The trouble with Job redesigns

People love to overdramatize their experiences to make them sound more skillful than they actually are. Base human reaction time is measured on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, even for college level and professional athletes, and that's before you even factor in latency and animation locks. It's also longer for visual cues than it is for auditory ones. Your numbers are off by 3-4 orders of magnitude.

Fixed rotations are very much just muscle memory. If you add in more random elements to either the rotation or as branches in fight design, then you force the player to adapt dynamically rather than following a preset script. The simplest type of proc is where you just push a button when it lights up, but it could represent an actual branch point in your rotation if it's designed that way. The reason why we don't see much of this is because players already struggle with simple visual branching cues in fights as they are designed. Could you imagine if your rotation branched off dynamically based off of visual procs as well? No shot.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

The reason why we don't see much of this is because players already struggle with simple visual branching cues in fights as they are designed. Could you imagine if your rotation branched off dynamically based off of visual procs as well? No shot.

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I think that'd be fun and cool. Let me adapt dynamically, other games do it and its fun. Even in this game BRD used to have dynamic procs like that before and all the BRD nuts (poor souls) I know loved it.
Players dont need to be coddled. As long as the buttons on the action bars aren't convoluted and incomprehensible it's fine to allow people to make mistakes and struggle a bit getting the PERFECT rotation down. We're headed the opposite way of that, the path of static dumb rotations with no resources to manage and barely anything to potentially mess up, and a quick glance at the forum will show you that people almost unanimously hate it.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

People love to overdramatize their experiences to make them sound more skillful than they actually are. Base human reaction time is measured on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, even for college level and professional athletes, and that's before you even factor in latency and animation locks. It's also longer for visual cues than it is for auditory ones. Your numbers are off by 3-4 orders of magnitude.

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Because SCALE is important. We're sitting here talking about how there's something that is a 2 mile walk away and a 5 mile walk away and about how the 5 mile walk is much farther and you're jumping in and saying "The circumference of the Earth is 25,000 miles, a 3 mile difference isn't a lot."

We're not talking about playing professional sports, we're not talking about elite trained military, we're not even talking about _competitive skill-base focused_ PvP games like FPS's and MOBAs. We're talking about a hotbar-based tab targetted MMO. By the very nature of an RPG, a lot of the "skill" is replaced by character elements (class, stats, etc), "aiming" and "dodging" are just dice rolls based on your characters stats.

At that scale, the things that we're talking about are the difference between the skill floor and skill ceiling and they are _relatively_ more complicated/difficult/skillful whenever compared to lower players.

Scale is important, yes. You're not performing actions on a 1 ms reaction time, because axonal conduction doesn't travel fast enough for that.

I'm not saying that you can't feel proud of learning your opener and core rotation. But how do you differentiate between players who are all able to do that much at baseline? I don't personally think that adding a '4' to the end of '1-2-3' is the answer. Some people now say procs and variability, others on the previous page say no. Hard to say, really. But the devs do need to think outside the box when it comes to skill expression.

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Originally Posted by Dyvid

Magical ranged DPS attack foes using a variety of arcane arts. Movement is restricted by casting times, but they excel at inflicting high burst damage.
-SMN is a fine example against this term. Almost their entire skill set is instant cast giving incredible movement with no DPS penalty. Even RDM is required to cast 50% of the time.

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This honestly doesn't work in a game like FFXIV which relies so heavily on mechanic based fights. Fights where you might have to move every few seconds to avoid attacks. This kind of gameplay works great in other MMO's like WoW, GW2 and SWTOR because their fights allow you to stand still and hard cast. This is the exact reason a lot of the community state that Black Mage is one of the harder jobs to play in this game. Throw it into WoW and it would be a relatively easy job to play just like WoW's mage. (Granted with a slightly more involved rotation.)

The other reason this doesn't work is because every job deals roughly similar-ish damage. Or at least has jobs in the different roles that can deal as much damage as the casters.

The whole point of a "caster" is that they're supposed to deal the most damage out of any dps. The drawback is that they're immobile and have to spend some time casting. Their damage also comes at the end of their cast rather than the beginning/ right after the button push like Melee.

The benefit of a Melee is that they can still deal 100% of their damage while moving. They have mobility but give up a bit of damage.

Anymore now a days everyone wants to deal the exact same damage as the next guy, so all roles now have to deal big burst damage. This gives "casters" a significant disadvantage with no gain over the mobile Melee.

Having Magic damage dealers with instant casts makes perfect sense in the modern day of gaming. Unless they're going to nerf Melee damage to compensate their Mobility vs the casters cast times, I don't see this trend changing.

And if in the next expansion Summoner's get Leviathan, Shiva and Lord Thunder Bread and their rotations are long hard casts, I'm willing to bet that you'll see a significant drop off in the amount of people playing Summoner. People like mobility. It's fun. Take that away and you'll see the same trend as Black Mage.

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Originally Posted by Saimeren

This honestly doesn't work in a game like FFXIV which relies so heavily on mechanic based fights. Fights where you might have to move every few seconds to avoid attacks. This kind of gameplay works great in other MMO's like WoW, GW2 and SWTOR because their fights allow you to stand still and hard cast. This is the exact reason a lot of the community state that Black Mage is one of the harder jobs to play in this game. Throw it into WoW and it would be a relatively easy job to play just like WoW's mage. (Granted with a slightly more involved rotation.)

The other reason this doesn't work is because every job deals roughly similar-ish damage. Or at least has jobs in the different roles that can deal as much damage as the casters.

The whole point of a "caster" is that they're supposed to deal the most damage out of any dps. The drawback is that they're immobile and have to spend some time casting. Their damage also comes at the end of their cast rather than the beginning/ right after the button push like Melee.

The benefit of a Melee is that they can still deal 100% of their damage while moving. They have mobility but give up a bit of damage.

Anymore now a days everyone wants to deal the exact same damage as the next guy, so all roles now have to deal big burst damage. This gives "casters" a significant disadvantage with no gain over the mobile Melee.

Having Magic damage dealers with instant casts makes perfect sense in the modern day of gaming. Unless they're going to nerf Melee damage to compensate their Mobility vs the casters cast times, I don't see this trend changing.

And if in the next expansion Summoner's get Leviathan, Shiva and Lord Thunder Bread and their rotations are long hard casts, I'm willing to bet that you'll see a significant drop off in the amount of people playing Summoner. People like mobility. It's fun. Take that away and you'll see the same trend as Black Mage.

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Yea, but it's worked for 9 years now. We have done it for 9 years. We have had no issue with casting for 9 years. BLM, which is consider the heaviest in casting has ranked in the top five DPS year after year.

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Originally Posted by Saimeren

The other reason this doesn't work is because every job deals roughly similar-ish damage. Or at least has jobs in the different roles that can deal as much damage as the casters.

The whole point of a "caster" is that they're supposed to deal the most damage out of any dps. The drawback is that they're immobile and have to spend some time casting. Their damage also comes at the end of their cast rather than the beginning/ right after the button push like Melee.

The benefit of a Melee is that they can still deal 100% of their damage while moving. They have mobility but give up a bit of damage.

Anymore now a days everyone wants to deal the exact same damage as the next guy, so all roles now have to deal big burst damage. This gives "casters" a significant disadvantage with no gain over the mobile Melee.

Having Magic damage dealers with instant casts makes perfect sense in the modern day of gaming. Unless they're going to nerf Melee damage to compensate their Mobility vs the casters cast times, I don't see this trend changing.

And if in the next expansion Summoner's get Leviathan, Shiva and Lord Thunder Bread and their rotations are long hard casts, I'm willing to bet that you'll see a significant drop off in the amount of people playing Summoner. People like mobility. It's fun. Take that away and you'll see the same trend as Black Mage.

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There's also a defensive element to this. With jobs also being roughly equal in terms of survival as well..

In days of old.
Melee DPS would hit hard, they could take a couple of hits, but had limited mobility. (Have to stay in range in order to do damage)

Caster DPS hit very hard, had almost no mobility, but could often take a hit via magic shields or control enemies with enfeeblements like sleeps or binds to keep them at a distance.

Then you had what was the hysical ranged DPS class. Bows, guns, bombs, etc. They hit super hard, were super mobile. But were incredibly fragile the slightest hit would kill them.

Back in those days these jobs were often referred to as the "Glass Cannons". super strong DPS jobs but took a lot of skill to stay alive.

These days it doesn't work out though as modern encounters are so scripted around timed and unavoidable damage, Shame really. some of those old school glass cannnons were hella fun to play

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Originally Posted by Saimeren

Having Magic damage dealers with instant casts makes perfect sense in the modern day of gaming.

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yes it does make sense but in moderation and not there entire kit. old smn was still super mobile when ya needed it and not for the whole time. old smn had the 4 pet attacks, phoenix, swiftcast, and ruin 4 and ruin 2. and we had ogcds to fill inside alot of those so its not just standing around till the next gcd is up. old smn had enough movement to do any content without being in terms of a physicals range. classes can have movement but they can be smart about how they implement it this current movement system. this is why sense the current smn is not like any of the other casters and is a black sheep in the caster catagory cause its does not follow the definition all the other casters have to follow. which is a class that has cast times. redmage still has cast times. and the instacast is ok sense the other system for the class is rng based and they play hand in hand. blackmage is a full on century cannon but still has decent amount of movement keep some uptime.

Right now job changes are basically falling into two camps: Quality of life improvements or dropping complexity to try and get each job in roughly the same place. Not going to comment on the samurai change since I don't have a strong opinion one way or another with it. Melee feels like it is in a good place right now and the only thing that they might do whether people like it or not is maybe tweak dragoon. Honestly, the one lesson I've learned all these years is that the jobs that are the most complex tend to be the jobs that have the highest dps. Dragoon and Bard are two of them and DRK was another one for a bit there.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

Right now job changes are basically falling into two camps: Quality of life improvements or dropping complexity to try and get each job in roughly the same place. Not going to comment on the samurai change since I don't have a strong opinion one way or another with it. Melee feels like it is in a good place right now and the only thing that they might do whether people like it or not is maybe tweak dragoon. Honestly, the one lesson I've learned all these years is that the jobs that are the most complex tend to be the jobs that have the highest dps. Dragoon and Bard are two of them and DRK was another one for a bit there.

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Melees were in a good spot in Shadowbringers, not Endwalker (with the exception of Monk) and job complexity does not equal DPS. All the jobs are similarly easy to play with the one punishing job left being BLM who's not as strong as melees. DRK is also the 2nd easiest tank to optimize.

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Originally Posted by butchersblock

Melees were in a good spot in Shadowbringers, not Endwalker (with the exception of Monk) and job complexity does not equal DPS. All the jobs are similarly easy to play with the one punishing job left being BLM who's not as strong as melees. DRK is also the 2nd easiest tank to optimize.

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I wouldn't say BLM is the only punishing job left as dragoon can be punishing along with Bard. The big problem they need to fix is dependency on spell / skill speed materia to align burst windows in rotation. BLM is punishing because the casts are so long without any coverage for drop off due to movement, and even if they fixed that aspect it still would be the most punishing job since because those casts are so long, having to cancel out hits a lot harder to personal dps than other jobs. They are doing that incrementally but there are jobs like DRK that they probably are going to revise at a later point.

Complexity doesn't always net more dps, but it often does since a more complex job is also more complex for the devs to balance, since there's so many variables involved in the output. They could be making a lot of changes to make the jobs easier to balance on the development end.

Complexity =/= Feel good to play.

EW AST feels terrible because it's complex for the wrong reasons. Cards are disconnected that they feel like afterthoughts.

I get that people miss pre-EW SMN but I can see why they made the changes they did. They felt like SMN was a mess and felt like they couldn't do more without adding more convoluted filler to an already cramped job. They just elected to axe the old design and do something else.

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Originally Posted by elioaiko

I get that people miss pre-EW SMN but I can see why they made the changes they did. They felt like SMN was a mess and felt like they couldn't do more without adding more convoluted filler to an already cramped job. They just elected to axe the old design and do something else.

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Correction: It's not about like or not like pre-EW SMN anymore. This is more about why the hell SMN is the most simplistic job in the game right now. You choose a summon to go with and you only have 2 obligatory buttons to press and that's it. Where's the rest of the kit? Where's all the oGCDs to weave in? Where's all the flexibility SMN had before? Why the hell 90% of SMN spells are insta cast now? Why the hell change Tri-disaster from pure damage oGCD (since dots are were gone) to a freaking upgrade of AoE spell that you never use? Why Aetherflow was not reworked to be a more dynamic gauge to work with summons instead of being left untouched in that now deplorable state?

There were a lot things to make the rework way more engaging to pre-EW SMNs mains while 'relieving' the job of it's messy gameplay, like you guys like to say.

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Originally Posted by elioaiko

I get that people miss pre-EW SMN but I can see why they made the changes they did. They felt like SMN was a mess and felt like they couldn't do more without adding more convoluted filler to an already cramped job. They just elected to axe the old design and do something else.

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and now we're left with what's essentially a phys ranged with training wheels. Wonderful.