On the topic of Role Actions in 5.0 and beyond

[Callinon]

I prefer synergistic mechanical flavour to flashy animations. SE already has the latter on lockdown, they don’t need to convince me that they can go full Micheal Bay. It’s the former they’re lacking, in spades. If they’re not going to actually make their systems interesting I don’t see the point in wasting the space on buttons that could be spent on distinct abilities elsewhere.

But what does that mean to you? Plenty of jobs have abilities that synergize with each other and with other jobs. So you must mean something different from what's currently there?

[Shurrikhan]

But what does that mean to you? Plenty of jobs have abilities that synergize with each other and with other jobs. So you must mean something different from what's currently there?

To be fair, what's there amounts to very little, gameplay-wise. We occasionally choose who applies a debuff first, and very rarely delay skills that could potentially waste uses per fight from their normal CDs in order to fit to raid debuff. Because we can always just push for more damage or fewer healing GCDs, few supportive (curative or mitigative) CDs are ever redundant or need to be rotated between the two providers, commonly lack the impact to meet new breakpoints if used alone, yet sync too haphazardly to be paired consistently.

We have synergy by numbers, but little that actually allows us new opportunities as to be visible in the gameplay itself.

Compare that to any MOBA or even a class-based shooter. Most good games in either genre have far more impactful synergies available. There's something to be said for feeling overly dependent on another class/hero, but there's at least for more interesting stuff in that direction.

Sadly, most of the difference probably comes down partly to bloat/perceived-impact but mostly to undermechanics.

[Grimoire-M]

-snip-

Yeah, you got it there. Synergies don't have to apply just to static cooldowns and raid buffs. It's just stacking multipliers based on their respective timing windows, after all. The optimal numerical option emerges naturally almost irregardless of what you want to do. And that is basically how 90% of the synergies in this game operate right now, even the ones I'm about to talk about.

I am referring more to interactions like Celestial Opposition extending Lucid Dreaming or Deployment Tactics and the Fairy, where individual parts of your own kit can come together to give you more, and you usually have to consider them if you want their full benefits. You can build whole classes based on manipulating portions of your own kit to achieve a stronger effect than the sum of their parts. Some classes that I feel do a better job at achieving this currently would be BRD/MCH/SMN for DPS, SCH for Healers, and DRK for tanks. A party example of this would be Bard and Dragoon synergizing with one another because of Crit Stacking on Bard specifically. Regardless, tiny examples of this do exist in all of them currently, just not to such a degree that it's meaningful.

It's also possible to add more interplay via anti-synergies as well. SCH has Dissipation and DRK used to have Dark Dance and still has DA-Dark Passenger, both of which don't work well with Blood Price. SMN achieves this rather accidentally via Bahamut and the Aetherflow lockouts, and MCH's interactions with skillspeed also are an example of this, the difference is the results come off as punishing and clunky, disrupting flow, but encouraging more forethought, which can be a good thing. In the case of DRK I would consider my cooldown sequencing a lot more because of those interactions. In the case of SMN? I'd rather focus more on Aetherflow/Bahamut itself than worry about timing Rouse properly. And I think that speaks to how I view their respective roles and the mechanics therein.

To give another analogy, compare it to Magic the Gathering:
- In general, should your class feel more like a value deck, an engine, or a combo deck? In other words, how much synergy do you want?
- All DPS would be aggro decks because of course they are. However, do you want your dps class to feel like a by the numbers Burn or Mill Deck? Or do you want them to feel like Affinity, or Merfolk?
- Do you want your healers & tanks to feel more like control, midrange, or tempo? All deal with pressure thrown at them in different ways but ultimately care about synergy differently because of it. Control would probably map best onto old style MMOs, where your focus is entirely spent on dealing with the encounter using your best value tools and proper use of those tools will secure you an inevitable victory. WoW would be closer to tempo, focusing on efficiently responding to an encounter with more limited tools that may or may not work well together but ultimately can't keep up with the encounter forever (whether due to enrage mechanics or simply not enough statistical power), Midrange is analogous to what we currently have in FFXIV, every tank/healer can respond to an encounter but also contributes a significant amount of DPS to help close it out.

[Shurrikhan]

I am referring more to interactions like Celestial Opposition extending Lucid Dreaming or Deployment Tactics and the Fairy, where individual parts of your own kit can come together to give you more, and you usually have to consider them if you want their full benefits.

Ahh, in that case I'm hesitant to agree without more specific parameters, since the quality of such synergies varies tremendously.

• I dislike being obliged to weave all my buffs into Celestial Opposition, almost to the point I'd rather cross-class skills not be affected at all and the duration of increase diminishes with each further, lower-value effect. (Yes, we do already have these tier orders, as shown from when OIP stripped buffs in a particular sequence in PvP.)
• I like stacking Mantra-Minuet-Convalescence-Defiance into a heal to be spread for far greater effect. If those were all my own skills I had to stack together, or if other options for those skills expense weren't competitive with the stacked use, however, I would not.
• I love the breakpoint-crossing synergies of things like Blood Weapon + Quietus in mass-AoE, though I wish the breakpoint was pushed to a sooner position and the reward past that breakpoint softened.

It's also possible to add more interplay via anti-synergies as well. SCH has Dissipation and DRK used to have Dark Dance and still has DA-Dark Passenger, both of which don't work well with Blood Price.

These, too, I'm fine with, depending on the parameters. The only thing that annoys me is when the kit seems balanced around the assumption that no anti-synergy would occur, despite the cost that would have on immediacy, burst (mitigation, in DRK's case) or CD-coverage over time. If truly balanced, I in some way like the forking paths caused by anti-synergy more than about half of our current examples of synergies, so long as they aren't hard counters to each other. This fit the aesthetic of DRK, because you knew that it would cost you something, but you often felt you had no choice, which just felt... properly edgy, and bursty.

To give another analogy, compare it to Magic the Gathering:
- In general, should your class feel more like a value deck, an engine, or a combo deck? In other words, how much synergy do you want?

And this is exactly how I proposed BLU should be able to create it's own skill arsenals, to the point of calling them "decks". And I generally agree, though in practice certain types of builds are contextually favored, often to the exclusion of all others. Thus a lot of design in XIV, so long as the game does not encourage having access to many different decks (jobs) and does not allow for their simultaneous progression (e.g. only one armor class progressable via weekly currencies and raid locks), will have to be tailored towards making the differences feel significant while in fact being insignificant in practice. We have our "all jobs on one character", yet far less freedom to progress multiple aspects at once at a competitive level than one does in almost any other MMO (wherein additional characters means additional sets of weekly lockouts), and for now we have to balance design around that inflexibility, even if it vastly diminishes identity or content variety.