Stop making the jobs easy and nerf them because "they're not complex"

As topic.

No one asked for the simple (aka braindead) designs for the jobs "remade" in ShB/EW. Devs, you're painting yourselves into a corner. At this rate all jobs will only have 4 DPS buttons and do shit damage in 9.0.

I think most players will agree that HW/SB was the peak. All the streamlining has been a mistake.

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Originally Posted by TakumiHarada

As topic.

No one asked for the simple (aka braindead) designs for the jobs "remade" in ShB/EW. Devs, you're painting yourselves into a corner. At this rate all jobs will only have 4 DPS buttons and do shit damage in 9.0.

I think most players will agree that HW/ShB was the peak. All the streamlining has been a mistake.

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So we are gonna ignore some of the good designs Stormblood had for jobs or gave certain jobs much needed flow?

Dark Knight, despite being the DA-spam job, had many other redeeming qualities that could have been fixed by simply increasing the MP cost of Dark Arts and the potency gain (standard 140) by 50%.

Instead we got a mix of Warrior's Beast Gauge and Samurai's Kenki and they called that our job Shadowbringers onward, both resource meters completely decoupled from each other. Other things we lost:

• Blood Weapon +10% Haste
• Irregular cooldown alignment of combat actions*
• MP-Blood interplay via TBN (MP -> Blood) and Delirium/Quietus (Blood -> MP)
• Delirium interaction with Bloodweapon/price to extend them, those actions in turn granting more MP + Blood
• More significant MP spending options (Dark Arts -> Abyssal Drain for instance)
• Sole Survivor, which could and should have been expanded upon
• Blood Price, which could have been turned into DRK's version of Unchained to make it less sh**.

* = irregular cooldown table:

• Plunge: 30s
• Blood Weapon: 40s
• Salted Earth: 45s
• Carve / Dark Passenger: 60s
• ExtenDelirium: 80s
• Sole Survivor: 120s

DRK was a job that had speed and non-standard flow, which is what made it highly enjoyable over being another 60s / 120s cycle job as we have gotten thanks to Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

I cite not HW DRK as the best version on purpose because it had issues like essentially hogging #1 enmity for parry engine, something PLD optimisation struggled to a degree as well with Shield Swipe. TBN was the answer, and it was as good as it could get. I do miss having more than one viable combo though, Delirium combo finisher was nice.

But what about other jobs than DRK?

Minus the clunky parts which got fixed (mainly Faerie related), Stormblood 4.5 Scholar was arguably the best and most fun iteration of the job - non-standard DoT durations (30s, 24s, 12s for Miasma, Bio II and Miasma II), Bane for dot spreading and active decision making between Broil / Ruin II / Miasma II on single target depending on the situation. There was also Shadow Flare to alternate with Sacred Soil.

WHM also enjoyed having non-standard dot timers and Aero III and certain other jobs had fun things stripped from them. Tornado Kick Monk rotation was one of them - it was basically the best state in 4.5, but got ripped to shreds with the removal of Wind Tackle / addition of Greased Lightning IV - which eventually got shafted altogether.

Sorry it was a typo. I meant HW/SB was the peak but I thought it could be implied from the previous paragraph that "No one asked for the simple (aka braindead) designs for the jobs "remade" in ShB/EW.".
HW/SB >>>>>> ShB/EW.

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Originally Posted by TakumiHarada

Sorry it was a typo. I meant HW/SB was the peak but I thought it could be implied from the previous paragraph that "No one asked for the simple (aka braindead) designs for the jobs "remade" in ShB/EW.".
HW/SB >>>>>> ShB/EW.

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Glad this was just a misunderstanding then, no worries.

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Originally Posted by TakumiHarada

As topic.

No one asked for the simple (aka braindead) designs for the jobs "remade" in ShB/EW. Devs, you're painting yourselves into a corner. At this rate all jobs will only have 4 DPS buttons and do shit damage in 9.0.

I think most players will agree that HW/SB was the peak. All the streamlining has been a mistake.

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This is why you don't make difficulty a rubric of job balancing.

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Originally Posted by TakumiHarada

As topic.

No one asked for the simple (aka braindead) designs for the jobs "remade" in ShB/EW. Devs, you're painting yourselves into a corner. At this rate all jobs will only have 4 DPS buttons and do shit damage in 9.0.

I think most players will agree that HW/SB was the peak. All the streamlining has been a mistake.

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SB was peak job design. HW was an unbalanced nightmare and I think people really forgot just how bad the balance was back then.

I agree.

We don't chose our jobs because of difficulty. I don't play MCH because it's easy or GNB because it's hard. I play those jobs because kaboom.
We're not the one making the jobs easier, it's the design team. They can't have the audacity to impose a difficult and punish for the difficulty they chose.
No one asks for easier jobs, but everyone complain the jobs are getting easier. We are only asking for Quality of life and flexibility.

This is a feedback old as Stormblood, it just explodes today because of the last communication from Yoshida.

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

I agree.

We don't chose our jobs because of difficulty. I don't play MCH because it's easy or GNB because it's hard. I play those jobs because kaboom.
We're not the one making the jobs easier, it's the design team. They can't have the audacity to impose a difficult and punish for the difficulty they chose.
No one asks for easier jobs, but everyone complain the jobs are getting easier. We are only asking for Quality of life and flexibility.

This is a feedback old as Stormblood, it just explodes today because of the last communication from Yoshida.

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I ask for easier jobs. One of my biggest complaints is button bloat. But I'll take QoL fixes too. *looks at Paladin*

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Originally Posted by SilverSkyway

I ask for easier jobs. One of my biggest complaints is button bloat. But I'll take QoL fixes too. *looks at Paladin*

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The problem is that in the past there were hard jobs and easy jobs in the roles: now we have the easy job, the other easy job and the easiest job with one or two exception.

You wanted easy jobs? you had quite a few of them already, which let some harder one for the taste of other people. People that want pet management, dot management, positionals or more strict jobs didnt get anything in return for those jobs becoming a simple "1 2 3 use ogcd on cd and press x times your magic button during burst".
People aren't against easy jobs, they are just sad that their jobs, that had many feedbacks and idea given to make them better while keeping their identity were just turned into another one button macro job that feel so similar to all the others.

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Originally Posted by SilverSkyway

I ask for easier jobs. One of my biggest complaints is button bloat. But I'll take QoL fixes too. *looks at Paladin*

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It’s not like hard jobs have to have excessive bloat, BLM is arguably the hardest job in the game and probably has the fewest buttons of any non SMN DPS

There is a middle ground between hard and bloated (AST for example) and needing it into the basement like SMN

I didn't know you could ask for easier jobs, how much dumber does a level 90 job have to get?

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Originally Posted by TakumiHarada

As topic.

No one asked for the simple (aka braindead) designs for the jobs "remade" in ShB/EW. Devs, you're painting yourselves into a corner. At this rate all jobs will only have 4 DPS buttons and do shit damage in 9.0.

I think most players will agree that HW/SB was the peak. All the streamlining has been a mistake.

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It won't stop them, and they'll continue their legacy of "Remove2Improve" your DPS kits by reworking them into ones with even less depth than healers offensive options in 2022. If there's an outcry they might make another lodestone post tailored to the affected job but not revert it, of course:

The adjustment to (Job-name here) was never intended to be a “nerf,” but merely the correction of values that were set with respect to the difficulty of playing that particular job and its rotation, as well as its support actions and their effects.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

It’s not like hard jobs have to have excessive bloat, BLM is arguably the hardest job in the game and probably has the fewest buttons of any non SMN DPS

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BLM has an action number similar to many jobs, around average/upper tier in that sense. See here and here.

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Originally Posted by SilverSkyway

I ask for easier jobs. One of my biggest complaints is button bloat. But I'll take QoL fixes too. *looks at Paladin*

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The problem with this mentality is there's always been easy and hard jobs
it's just that now the easy jobs vastly outnumber the hard ones, which is horrible

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Originally Posted by Sunhwapark

It won't stop them, and they'll continue their legacy of "Remove2Improve" your DPS kits by reworking them into ones with even less depth than healers offensive options in 2022. If there's an outcry they might make another lodestone post tailored to the affected job but not revert it, of course:

The adjustment to (Job-name here) was never intended to be a “nerf,” but merely the correction of values that were set with respect to the difficulty of playing that particular job and its rotation, as well as its support actions and their effects.

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Pft. Nah, they'll just ask for feedback and ignore what gets posted like they did for SAM. That or they cherry-picked the hell out of it, since I do recall some mention of our AoE damage being shit post 6.1.

Why do people want buttons for the sake of buttons?

I already need to dedicate a completely separate cross hotbar to aoe on drg because of the ridiculous amount of ogcd abilities and long as hell five ability single target combos.

You can make a job fun and interesting to play without adding more buttons.

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Originally Posted by Imora

You can make a job fun and interesting to play without adding more buttons.

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someone should tell the devs then, because they aren't doing a good job of that either.

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Originally Posted by Imora

Why do people want buttons for the sake of buttons?

I already need to dedicate a completely separate cross hotbar to aoe on drg because of the ridiculous amount of ogcd abilities and long as hell five ability single target combos.

You can make a job fun and interesting to play without adding more buttons.

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Yes BLM is a good example, instead recent remakes have given us SMN, MCH and the ShB healers

I don’t care about buttons for the sake of buttons but square can’t seem to make a job that’s complex to save themselves these days

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Originally Posted by Imora

Why do people want buttons for the sake of buttons?

I already need to dedicate a completely separate cross hotbar to aoe on drg because of the ridiculous amount of ogcd abilities and long as hell five ability single target combos.

You can make a job fun and interesting to play without adding more buttons.

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Because we want complexity and the nature of tab targeting hot bar style mmos requires a large amount of skills to create that. WoW and SWTOR with their skill purges have proven just how shallow these kind of games can be when you nuke the skill list and simplify everything. I feel for controller players, I really do, but I'd dislike losing skills and complexity because of them and their limited button issues.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

Because we want complexity and the nature of tab targeting hot bar style mmos requires a large amount of skills to create that. WoW and SWTOR with their skill purges have proven just how shallow these kind of games can be when you nuke the skill list and simplify everything. I feel for controller players, I really do, but I'd dislike losing skills and complexity because of them and their limited button issues.

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Hi, controller player on a console. The only jobs I've leveled that seem weird to place for the cross hotbar for me personally have been paladin and ninja. Everything else I can somewhat fit onto the bar after going over their actions tab to pre-place abilities for when they're unlocked.

Majority of what I've played, seems fairly easy to setup. The only way it would be a problem is if they added 3-4 completely new buttons to a given job in the next update.

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Originally Posted by xAFROx

Hi, controller player on a console. The only jobs I've leveled that seem weird to place for the cross hotbar for me personally have been paladin and ninja. Everything else I can somewhat fit onto the bar after going over their actions tab to pre-place abilities for when they're unlocked.

Majority of what I've played, seems fairly easy to setup. The only way it would be a problem is if they added 3-4 completely new buttons to a given job in the next update.

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The devs have done a decent job staying within the 32 buttons as that's about around how many keybinds you can get out of all the shortcuts with the crossbar. The problem is though they keep removing stuff to make room for new stuff which would normally be fine, but they remove things that make things worse or feel incomplete and then it takes them years to fix it.

We don't have limited buttons/options on controller. We were never the reason that lead to simplification and I don't know why we are being used as scapegoat now.

Controller players can easily use 32 or even 48 buttons if you use double tap. And most jobs can't even fill the minimum 32.
Infrequent buttons like summon carbuncle/eos, tank stances, close position, sleep, etc. shouldn't be counted because they can be put to a third hotbar, much like on keyboard & mouse.
Stop blaming it on controller players. Not that more buttons necessarily means more fun, but the game can indeed still handle more buttons.

Absolutely. It might seem like a controller player is disadvantaged to someone who doesn't know better, but it's very clear that there is no discrepancy between a k&m vs a controller.

I, too, would appreciate if folks stopped saying controller compatibility is the problem, because it never has been.

My issues with certain jobs is simply that. An issue on my part.

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Originally Posted by xAFROx

Hi, controller player on a console. The only jobs I've leveled that seem weird to place for the cross hotbar for me personally have been paladin and ninja. Everything else I can somewhat fit onto the bar after going over their actions tab to pre-place abilities for when they're unlocked.

Majority of what I've played, seems fairly easy to setup. The only way it would be a problem is if they added 3-4 completely new buttons to a given job in the next update.

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I have no problem with paladin.

Paladin fits on my main cross hotbar with my extended bars just fine.

Dragoon needs a completely separate bar for aoe because it doesn't effing fit on the main one. I have face buttons on both triggers set to GCDs and dpad set to ogcds and there's no bloody room.

I don't even want to think about ninja. Might just half ass it to 90 and then ignore the job altogether.

You can add complexity by adding skill interplay rather than just adding more buttons you might never use, or just set into a rotation and use on cd. CDs aren't fun. We have a ton of them. Maintenance buffs/debuffs aren't fun(think Savage Roar from wow, or Death's Design debuff.. maintenance crap). You could add complexity solely by removing the 2 minute burst paradigm they got going on here.

Either way, someone somewhere will find your optimal rotation and you'll do it, thus making it not complex.

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Originally Posted by TakumiHarada

Controller players can easily use 32 or even 48 buttons if you use double tap. And most jobs can't even fill the minimum 32.
Infrequent buttons like summon carbuncle/eos, tank stances, close position, sleep, etc. shouldn't be counted because they can be put to a third hotbar, much like on keyboard & mouse.
Stop blaming it on controller players. Not that more buttons necessarily means more fun, but the game can indeed still handle more buttons.

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My "click buttons" that go on the hotbar I use to keep track of CDs are pet summons and tank stance.

I use two shared bars for things like teleport and limit break, as well as a mount and greens to summon chocobro.

I should not have to hit R1 to cycle hotbars. I use 31 buttons on dragoon, and my double tap bars are static. Most are mostly buffs and role abilities, as well as things like feint and true north. bar R1+2 is my aoe. I should not be forced to use this bar, but my aoe does not fit on the others.

SAM is uncomfortable. I managed to get it to all fit on one set, but it's cluttered and not everything makes sense where i put it because there's no room to put it where it makes sense to me. Rotational buttons I should never have to double tap anything for, it's awkward.

Most jobs my ST combos are on R2 face buttons, aoe on L2 face buttons. Can't work like that for DRG.

I'd complain less if the simpler jobs didn't suck complete arse damage wise right now(balance was a hell of a lot better in prior expansions and even patches) or have garbage stat allocation on the available gear without having to do savage making rotations feel like trash.

Ugh.

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Originally Posted by Imora

SAM is uncomfortable. I managed to get it to all fit on one set, but it's cluttered and not everything makes sense where i put it because there's no room to put it where it makes sense to me. Rotational buttons I should never have to double tap anything for, it's awkward.

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Because SAM has bloated buttons. NOT Kaiten, but all the goddamn single vs AoE double buttons with shared recast they keep adding.
I can't fathom why they don't just upgrade the single version to the AoE version like PLD's expiacion. They cause a button bloat without adding any depths to the rotation (the rotation doesn't change AT ALL), while removing things like Kaiten that actually required a couple of brain cells.
The more same recast skills they add the worse it becomes.

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Originally Posted by TakumiHarada

As topic.

No one asked for the simple (aka braindead) designs for the jobs "remade" in ShB/EW. Devs, you're painting yourselves into a corner. At this rate all jobs will only have 4 DPS buttons and do shit damage in 9.0.

I think most players will agree that HW/SB was the peak. All the streamlining has been a mistake.

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5.1 sam was perfection

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Originally Posted by Imora

My "click buttons" that go on the hotbar I use to keep track of CDs are pet summons and tank stance.

I use two shared bars for things like teleport and limit break, as well as a mount and greens to summon chocobro.

I should not have to hit R1 to cycle hotbars. I use 31 buttons on dragoon, and my double tap bars are static. Most are mostly buffs and role abilities, as well as things like feint and true north. bar R1+2 is my aoe. I should not be forced to use this bar, but my aoe does not fit on the others.

SAM is uncomfortable. I managed to get it to all fit on one set, but it's cluttered and not everything makes sense where i put it because there's no room to put it where it makes sense to me. Rotational buttons I should never have to double tap anything for, it's awkward.

Most jobs my ST combos are on R2 face buttons, aoe on L2 face buttons. Can't work like that for DRG.

I'd complain less if the simpler jobs didn't suck complete arse damage wise right now(balance was a hell of a lot better in prior expansions and even patches) or have garbage stat allocation on the available gear without having to do savage making rotations feel like trash.

Ugh.

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So for the way I set up most of my jobs, I use a total of 3 bars, but the third is usually extra stuff if a job is able to fill out the first two with the brunt of its kit.

Cross 1, cross 2 (accessed by R2->L2 and L2->R2), and cross 3 through the double tap method you mentioned. That's a total of 48 buttons without having to use R1 for anything.

If that still doesn't help you, then it really is just a you thing, and not so much a problem with certain jobs. I fit drg fairly comfortably on my bars. Pld, I think I had like... 2 or 3 skills that I had to place on bar 3, which I don't particularly like to do.

Granted, none of the bars I access through the setup I mentioned are shared. Those are the ones I go to manually with R1

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Originally Posted by rewd

We don't have limited buttons/options on controller. We were never the reason that lead to simplification and I don't know why we are being used as scapegoat now.

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Crossbar has 128 slots with all 8 crossbars, but with the way the shortcuts work you can realistically only quickly get to 32 of them. After that you're manually flipping to a specific page. The developers for the past few expansions have done in a pretty blatantly obvious manner to keep the ability count within that 32 range. You're not being used as a scapegoat, its just obvious that controllers are being looked more heavily when the devs refer to ability/action bloat.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I don’t care about buttons for the sake of buttons but square can’t seem to make a job that’s complex to save themselves these days

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Because they're obsessed with simplicity and accessibility.. anything complex means a chance of failure and omg can't have that..

The jobs are braindead easy because all the mechanics that added depth and complexity are gone. Crowd control debuffs. Meaningful stuns and interrupts, enmity management, resource management. Mob strengths and weaknesses. Anything that adds anything to combat that isn't just hit it till its dead has all but been destroyed in the name of simplicity and accessibility..

A complex job can't function in a game that has no complex mechanics or systems to interact with.

Good.

/10char

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Originally Posted by Dzian

The jobs are braindead easy because all the mechanics that added depth and complexity are gone

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Question:
What is depth in any role?

I havent seen any game in all this years, where i would say, that the class or gameplay had something, that i could call depth.
Complexity exist in this game (see mudra for Nin, beast chakra for monk and the multiple combos of samurai).

And there isnt anything wrong with braindead stuff. I liked the monk at the end of shb, because he was braindead.
No complex combos. I followed simply two sets of skills in endless looping. No ressources to watching. Practicly no dot to looking after. I that i had to do was punching my enemys, while im braindead from after the work.
Now, i have to watch by the beast chakra, that i have to use at one point 2 skills of the same time following the other, for creating dark chakra. I dont like it that much, because it interrupt my flow of buttom pressing.^^

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Originally Posted by SilverSkyway

I ask for easier jobs. One of my biggest complaints is button bloat. But I'll take QoL fixes too. *looks at Paladin*

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Same.

I get some people want galaxy brain Jobs. I prefer a bit closer to smooth brain for my ironed out gray matter to be able to handle it..

WAR, MCH, SMN - love those Jobs.

I also like GNB and main healers (other than AST - because I don't want to have carpel tunnel before I even turn 40 from that cursed opener and burst phase!)

I think the game SHOULD have some easy Jobs, medium Jobs, harder Jobs; low APM Jobs, high APM Jobs, some in between Jobs; complex and involved Jobs, metronome simple Jobs, and so on and so forth.

I think the trick is making them diverse and distinct - there's zero reason for all four healers to have basically identical rotations in the same game that we have tanks with WAR, PLD, and GNB different rotations - and then let players pick the ones they groove to the best. People insist "if they all do the same damage, only the easier Jobs will be picked!", but (a) would that be so bad? and (b) what is easier depends on the person - I find GNB easier than WAR because I don't lose my place in the rotation; people find BLM hard but its rotation is actually not so bad, it's the fight knowledge optimizing that makes it hard.

But yeah, I think it's fine if there are some of each as long as they're relatively well balanced. Players can then pick what suits them best.

I do feel like "remaking" Jobs should be avoided, though. I like MCH and SMN as they exist now. But I also liked old SMN. It'd be nice if something AKIN TO old SMN existed as Mystic or Green Mage or something. That way the players that liked THOSE gameplay styles would have those options, too.

.

I know, hot take to dare say on this forum I like easy Jobs but...meh, why lie about it? /shrug

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Originally Posted by SleepyCococat

This is why you don't make difficulty a rubric of job balancing.

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You can and should actually, the issue is that currently taxes aren't properly applied

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Originally Posted by Majatok

As for the difference between depth and complexity, i believe that complexity is how hard to understand and execute something is, while depth is about how many options and possibilities it gives you.

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I'm only quoting Google article but this is how I can explain it the best:
Complexity is defined by the numbers of inputs required to complete a task.
Best example I could find is Wildfire, the combo to pull off between then and now is day and night.

Depth is something that requires active thinking and decision making.
A good example would be stance dancing such as casting stance for Ranged and Priest stance for Healers.
Nowadays we establish and execute, that's the problem with XIV.

And no, choosing between AoE and Single Target isn't depth, the choice is already established based on the number of targets.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

Because we want complexity and the nature of tab targeting hot bar style mmos requires a large amount of skills to create that. WoW and SWTOR with their skill purges have proven just how shallow these kind of games can be when you nuke the skill list and simplify everything. I feel for controller players, I really do, but I'd dislike losing skills and complexity because of them and their limited button issues.

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i've been playing on controller since 3.2, and i've never had too many buttons to work with on the 32-slot cross hotbars. especially when they added the double-tap trigger hotbars for another 16 slots; i put food/pots and other non-class specific skills there.

(tho i never played SCH in HW, that prob would've been too much but that was the most complex job in the game so it's fine.)

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Originally Posted by Renathras

I know, hot take to dare say on this forum I like easy Jobs but...meh, why lie about it? /shrug

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What you've said isn't at all opposed to what the discontent voices on this forum have been saying for years though. Virtually nobody is asking for all jobs to be made galaxy brain difficulty and the game to become an inaccessible, hardcore mmo.

What most people who are unhappy about the job design direction tend to complain about, is how in the past we've had that diversity of playstyles and complexity levels to pick from and both have been gradually removed in favor of making every single job "the simple one" - be it via watering down and trimming of existing job mechanics or just downright reworks into something that doesn't resemble its old gameplay in the slightest. We used to have different jobs that catered to different players. Now it seems the goal is to make all jobs popular, but with only one type of player. That type might be the most common, but this direction is still leaving the many "minorities" that don't belong to it with nothing to play.

There is no problem with simple jobs, burst jobs, linear jobs - there is a problem when that is all there is though, especially when there used to be other options, they were just taken away. Having your favorite job not just totally changed, but then also nerfed with that change given as the reason, is just an extra slap in the face I imagine.

Thinkin' about how blissful Heavensward Machinist was, makes me rage about what it has become.

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

I'm only quoting Google article but this is how I can explain it the best:
Complexity is defined by the numbers of inputs required to complete a task.
Best example I could find is Wildfire, the combo to pull off between then and now is day and night.

Depth is something that requires active thinking and decision making.
A good example would be stance dancing such as casting stance for Ranged and Priest stance for Healers.
Nowadays we establish and execute, that's the problem with XIV.

And no, choosing between AoE and Single Target isn't depth, the choice is already established based on the number of targets.

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So what is the term for "kit where lots of things interact with each other, but not necessarily requiring a high number of imputs"? Like BLM has among the fewest abilities in the game, but most of the abilities in the kit interact with one another in various ways. Thunder interacts with Tundercloud procs, Firestarter with Fire 3, Sharpcast with both (and also Scathe and Paradox), Blizzard 4, Freeze, and Umbral Soul all interact with Flare via Umbra Hearts, and maintaining the Fire/Ice thing grants Xenoglossy/Foul. While having the among fewest abilities of ALMOST any Job in the game (I think just MCH and RDM or something have less?), its kit has a lot of interactions, both between the various abilities themselves and the overarching mechanics of Astral Fire/Umbral Ice uptime and Polyglot stacks. And it does this with the lowest APM in the game other than maybe WHM.

It's not complex - in it has few actions and a low APM, so not a high number of inputs.

It's not depth, per se - there is decision making, but it's not PARTICULARLY more advanced than RDM since it's context based on (a) your remaining MP and duration of Fire (Ice is a quick refresh then return to Fire) and (b) the upcoming boss mechanic; collectively, RDM has these same concerns with Mana and what the boss is doing.

...so what's the word for "not large number of inputs necessarily and not lots of decision making necessarily, but lots of interactions between the relatively smaller pool of options you have"?

EDIT:

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Originally Posted by JakkuPM

i've been playing on controller since 3.2, and i've never had too many buttons to work with on the 32-slot cross hotbars. especially when they added the double-tap trigger hotbars for another 16 slots; i put food/pots and other non-class specific skills there.

(tho i never played SCH in HW, that prob would've been too much but that was the most complex job in the game so it's fine.)

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My personal position is 29 buttons for a Job, as that leaves room for Sprint, LB, and potion (or mount when in the field). Jobs with more than 29 require dropping things. WHM/SGE this is an easy choice, as you only have to drop one thing (Repose). MCH and RDM you don't even hit that limit.

PLD, SCH, and AST have problems because they're up in the 33 range, and those extra buttons start to be an issue when they're all important and there's little you can drop. Contrasting PLD with WAR, the latter is super easy to set up on controller while PLD is...not.

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Originally Posted by Satarn

What you've said isn't at all opposed to what the discontent voices on this forum have been saying for years though. Virtually nobody is asking for all jobs to be made galaxy brain difficulty and the game to become an inaccessible, hardcore mmo.

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I didn't say everyone was saying it, but I've been attacked for expressing such an opinion. To hear some people talk, if you don't want every Job to be like Wildstar or something hardcore, you're a dirty casual bad who should uninstall and stop sullying their game. I get it's a minority, but it's a rather vocal and opinionated one. :)

I personally think SB got it ABOUT right. There were some cases that I think ShB got better, but I think SB was the gold standard.

HW was kind of a convoluted mess, which is why they went to the SB and eventually ShB model. And in some cases, ShB was an improvement. For example, SB WHM was kind of meh, and the Lilies added in ShB (in SB, they just had some weird chance to proc reducing your oGCD timers if you cast Cure 2 or something I don't even remember and which made no sense in practice), and I don't mind losing Aero 2 for it (though having Aero 3 for AOE situations might not be such a bad thing as long as it's still a DPS loss for single target vs Glare). But SB hit that sweet spot of a lot of the clunk and convolusion and imbalance of HW being hammered out, but most Jobs still had a fair bit of nuance and depth to them, and the few that didn't were honestly fine (like RDM has never been considered a hard/complex Job, and there was nothing wrong with that, imo)

I like some of the spreads we have right now - like I really like how there's a Tank right now to appeal to every playstyle and engagement/skill/whatever level (which wasn't really as true in SB), but I feel that others have gotten weird.

And the worst part is, we have cases like Melee with 100% uptime, but in a game design that still includes Ranged Tax for legacy reasons when it makes no sense with the current model where Melee don't really have the problem that brought about the tax in the first place.

Though I contest there are no complex Jobs. Anything is "easy" if you practice it long enough, but things like NIN and MNK are not simple Jobs; they are complex, people who have just mastered them don't find them so anymore. PLD has a rotation on par with a DPS Job and has a lot of optimization points (and cursed openers) making it the Tank for players who want a complex and nuanced gameplay style.

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I dunno, I don't think things are unsalvagable OR as bad as people are saying, and there absolutely are some complex Jobs in this game - with the caveat that what we each call complex IS going to be subjective.

But I do agree IN PART that some Jobs transitioning back towards their SB states wouldn't be a bad thing. SCH going back to its SB kit while keeping the improvements (less pet jankiness/bad responsiveness) and abilities (like Expedience) would be fine and probably an improvement, imo. WHM going back to its SB incarnation would be horribad, though. Like...SB Lilies were a PAINFULLY bad mechanic, and I was glad for that to die and be replaced with ShB and later EW's variants. WHM's in a good place right now, imo. The only thing I might change is giving it Aero 3 back.