A design exercise for job changes, come 8.0

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Originally Posted by Valence

I think without fleshing out the whole battle system enough, making jobs more unique and standing out is doomed to failure. Else everything is just about doing damage but "differently". How do you make this differently enough in system devoid of anything else but dodging encounter DDR and visual cues? Even on healing, saw how TOP WhM healing goes? It's glare and dia everywhere, and TOP is probably the hardest piece of pve content in the game right now.

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It’s definitely true that encounter design / battle system is one of the biggest barriers to unique/interesting jobs.

What I don’t get is…why not both (*insert meme here)*? Slower paced, more strategic mechanics that test a user’s knowledge of their actual toolkit interspersed with more fast-paced reactive DDR mechanics (i.e dodge the yellow, stack/spread). Or vice-versa or whatever ‘job mastery to reaction time’ ratio they deem necessary.

Ofc, I can also hear Yoshi-P’s voice now…”sorry…we can’t afford it…here have another unavoidable raidwide that does like 20% of the party’s HP’.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I think without fleshing out the whole battle system enough, making jobs more unique and standing out is doomed to failure. Else everything is just about doing damage but "differently". How do you make this differently enough in system devoid of anything else but dodging encounter DDR and visual cues? Even on healing, saw how TOP WhM healing goes? It's glare and dia everywhere, and TOP is probably the hardest piece of pve content in the game right now.

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I understand this... but we've seen what they settled for in 7.2 raid encounters. Can we really expect something more distinct than that?

The likelyhood is that jobs in 8.0 will receive features to match this encounter design, even if they change the prevalence of the 2min meta, which is a big point of contempt... Fights are probably still going to be fast paced DDR's and is unlikely, for example, to see a caster job getting heavy turret aspects. They seem to want people doing their rotation while moving.

20+ major overhauls in just one patch, especially when the release of a single caster in Dawntrail broke the entire game balance, are extremely unlikely. The new melee also required major adjustments to AoE damage. If FRU had 6-target scenarios, VPR would be a mandatory pick just like PCT.

The fact that SE is so cryptic about it doesn't help, but this is unfortunately a common issue. Considering Yoshi-P has always made it clear that hard content requires easy jobs, my guess is that we won't get many major changes, if any at all. My expectations are low until I see it. Let's also remember they were not supposed to dumb down any jobs in Dawntrail.

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Originally Posted by brinn12

20+ major overhauls in just one patch, especially when the release of a single caster in Dawntrail broke the entire game balance, are extremely unlikely. The new melee also required major adjustments to AoE damage. If FRU had 6-target scenarios, VPR would be a mandatory pick just like PCT.

The fact that SE is so cryptic about it doesn't help, but this is unfortunately a common issue. Considering Yoshi-P has always made it clear that hard content requires easy jobs, my guess is that we won't get many major changes, if any at all. My expectations are low until I see it. Let's also remember they were not supposed to dumb down any jobs in Dawntrail.

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This is also just a known issue. If you want people to play the game, the maximum total difficulty must be relatively even and consistent. In HW, the classes were too hard and fights comparatively easy. End result, people stopped playing the game. EW and DT is the opposite. Classes are easy, but content is extremely hard. Same issue, people stop doing the content.

Personally, I prefer easy fights and jobs of variable skill requirements. It lets me choose the best job for my personal playstyle and skill level and still do ultimates, and taking a challenging job into brain numbingly easy dungeons can make it an interesting experience. Which is just a lot better than dungeons where I die from making a single mistake because I dared to do casual content slightly distracted.

It's all the better when the most homogenized thing in the game, fight mechanics, also aren't homogenized and target roles by role. M6S is a fantastic example of how giving rphys a unique mechanic, liquid hells, can be very fun. But also that trying to force casters to do liquid hells spoils caster gameplay. Because casters aren't supposed to be mobile like rphys. It cheapens the experience and homogenizes the game. 'But casters have a mechanic!' Yes, and the mechanic isn't a good caster mechanic, which can be seen by the fact that the devs keep removing the 'cast' from 'casters.'

I digress. I could talk about all the things I'd love for BLM to have. Pruning of low-use and somewhat boring skills, removal of thunder dot because dots just cannot be fun in the game as designed because of server limitations. But the biggest thing I want is for all casters to be casters again. To have extremely limited movement and have bosses designed around casters having limited movement.

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Originally Posted by Connor

It’s definitely true that encounter design / battle system is one of the biggest barriers to unique/interesting jobs.

What I don’t get is…why not both (*insert meme here)*? Slower paced, more strategic mechanics that test a user’s knowledge of their actual toolkit interspersed with more fast-paced reactive DDR mechanics (i.e dodge the yellow, stack/spread). Or vice-versa or whatever ‘job mastery to reaction time’ ratio they deem necessary.

Ofc, I can also hear Yoshi-P’s voice now…”sorry…we can’t afford it…here have another unavoidable raidwide that does like 20% of the party’s HP’.

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The answer to your question is rather simple. The game does not have the infrastructure to enable fast-paced reactive DDR fights. From being woefully incompatible with classes that should be all rights sit still and cast, to the fact that the game has absolutely no rollback netcode and 0 tolerance for even 0.5% packet loss, fast-paced fights literally break the game. The higher your ping, the more broken the game is. The more packet loss, the more broken. If this game had world of warcraft's netcode and server architecture, it could have faster fights provided casters weren't forced to play like rphys. If the fight had GW1 or 2's netcode, it could have faster fights. But unfortunately, this is a Japanese game made by Japanese developers that don't understand the concept of ping above 5ms, and as such, the game breaks progressively more and more above 5ms ping.

What's especially frustrating is the devs learned this lesson when ARR launched with titan's weight of the land nailing people all the time. They just forgot the lesson. This game is not a fast paced game. The more they try to make it fast paced, the more people will leave because of how awful the game feels at that pace.

If literally nothing else, trying to cater to both styles means they alienate both groups of players. I fell in love with FFXIV for the slower-paced methodical fights that allowed me to sit still and cast for long periods of time. That's kind of what made FFXIV successful to begin with. But the more they move away from that, the worse the game has gotten and the lower the playerbase has gotten. It just so happens that one style has both the weight of the game's history and the design of its infrastructure backing it up. While the other has m5s having its music completely desync from its mechanics (and even mechanics desyncing from mechanics) because of latency, completely ruining the entire fight.

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

I personally highly enjoy the raw base idea of the fights we have because I enjoy puzzles/riddles, and I enjoy figuring them out. I view them more like a match of tactical Chess. If you choose the correct or best move, you will win the match.

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If I want to play actual tactics and chess, I'll go play pvp, which I already do because that type of content actually keeps me engaged with my brain, figuring out what opponents are going for at each instant and dealing with the hand I have at any time, and not trying to figure out how a ballet goes the first time and proceed to execute the same strat again and again ad nauseam after.
If you keep pulling the exact same rigid strat at chess, you're not going to go very far.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I understand this... but we've seen what they settled for in 7.2 raid encounters. Can we really expect something more distinct than that?

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I don't think we can. It's been like this since ShB no matter what people want to say. We just gained the 2min meta on top of it as you said.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

The likelyhood is that jobs in 8.0 will receive features to match this encounter design, even if they change the prevalence of the 2min meta, which is a big point of contempt... Fights are probably still going to be fast paced DDR's and is unlikely, for example, to see a caster job getting heavy turret aspects. They seem to want people doing their rotation while moving.

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That's why believing in the 8.0 job rework without a battle system rework is like believing in a ponzi scheme. A full action DDR game with memorization isn't conductive to any kind of deep nor engaging RPG tactical gameplay, period. That's not what that kind of game is designed around, because it's designed around dancing and movement while pressing buttons and memorizing the script, not around dealing with RPG battle mechanics.

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Originally Posted by Taranok

This is also just a known issue. If you want people to play the game, the maximum total difficulty must be relatively even and consistent. In HW, the classes were too hard and fights comparatively easy. End result, people stopped playing the game. EW and DT is the opposite. Classes are easy, but content is extremely hard. Same issue, people stop doing the content.

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I'm not totally sure where this conception that players stopped playing the game in HW when all charts seem to hint at a steady demographic that certainly didn't go down comes from. One could argue that Stormblood proved more successful considering that the curve truly took off there though, but it's always hard to exactly nail down what makes it so since it's hardly going to come from a single factor such as complexity.

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Originally Posted by Taranok

The answer to your question is rather simple. The game does not have the infrastructure to enable fast-paced reactive DDR fights. From being woefully incompatible with classes that should be all rights sit still and cast, to the fact that the game has absolutely no rollback netcode and 0 tolerance for even 0.5% packet loss, fast-paced fights literally break the game. The higher your ping, the more broken the game is. The more packet loss, the more broken. If this game had world of warcraft's netcode and server architecture, it could have faster fights provided casters weren't forced to play like rphys. If the fight had GW1 or 2's netcode, it could have faster fights. But unfortunately, this is a Japanese game made by Japanese developers that don't understand the concept of ping above 5ms, and as such, the game breaks progressively more and more above 5ms ping.

What's especially frustrating is the devs learned this lesson when ARR launched with titan's weight of the land nailing people all the time. They just forgot the lesson. This game is not a fast paced game. The more they try to make it fast paced, the more people will leave because of how awful the game feels at that pace.

If literally nothing else, trying to cater to both styles means they alienate both groups of players. I fell in love with FFXIV for the slower-paced methodical fights that allowed me to sit still and cast for long periods of time. That's kind of what made FFXIV successful to begin with. But the more they move away from that, the worse the game has gotten and the lower the playerbase has gotten. It just so happens that one style has both the weight of the game's history and the design of its infrastructure backing it up. While the other has m5s having its music completely desync from its mechanics (and even mechanics desyncing from mechanics) because of latency, completely ruining the entire fight.

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While I do agree with your point overall, it's more insidious that just latency. I have played at 200ms ping on NA back then, and the fact that I could pull a very smooth experience in housing wards against dummies and then get over 2s of clipping in actual combat instances is very telling: it's their netcode that's garbage (perhaps in combination with the realities of the world's internet and ISPs and nodes), and that's what keeps tripping them when they tell us stubbornly "we test everything locally with a simulated 200ms latency and it works on our machine".

Even today with my 15ms ping on EU sometimes I just get crooked instances in pvp for literally zero reasons where everything microfreezes every handful of seconds which makes it utterly unplayable and I have to eat the bullet for that. And the next instance is suddenly back to smooth like if nothing happened in the previous one.

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Originally Posted by Valence

If I want to play actual tactics and chess, I'll go play pvp, which I already do because that type of content actually keeps me engaged with my brain, figuring out what opponents are going for at each instant and dealing with the hand I have at any time, and not trying to figure out how a ballet goes the first time and proceed to execute the same strat again and again ad nauseam after.
If you keep pulling the exact same rigid strat at chess, you're not going to go very far.

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While there are elements that can be said about PvP as well, there are also 71 additional factors vs 7. I would argue that raiding is vastly more controlled compared to PvP.

However, PVP does have a lot of Chaos and variance, which can be engaging for some.

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That's why believing in the 8.0 job rework without a battle system rework is like believing in a ponzi scheme.

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It would pretty much make 0 sense to absolutely rework everything from the ground up. It's not realistic to even expect that.

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it's their netcode that's garbage (perhaps in combination with the realities of the world's internet and ISPs and nodes), and that's what keeps tripping them when they tell us stubbornly "we test everything locally with a simulated 200ms latency and it works on our machine".

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I think what they mean by that is that you are not required to play 100% to clear a fight, and even if you make mistakes, and even if you do clip and drift you should still be able to clear. If the ping results in a blatant inability to clear the fight, then they will maybe look at latency and ping. However, that is hardly ever the case.

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Even today with my 15ms ping on EU sometimes I just get crooked instances in pvp for literally zero reasons, where everything microfreezes every handful of seconds which makes it utterly unplayable and I have to eat the bullet for that. And the next instance is suddenly back to smooth like if nothing happened in the previous one.

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If your PC micro shutters, micro lags, and freezes, that is a hardware issue and not a net/ping issue.

The net/ping issues usually translate into rubberbanding, teleporting across the map, because the server has delays in allocating you the new position.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

- Fixing Tillana's esprit issue, and just giving some sort of "DotD Ready" treatment, to be on par with other similar changes;

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I cannot agree with this more, it honestly baffled me when I saw tillana give me 50 gauge at the start of the expac since they literally made changes to RDM, MCH, and RPR to fix their (annoying but manageable) gauge problems just to give them to DNC which can't control the rate at which the espirit gauge procs. :/

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

It would pretty much make 0 sense to absolutely rework everything from the ground up. It's not realistic to even expect that.

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Even though it didn't seem to bother them to remove everything back in ShB, I do agree, it is not realistic to expect this considering their current design stances. Thus, the ponzi scheme comparison.

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

I think what they mean by that is that you are not required to play 100% to clear a fight, and even if you make mistakes, and even if you do clip and drift you should still be able to clear. If the ping results in a blatant inability to clear the fight, then they will maybe look at latency and ping. However, that is hardly ever the case.

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I am not interested in trying to analyze what they "could have meant", especially when what I'm referring to and what brought me originally on those very forums back in 2018-2019 was a very objective, material problem focused on MCH playability at high latencies, which they kept dismissing in a condescending way with what amounted essentially to "works on my machine, but if you have evidence otherwise, please provide" (how about you just went to play on NA and see for yourself Yoshida???).

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

If your PC micro shutters, micro lags, and freezes, that is a hardware issue and not a net/ping issue.

The net/ping issues usually translate into rubberbanding, teleporting across the map, because the server has delays in allocating you the new position.

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Please spare me the dunning kruger. My rig works fine, and if it didn't then it wouldn't only be happening on specific instances of the same duty.
Fact of the matter I'm no stranger to their server hiccups, as this was pretty common back when the NA servers were still located in Canada, for weeks at times we'd just get micro freezes like those constantly. Rubberbanding tends to occur in games that use a different protocol (notably UDP) because of desyncs. This ain't about desyncs chief. This is about random delays.

If you're interested in learning more about those, I can recommend a good thread about the ins and out with interesting tidbits of data.

There are different types of micro lags/stuttering and they're indicative of different things. The types Valence are experiencing are probably indicative of the servers dropping packets or struggling to connect to players in whatever instance they're in, or in cases like mine, just a shoddy internet connection. These are typically pretty easy to differentiate from hardware issues because the rest of the game (i.e moving yourself/the camera around) will still be buttery smooth while everyone else freezes up for a second or two.

Yes, having a faulty/broken setup can also cause micro lags, but these (from my experience of frying my GPU by doing rendering work and then going straight into raid) freeze your entire screen, not just players.

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

The net/ping issues usually translate into rubberbanding, teleporting across the map, because the server has delays in allocating you the new position.

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This is true for other players looking into the person lagging, but FFXIV at least tries to make the movement look smooth on the player's own side. That means that extremely laggy players typically feel/look like they're moving smoothly on their side, even if they're lagging around or have outright disconnected from other players' perspective. I've never seen client-side rubberbanding occur in this game. This is also why dead bodies can move around sometimes, since the player's client is still giving the server information about their movements on their side long after the server's determined that they've died, but the server is simultaneously failing to deliver this information to the player's client.

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

I think what they mean by that is that you are not required to play 100% to clear a fight, and even if you make mistakes, and even if you do clip and drift you should still be able to clear. If the ping results in a blatant inability to clear the fight, then they will maybe look at latency and ping. However, that is hardly ever the case.

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Just as a note, I've definitely been killed by the game's awful netcode MANY times in normal, extreme, savage, and ultimate fights. On particularly bad days last patch, I'd watch the boss from m5s cleave both sides of the room at once, or get stuck in an infinite movement mechanic loop in m8s phase 2. The fights typically aren't impossible with ping, but they can be when the servers get bad enough on any given day, which is becoming more and more common.