Are MNK and VPR on autopilot? Is job design all about bursts?

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Originally Posted by Lyth

'Is job design all about bursts' is both in the topic title itself and was the subject of discussion of the past page. It's fine if you want to talk about burst in the context of an actual burst-focused job like PCT, but it demonstrates a lack of knowledge to bring up a discussion of how jobs are 'too burst focused' in the context of VPR. I think a lot of people blindly look at aDPS without applying critical thinking around what the damage profiles actually look like.

Either way, most jobs might seem 'played for you' if you have a printout of the rotation taped to the side of your monitor. But can you execute the rotation in a practical raid encounter while being completely dependent on external prompts rather than memory and keybinds? Actually, I take that back. You could totally do that on a 25 APM job. Just don't try it on a 50 APM one.

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I’m not sure why you place so much value on APM as the deciding factor of job complexity

You don’t need a rotation taped to your monitor to play VPR, being fast doesn’t make it remotely hard, SAM is hard, but again not because it’s fast but because of its rotational design. VPR may press buttons twice as often as PCT but that doesn’t make it a hard job to play because VPR has no choice. Most of its APM comes from forced weaves, that doesn’t make the job any harder it just inflates its APM

PCT is definitely burstier than VPR as motif dumping is a greater gain over aetherhue than reawaken is over VPR’s filler but still that doesn’t really relate to OP’s point, I read OP’s point as classes like MNK and VPR are full of false choice, why allow you to press basically any button in your rotation at any one time and act like there is choice involved when you are always going to press what “lights up” so to speak

At least jobs like MCH don’t hide the fact that pressing the rotation out of order is not the correct action

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Originally Posted by Carighan

I mean, they're no more on autopilot than any other job.

Because, virtually all combat rotations in this game are static or quasi-static in nature. Meaning you can know 10, 20, 30, 100 GCDs in advance. And the only thing a glowie button or an autocombo does is collapse X of these GCDs into a single button that cycles between the skills. But functionally it makes 0 difference whether these are on the same button and swap out or do not, there's no variety either way. (In fact that's the big pro-argument for autocombos, there's no player agency either way so why even waste hotbar space on it for no reason)

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I'm a big fan of how VPR does the button cycling, since you can't really rely on tactile feedback to tell you the sequence. I know it's controversial, but I'd like to see more jobs take on this approach.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

PCT is definitely burstier than VPR as motif dumping is a greater gain over aetherhue than reawaken is over VPR’s filler but still that doesn’t really relate to OP’s point, I read OP’s point as classes like MNK and VPR are full of false choice, why allow you to press basically any button in your rotation at any one time and act like there is choice involved when you are always going to press what “lights up” so to speak

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I've never thought for a second that any of FFXIV's combat jobs were about 'choice.' You're not typing out a poem about your feelings around the encounter. You're executing a rotation. That means that there is one single best sequence that you execute pull after pull with machine-like precision. When you're clear ready on a fight, you generally can point at any specific mechanic and recall the exact GCD sequence that occurs at that point. That's how predictable the fight design is. Playing a faster job means that there's more of a focus on mechanical execution.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

That's not the point being made. Did you look at the graphs?

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I'm just stating a fact that every job in the game is burst job, based around a 2 minute burst. It's completely inarguably true that it's the case right now because of how raidbuffs are designed and how CD timers are designed.

The two minute meta is just...not good design when it comes to overall engagement, how punishing it makes mistakes whether through deaths or suboptimal CD timing, and the amount of influence crit/DH RNG has on your overall DPS due to how much potency is tied to CDs.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

'Is job design all about bursts' is both in the topic title itself and was the subject of discussion of the past page. It's fine if you want to talk about burst in the context of an actual burst-focused job like PCT, but it demonstrates a lack of knowledge to bring up a discussion of how jobs are 'too burst focused' in the context of VPR. I think a lot of people blindly look at aDPS without applying critical thinking around what the damage profiles actually look like.

Either way, most jobs might seem 'played for you' if you have a printout of the rotation taped to the side of your monitor. But can you execute the rotation in a practical raid encounter while being completely dependent on external prompts rather than memory and keybinds? Actually, I take that back. You could totally do that on a 25 APM job. Just don't try it on a 50 APM one.

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See the problem is that we keep explaining to you what the OP means but you're still stuck on reading a bunch of words that your misunderstood and don't seem to be willing to get past the title of the thread. Still completely missing the point and digging more instead of stepping back and reconsidering.

No matter if a job caters more of its damage into its burst or if it's a bit more spread out, one of the points of the OP was, again, on the rotational design that seems to only care about bursts and not filler gameplay. I was talking about design meaning and agency, and not damage profiles.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I've never thought for a second that any of FFXIV's combat jobs were about 'choice.' You're not typing out a poem about your feelings around the encounter. You're executing a rotation. That means that there is one single best sequence that you execute pull after pull with machine-like precision. When you're clear ready on a fight, you generally can point at any specific mechanic and recall the exact GCD sequence that occurs at that point. That's how predictable the fight design is. Playing a faster job means that there's more of a focus on mechanical execution.

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Then you'd have thought wrong. We used to have more of those jobs that were actually, indeed, about occasional choices based on rng, and MCH comes to mind immediately as one example. DNC used to be in its first iteration in ShB as well with flourish prep. Current BRD and DNC still have choices and triaging to do during their bursts even if DT added more fixed state buttons that reduce the rng somewhat. You cannot just print out a script that would autoplay on BRD or DNC because of rng. And within proc rng design, there is also two different levels: level 0 being what we have with DNC and BRD procs which is essentially about pressing the glowy button when it procs and isn't very different from autopilot 3 steps basic combo; level 1 being GCD triaging depending on procs (seen in BRD and DNC bursts); and level 3 being overwrite and pattern recognition based proc gameplay which removes entirely the autopilot of "just press the glowy button when it lights up" (seen in old DNC and old MCH, and perhaps at lower level in some RDM acceleration iterations).

MNK as exposed in the OP also required the player to know at which step of the rotation they were and identify the next button according to a leaden fist buff, a self buff and a dot. Right now the job does this choice for you with glowy buttons. What I didn't consider and was exposed to me as an alternative view of the problem is that those jobs have been simplified so much that they're now perhaps expecting you to go above the glowy button autopilot in order to not even glance at your hotbar once you have everything committed to muscle memory. Maybe that's what melee is all about, and maybe that also explains the radically different views we all have on what a job rotation should be, and why I main rphys and not melee even though I ironically enjoy playing MNK more today since as a more casual MNK player I was unable to deal with the filler cycle without the glowy button (could do 2 forms but not 3 at once). Which leaded me to ponder if the changes they made to the job for DT weren't actually addressed to players like me, that didn't main the job because of their inability to deal with the complex, fast paced rotation of the filler cycle.

But if people are telling me that the handful of MNK players that played the job actually managed to do this without the autopilot glowy buttons before just because they had committed everything to muscle memory, then first, props to them because I couldn't even be arsed (to each their own), and that would actually explain why the job clicked with so little people.


Either way, I still found some of the replies in this thread enlightening and it made me think more about what kind of players and design profiles roles tend to have, where casters tend to be more about fight mapping and planning (mechanics memory), melees at least the new ones try to be as minimalist as possible with a guardrail so that people can just muscle memorize its main cycles without a care, and rphys... well, it used to be something else, let's just leave it at that. And don't get me wrong, I appreciate that those different potential profiles help defining roles outside of an otherwise too homogenous dps group.

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Originally Posted by Valence

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You're completely contradicting your own points. All jobs exist on a continuum of sustained DPS and burst DPS. This happens the instant that you have actions with different potencies. In fact, even if you had a job where every action had the exact same potency, the very existence of raid buffs would give you a period of 'burst'. That's why I really wonder if you've actually played these jobs outside of levelling them (well, you hadn't levelled MNK yet at the time of this post, but let's leave that aside for the moment.) I think a big part of the reason why people like VPR is because the job is 'always on'. That's why it uses a four combo rotation with the highest positional and APM count in the game. This is no frills melee.

The funny thing is, I seem to recall you specifically campaigning against VPR having positionals. So I can only imagine the extent of your derision towards the job had you been successful. I also think that if you're at the point where you need guidance on what button to press next, then you aren't playing the job nearly at the point where you could describe it as being 'on autopilot' (or even at the point where you ought to be commenting on it at all).

It's great that you like proc-based jobs, but those aren't 'choice' either. Procs generally amount to pressing a flashing button when it lights up before going back to your set rotation. Part of the problem is that we're playing a game where they've had to remove crit variance from some jobs because people complained that it affected their optimal run. What are the chances that you're going to have a dynamically changing rotation where you get combos that branch off of procs (and no, spamming Split Shot to see if you get to proceed to Slug Shot doesn't count). Either way, there is generally one optimal way to play, modified to meet the specific uptime conditions of various fights. This is an MMO. Choice is an illusion.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Either way, there is generally one optimal way to play, modified to meet the specific uptime conditions of various fights. This is an MMO. Choice is an illusion.

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Technically, every game with a win condition is going to only have one or two optimal ways to play, it's just usually obscured by the "fog of war" (each actor only having access to partial, and often inaccurate, information).

The extremely predictable "groundhog day" nature of XIV's fights means that there's no real uncertainty in this regard, so all decision-making is eventually mapped out into a repeatable sequence. However, the "eventually" part is pretty important. Unless the player is just copying other players who already cleared, these decisions still had to be made at some point during prog. Once I realize I can maintain uptime by holding a Tsubame-gaeshi, it's no longer a decision, but it was a decision the first time I did it, uncertain if the increased range would be sufficient.

This makes jobs with greater degrees of flexibility (combined with meaningful constraints) like BLM or PCT feel different from mostly static jobs like MCH. Your optimal rotation isn't simply given to you, it's something you yourself have to develop over multiple iterations of a fight, much like a healer's healing/mit plan.

Proc-based jobs are a different category entirely and are usually more about attentiveness + pattern recognition, rather than muscle memory or decision making.

Returning to the original prompt, MNK does have an abnormally low amount of decision-making in its rotation. I can only think of a single example, which is when in the 15s window it's available you use Wind's Reply. It's approaches to disengagement are some of the more interesting ones, but the rotation itself is the most static in the game (yes, more than NIN, more than DRG, more than MCH). Does this make the job bad? I personally think the playstyle is dull and completely antithetical to the fantasy of a martial artist, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it.

VPR isn't really on rails at all, it actually has the most freedom out of any of the melee DPS, it's just that it mostly lacks interesting constrains in which to exercise this freedom. Yeah, the twinblade combo can be mildly inconvenient at times, but you have an extremely generous window to find an opportunity to use it (imagine if you could only use Uncoiled Fury for 10s after using Dre... Vicewinder, you'd have to think much more about when you pressed it). As a result, most of your choices comes down to vibes rather than any sort of strategic considerations. Again, this doesn't make the job objectively "bad", but it does result in a playstyle I personally don't find very engaging and wouldn't want to see applied to every other job.

What you're describing is just the process of mapping your rotation, that you've executed thousands of times, to the specifics of a fight. It's the same category as learning to pre-position when you know a boss always jumps to the A wall, knowing that a boss orientates to C instead of A for a specific mechanic, or even recognizing a positioning quirk that a PF tank does on every pull. I don't see these things as decisions, though, so much as they're just observations about how the encounter works. If you've been playing a job for long enough, you develop fairly standard solutions in your toolbox for dealing with these situations, such as noting how the 6-8y range of some SAM actions aligns with certain mechanics, or counting many UFs you can burn off in a specific fight opener. That's coupled with the fact that a lot of these patterns get reused across tiers.

When you call it 'vibes-based', I think that's fairly accurate for most melee jobs. That refinement process of mapping your rotation to the fight is fairly intuitive, and there's a certain visuospatial logic to it that players either get or don't get.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

You're completely contradicting your own points. All jobs exist on a continuum of sustained DPS and burst DPS. This happens the instant that you have actions with different potencies. In fact, even if you had a job where every action had the exact same potency, the very existence of raid buffs would give you a period of 'burst'. That's why I really wonder if you've actually played these jobs outside of levelling them (well, you hadn't levelled MNK yet at the time of this post, but let's leave that aside for the moment.)

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... What are you even talking about? Why are you still bringing up damage profiles? What does this even have to do with all of this? (and why do I even bother?)

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Originally Posted by Lyth

The funny thing is, I seem to recall you specifically campaigning against VPR having positionals. So I can only imagine the extent of your derision towards the job had you been successful. I also think that if you're at the point where you need guidance on what button to press next, then you aren't playing the job nearly at the point where you could describe it as being 'on autopilot' (or even at the point where you ought to be commenting on it at all).

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I do not recall myself ever campaigning against VPR positionals. Please provide the source right now and i'll apologize if you're right, but I'm lowkey expecting you to once more misunderstanding everything on purpose as evidenced in this thread.
The only thing I ever remember saying in one melee thread was that I didn't consider positionals part of melee dps identity and that as a casual melee I'd like to play one without that isn't a tank. Never did I campaign for VPR's positionals to be removed, what are you smoking?
I do not know why you feel so offended by this thread as I even specifically opened by saying how I'm torn on how I'm feeling about melee DPS like VPR and new MNK. And if it helps, I'm actually enjoying MNK in DT because it's not messing with my brain anymore. I always liked that job. But I also clearly saw the huge downgrade in terms of skill on the main filler cycle which prompted this thread, if just to see what melee mains would think of it, and got actually interesting replies that I didn't consider at first and gave me a new perspective on how melee mains tick.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

It's great that you like proc-based jobs, but those aren't 'choice' either. Procs generally amount to pressing a flashing button when it lights up before going back to your set rotation. Part of the problem is that we're playing a game where they've had to remove crit variance from some jobs because people complained that it affected their optimal run. What are the chances that you're going to have a dynamically changing rotation where you get combos that branch off of procs (and no, spamming Split Shot to see if you get to proceed to Slug Shot doesn't count). Either way, there is generally one optimal way to play, modified to meet the specific uptime conditions of various fights. This is an MMO. Choice is an illusion.

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If you ever had bothered reading my previous post you'd have also understood that I specifically described different levels of proc rng gameplay and what you're referring to is literally barebones proc gameplay, aka DNC and BRD outside of burst where, as I said, it's not much more than following a basic combo and pressing what lights up, just with rng involved (which is already a step above... it ain't much, but it's something). The burst has more than just "press the glowy button next" though. And rphys used to have much more than what we have today.

Now I actually return the question and will honestly ask if you ever played any of the rphys jobs when they had more than just whack a mole rng gameplay? Because there was no better way to tell me that you have literally no clue of what you're talking about.

I'm actually amazed that this thread shifted from melee DPS to rphys gameplay, but I guess for comparison that can't be helped...

Saying a Machinist main likes procs based jobs is very funny. It's like saying to a SMN that they like casts.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I don't see these things as decisions, though, so much as they're just observations about how the encounter works. If you've been playing a job for long enough, you develop fairly standard solutions in your toolbox for dealing with these situations, such as noting how the 6-8y range of some SAM actions aligns with certain mechanics, or counting many UFs you can burn off in a specific fight opener. That's coupled with the fact that a lot of these patterns get reused across tiers.

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I would consider adjusting your behavior based on fight-specific observations to be a decision the first time it happens, but we're starting to get into semantic/philosophical territory that extends well outside of the scope of the game. I think I agree that a choice made with perfect knowledge of the resulting outcome isn't really a "decision", but it is still a form of player agency, which is probably the more relevant consideration.

Ultimately, almost every game can be reduced to an optimal set of inputs, with only RNG and human error standing in the way. Executing an optimal BLM rotation is much simpler than speedrunning Mario 64, but the principle is the same. Once you resolve to play optimally, you're pretty much locking yourself onto a single predefined path, even if you don't know exactly what that path is ahead of time.

If you intend to play optimally every game can only offer the illusion of choice. Most just have more variance/moving parts than FFXIV, which allows them to hide it better.

Decision-making would play a bigger factor if you had more variable/random elements in encounters, and if there were multiple solutions to the same problem (movement tools are good for this sort of thing). A lot of the early community feedback back in Heavensward was based around speedrunning, which is part of the reason why the game is so streamlined in its encounter and job design and why variability tends not to be well tolerated. It's especially obvious when you throw in a fight mechanic with random elements and watch players react to it, which is why I'm really glad to see some of the experiments they did in this past tier. The other problem is that the game code isn't all that responsive, so it doesn't facilitate reactive gameplay very well. You need only consider how janky boss movement is around repositioning compared to some others.

Most of these factors come down to encounter design, rather than job design, though. If you wanted 'decision-making' in the context of target dummy conditions, you would need resource systems where the rate of generation was variable rather than generated on a strict GCD by GCD basis and variable recasts that are influenced by non-player factors (i.e. Low Blow resets). I think that's one area in particular where support jobs in particular could have more interesting gameplay, because of how much of their toolkits are linked to interacting with encounter mechanics, allowing for things like counter-attacks. But as long as someone organically optimizing a job can naturally find themselves on the same GCD sequence on the same mechanic, pull after pull, we can't really talk about 'decision-making' in this game.

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

Saying a Machinist main likes procs based jobs is very funny. It's like saying to a SMN that they like casts.

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For the record I do like proc gameplay, that's my jam. However I'm out of three tiers of Endwalker ran on BRD main and I'm absolutely burnt out of the job that I'm not even able to violence myself to level it up to 100. Next what? Play DNC? I did on some P8S helping friends prog, and on two criterions and the job was literally resident sleepers. I do hate what they did to MCH but I like the aesthetics and at this point that's the only thing I have left. Yeah, it's that bad. May explain why I'm so disheartened at the devs for what they're doing to the role and rng gameplay as a whole.

Also, I find it pretty tragic that this other player has the gal to specifically go all the way to lurk on my character pages and online data to literally go find what jobs I have leveled at all time, bring it up there, and literally uses a blank alt on their forum account themselves. Tells me all I need to know about that kind of jabs.

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Originally Posted by Valence

For the record I do like proc gameplay, that's my jam. However I'm out of three tiers of Endwalker ran on BRD main and I'm absolutely burnt out of the job that I'm not even able to violence myself to level it up to 100. Next what? Play DNC? I did on some P8S helping friends prog, and on two criterions and the job was literally resident sleepers. I do hate what they did to MCH but I like the aesthetics and at this point that's the only thing I have left. Yeah, it's that bad. May explain why I'm so disheartened at the devs for what they're doing to the role and rng gameplay as a whole.

Also, I find it pretty tragic that this other player has the gal to specifically go all the way to lurk on my character pages and online data to literally go find what jobs I have leveled at all time, bring it up there, and literally uses a blank alt on their forum account themselves. Tells me all I need to know about that kind of jabs.

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IK but he was so locked on talking about you being a Machinist main for some reason then bringing up procs and stuff after bringing up you main a job that doesn't have procs and hasn't for half a decade. It was just pretty funny, it would be like saying I like procs because firestarter exists.

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

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No, Valence has talked about proc gameplay a lot in the past. That was just a passing acknowledgement of the fact. You should probably re-read what I wrote, as well as the post that I was responding to which discusses procs.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

No, Valence has talked about proc gameplay a lot in the past. That was just a passing acknowledgement of the fact. You should probably re-read what I wrote, as well as the post that I was responding to which discusses procs.

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Nah I don't really care tbh I just like seeing arguements

Yeah, it's auto pilot.

every melee is autopilot, dont know why people always think different

Ninja the only decision you have to make is Armor Crush or Aoelian Edge otherwise its Autopilot too
Samu its which route you do since you need all 3 routs its autopilot too
dragoon the same example you have 2 paths but you alwayw want to alternate so its auto pilot too

there is nothing behind the base combos from melees which isnt "auto piloted" people think they have freedom, no you dont

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Originally Posted by ovIm

> Is job design all about bursts?
yes.
this has held job design back for a while now.

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I don't think they are familiar with the 2 min window design philosophy..