What if it's a game where items don't heal enough to keep up with the damage? But I guess the issue here is that if you don't give White Mages anything else to do, they become boring to play with.

MP restoring items are only rare if you want them to be. But you can also play with that concept and make them rare and give the WM higher level healing spells that actually consume less MP than previous spells. A rarely used balancing method. Also, I never understood spellcasters consuming unreasonable amounts of MP, thus forbidding them from using their spells. Their purpose is to use spells! Let them do it. You can balance this in several ways while still making spells useful.

If you give WM more to do, then once again the player must decide between healing or something else. the WM can excel at destroying undead, if you make those undead extra spicy, then it may really become a hard choice. I'm sure healing items will still be used in this instance. And would give the WM the chance to shine in a mostly undead dungeon.

One interesting spell to give the WM is what I call "glow", a spell that when used in a party member will cause healing spells to heal it more. Specially interesting in boss battles due to all the choices this provides. I also refuse to give the WM a spell that causes "glow" in the whole party. Enemies can also use a "reverse-glow" that, you guessed it, causes healing to be less effective, and which only the WM can counter.

One additional point I'd like to bring up is that, sure you can make every battle a trial, but I feel that can make for a tiring game, so I only like to sprinkle some random "trial" battles among the "normal" random ones, to balance things, and obviously make every boss battle a trial as well. By trial, I mean strategic battles where you have to carefully consider your options and what to do.

If during every random battle I have to really consider what character should give up their action to heal, then it becomes tiresome for me, since all battles are hard and there's no resting period to keep the flow going. This for me is as problematic as a boring WM.
Kentona, some years ago (yes I do read this stuff and pay attention), mentioned something about having harder battles and easier battles, harder dungeons and easier dungeons. I agree with this because it gives the player the chance to feel stronger and notice an evolution, and allows them to rest before the next difficult challenge.

Unless I completely misunderstood this and you're only talking about FF1? In that case disregard my insane babbling.

In other news, I'm excited to see this kind of discussion again in RMN. I haven't been around much, so maybe this is common again. I dunno.