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

[cjbeagle]

That problem will still exist as before. It can't be a "solution" to X or really "mitigate" X, if it doesn't actually deal with or slow X, but only change its form.

You're right, we're going in circles.

As I already said before, the difference is that it gives the hyper casuals "choice" to self-select into an easier kit. A lot of people would rather do something easy well than do something hard poorly, even if the ultimate outcome is identical. If you won't accept that, then we agree to disagree on a fundamental facet of this issue.

It's also worth noting that you can absolutely solve problems simply by reframing things even if there's no mechanical change. Here are my favorite 2 examples:

- From what I've heard, the concept of "rested XP" for WoW was originally designed as a way to discourage players from playing excessively. You accumulate rested XP just like you'd expect, and during that time you get full XP, but after that time you get half XP (again, to discourage people from playing excessively). As you'd expect, people hated it. Someone had the idea to treat it as "double XP" instead of normal, and when depleted, "normal XP" instead of halved, and just double the XP required to level so that nothing really changed except the optics. Everyone loved it. As a disclaimer, I've never worked for Blizzard and I don't even remember who I heard that from, so maybe it's true, maybe it isn't.

- There was this gun in an FPS that everyone hated, playtest feedback was all over the place, but in general it was just seen as "too weak" compared to other guns available. It got buffed repeatedly until it was objectively overpowered, but people still said it felt weak. The solution ended up being to change its SFX. As soon as its shots were more bass and less pewpew, nobody thought it was underpowered anymore.

This ties back to the idea that some players would rather do something easy well than something hard poorly. The types of people that are vocal about wanting jobs to be easier probably aren't parsers and may not even use ACT - they might not even know how poorly they're doing, but they can tell they're not playing their job well. They might end up doing even less dps with a simplified kit and be happier doing it just because they feel like they're playing proficiently.

[CelestiCer]

Please forgive me if some of these seem nit-picks, but many of these examples illustrate many of the pitfalls likely within customization at the fine/minute end.

Let me get this right... I present hypothetical examples of what could be fun in the form of freedom to choose, none balance breaking nor impossible to balance. Yet your choices of words were

• sacrifice range for... well, not really anything of value
• Ultimately just ends up just having a best choice
• Not really a relevant choice
• only two truly viable possibilities
• extensive and impactful enough

Your Entire PoV = Optimization

Example: I loved Tenka Goken Cone + Kaiten. Now 6.1 its Circular and no Kaiten? I hate it. I hate it so much that I have not done a singular dungeon or fate that I used to spam out of pure joy of my skills. Is Circular with Kaiten more optimal and it more optimal to press less buttons? What good is all that optimization, if it makes me stop playing.

If its 100% purely about optimization? You can justify removing everything because it can be viewed as a hindrance for performance numbers to the decimal actions per second. Then where is our fun?

• Higanbana 1 min dot removed, less restrictive
• Tsubame removed, less restrictive
• Ogi Namikiri only hits once, less restrictive
• Kenki gauge removed, less restrictive
• SAM buffs apply on Hakaze, less restrictive
• Jinpu Shifu removed, less restrictive
• Crits removed, less variences less restrictive
• Postional bonuses removed, less restrictive
• Yaten / Gyoten costs no, less restrictive
• Rebalance everything with increased potencies
• No more managing nothing
• 100% performance and optimized

You might argue " well Celesti you taking it a bit far ", am I? cause that's what that logical view point is heading towards.

• Less Buttons
• Less APM
• Less Bloat
• Less Choices
• All Streamlined
• 100% Performance
• 100% Optimized

No line to be drawn with optimization

And we can go further by focusing optimization of " accessibility of content ". Suddenly you justify homogenization of difficulty. Simplifying not just jobs but also the content. Cause why optimize 5% of the player base finishing high-end content, that isn't as optimal as having 100% finish it doesn't it? see where this is going?

You can advocate for Low Skill-floor / High Skill-Ceiling, but I don't see the logic in your Reponses. You're advocating purely optimization -> and that leads to simplification of everything.

I vouch for Balance, totally okey. But not to turn the game into how little keystrokes I need to push or how dumbed down people want to advocate to make our jobs, in support of deleting skills, streamlining everything to the point I see no difference in any job.

How about instead of that, Optimize our fun <- I think this is less difficult and not even impossible to do while maintaining game balance.

[SilverSkyway]

Now. I'll go back a little what I said before in this thread.

are you playing EX or above? No? Congratulations your performance literally doesn't matter.

And some people still like to preform the best they can as if they were playing ex and above even though they don't. I like being useful to my team, meaning i'm going do my rotation best I can.

I'll practice it some day.."

Some people can practice all day for a week and never get good. Why.
Some people may not click and/or flow with said classes/job. Though some might understand said class more.
I love melee but I don't click with them like I do with range. Throw me a bow or a gun class and 80% time I will be decent enough to raid (if I raided that is)

The other day I wanted try Sam. Now my sam only level 50. So the start. Even so, I set up hotbar and went and practice on a dummy. Get the flow, move skill around. Wasn't feeling it still. After some time I went do a trial to practice on a moving target. A lvl 50. It just didn't click and Sam get more skills. If I unable to get lvl 50, 90 be a nightmare.
Back to practicing. Practice on a dummy is useful. I use them. But a dummy not going teach the doing of bosses throwing junk at you.

[Shurrikhan]

Let me get this right... I present hypothetical examples of what could be fun in the form of freedom to choose, none balance breaking nor impossible to balance. Yet your choices of words were...

If this cherrypicked selection is what you take away from that exchange, then, that seems neither the result nor goal.

My words, noting simply what degree of choice tends to have both palpable gameplay effect and managed to have multiple truly viable options (rather than a single real choice per content type), were all prefaced with:

Please forgive me if some of these seem nit-picks, but many of these examples illustrate many of the pitfalls likely within customization at the fine/minute end.[/B]

...which was the point of discussion in the post you quoted just before laying out those suggestions.

Example: I loved Tenka Goken Cone + Kaiten. Now 6.1 its Circular and no Kaiten?

Why not just give a skill for each, circular and conal?

We could then put the conal one on our hotbars if we want conal. Put the circular on our hotbar if we want circular. Or slot both for all anyone cares.

I'm not sure how you took away from "We could do this even now to produce a win-win, without need to visit rest areas and swap talents" solely a joke about the "benefits" of the circular AoE as if it were a jab at your suggestion specifically?

If its 100% purely about optimization? You can justify removing everything because it can be viewed as a hindrance for performance numbers to the decimal actions per second.

• Higanbana 1 min dot removed, less restrictive
• Tsubame removed, less restrictive
• Ogi Namikiri only hits once, less restrictive

You're strawmanning. I've not recommended removing restrictions. Yours is literally the first post in this thread to even use the word or its synonyms.

I only noted that if there's talent choices tend to be wasted if (A) there is a definitive best answer (as the case for having any AoE output from meditation spender or not) or (B) if neither option makes any palpable difference whatsoever (as per sacrificing Gyoten range for cooldown).

Apart from that, you are simply seconding what I already mentioned: if you allow a reduced kit as would be permitted through talents meant to give the options to remove depth from a kit to then compete with the unreduced kit, you provide significantly less reason to use the depth. And if you don't, you merely replace skill envy ("I don't yet know how to fully play this job...") with build envy ("Why does their build get to do more than mine if mine's supposed to be a legitimate choice?"), complete with further barriers to growth (as now one has to swap out of their allotted head-in-the-sand comfort zone in order to even try out the other tools available to a job).

No line to be drawn with optimization

You're really milking a twist on "Choices should be competitive (to a degree commensurate with effort)" into "We should only ever care about optimization" for all it's worth. If a DRK were to have asked for more sustain and functioning immunity in 6.0, would they likewise be "optimization-obsessed"?

You can advocate for Low Skill-floor / High Skill-Ceiling, but I don't see the logic in your Reponses. You're advocating purely optimization -> and that leads to simplification of everything.

In what possible way is "No, let's just keep jobs interesting and deep, instead of opening up job to yet new ways by which those who don't play them can demand changes" equates to "simplify everything"?

"No, let's not give players the option to nuke their kits, because the next step will inevitably be complaints of imbalance between dumbed down jobs and their real counterparts, ultimately leading to reduced reward for making use of one's full kit" =/= "Let's nuke every job's kit."

What possible part of this (below), for instance, makes it sound like I want to simplify every kit?

Such is complicated, though, so 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.

Optimize our fun

Allowing for optimized fun is not separate from balance, though. Yes, build for fun first, balance later. I'm not against that. I will have and will continue to advocate for that. But a "choice" which can be taken in isolation and in which one option is always better than the other is not a choice. Since you've allowed the choice, per your examples, to be made discretely --no longer bundled with anything else-- there will be no use cases for the option that is inferior within a given context (say, forgoing an AoE ability for extra ST damage or vice versa).

Moreover, the customization idea as it was presented is literally, unless you quoted the prior conversation by mistake and your post therefore had no connection to what you quoted, about the degree to which we specifically sanction players to strip away depth from their kits.

To use your earlier examples, my preference would just be to outright revert the SAM changes.

If some nebulous, barely-seen group of players who nonetheless have the devs' ears make enough of a racket about Tenka cones, you do either of two things: Ideally, you tell them the conal is here to stay because it was designed always to be conal and the kit works better when it's conal, but grant basic QoL in the form of conals (and linear AoEs) no longer requiring a target and having the player option to snap their aim to target or retain player facing. Barring that, you simply give players their choice of cone or circular Tenka via the Actions and Traits menu, rather than involving a whole new talent system, its costs, and its limitations just to manage one's preferred AoE shape.

If some nebulous, barely-seen group of players who nonetheless have the devs' ears would demand the removal of Higanbana, the devs should not find a new way to attempt to briefly reframe and thereby postpone the problem but rather just make clear that this is the kit, and they can use it fully or not.

That, more than chopping up jobs into piecemeal in the name of placation, is how you protect (or, as you put it, "optimize") fun.

[Shurrikhan]

Tl;dr: My position is simply that rather than lowering the skill ceiling of the jobs and/or giving players the choices by which to strip their jobs of depth --and pretending that MCHs (with a comparatively shallow kit) don't already complain about BLM rDPS outperforming them or that build variance would surely never be subject to similar complaints-- you just stop accommodating that bull. You leave kits interesting and capable of high ceilings, repairing what cracks and mending what cuts have already been put into them.

It's absolutely fine if the floor is lowered so long as it's moved by a far greater amount than is the ceiling, but in at least a majority of new expansions, the ceiling should increase to compensate, rather than changes going in only one direction. Conal/line AoEs no longer requiring a target? Totally fine. Hypercharge using ammo instead of a duration? Totally fine. A skill notoriously slow to activate and with no use cases for its delay losing that arbitrary distinction? Fine. Awkward lockouts that even those managing well get no kick out of (e.g., Searing Light pre-change)? By all means, sure, get rid of that bit of awkwardness, especially if the change would allow surrounding skills more flexibility and therefore use cases.

But do not accommodate requests that would nearly so greatly affect the skill ceiling. Don't do it through a talent system that you'd later be obliged to balance, thus defeating the point and at most slightly delaying the issue. Don't do it through trimming the base kits. Just don't do it. Period. It's as simple as that.

[tearagion]

And some people still like to preform the best they can as if they were playing ex and above even though they don't. I like being useful to my team, meaning i'm going do my rotation best I can.

Then learn, or if you are unwilling go to an easier job. Acquiescence will only deteriorate gameplay further.

Some people can practice all day for a week and never get good. Why.

I refuse to believe more than a tiny fraction of the population would legitimately have this issue. A week of effective practice at an entry level will see significant progress in any skill, let alone a not-overly-difficult video game.

[SilverSkyway]

What if every job is hard?
I can try and level any melee (which I still need do to see the role quests). Practice and all that. I wouldn't get it. Again. It wouldn't click. Would I understand how the job work, yes. But play it at a decent, what I think is decent level. No.

But do not accommodate requests that would nearly so greatly affect the skill ceiling. Don't do it through a talent system that you'd later be obliged to balance, thus defeating the point and at most slightly delaying the issue. Don't do it through trimming the base kits. Just don't do it. Period. It's as simple as that.

Why?

[Magikazam]

I just think people should accept that some classes should be easy while others should be harder. Rn we only get jobs simplified and they all just become more and more easy and boring in some case (Looking at you SMN). People should just accept that if, let say, BLM look to hard to play, then maybe it not the class for you and you should play another class rather than the class changing for you.

[Shurrikhan]

But do not accommodate requests that would nearly so greatly affect the skill ceiling. Don't do it through a talent system that you'd later be obliged to balance, thus defeating the point and at most slightly delaying the issue. Don't do it through trimming the base kits. Just don't do it. Period. It's as simple as that.

Why?

Because it denies you content.

It's effectively the same as asking that Savage and Ultimate be removed from the game just because you don't want to bother with it.

You have no need, in the content you do, to touch the more difficult to utilize parts of a given kit. But it is there, available to you, if you later decide you'd like to try it out. That is, unless you remove it.


_________

Tangent: This is, again, why I prefer to avoid depth-trimming options in customization. It's like presenting the player with "Are you the kind of person who'd ever touch Ultimate? Savage? Extreme? Alliance Raids? No? Then here, we'll pretend they don't exist. To decide to be a different type of player, you must visit your inn room." It merely adds unnecessary, obfuscating steps and frames itself around the points of division we'd be better served by getting over than placating.

[VentVanitas]

What if every job is hard?

Sounds like a you problem, to be honest.