Unpopular opinion: No new jobs next xpac please

[Raqrie_Tohka]

But how would we start about “overhauling” the combat system and class design philosophy? It’s complex and risky even for professional development teams.

Just curious, it’s a deep topic.

[IntrovertAnt]

Actually, I would be ok with no new jobs next expac!

[Adonan]

I played Maplestory as a kid. If any of you have played Maplestory, you'll know where adding too many classes will get you. Most of them are fine, I think, but a lot of them are too similar. While I'm still holding onto the hope of one day seeing the Onion Knight, I wouldn't mind an expac or two without a new class.

[CookiesNCreams]

I usually craft, but, isn’t that not fair for the healer mains that have waited years for a new healer?

[Adonan]

Honestly, they don't need to add more than one class every expansion either. Better yet, I wouldn't mind if they added one class every other expansion. I think that would allow them to allocate resources elsewhere, potentially to fitting a new, much requested class into the game.

[DumdogsWorld]

Please SE give us Beast Master next expansion, ty.

I feel Beast Master will be a limited job

I would like a minion master as a limited job. Then I could actually put my army of pudgy puks to good use outside of the Gold Saucer!

[Billythepancake]

I usually craft, but, isn’t that not fair for the healer mains that have waited years for a new healer?

It's also not fair that the current healers got stripped and gutted down for the sake of "balance". I'd rather a 4th one was spared that treatment than added purely because of tradition.

[Hugowulf]

I’m all for not having new jobs. While I enjoy playing gunbreaker, I’d be okay for devs to delete if it meant HW DRK coming back.

[Shurrikhan]

But how would we start about “overhauling” the combat system and class design philosophy? It’s complex and risky even for professional development teams.

Just curious, it’s a deep topic.

Definitely. I'd imagine you'd want to start from a list of things that you want to be possible, if only for future-proofing, including some more definite leads or concrete gameplay goals, consider the undermechanics necessary for those things, and then finally consider what netcode changes would be necessary for those things.

For instance, the way our code works allows us to "absorb" the effects of up to 250 ms ping on GCD skills, but appears to zero protection for oGCD skills, for which the delay before we can perform any other action is increased by twice our ping (atop the base 600 ms delay). This rapidly increases the delay inflicted upon players of higher ping, until 200 ms ping would require a 3-second GCD to double-weave. (Of course, when they first made the claim that the game would be equally playable by all players up to 200 ms ping, wasn't the game in beta, still with a 3-second GCD? Hmm.)

A "simple" change (in terms of the described change, though likely not in term of the effort required to work around the code change) to allow for oGCDs to query the server earlier in the same way that GCDs do would be tremendous, but what actual gameplay could form from that? After all, even if the skill goes off early, the damage won't, so the increased responsiveness won't actually allow us an action every .6 seconds in terms of damage, healing, or mitigation generated or effects inflicted; all that would still rely on the server tick, which would for then remain painfully infrequent compared to most triple-A MMOs.

If we wanted more interception mechanics, the ability to stagger enemies in any way, more active mitigation, or more responsive healing to synergize with new expansions in healing kits, all that would take an increased frequency of the server tick. But it'd probably feel a waste to plan for all those things before we have even a single concrete desire. And so begins the loosest part of the brainstorming phase, which will then contract and expand according to whatever it finds lucrative.