Paladin doesn't suck, 2 minute rotations just ruined combat

[Marxam]

And the best part is, the people this is meant to address, the players who can't keep raidbuffs aligned, will STILL drift their 2mins for whatever reason. I see it a lot in P8S, some people drop raidbuffs at the start of Manifold Flames before we spread out, some people use it after. Great, now the buffs are drifted from each other.

Thankfully in 6.3 with the UI updates you can finally call out ppl in your party since you can see their timers. I doubt PF will improve because of this but it will make spotting potential trap parties much easier when you can see their timers in-game and if they are using it at the appropriate times.

[Mithron]

The ONLY place this meta applies is speedruns, and if you aren't speedrunning, you can play whatever tf you like and it'll be fine. Well, if SE can actually balance the fights right next tier

Normally I would 100% agree with this and back the statement "The meta is whatever you want to play so long as you play it well," but given how bad balance was for P8s specifically, we really do have to focus on "if SE can actually balance the fights right next tier." There really shouldn't be 15%~ DPS disparity difference in any scenario. That goes beyond just fight design failure.

[Gserpent]

That's some serious copium if you think SE would replace those 2 hotkeys from our combos with anything interesting.

You wanna talk about real hopium? 7.0 introduces a full rework of classes styled after PvP - individual LB bars and the works. Each class only has say 6-8 core buttons, plus some role ability buttons, and most of the variety in play comes from things added on to flesh it out - maybe one class has meaningful job gauge management rather than a very basic builder-spender setup, maybe another has positionals that are required to activate other abilities or traits, maybe that one is heavily focused on responding to and utilizing procs at the right time and in the right order. And "doing it right" results in a boost to your limit break. Funnel a large portion of DPS into that limit break, lowering skill potency where needed to do so (pls no more 2500 potency auto-crit buttons designed to fit automatically into 20 different raid buffs) make it deal "pure" damage much like current LB does (so it is less reliant or affected by buffs from buddies, making raid buffs less meaningful.) I'd even include the buttons that have CC abilities attached, too. CC is relevant in non-raid content (not that it's *important*) and in raid content... well, it's still a button that deals damage or has some other kind of relevant effects. You could even do the thing that *other* game has done on occasion and give the skill an effect that increases its damage against enemies that are permanently immune to whatever CC effect it provides (150 pot+stun, or it instead does 250 pot against things that cannot ever be stunned.)

Because I don't think anyone except the absolute newest of players find 1-2-3 filler combos and that sort of thing to be interesting gameplay, do they? And they've streamlined and sanded down DPS rotations to such an extent that I don't think "player makes errors" is a genuinely meaningful element in raid DPS. Instead, raid DPS honestly feels pretty much automatic as long as everyone has passing familiarity with the class and it's instead just based on how well they've memorized what their role does in that specific encounter and when. You can easily get mid-high purple parses with a number of errors on XIVAnalysis, and anything above that general level of placement is excess and hardly necessary to clear savage or even ultimate (assuming no more P8S shenanigans.)

I recognize this as heresy, though. I know it'll never happen, it's pure hopium. But I don't think the current design style, with lots of meaningless filler buttons and a bunch of other stuff you only use every 60 or 120 seconds, is sustainable.

[Mikey_R]

You wanna talk about real hopium? 7.0 introduces a full rework of classes styled after PvP - individual LB bars and the works. Each class only has say 6-8 core buttons, ...

I don't think you realise how boring a job would be with that few skills. It works in PvP because of the more dynamic and shorter encounters as opposed to the more scripted, longer encounters for bosses. It also needs to be simpler so that you can focus more on the fight rather than your own rotation, which are designed to be quick, short, burst damage before some downtime.

As for personal LBs, is that not just a long cooldown action? Even if you want them to ignore raid/personal buffs, you just use the LB outside of those effects, so you can keep your high burst and keep high damage on the inbetween. So really, it just becomes something to use as a filler between big bursts.

For CC, adding damage to CC is not a good idea, not only from the point of (in your example), you do more damage just because they are immune, but on the opposite side, if the CC is part of your damage rotation, and the boss is vulnerable, you can make the boss immune to the CC so that when you actually need it, it is ineffective. A good example of this was Ifrit hard way way way back in the day. You rarely see it now, but he has an attack that fills the whole arena except 2 safe spaces, very common for a tank to stun it. However, with Stuns on Monk's shoulder tackle, Dragoons Leg Sweep and Spine Shatter dive, Warrior's Brutal Swing, I think Ifrit Egi had a stun IIRC, chances are, Ifrit was immune, so it wasn't stopped and people died, because they expected it to be stopped. You could prevent it slightly with a PLD and Shield Swipe (Pacification) and a bit of block luck, but should you reduce your damage just for CC?

If you want to make CC interesting, you change how the boss interacts. I have said in the past that, rather than it stopping a bosses attack, it changes it's properties. The room side is still a room wide, but it has not lost the heft DoT attached to it, that sort of thing.

You say current design style isn't sustainable, however, I would posit that your ideas would be even less sustainable.

[Ransu]

You wanna talk about real hopium? 7.0 introduces a full rework of classes styled after PvP - individual LB bars and the works. Each class only has say 6-8 core buttons, plus some role ability buttons, and most of the variety in play comes from things added on to flesh it out - maybe one class has meaningful job gauge management rather than a very basic builder-spender setup, maybe another has positionals that are required to activate other abilities or traits, maybe that one is heavily focused on responding to and utilizing procs at the right time and in the right order. And "doing it right" results in a boost to your limit break. Funnel a large portion of DPS into that limit break, lowering skill potency where needed to do so (pls no more 2500 potency auto-crit buttons designed to fit automatically into 20 different raid buffs) make it deal "pure" damage much like current LB does (so it is less reliant or affected by buffs from buddies, making raid buffs less meaningful.) I'd even include the buttons that have CC abilities attached, too. CC is relevant in non-raid content (not that it's *important*) and in raid content... well, it's still a button that deals damage or has some other kind of relevant effects. You could even do the thing that *other* game has done on occasion and give the skill an effect that increases its damage against enemies that are permanently immune to whatever CC effect it provides (150 pot+stun, or it instead does 250 pot against things that cannot ever be stunned.)

Because I don't think anyone except the absolute newest of players find 1-2-3 filler combos and that sort of thing to be interesting gameplay, do they? And they've streamlined and sanded down DPS rotations to such an extent that I don't think "player makes errors" is a genuinely meaningful element in raid DPS. Instead, raid DPS honestly feels pretty much automatic as long as everyone has passing familiarity with the class and it's instead just based on how well they've memorized what their role does in that specific encounter and when. You can easily get mid-high purple parses with a number of errors on XIVAnalysis, and anything above that general level of placement is excess and hardly necessary to clear savage or even ultimate (assuming no more P8S shenanigans.)

I recognize this as heresy, though. I know it'll never happen, it's pure hopium. But I don't think the current design style, with lots of meaningless filler buttons and a bunch of other stuff you only use every 60 or 120 seconds, is sustainable.

I would outright never play this game again if they did that to pve. WoW did that garbage and it now has the most boring combat ever.

The pvp stuff here is fine for pvp given the nature of pvp, but I don't want that for 12 minute pve fights...I actually enjoy maintaining a rotation and dealing with the drift of your buffs/debuffs/dots. Narrowing everything down to a handful of skills would be awful.

[Shurrikhan]

You wanna talk about real hopium? 7.0 introduces a full rework of classes styled after PvP - individual LB bars and the works. Each class only has say 6-8 core buttons, plus some role ability buttons, and most of the variety in play comes from things added on to flesh it out - maybe one class has meaningful job gauge management rather than a very basic builder-spender setup, maybe another has positionals that are required to activate other abilities or traits, maybe that one is heavily focused on responding to and utilizing procs at the right time and in the right order.

The pvp stuff here is fine for pvp given the nature of pvp, but I don't want that for 12 minute pve fights...I actually enjoy maintaining a rotation and dealing with the drift of your buffs/debuffs/dots. Narrowing everything down to a handful of skills would be awful.

Generally agreed, but...

I would outright never play this game again if they did that to pve. WoW did that garbage and it now has the most boring combat ever.

Two things here:

1. It hasn't, let alone as any sweeping change (instead of individual small consolidations or expansions of a given spec's rotation).
2. Many DPS specs will even now will frequently have a greater number of separate rotational choices/actions than a typical XIV DPS job; button count alone does not tell the whole story.

There has been no sweeping change across WoW specs that has reduced the actual button count of combat-related skills by more than a sixth or so at most, unless you want to hugely stretch that definition by counting each of the umpteen forms of "Track X" as combat related and as separate actions just because there was, for a time, no tracking button on one's mini-map.

They've trimmed RPG-skill bloat, brought it back (since one could just not bother putting in on their bars anyways), slightly de-clunked/unbloated rotations (no Jab for Monk, no Hemorrhage for Sub Rogue, etc.), only to usually refill those lost buttons with new ones, etc. I'm sitting on 12+ non-situational rotational buttons (Charge [which, yes, is a damage gain], Slam, Whirlwind, Execute, Mortal Strike, Cleave, Skullsplitter, Rend, Thunderclap, Colossus Smash, Avatar, Bladestorm) on a Warrior, a "zug-zug" class. (Yes, if using an at all hybrid build there, even the AoE (minus perhaps Thunderclap) skills see use also in ST due to their amp windows.)

That's... the highest it's ever been, unless including incompatible or wasteful actions like Shield Slam (can't use except when sword-and-board, which in turn prevented/nerfed-to-death your core DPS rotational skill[s]) or pre-Cata hybrid specs (which were generally quite poor).

Moreover, if we compare that against the likes of, say, SAM, you'd have count each combo action separately --despite their being non-separable actions-- in order to push over that --especially given that, unlike the spec above, its AoE has no place, not even in short windows, in ST combat. You have a hit-when-charged Shoha, up to 4 charges of Shinten/Senei, Gekko [combo], Kasha [combo], Yuki [combo], Meikyo, and Ikishoten, Iaijutsu [combo via TG], and Namikiri -- is just 10 rotational actions. We could push the envelope a bit there and somewhat consider Hagakure rotational since it's used for sync, but that still pushes us up only to parity -- 11 actual separate rotational actions. (And if counting TG separately, we should probably do the same for rotational uses of Heroic Leap for its reduced uptime costs on Charge, etc., etc.)

One has roughly ~24 buttons and the other ~30, but both have roughly the same number of actual separable rotational actions (and a good deal more meaningful utility --3 mobility tools, 2 external mitigation tools, 3 personal mitigation tools, 3 CC tools, etc.-- on the one with fewer buttons).

We can definitely afford to convey more spec identity and flesh out spec kits even while spending fewer buttons on basic functions.

Whether "6-8 core buttons... + role actions + "things added on top to flesh it out" would be sufficient comes down to...

• to sophistication of consolidation and/or small tweaks to better allow for consolidation,
• semantics regarding what is "core,"
• and how many actions are given to "things added on to flesh it out,"

...but since PvP was the example [and given the later comments on XIV's "combos"], you can be assured that the likes of DRG's 10 combo buttons would instead just take up 3 slots (leaving enough also for Geir/Nos, Jump>MD, SSD>DFD>SD, a personal buff and a shared buff among the "8 buttons" -- which would be damn near the whole kit already -- without even relying on the X additional keys to flesh it out).

[Gserpent]

I don't think you realise how boring a job would be with that few skills. It works in PvP because of the more dynamic and shorter encounters as opposed to the more scripted, longer encounters for bosses. It also needs to be simpler so that you can focus more on the fight rather than your own rotation, which are designed to be quick, short, burst damage before some downtime.

As for personal LBs, is that not just a long cooldown action? Even if you want them to ignore raid/personal buffs, you just use the LB outside of those effects, so you can keep your high burst and keep high damage on the inbetween. So really, it just becomes something to use as a filler between big bursts.

Except PvE is designed the same way - they don't care about you messing up your rotation, because they've consistently made it to the point that you almost *can't* screw up your rotation anymore - WAR is a very obvious example of this and is the most "idiot proof" class they've made, but it's not the only example of a general design trend in this direction. Oh, sure, you can break combos or whatever, but anyone that raids regularly has their 1-2-3 long since handled by rote muscle memory anyway, it's not like they're actually thinking about what button to push next. All of the challenge and difficulty in raids is from memorizing and understanding the fight script, not from something like counterbalancing a challenging multi-stage rotation against a fight script like it kind of once was. My position is simply, trim the fat.

Personal LBs is more of a flavor thing to me, more than a design thing. You could just as easily make Midare or whatever ignore raid buffs or something. But one of the undeniable successes of the new PvP system is how much everyone loves the personal LB system and how flavorful they are - look at the sheer number of MCH portraits using the snipe action. I also think that directly tying the "cooldown" of the personal LB into how well you are performing your rotation is a bit of concrete feedback on how well you're performing, and also rewards you for playing well. If you can get an extra LB usage out of a typical fight by nailing your rotation, that makes your play directly correlate with substantially higher DPS. Especially if they were to somehow adjust sub-stats and other outlying problems to address the "get lucky with crits" setup that largely defines top-level performance right now.

[Kalaam]

Personal LBs would be a bit different from just a CD 'cause they wouldn't benefit from downtime, would they ? If you're not fulfilling your role (doing damage, taking hits, healing someone) your LB bar shouldn't fill up, if I recall.
So it'd reward good play, but then it could create more power creep.

[Shurrikhan]

Personal LBs would be a bit different from just a CD 'cause they wouldn't benefit from downtime, would they ? If you're not fulfilling your role (doing damage, taking hits, healing someone) your LB bar shouldn't fill up, if I recall.
So it'd reward good play, but then it could create more power creep.

I don't think "always be casting", something you'd already have done, would constitute "reward[ing] good play"...

A personal LB would essentially be just another job gauge action, except spendable on only one action.

[Kalaam]

Maybe yes, though if you perform well (mainly for tanks and healers I feel, by using mitigation etc) it would be a bit faster I imagine.
Does taking hits while a mitigation is up charges LB faster currently ?