The trouble with Job redesigns

[Dyvid]

Many of the things that people put forward as 'raising' the skill ceiling generally don't. Being able to execute your job's opener and rotation consistently under target dummy conditions is a fundamental barrier to entry, sure. I absolutely agree that there is more that can be done in-game to give newer players feedback and help them improve. There's been talk about a 'Hall of the Intermediate/Expert' for years. It would be great to get players to do damage on a target dummy and replay it back to them showing places where they dropped buffs or held cooldowns for too long. You don't have to provide numerical feedback on which they can potentially be judged in order to help people improve. Perhaps allow them to specifically select recurring raid mechanics to practice while doing so. The majority won't bother with it, but there should be opportunities for those who actually seek it out.

But your rotation defines the skill floor, not the ceiling, especially when you've been mashing out the same button sequence for hundreds of hours. The only way that you're going to challenge players through 'job design' is if you design actions which actually require mechanical precision to use. Movement abilities. Skillshots. The sort of things that define skill expression in MOBAs. Otherwise, you're entirely dependent on fight design, which is the direction which we've moved towards.

What is hard to some is easy for others. Jobs should be designed to offer different playstyle within the Job Roles. Take ARR Melee for example: You had Monk that was about fast GCD and Positional, Dragoon was more of a straightforward DPS, and Ninja had a combination mechanic of DPSing. This kind of design allows player to gravitate toward mechanics they enjoy to play.

[CelestiCer]

...But your rotation defines the skill floor, not the ceiling, especially when you've been mashing out the same button sequence for hundreds of hours.

I define " Skill-Ceiling " of rotations by anything that increases the total amount of

• Actions Per Minute (APM)
• Variety of buttons to press
• In more then just 1 specific pattern

Needing to press 1-2-3 isn't as difficult as pressing 1-2-3-4 and so on. Subjectively, you might find FFXIV's job-design not as skill expressive as reactionary gameplay as equally as I find Checkers not as skill expressive to Chess.

The " Skill-Floor " however I define by " Players skill-requirement to clear Average Content ".

Players can with beyond minimal understanding, pressing buttons in random orders clear the average content because Square literally drags our dead bodies through the finish lines. That's FFXIV's Skill-Floor, Thus...

Many of the things that people put forward as 'raising' the skill ceiling generally don't.

What players have suggested in general " isn't " requiring a master's degree in physics, forcing players to purchase PC's with a 100 Dollar MMO-mouse that has 2nd mini-Numpad attached to it... What players have put forward, is to have the Skill-ceiling stop dropping, preserving the skill-expression they come to love.

Instead players see their jobs being changed, reworked like the skill-ceiling is being " Demoed". We're not asking a rework overhaul of the entire game system where we want unrealistic difficulties like

• Adding Blocking and Guarding
• Adding unavoidable attacks that can only be dodged through dashing and rolling
• Rear and flank defense negatives for your own Character
• in-build Crowd Control and Anti-Crowd Control system in our jobs
• All skills 100% be Non-Tab-targetable, requiring more precision
• All jobs now Manage a 3rd/4th/5th and 6th resource bar
• Cast Bar progression of al enemies are now all hidden
• Adding more positional-bonuses then just Rear and Flank
• Tripling the APM requirement to clear any content
• We lose Exp and Levels upon death of any kind
• Our gear breaks 6x faster now

Maybe all of the above plus reactionary gameplay requires more skill, but we're asking the bare minimum of Square to not... how to put it lightly... " F-king our Jobs with unrequested redesigns "

Cause reactionary gameplay might be more skill-full? but you know what's also less skill expressive then the current FFXIV we have? Having the job's of players be ruined and turning it's gameplay into this -> " 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 "

[Nizzi]

because for some reason it is that important to them. I guess in the end you can just talk about how magnificent old SMN was

Yeah man I can't imagine something being important to you in a game we play for thousands of hours and invest large amounts of our free time in. Clearly nothing should be important to us and we shouldn't care, right? That's the enlightened philosophy of the true XIV fan, just don't care about anything and you'll be happy when they kill the things you love!

I'm not sure if you meant this to come off as callous as it does but yeah, are people just not supposed to be sad that something they loved is taken away from them? This genre of games isn't like other games; when they change and rerelease old Final Fantasy games, it doesn't affect my ability to go back and play those as they were. Whenever they change jobs radically in this game, it is impossible for me to ever play it like it was again. Are we just not supposed to care and go "oh well! lol!!" and move on?
Things like this are why Scholars talk about their DoTs, ASTs talk about their old cards, BRDs talk about Foe's and Refresh, etc etc. Sure, we can say that that's just how MMOs works, but that doesn't mean we have to accept changes that alienate us from the things we love and enjoy.

Regardless of your opinion on whether or not new SMN is good, the fact of the matter is that they did indeed alienate players who had been playing and enjoying this style of gameplay for years. There's not anything like it in the game anymore. What should they play now to get that type of gameplay?

[Lyth]

...

Sometimes it can be difficult for players to objectively tell where the 'difficulty' comes from. To take your historical MNK example, in ARR and HW, about 40% of MNK's damage came from auto-attacks. That might strike you as strange, until you remember that prior to 3.4, auto-attacks were directionally based. That's why if you watch videos of good tank/melee players from that time period, you'll see them glide around mobs due to strafe-locking. This was not a skill differential, but rather a performance differential - if you knew the correct techniques on how to maintain uptime, you were gifted a bigger reward for doing so then than you are now. It was just a barrier to entry so we could feel good about ourselves.

Generally speaking, the more time that you've invested into a particular job, the more you will subjectively perceive it as high skill. That's not exclusively an ego thing; you just have a deeper understanding of the job than you do the others, and every time investment carries an opportunity cost of mastering other jobs.

...

Most of what you're describing is purely muscle memory. If you've spent enough time in a fight, you generally don't even need to look to see when specific abilities are coming off cooldown, when a buff needs to be refreshed, or what positional you'll be on during a particular mechanic. It's just auto-pilot. You could probably do it with the HUD off at that point (which is pretty fun to do, but you do have to trust your knowledge of the fight). I personally think that having a higher APM is fun (I wouldn't say 'high skill', but it does feel good to perform well), but then you do end up running into a lot of complaints about clipping issues and animation locks because of how this game handles weaving.

I do think that 'changing up' the pattern and adding in an element of randomness is good, though. Procs actually do force you to do some decision-making on the fly. This game does try to bring in the occasional 'skillshot equivalent' with ground targeting, but most people just end up creating a placement macro that converts it into a generic 'on target' effect. That's not to say that clunky ground targeting is the only way to do this; there are plenty of movement skills that require you to become good at eyeballing a distance and a faced direction. I found your list of 'unrealistic difficulty' additions to be kind of entertaining, because most of them wouldn't even be that hard, perhaps just intimidating for newer players.

Bottom line, if you want to see more procs that dynamically change your rotation, I could get on board with that. More clever movement mechanics are always good. But I think that the vast majority of the 'skill expression' dependent on the fight design, rather than in typing out the lyrics to 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' on a target dummy until you can do it semi-conscious and blindfolded. You will of course get reddit bragging rights for having an extra '4' attached to the every '1-2-3' that your job puts out, if that's your endgame, sure.

[Mikey_R]

I do think that 'changing up' the pattern and adding in an element of randomness is good, though.

Not everyone wants randomness in their rotations though. Make every job have random elements and you can potentially force people out. Of course, the reverse is true, make all jobs have a strict rotation and you will also force people out.

This is why you see a wide variety of randomness in the jobs from Dragoon and it's very strict rotation to Dancer who has a ton of Procs to track or Bard where the procs affect the rotation differently depending on the song currently being played.

[CelestiCer]

(snip) Most of what you're describing is purely muscle memory.

Definition of Skill

• the ability to do something well; expertise
• to use one's knowledge effectively
• readily in execution or performance

Sounds like repetition to get good at something, skillful, almost sounds like...
" Muscle Memory".

Skill is subjective, endless argument going down that road. I am aiming my points towards the thread topic " The trouble with Job redesigns ".

Square obviously aims job-redesigns to be simplistic and homogenized, and that's all I am advocating against. The problem doesn't lie at how much less or more Muscle Memory you need or not for this game no, but needing to press less for the sake pressing less doesn't make this all better either.

(I found your list of 'unrealistic difficulty' additions to be kind of entertaining, because most of them wouldn't even be that hard, perhaps just intimidating for newer players.

Then again, FFXIV's difficulty as far as I am sensing to you is just too easy. Thus... if you want to suggest a complete overhaul of the gameplay/job/fight designs to be astronomically complex to meet your lofty standards? you can have fun with that. I gave my examples taken from other (mmo)games that you of course wouldn't find challenging.

If I set the bar to low with requesting Square to stop

• Redesigning Jobs to be simplistic and homogenized
• Stop dropping the Skill-Ceiling we had/have

versus your

• I want FFXIV's game design to be overhauled entirely
• I want fights and job rotations to have more randomness

Then I am very sorry for requesting something realistic... and not setting my request at... GodGamer? cause I do enjoy FFXIV's difficulty, I just do not agree with their direction of Job redesigns.

[Lyth]

Actually, your post doesn't have anything to do with the OP, which is questioning who the target audience for these reworks are.

I'm actually not offering a commentary on 'difficulty'. If you want to challenge yourself, there are always ways to do so. It's not like you can 'run out' of ways to improve if you're interested in doing so. What players are usually asking for when they talk about 'difficulty' are ways to distinguish themselves above others. But that's not about 'skill expression'. It's about creating barriers to entry. You shouldn't feel threatened that someone completely new to the game can pick up your job and put out a decent performance on it after practicing the opener and rotation on a target dummy. And that's really the extent of the challenge that basic rotational hurdles offer. There has to be something more than that on the table if you want to talk about skill expression. It's a worthwhile discussion, but you haven't addressed it.

[CelestiCer]

Actually, your post doesn't have anything to do with the OP, which is questioning who the target audience for these reworks are.

Fairly convinced you either didn't read and/or dodging my points or the thread topic for that matter.

The OP said " Job Redesigns " where Square failed to improve upon core mechanics of our jobs. Removing aspects and alienating core players of a job. Preserving Skill-Ceiling, means I am against Square removing more aspects and nuances of our Jobs yes. Quite on topic. Which I find a realistic request vs your request of a combat system overhaul... which also sounds off-topic.


You said " Most of what you're describing is just Muscle Memory ", implying it isn't difficult. In-fact you said my entire list of unrealistic difficulty additions is not hard, your words.

Yet now you're saying " Muscle Memory " is about creating barriers of entry? So 1st Muscle Memory isn't difficult, yet now it's suddenly too difficult when it suits your narrative? and my unrealistic list isn't creating barriers, to easy right? huh...


As for new players picking up and performing well at a job isn't about feeling threatened either. Heck you're practically describing me. I didn't join in 2015, I joined fairly recently and I picked up a job fairly quickly and decently.

Do you realize the contradictions in your post? I feel like unless you realize this, we're gonna go into circles until you properly read posts and quote points properly... lets just agree to disagree.

Meanwhile for sanity reasons, I'll go over here and... " face-desk " a little.

[Lyth]

Your rotation under target dummy conditions defines the skill floor, not its ceiling. It might intimidate newer players into thinking that the job in question is difficult, but it has little to do with skill expression. That typically comes out purely through maintaining uptime despite fight mechanics in this game, but that doesn't mean that you cannot also design interesting abilities that challenge a player mechanically. Intelligent use of movement abilities in movement heavy fights are a potential example of this. Hopefully that clarifies things for you.

[Shurrikhan]

Your rotation under target dummy conditions defines the skill floor, not its ceiling. It might intimidate newer players into thinking that the job in question is difficult, but it has little to do with skill expression. That typically comes out purely through maintaining uptime despite fight mechanics in this game, but that doesn't mean that you cannot also design interesting abilities that challenge a player mechanically. Intelligent use of movement abilities in movement heavy fights are a potential example of this. Hopefully that clarifies things for you.

That seems an rather arbitrary place to draw a line in the sand.

How optimized a target dummy rotation are we talking here? If every duration-based buff is held until just miliseconds short of where it'd cause clipping so long as it wouldn't push it back over another animation in some future in-fight use, is that still mere "skill-floor"? Perfect banking for X or Y composition's raid buffs? Still "skill floor"?

And how would flashing icons from RNG procs somehow generate more towards skill ceiling then, say, optimized drift per an EW Monk or ShB Samurai's rotation or a BLM perfectly exploiting whatever raid buffs it expects to receive? How does a proc one can react to optimally with just peripheral vision alone, using here or there until depleted, not likewise become "just muscle memory"?