New Missaphenchair video makes great point about the direction of job design

[AsiTsurugi]

Bard on the cusp of having to much going for a controller. I think need a small rework but nvm that.

I don't play melee in FF14. I play the three rdps and rdm. I tried Rdm being that it 1/3 melee but just not a fan of casting (and pvp rdm no fun for me). That leave the rdps which I do like but I don't feel powerful. But going to other games like.. WoW. I have a hunter (BM) and Paladin (Ret). I can play Ret but not fun spec as the playstyle sucks and is super slow movement. BM I find fun and easy. I always fall into anything that not melee despite liking swords. lol.

The dedicate going to stay no matter what the game devs going to do. Look at WoW. Whom going to leave are the content creators and their groupies and the silent players.

I like easy. I want play a game to relax, not be challenge.

So what is your point in all of your posts other than "everything needs to revolve around my inability and/or lack of desire to put in any amount of non-zero effort"?

[cjbeagle]

I like easy. I want play a game to relax, not be challenge.

You, sir, are exactly the kind of player that makes me think we should have job kit customization via a preference system akin to talents (but nothing like talents seen in most games).

Using bard as an example, would you prefer to have 2 dots, or just 1? If you were to pick just 1, would you pick it even if it meant doing a little lower dps overall?

If you had the option between the 45s dots as they are, or dots that lasted forever so you never had to refresh them, which would you pick? If you'd pick never having to refresh them, would you pick that even if it meant doing a little lower dps overall?

Letting players customize their kits to their preferences in a way that easy is available but hard is rewarding would let players who want easy have easy and players who want challenging have challenging (and be rewarded for it).

It would also allow players to ramp from easy to challenging at whatever rate they're comfortable with (or not at all, for some players).

But more importantly, it would let the devs design and balance in a way that can appease the entire easy-to-challenging spectrum instead of having to find a happy medium - let the players find their own happy medium by adding as much or as little complexity as they want.

[Shurrikhan]

You, sir, are exactly the kind of player that makes me think we should have job kit customization via a preference system akin to talents (but nothing like talents seen in most games).

Using bard as an example, would you prefer to have 2 dots, or just 1? If you were to pick just 1, would you pick it even if it meant doing a little lower dps overall?

Speaking more generally...

If the ability even to do positionals for a minor gain would prevent one from wanting to play melee, to the point of advocating that positionals ought to be removed entirely even though they play no job affected by it and have yet to really attempt to learn the mechanic, it seems more likely that one would choose to take just 1 DoT and insist that the more difficult option have no practical or over-time advantages over the 1-DoT option.


Let's keep in mind that job choice is already a form of build choice, and even in that regard many insist that difficulty be irrelevant to performance -- i.e., that a job which is most difficult (even if not, in XIV, by much) and a job that is least difficult should have the same performance even at high percentiles (nevermind that the easier will outperform the others until that point due to its ease).

Offering build choice wouldn't escape that conflict; it'd merely offer it another facet. For that conflict to resolve, the game would still need to take a firmer stance one way or the other: Should more difficult jobs underperform until point X, or should less difficult jobs underperform after point X, and where ought that line, however roughly, be drawn?

[cjbeagle]

Speaking more generally...

Fair point, but - and this is conjecture - I suspect that players who say "[hard job] shouldn't do more dps than [easy job] just because [hard job] is harder to play well" are primarily players who play [easy job] who don't want to switch to [hard job].

Maybe they don't want to switch because they love the aesthetic of [easy job], or maybe [easy job] is proc-based, which they like, whereas [hard job] is cooldown-based or something - regardless, they have their reasons for wanting to stick with [easy job] and those reasons might not actually have anything to do with how easy it is - I suspect a lot of players who play [easy job] would be happy if they could make their favorite job perform better by opting into some additional complexity.

You're right that the devs would need to take a firm stance that difficulty should be rewarded with performance, but by letting people select for their own difficulty, you'd largely remove the aspect of job X vs job Y difficulty and replace it with [easy job X] vs [hard job X], and I doubt anyone would actually object to the idea of an easy version of a job doing less dps than a harder version of the same job (and if they did, screw 'em =P). I think the current objections stem from the fact that their favorite jobs just happen to be an "easy job", and they don't want to perform worse than other jobs just because it's easy, especially if it being easy isn't what they like about it.

EDIT: I'd argue that another problem with the current complaints compared to the preference selection is subjectivity vs objectivity. If someone says job X is easy compared to job Y therefore job X should do less dps than job Y, well, even if it's true that it should do more dps if it's harder...is it even true that it's harder? Some players find procs easier to play around than cooldowns - some are the exact opposite, so saying which is harder between job X or job Y is not only subjective, but varies by player, whereas with these preference examples, one option is objectively easier than the other, which removes subjectivity and by-player variance from the difficulty->reward equation for the preferences.

[xAFROx]

Bard on the cusp of having to much going for a controller. I think need a small rework but nvm that.

I don't play melee in FF14. I play the three rdps and rdm. I tried Rdm being that it 1/3 melee but just not a fan of casting (and pvp rdm no fun for me). That leave the rdps which I do like but I don't feel powerful. But going to other games like.. WoW. I have a hunter (BM) and Paladin (Ret). I can play Ret but not fun spec as the playstyle sucks and is super slow movement. BM I find fun and easy. I always fall into anything that not melee despite liking swords. lol.

The dedicate going to stay no matter what the game devs going to do. Look at WoW. Whom going to leave are the content creators and their groupies and the silent players.

I like easy. I want play a game to relax, not be challenge.

Then play a different game. There's little else to say if you can't put in effort to try. I don't mean to be rude, but you're literally saying you want to put little effort but want to be useful. Not to meme, but either get good or don't bring a discussion of complexity to a group who prefers more to do.

There's other things to play that are far less taxing than this game for you.

[Shurrikhan]

Fair point, but, and this is conjecture, I suspect that players who say "[hard job] shouldn't do more dps than [easy job] just because [hard job] is harder to play well" are primarily players who play [easy job] who don't want to switch to [hard job]."

Not all, but probably at least a slight majority, yes.

For my part, having played games like WoW, Rift, Path of Exile, etc., I find that customization is often attributed with benefits that isn't really quite its own or could certainly be met through other means.

Don't get me wrong; I loved using "gutter" builds to outperform, or better do what was needed, than meta builds just because I more often swapped things about and better understood both what was needed and what opportunities the given fight would grant. That much is fun, but it also indicates, to a degree, that there was just that much less depth in the baseline toolkit. With a deeper, more versatile kit, the increased risk and reward for choiceful usage in combat would largely include or subsume, also, the risk and reward of choiceful selection out of combat.

To (over)simplify briefly: So long as we can accept that not every player needs to regularly make use of every skill, why would we want to siphon in-combat choice instead to out-of-combat choice?
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The catch, though, is that these enlarged toolkits --able to find multiple, contextual ways of playing the same job such that broader methodology remains but concrete rotations depend on the given fight, composition, or even familiarity with one's party-- require having skills that, to many, would appear slightly superfluous.

Let us differentiate, though, between this and "bloat." "Bloat" actions lack unique affordance (something they, in their implementation, could do for the player's engagement or capacity, that could not be achieved with a more efficient implementation), at least to a degree worthy of their button-presses, in any and all scenarios.

"Superfluous" skills, on the other hand, have at least further theoretical use cases, even if we might not often be able to apply them when playing in a typical matchmade group, in the most standard of ways, while nothing has gone drastically wrong.

These skills would likely be subject to their own, further tests of worthwhile design: How often can their unique affordances be leveraged? How much engagement do they add even outside those use cases? What opportunities are missed, either in more convenient and therefore responsive key-mapping or in other possible actions that could take its place, for having those actions? Etc., etc.
______________

Such is complicated, though, let's try to contextualize this concretely lest it remain just nebulously theoretical.

Take a skill like Shadewalker.

So long as Enmity remained just a basic table that summed a product of total damage and healing and their respective modifiers, it was almost entirely bloat; its unique affordances were limited to add grabs for which a NIN's burst damage would outpace his fellows'. In all other cases, it simply, rather directly, became tank rDPS, supplied on CD. There was, for the party as a whole, no difference between your having Shadewalker or just having, say, 10 more potency on Gust Blade.

But that is true only for a narrow span of play in which most of its value would be wasted. Imagine, instead, for instance, a situation in which it'd make sense to place Shadewalker instead on, say, a sprinting Ranged DPS, for altogether more mitigation. That, too, would ultimately end up as rDPS, of a sorts, but so long as the use cases vary noticeably in their synergy, the skill's value, too, would vary greatly, with competing uses providing risk and reward: Do I simply use it on cooldown for this simpler <Affordance A>, or hold for this later opportunity for potentially far greater <Affordance B>?

Or, imagine if Ninja had actually built around use of Shadows. Now, Shadewalker is a more noticeable buff, sacrificing some resource on your part to give some further affordance to the target ally or affordance against a target enemy (which ought to be the rarer use case, as not to make it the default). You can now switch-teleport with the Shade you leave on the target, leaving a shadowy simulacrum in your place as you teleport behind the target. When using Dream Within a Dream, you and every Shade you've left now linear-AoE gap-close to the target of Dream Within a Dream. Etc., etc.

While you'd have only ultimately added a line of text to Shadewalker --"Attach a shadow of your martial soul to the target, transferring to them the benefit of Shadeskin if allied or converting that benefit to Shadows' Eyes if an enemy"-- you've expanded its use cases tremendously. And rather than needing, out of combat, to swap between which single capacity or set thereof you'd wish to eventually use, you'd have access to all of them. It'd just be up to you to learn which you can, in the given context, leverage best, in combination with the best choices among the rest of your kit.

[Nizzi]

Bard on the cusp of having to much going for a controller. I think need a small rework but nvm that.

I don't play melee in FF14. I play the three rdps and rdm. I tried Rdm being that it 1/3 melee but just not a fan of casting (and pvp rdm no fun for me). That leave the rdps which I do like but I don't feel powerful. But going to other games like.. WoW. I have a hunter (BM) and Paladin (Ret). I can play Ret but not fun spec as the playstyle sucks and is super slow movement. BM I find fun and easy. I always fall into anything that not melee despite liking swords. lol.

The dedicate going to stay no matter what the game devs going to do. Look at WoW. Whom going to leave are the content creators and their groupies and the silent players.

I like easy. I want play a game to relax, not be challenge.

"the dedicated are going to stay no matter what" is an awful reason to dumb jobs down even further because you have zero desire to try and want to ruin everyone else's good time for your own sake. If you want "easy" and "to relax", then stay in the casual content where you can do whatever you want and stop complaining about your lack of desire to try. Give me a break.

[Shurrikhan]

"the dedicated are going to stay no matter what" is an awful reason to dumb jobs down even further

It's also likely contrary to fact. Quite a few of my friends have quit for good over changes to their main job.

Others have quit said main in favor of a job they don't necessarily like any more, but at least reminds them less of what they lost. They typically now only play for the first month of each Savage patch, buying crafted gear, doing the new content once or twice each, and then leaving again. Arguably, that isn't any better a sign of gameplay quality in regard to those players.

[cjbeagle]

To (over)simplify briefly: So long as we can accept that not every player needs to regularly make use of every skill, why would we want to siphon in-combat choice instead to out-of-combat choice?

tl;dr: Because the alternative is the current trend of the devs continually simplifying jobs, removing meaningful choices instead of adding new ones. This is as much about preserving complexity as it is about appeasing hyper casuals. I'd be perfectly content to have jobs be as complex and nuanced as their designs called for and let the hyper casuals kick rocks, but looking at SE's decisions, they've decided not to take that path, and we're the ones being left empty-handed - not the casuals. I'm looking for a way that they can appease both since we're the ones that are being told to kick rocks.

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Because some players want easy, and for them, they'd rather play an easy kit well than a hard kit poorly, and because some players want hard, but from what I understand, they've been continually losing ground in the name of accessibility.

That said, I think the question itself sidesteps the intent of the options. We aren't talking about niche skills that can largely be ignored, we're talking about optional fundamental changes to how the job plays that would make it meaningfully easier or harder. Ultimately it boils down to "making jobs more accessible" in a way that doesn't impact players who value complexity and nuance while also granting paths for additional complexity and nuance in a way that doesn't impact hyper casuals - to let the devs develop "accessible" and "idealized" on completely different branches, and let the players opt into whatever balance between the two they're happy with. For some skills this could mean implementing a dumbed-down option to make the job optionally more accessible, albeit at a cost to performance, while for other abilities it offers a way to enhance performance through optional addition of complexity. I think this is valuable to the players, but I want to emphasize that the real value here is to the development - it lets the devs introduce ways to dumb things down in ways that players don't have to opt into as well as introduce as much opt-in complexity as they want, accessibility be damned.

[Shurrikhan]

tl;dr: Because the alternative is the current trend of the devs continually simplifying jobs, removing meaningful choices instead of adding new ones. This is as much about preserving complexity as it is about appeasing hyper casuals. I'd be perfectly content to have jobs be as complex and nuanced as their designs called for and let the hyper casuals kick rocks, but looking at SE's decisions, they've decided not to take that path, and we're the ones being left empty-handed - not the casuals. I'm looking for a way that they can appease both since we're the ones that are being told to kick rocks.

You'll be fighting the status quo in either case, and creating a talent system is far more resource intensive than simply unpruning and/or revising skills for increased use-cases and increasing gap between a kit's floor and ceiling (as to be "easy to use, difficult to master").

You won't avoid protests of "<X player/class/job/spec/build> that requires more work can produce more than me/my job/my build!!!" regardless. The wails already echo across job choice, even when jobs are in their arguably most balanced and ideally tuned states.

Better then, to have mostly accessible kits, a few skills among which more casual players just bemoan the complexity of and leave untouched or off their bars than to simply have one's pick of working harder for roughly the same throughput or leaving complexity equally low as, if not lower than, it is now.