What is your RPG playstyle?

My general approach to JRPGs would be to start it if the story sounds interesting and the art style looks nice, then stay if the characters are likeable or one of the other factors is good enough to make it worthwhile regardless.

Story is the main focus and I'll talk to all the random townspeople wherever possible to learn more about the setting, and of course any opportunities to talk with your party members and get any missable dialogue from them.

Sentimentality wins over optimisation (my Pokémon team always includes my starter and probably some things I caught on route 1) and if the game has a job system then I'll tend towards keeping characters as their "canon" jobs unless something else really suits them better.

I'm pretty terrible when it comes to being optimal in battle. Just follow the elemental rock-paper-scissors and hit the enemy as hard as you can. I don't experiment much with support skills and feel vaguely bad that I'm probably missing out on some good tactics, but it just doesn't click with me and when it's a single-player game that I'll probably play through once and move along, I don't see the point in learning complex strategies if I can just brute-force it with some explosions.

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

despite my incessant ramblings about job design for XIV, I'm actually an "aesthetics first" kind of person when it comes to picking a class or playstyle in an RPG. hell, the whole reason why I picked MNK as my first job and main to begin with was because at the time I was incredibly obsessed with Hunter x Hunter, it being a technical job was merely an added bonus and brother I won't lie to you- I'm on the verge of becoming a Viper main just because I've been waiting for a DPS sword job.

because of this though, my aesthetic preferences tend to take me to options that are not typically considered "top tier" in other games, but I'm not really bothered by that.

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I'm honestly in a similar boat. I think it's really important that a job actually have good gameplay, and I want to have that aspect of choice in my gameplay, but as long as I have that, there's a lot that I can look past if the rest of the gameplay looks cool. My biggest gripe with Sage personally is that I'm stuck with a glorified bugzapper for 80% of my gameplay. I don't feel like a gundam healer.

This is what I want.

This is what I have.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

This seems like a really strange base definition of RPG to me.

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Hehe, yeah, it's basically impossible to talk about genre without stumbling into semantics, because genres are these ambiguous, subjective vibes without any official definition. And so we all come to define every genre in our own way that's distinct to us, a collection ideas that in some ways overlaps what some people think, and in some ways doesn't. That's why generally speaking, I find it best to not talk about genre at all, but rather to unpack these ideas and talk about the actual traits themselves. Maybe when I say RPG's what I'm really talking about is player choice and strategic options. Maybe I'm talking about role-playing. Maybe I'm talking about epic adventures. Maybe numbers that go up? Maybe some of that, or all of that, or none of that. So it helps to specify, because that way even if we have different definitions of "RPG", we can at least talk about the things that person wants to talk about.

That said, OP didn't specify, and I didn't want to interrogate them with 20 questions, so I just did my best and rolled with it. ^^

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

The changes we have are not made because they must be made. They're made because someone in some seat of power wants to see the game streamlined even more than it already is.

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Just to be clear, I don't think there's any change that would ever need to be made to any game. Games are fake, imagined from whole cloth. They can be anything anyone wants them to be. So yeah, I agree, and I hope nothing I said suggested that I thought the game was in need of change one way or the other. All I wanted to point out was that over 10 years the game has changed and become a meaningfully different experience compared to what it once was.

In terms of what classes I gravitate to, I love playing classes that don't conform to the classic trinity of Healer/DPS/Tank. These are usually support classes, whose contributions fall outside of healing, tanking, and damage (like mana battery classes--probably my favourite type of support class); or hybrid classes, who blur the lines between these three roles and perform two or more of these things simultaneously, all while sacrificing gameplay elements typically expected of the roles they're playing. Rogue Tank in WoW's Season of Discovery was a cool example of this - in Phase 1 they were tanks with incredible single-target damage, but they lacked proper AoE (very unusual for a tank), and they had no answer for magic damage (also very unideal for a tank). In FFXIV, I play a Scholar in PvP. This is the closest I can get to a support job - I love that their toolkit emphasises buffing and debuffing rather than plain old healing/damage.

In terms of how I approach gameplay, I take on an explorer/researcher type of role. I like to dive deep in game mechanics, figuring out hidden interactions and how I can use them to my advantage. There aren't many opportunities for this in FFXIV, but I've made some discoveries I'm proud of. I was among the first PvPers in Primal to figure out how to optimise Scholar's Biolysis spread in Frontlines. I also hypothesised that knockback effects in PvE ripple outward from the origin the same way raid buffs do (i.e. the person closest to the knockback gets hit first, hitting the raid group in order based on distance)--I never found a practical application for this, but a top MNK player in The Balance Discord told me he could use this information--he then found a way to get an extra GCD in DSR's Rewind Phase by cleverly positioning himself. Honestly the coolest shit I've ever seen.

With these two things in mind, one of my favourite classes in any MMORPG I've played was MapleStory's Hayato (or Samurai) from 2015-2017. At the time I played, it was a black sheep class whose gameplay revolved entirely around mobility. Honestly it was god awful - it had worse damage than a support and the entire class was held together by duct tape. But that was precisely why it was so enjoyable - its skillset was rife with weird and buggy interactions, and 99% of the fun was figuring how to apply that knowledge to optimise my EXP/hr gain. In practice it was just me figuring out different ways to zoom around the map all flashy-like, and for a time I became a minor celebrity for playing the game's 2nd/3rd most unpopular class in such an innovative way. It's sad these opportunities for unplanned gameplay are near non-existent in FFXIV's jobs. We had BLM's non-standard rotation, but now that seems to be going away. I will mourn the death of non-standard going into Dawntrail.

In games where everyone can be everything (FF5, FF7, FF8, Original FF12), I like to categorize characters into roles. I intentionally limit what each character can or cannot learn. If it's a game with 4 characters (like FF5), I'd have 1 heavy melee/tank, 1 fast melee, 1 offensive mage and 1 defensive mage. If it's 3 (FF7, FF8), I'd have a Paladin type (tanky/heavy melee but with healing), a mage type (with back up healing) and utility (mostly attacks but with buff/debuff).

The very first playstyle i liked was tanking... main hand doesn't matter for as long as i wield a shield with it.

Then i got into healing/support.

Finally, i got into summoning... i will blame diablo 2 for this... i immediately loved playing summon druid.. not a fan of summoning skeletons. This was when spirit/dire wolves and grizzly cannot coexist. So i cycle depending on what i am currently facing.

That's why i was so happy when i got to play all of those in ff14 without the need to make multiple characters. But we all know what they did to healers and pets. :(

My preference seems to be either nature-themed or edgy classes, but I have played all party roles of the trinity. In WoW I liked playing hunter, druid and death knight the most. I was able to command beasts to fight for me, use poisons and traps, shapeshift into animals and summon the power of the stars and the earth to heal and deal damage. As a DK I could heal myself by doing damage, raise an army of zombies and spread plagues to my enemies.

There aren't a lot of jobs in FFXIV that fit these archetypes perfectly. A bard is not quite the same as a hunter and a dark knight can't raise the dead or leech life force from enemies (the job quest was great though). Summoners can no longer spread disease or control their pet, which are the things I liked about the job. Neither WHM or AST have a strong nature aesthetic and they give angelic/holy and fortune teller vibes instead. I'm happy Endwalker and Dawntrail have finally brought exactly the type of jobs I like to play: reaper and viper. I love reaper's dark transformation, being able to summon a void being from across the rift, healing myself with bloodbath and weakening enemies with my debuff. Viper is the hunter-style job with a poison I've been waiting for. We will also get beastmaster, although I had hoped it would be a full job.

My playstyle is pretty much following the story to uncover what happens in that fantasy world and then doing whatever I want, such as collecting rare items, accumulating wealth and making my character stand out. I enjoy being the main character or having the kind of power that is not accessible to regular people.

Gameplay concepts that I generally like to see are:

• Fast gameplay with a significantly reduced GCD
• Multihit attacks
• Swords/Greatswords
• Spellblade effects
• Time magic (especially when used to rewind time or alter action recasts)
• Teleportation
• Shapeshifting
• Weapon summoning/Armiger
• Counterattacks
• Debuff management
• Interesting movement tools
• Hitstop animations

My ideal job concept would probably be a Striking Melee DPS based off Final Fantasy Tactics' greatsword users, like T.G. Cid, Agrias, or Meliadoul. Link the lore to the Corvosi Unyielding Blade sword style, with a mix of Mystic Knight style blade enhancement and Ivalician spellblade effects. Add in Celes' Runic and Leo's Shock for good measure. And none of this greatsword with cutlass handles or spikes nonsense - just a traditional, clean, double-edged classical medieval sword in the style of Defender and Save the Queen. Fusion sword concepts are fine too, as long as the core weapon follows a more traditional design.

The other job concept that I would consider playing is a melee range healer, especially one with a quarterstaff and non-MP based resource management, but I doubt they'll ever shake things up that much.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Just to be clear, I don't think there's any change that would ever need to be made to any game. Games are fake, imagined from whole cloth. They can be anything anyone wants them to be. So yeah, I agree, and I hope nothing I said suggested that I thought the game was in need of change one way or the other. All I wanted to point out was that over 10 years the game has changed and become a meaningfully different experience compared to what it once was.

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Right, I’m just trying to note that I don’t think the qualities I look for in a character or class, or the qualities that Scholar once had are in direct opposition to the experience modern FFXIV is generally trying to foster. The removal of those elements is not because those clash with the game flow of FFXIV, and if they were to return, or if Sage were to adopt the playstyle it was originally described as having, that that cannot work within the confines of FFXIV’s systems.

In other words, I don’t think me not finding what I’m looking for is because it cannot work within FFXIV’s structure, which is the what I took from your original response to be suggesting.

You should try RDM or DNC, since they're the other way around. Healing in this game has left me unsatisfied for years, i love healing but the game requires you to do so little of it once people know what they're doing. I never really liked any of the DPS jobs since ARR BLM because i am a simple soul. Then i recently decided to give RDM another shot and reduced some of the bar bloat with a combat macro (Ever since they changed the aoe rotation from scatter spam i had trouble finding comfy places for everything. Also i know combat macros kind of suck but don't @ me). It felt like a breath of fresh air, i have a rotation that feels good and support capabilities that are genuinely helpful if things go wrong.

I actually enjoy playing this game again.