Are ANY dps jobs allowed to remain complex?

Title.

If all jobs are for everyone, don't they all just become the same job?
Is any job allowed to remain complex, or have a high skill ceiling?
Is this change for the players, or does the new raid design necessitate it?

The BLM changes are incomprehensible and the reasoning for it has not been adequately explained. I sincerely doubt many opinions will change much even after trying it.

Please allow unique jobs to remain unique.

As if any DPS job was complex even before...

Uniqueness, that's a different thing. And I readily agree there. I can understand why they remove unique aspects, but I don't like it. Complexity? Wasn't ever really there, beyond pure button bloat adding a certain amount of mechanical complexity.

I mean by the title I'm just going to point out that this applies way more to tank and healers still both are beyond broken and fixable in their current forms.

In reality we should have complicated jobs, easy jobs and medium entry jobs but also add back some uniqueness, some jobs should have more RNG like procs ect. Some jobs should have combos, other jobs should have movement optimisation (like current 7.1 black mage).

moving away from uniqueness has been a long goal it seems for a long time to focus on encounter design, problem is jobs interact heavily with encounters still, its all well and good having fun boss fights and fun content, but if your base kit that interacts with that content is boring then your missing out on half of the design. It's a fundamental design issue to just ignore one major aspect about the game design which is arguably the most important in a RPG which is having a fun and varied class system that makes sense.

mechanics are important but Job design is just as important to a successful combat system, Just like if all we had to fight was striking dummy's then no matter how good the class design is it would be boring, both need to enhance each other and play a major part in making a fun and successful combat system.

Viper is the standard for 8.0, we'll only eat slop where buttons shines and we have to press them.

Yoshida, bring more slop job change! Boy's hungry!

4 years of jobs design should answer the question... i mean if it is not obvious by now.

any complexity that was not plan by them get patch every update. BLM is a good example but they are just very loud about it, but all the jobs like DRK / MNK / SMN / AST... are the most obvious examples.

Most of the complexity in BLM rested on the fact that its base rotation is exceedingly simple and that you want to try to squeeze in optimizations based on the encounter. Firestarter should generally be used after a transpose into AF1 for the boost, but sometimes one might need to use it to extend the second half of the fire-phase.

If we want to engage in sophistry we would say this isn't difficult: you do or you don't, and it's a button press. But the simple reality is that this is a choice, with upsides and downsides. Perhaps instead of using firestarter I could use a triplecast - great if I can use it for 2x F4, 1x FS but painful if it's F4, FS, B3 and either way it's no longer available for Leylines. If I just need one more F4, swiftcasting it and then despairing buys two GCDs of movement and refreshes the timer, so even if I still need to move I could use glossy. Yes, this isn't as difficult as playing a piano: but you are making many choices along the way which may work out for you and may work poorly for you.

The crux of their design philosophy is that choices are bad and rotations should always be static - because if a bad player makes a bad choice, their performance will slide a lot compared to a good player making a good choice. Reducing this delta makes it easier to balance the classes, which is pretty clearly done by spreadsheeting rather than actual playtesting. 7.0 BLM clearly did fine on a spreadsheet, and just ignored that the second-half of AF had almost no leniency with regards to Despair's cast time. Missing that instant-despair enabled another nonstandard line that was useful for movement or recovery was clearly not something that has been spreadsheeted, and was beyond the current designer's ability to find, and so it had to go.

Obviously, the answer is no. They want them to be playable by someone that has never played the game before and is suddenly thrust into testing out their new alliance raid.

The actual reasons for the BLM changes is likely to:

• Prevent Flarestar dropoff.
• Compete with PCT, because a lot of BLMs were won over by it after the 7.0 changes, so now it'll move as easily as they can.
• Because the new raid tier involves dancing and they could make it involve even more movement if they don't think someone needs to stand still for ages.
• And the obvious one: they made all the other jobs pretty easy so BLM is next.

Going thru them all, Im pretty sure they gutted every single one of them. RDM used to be the easy simple job, now it overshadows its lobotomized friends SMN and BLM. MCH and BRD, more so MCH has been cleaved. only a matter of time before BRD gets its true gutting. SAM, DRG, NIN, MNK, even days old VPR got its head shot. Am I missing any?

By the way, they WILL explain the reason for it in the patch notes. It will have a link to the job guide, which shows their reasons for every change. They started doing this after the frustration people had over previous changes not being explained.

Playing BLM myself today, there aren't even really issues at level 100. It's easier to keep the timer up at level 100 compared to lower levels due to insta cast Despair acting as a backup Fire III, plus the reduction in Swiftcast timer. Once you remember and have a plan for the mechanics, it's no problem either. I got M2 today and although it was a mess (I misjudged mechanic distances), I wasn't losing my Flare Stars at all even after a lot of others died.

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Originally Posted by Jirah

Am I missing any?

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Every tank and healer has been gutted at some point. AST being the most recent victim.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

They started doing this after the frustration people had over previous changes not being explained.

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As a MNK main, their explanation and reasoning for gutting it was just awful, truly awful. Lets not even get into what they tried to do to MNK in DT, but were forced to fix after the flood of negative criticism.

The problem I have with this whole mentality of making all jobs accessible is that there is no sense of accomplishment of mastering a favorite job. Sure you might get people to try out the class but the veterans might just put down the job and the newer ones who try it then don't like it will drop it even faster.

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Originally Posted by MitsukiKimura

The problem I have with this whole mentality of making all jobs accessible is that there is no sense of accomplishment of mastering a favorite job. Sure you might get people to try out the class but the veterans might just put down the job and the newer ones who try it then don't like it will drop it even faster.

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More importantly it also reduces the shelf life of an MMORPG as with jobs being ultimately quite similar in how they feel to play (in content, not in a vacuum) as all edges have been sanded off that could make them feel different, the ability to keep being interested in the game by switching your main is removed. A staple of MMO play, usually.

Imagine a world where every job has an accessible core but complexity in depth and ceiling.
A world where you don't need jobs on training wheels existing alongside tryhard jobs that are actually meta. Although I guess the latter is getting slowly extinct now...

I said this in another thread but feel it's relevant to this discussion.

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Originally Posted by reflettage

I think it's okay if certain fights or certain mechanics are slightly easier or harder as certain jobs just because of how said jobs work. That doesn't automatically mean the jobs are flawed or need to change. A player's perceived difficulty of a given encounter at any given point on its timeline comes primarily from the cognitive load experienced when trying to harmonize the content's mechanics with their role+job's mechanics from moment to moment. Fights are largely scripted, which acts as a baseline for difficulty that the players have no control over. The baseline difficulty is what makes something like Savage feel inaccessible to someone who can barely get through their daily Expert Roulette, and that perceived inaccessibility is why Savage is completely optional content that gates nothing but gear + some mounts and achievements behind it. FFXIV's MSQ actively gates the rest of the game behind it, making it effectively mandatory for every single player regardless of their abilities. So how can the developers make certain parts of the game both accessible and decently rewarding for everyone? Well...they can't. A story-only casual player who plays a little bit every 6 months and a hardcore multi-legend who plays a lot every day have fundamentally different needs when it comes to deriving reward and entertainment from content. This means the devs either make multiple versions of every duty and force players to segregate themselves, OR they give players multiple ways to engage with the same duties. This is a multiplayer game, you want as many people engaging in the same content as possible. Jobs are the vehicles through which players engage with the game, so the devs need to offer a vast array of jobs that vary in playstyle, mechanical complexity, and physical requirements for execution. This enables a variety of ways to experience the game and its content, therefore making the game appeal to more people in general. Don't get me wrong, job potential should absolutely NOT scale linearly with difficulty. "Harder" is not synonymous with "superior" and a player's choice of job should be largely a matter of preference. I play BLM because I like playing BLM. Experiencing FFXIV content through a Black Mage lens is extremely enjoyable for me. On the other hand, I despise playing melee DPS. Idk why, I just don't like it. That's not something the developers can fix; they would have to turn melee jobs into tanks/healers/ranged DPS for me to possibly want to choose them over literally anything else. But I already have plenty of non-melee job options, I don't NEED to play melee jobs to engage with the game -- every single melee enthusiast, however, would have their favorite way of engaging with the game totally deleted for no reason.

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Bard has so many systems, I often forget what they all are.
Not that it's important to know them all since a lot of them will just light up a button.. but still, it sure does have a lot of systems which I guess could be counted as complexity.