Thread: Classes and Rotations to be "Easier" in 4.0. Predictions, Concerns, and Discussion.

Originally Posted by Judge_Xero

Reduce all classes to 2 buttons.

Heavy Attack
Light Attack

By pressing these buttons either rapidly or in alternating orders it will always perform all optimal skills.

Oh god, I'm having flash backs to the early days of 1.0. I say NO NO NO to this.

Originally Posted by Duelle

Originally Posted by Jandor

I assume they plan to back away from the 'buff maintenance' they added to several jobs.

Some people find it fun, but not enough people to justify so many jobs having a variant of it.

That's the thing, though. Not every job should be about stacks or buffs or <insert other overused mechanic>. You can have jobs with varying levels of difficulty or focused on certain mechanics while excluding others. When ROG/NIN was implemented, some people expectedly switched mains because ROG/NIN was not chained to positional attacks the way MNK and DRG were. This is also why people lost their shit when the devs talked about wanting to add positionals to NIN; the very thing they were trying to get away from was being forced on them through lack of alternatives.

What was mentioned was an exclusion—not a broadened inclusion—though, and already certain buff maintenance mechanics work almost identically to each other (BotD and Enochian) while also feeling more like mere CDs than any augmented gameplay or rotations when used in typical open-world combat. If anything, going by your quote I figured you'd think they should be more varied (in some cases by not being a matter of buff "maintenance")?

I think the easiest way to make things easier is to make the DPS difference between keeping something up or not would be smaller, or shortening the time you would be without said buff. Some changes can think of here is:
Eno/BotD cooldown from 60s to 40s.
Aethertrail Attunement staying around for a minute instead of 30s.
AF/UI/Eno checks only occurring the start of the cast, and no longer interrupting the cast when the buff expires (although the damage would still be lower when a F4 lands without F3/eno, you're not losing an entire cast).
Greased Lightning no longer providing the damage buff (damage increase built in the skills), and only the attack speed buff.

All these changes won't change the optimal rotation much, but will make the DPS loss for not performing that perfect rotation much lower, meaning it's easier to just focus on a mechanic and pick up the rotation afterwards.

My -hope- is that they're going to combine abilities or even make some into traits, and streamline the duration/cooldown timers on many abilities for simpler management.

For instance, DRG weaponskill "Heavy Thrust" could be nixed in favor of a trait that adds the effect of heavy thrust to "True Thrust" while increasing the duration. DRG weaponskill "Phlebotomize" could be taken out and have it's DoT added to "Chaos Thrust".

"Power Surge" could be made into a trait that increases "Jump" damage such that it amounts to the same thing in the long term.

BRD's "Bloodletter" ability could be made into a perpetual ability (like MNK "Fist of" abilities, ends on reuse) that adds an additional 150 potency auto-attack every 15 seconds, as well as whenever "River of Blood" procs. Timer displayed on hotbar and status icon.

Stuff like that would improve rotations and make it easier to maintain a proper DPS.

That's the type of change I would like to see, but across all classes.

My main problem with rotations is that they're way to scripted. Especially for DPS. I can't even play dps end game with all the skills and rules they have. One mess up and the dps is shit. Which is why I commend those who beat a3 a4s when it was relevant.

They would be smart to start replacing old skills or seriously consider trimming it down.
Eventually after x amount of expansions we'll reach level 100, and that means 20 more skills will be added on top of what we have. That's something I don't want to stick around for.

I expect them to remove useless spells and skill by either totally removing them from the game or doing a bit like in GW2 where the spell change everytime you press it as your progress into your combo so instead of having 3 spells for your basic rotation you'd have 1 that just change to the next one as you smash it.
I don't agree with people saying "this" would make the game too easy in the sens that smashing 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 doesn't much more skill than spamming 1 1 1 1 1 1
It would just free spell slot on your keyboard / controller.
Some spell could also see a great rewhole, things like Apocatastasis while good in raid are very dull. There are currently too many CD in the game with enormeous duration imo.
Also, a hard rotation isn't necearly an interesting rotation. They could make a 6 dots 8 active skill 5 out of cooldown skill rotation which could be extremly hard to master and yet dull as fuck and inninteresting.

i find it really hard to imagine how certain jobs could become easier. sure i guess you could take out comboless DoTs like mutilate, touch of death or phlebotomize. they could reduce the number of available combos per job. mnk e.g. could be more stream lined by actually giving it set combos, same for mch. give an enmity multiplier to the other tank combos and get rid of the enmity combo.
but in the end some of the jobs won't feel like they did so far or even worse, they will all play more or less the same.
though i think certain mechanics could be made a bit easier (enochian, blood of the dragon, shadow fang applying the slashing debuff and getting rid of dancing edge this way, Hotshot, etc.]

I can't possibly imagine this game being easier than it already is without being brain dead to boot.

It's already possible to hit 80% of the-best-possible-performance while being extremely sub-optimal.