Making jobs spam the same move more than once feels boring

[linay]

Improvements aren't just seeing the numbers get bigger, it's -feeling- your job getter stronger as it progresses.

Increasing the usage of Fell Cleave is not just about seeing numbers get bigger. It's literally a showcase of your job getting stronger as you are able to master a powerful ability even more such that you are able to make use of an ability better, especially when combined with Nascent Chaos.

[KalinOrthos]

Increasing the usage of Fell Cleave is not just about seeing numbers get bigger. It's literally a showcase of your job getting stronger as you are able to master a powerful ability even more such that you are able to make use of an ability better, especially when combined with Nascent Chaos.

Increased Fell Cleave usage comes at 70. From 70-80, Warrior gets, in order, Berserk-enhanced Decimate, AoE gauge generation, Nascent Flash (which is fun, but, again, doesn't really make you feel stronger), better ToB, and Berserk-enhanced Fell Cleave. Nascent Chaos only really makes the numbers bigger, they don't give you new tools to play around with. I don't think that's enough to give Warrior a true feeling of improvement, especially when Paladin gets an extra three steps in its rotation and magic finisher, Dark Knight gets a new AoE step and the Stand [PAINT IT BLACK], and Gunbreaker gets instant full meter and another AoE step, and this is JUST the tanks.

My point isn't that number increases aren't you getting stronger, it's that number increases alone aren't enough to make a class genuinely feel like it's getting better.

With that said, completely changing the way a class plays the closer they get to the level cap is too far a swing in the opposite direction. Instead of making the class feel stale, it ends up being completely different from what you started out with. For some, that's fine, but it makes new player experiences even more difficult because you have to forget everything you spend 80 levels learning. There's a balance; abilities like Nascent Chaos, Blasting Zone, and Edge/Flood of Shadow have their place in giving the raw damage increases, but it also has to come with new, useful tools and toys to play with.

[linay]

My point isn't that number increases aren't you getting stronger, it's that number increases alone aren't enough to make a class genuinely feel like it's getting better.

But even in Warrior's case, it doesn't just have number increases. That's just the specific effect of Nascent Chaos. And there is also something to be said about not completely changing everything, as you've said. So you can use Fell Cleave more at 70 and you can upgrade Fell Cleave at 80. That's a nice, steady progression, along with other changes to the job, most notably in Shadowbringers being the tank changes where you don't have to sacrifice defense for offense in terms of enmity management.

[Shurrikhan]

With that said, completely changing the way a class plays the closer they get to the level cap is too far a swing in the opposite direction. Instead of making the class feel stale, it ends up being completely different from what you started out with. For some, that's fine, but it makes new player experiences even more difficult because you have to forget everything you spend 80 levels learning. There's a balance; abilities like Nascent Chaos, Blasting Zone, and Edge/Flood of Shadow have their place in giving the raw damage increases, but it also has to come with new, useful tools and toys to play with.

Any examples you can give of where changes were made on the right side of that line and where they were made on the wrong side?

For instance, I see Fire II's eventual complete obsoletion and Aspect Mastery (which invalidates the MP margins we'd been used to accounting for previously) as each belonging to the wrong side, even if I may prefer their resultant gameplay. That doesn't mean I find Flare spam to the exclusion of Fire II necessarily bad, to be clear. I just dislike how it amputates a previous understanding of how to optimize the job just for increased power elsewhere, especially since it didn't have to remove and resultantly simplify gameplay. It particularly annoys me when the one (e.g. Flare spam) completely replaces the other (at least situational Fire II), much like a direct upgrade, without doesn't go so far as to admit that the old gameplay is dead and gone.

On the other hand, Mirage Dive even just in terms of its potency (i.e. as a direct upgrade to Jump and Spineshatter Dive) seemed to draw a new theme for SB DRG -- deliberate macrorotational timing. If not for the 15 second window it granted us to bank for Blood for Blood, I likely would have thought it pure bloat, but that window brought DRG into a new perspective, a new or deepened theme of optimizations. Geirskogul-->Nostrond, especially before its simplification, likewise returned at least some usefulness to Blood of the Dragon and something to capstone rotation, rather than being just another (compound) CD to throw into the mix. Those each seemed well-designed upgrades; they ushered in a new stage of play for the job without invalidating (in 4.x Nostrond's case, specifically returning) previous means of optimization.

[KalinOrthos]

Any examples you can give of where changes were made on the right side of that line and where they were made on the wrong side?

For the wrong side, I have previously mentioned monk but I think it bears repeating. As it is right now, they have a very stale regular rotation that hasn't changed since ARR, but this expansion they got a few new toys that -should- have been neat to play around with in Anatman and SSS, as well as, finally, a fourth stack of GL. However, problems arose when they also took away monk's ability to generate those GL stacks quickly by removing SB Riddle of Wind, then making Anatman on the GCD in patch 5.1. Ultimately, while on paper they should have gotten some new tools to play with and a substantial damage increase in 4 GL stacks, most monks have ended up frustrated with not having a single change to their core rotation, a repurposed PB from quickly stacking GL to a DPS cooldown, and three new skills that see very limited use (Kamehameha only in AoE situations; Anatman for the opener, as Form Shift is the de-facto way to sustain GL stacks now; and SSS in the rare circumstances where you'll have to be away from the boss for a substantial amount of time); they lack any real, truly useful new skills when they reach 80.

Conversely, it's already been mentioned, but Samurai gets a lot of neat abilities that add on to the job without drastically changing how they play. Tsubami-gaeshi gives you even stronger burst, despite being restricted to only Kaeshi: Setsugekka, and Shoha rewards efficient Iaijutsu usage and adds onto Kaeshi's power, while enhanced Shinpu and Jinpu just give raw damage numbers and skill speed. The simplicity and flavor of the class isn't really broken but still offers a good skill ceiling for raiders to achieve, and while some will feel that the Setsugekka spam may be a bit overload, it still feels great to hit two massive hits that melts enemy HP, in the same, satisfying way it feels to turret Fire 4s as a black mage.