Red Mage: Potential adjustments

[Shurrikhan]

Was this a conclusion reached retroactively? Pretty much everything I saw at the time pointed to not bother with Fracture and just use your GCDs on combo skills for stacks.

No, that was common knowledge among most Warriors I met doing Extreme Trials or higher.

You're attaching metrics like cohesion and intuitiveness to something subjective like fun, which is something I have a problem with.

Then you're effectively barring any meaningful discussion of good design. If aspects like cohesion, readability, intuitiveness, etc., cannot actually connect to whether a design is, on the whole, enjoyable, then they become worthless. There is no other point, ultimately, to design in a video game than for it to be enjoyable -- to be fun.

Saying the hypothetical DoT would delay resource generation is a strong argument against it, or at least enough to prompt the suggestion be taken back to the drawing table.

Honestly, that's one of the few things about it that would be nuetral. After all, every builder-spender system is merely a way to delay throughput. That RDM uses spendable Mana at all, instead of merely strapping a CD onto its melee combo (or, say, 4 charges each consumable by any GCD of the melee combo or Moulinet) is deliberately delaying a vital, iconic part of RDM's playflow.

That's a far, far cry from using "fun" as an argument for or against something.

I'm not pretending to know whether it will, for each person, be fun or not. But we absolutely can guess reasonably at likelihoods, based on what has been well or poorly received both generally and in this game.

Have you met anyone who actually enjoyed getting stuck (seemingly at random or otherwise outside of their control) with a full 2.99-second wait before their first Umbral Ice MP tick, back before Ice spells were made free during AF3 via the Aspect Mastery trait (lv.72)? That is very, very similar to what your MP-ticking DoT would likely cause, in that it uses a separate server tick that therefore does not scale with the GCD (and thereby punishes Spell Speed even more than usual), frequently forcing one among (A) a 3rd-party tracker and specific delays, (B) less-than-optimal play to stay safe, or (C) throughput per rotational string badly skewed any which way by issues of sync that felt outside the player's control.

Look at what people say they like about RDM in practice. Look at what they say they like about it conceptually. Does reliance on server-ticks to milk a maintenance skill align with any of those points of favor? If so, then it may be worth the effort of polishing to get around its likely issues. If not, though...

Worrying about whether a mechanic or skill is "fun" doesn't help in the long run because it's not something you can really design around, much less predict from your playerbase.

I fully disagree. You both can and should predict as much to a worthwhile degree, and both can and should design towards what will more likely be fun.

While you cannot judge the result for any particular individual, you can make reasonable predictions for large enough groups, especially among those with preferences in common. To simply throw your hands into the air and toss random mechanics into the mix, without proportionate regard for the aspects likely to contribute to their users enjoyment, because it "can't be predicted" is merely preemptive failure. It's a shit excuse that acts merely to let developers less understand their players or their designs produced.

[Duelle]

Then you're effectively barring any meaningful discussion of good design. If aspects like cohesion, readability, intuitiveness, etc., cannot actually connect to whether a design is, on the whole, enjoyable, then they become worthless.

A system can be recognized as out of place without having to factor anything other than the elements that compose said design. This is how you notice something feels clunky or doesn't fit in with other gameplay elements and/or the rotation.

That is very, very similar to what your MP-ticking DoT would likely cause, in that it uses a separate server tick that therefore does not scale with the GCD (and thereby punishes Spell Speed even more than usual), frequently forcing one among (A) a 3rd-party tracker and specific delays, (B) less-than-optimal play to stay safe, or (C) throughput per rotational string badly skewed any which way by issues of sync that felt outside the player's control.

Fair enough. I hadn't considered getting stuck waiting for server ticks the way BLM used to wait for Umbral Ice ticks.

I fully disagree. You both can and should predict as much to a worthwhile degree, and both can and should design towards what will more likely be fun.

Since we're disagreeing with each other, I'll share a bit of my thought process with you in hopes of showing you where I'm coming from. When I put any of my designs together, I never ask myself if something will be "fun" because, as I said, fun is a subjective thing. This is what I ask myself:

1) What's the concept of the job I'm trying to build?
2) Are there any precedents to how this class has been implemented?
3) Are there any solid foundations that can be used as a starting point?
3a) Are there any ideas/mechanics from other media/games that can be used as inspiration for this design?
4) How many additional systems (if any) should be attached to the foundation?
5) What do I want the final gameplay to look like?
6) Do the pieces I've picked come together into a cohesive whole?

This has been the thought process for pretty much every writeup I've done here and elsewhere. Do I hope someone will enjoy the design? Definitely. What I don't do is go into these with the mindset that it's going to be fun or that people are gonna love it; that would be delusional at worst and limit one's receptiveness to feedback at best. And as you may know, I like receiving feedback.

inb4 "lol you're not a developer so your methods don't matter"

[Shurrikhan]

inb4 "lol you're not a developer so your methods don't matter"[/HB]

Haha, nah. That's a pretty great procedure, so far as I can guess (as I am, likewise, not a developer).

I just tend to add onto it a fair bit more "in practice" stuff:

7) If I were to play this through fights A, B, C, D, E, or F (with these being about as different among serious content as I can imagine, and at least 1 of them adding very new mechanics I'd like to futureproof for)? What would its moment-to-moment decision making be like? What unique affordances might it carry, in practice?
8) Where/what are my major fixtures of attention? How does their prevalence affect what feels particular <job>-like about its playflow?
9) What are some iconic moments likely? How do those, too, influence the apparent "character" of the job as seen through its playflow?
10) What binds, "traps" or notable annoyances might tarnish its resultant playflow?

A system can be recognized as out of place without having to factor anything other than the elements that compose said design. This is how you notice something feels clunky or doesn't fit in with other gameplay elements and/or the rotation.

This is probably down to semantics at this point, but just to clarify....

The way I look at is that you can, but if you take out any respect (as in looking back towards X, or letting X influence your view) for those other areas as you suspect they will proportionately affect player enjoyment, you can easily spend a long time fixing something that won't really matter.

For instance, clunk(iness) sucks regardless, but there's a huge difference between -- to use pre-ShB BLM as example again -- clunk as a threat (chance of being stuck unable to do anything for up to 2.99 seconds) and clunk as something basically unavoidable (or, worse, only faced when optimizing, and with (unlike when you could more or less swap at will between B4 and straight-fire rotations on HW BLM, and could thus plan out when, in a mana tick, your fire rotation would end) little agency in countering the clunk itself, let alone in any engaging sense of said agency.

So, yeah, I'll target those areas of cohesion, identity, etc., separately, too, but I just try to keep in mind what I expect to what extent each is important for the particular thing in question. If big, meaty, deliberate hits is what 90% of players are looking for in a given class, I have to keep that in mind in my improvements towards responsiveness, etc., else the separate factors (responsiveness, cohesion, etc.) might total higher, but I'll have lower engagement overall, at least from my veteran players of that class.