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

[Gserpent]

You also have to keep in mind that while we might be okay with 8 core skills in savage/ultimate fights (I don't think we would but let's assume so), what happens when we step into more casual content, you know the thing that makes up 90% of this game's pve?

I'm already bored to death in normal dungeons and a lot of extreme fights with all the skills we currently have, reduce that down to a pvp style system and I'll have to hook myself up to an IV drip with espresso just to not fall asleep.

Casual content is always going to be boring. There's no way around that. It has to be, in order to remain accessible to effectively all players who wish to participate in it (even with trusts, people will still probably use Duty Finder for dailies if nothing else.) It does so little damage that healers don't have to do any meaningful healing and tanks don't really need to worry about mitigating it properly and DPS players can just stand in the fire nine times out of ten because it's so easy to heal through it. DPS players additionally don't need to do proper rotations, because there are no enrage timers, or in the very rare cases where they exist (a few normal raids here and there), they are *incredibly* generous. "3 DPS and 1 tank" was already meta in ShB and it's even more dominant in EW now that all tanks were given a WAR-like toolkit full of absurd sustain and healing - if you're playing with a full party, you literally do not use healers.

If Square-Enix actually cared about casual content, that content that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase participates in, then they would have done a top-to-bottom complete and total rework of ability trees. Classes getting AOE buttons earlier, getting complete elements of their class earlier, getting core job elements earlier (lilies and such), and so on. But they didn't. DRG and NIN still have to wait into the 40's to get even one AOE button, WHM doesn't really play remotely like WHM until... what, 54? when they get the first Afflatus skill. And so on.

So I'm operating on the assumption that Square-Enix *do not care* about casual content, except to ensure that it is as accessible as they can reasonably make it so that all players can do it reliably and at a reasonable speed regardless of their ability to play the game. I don't think, for one moment, that Square-Enix is actually designing combat systems around that content. I think their intention with "continuing forward with 5.0 design" is that they're trying to make it as easy as reasonable for "casual" players to break into Ex and Savage content as possible. I don't know if they've been successful on that front or not, since achievement scraping etc won't really give you good data on "current content" clears, and "casual" players probably aren't utilizing parsing tools.

In fights that actually matter, messing up your rotation can be detrimental to the point you cannot clear the fight. However, to counter your point, look at healers. They are as simple as it gets in their DPS rotation and they complain about that simplicity. If a fight is going well, they even know where they will use their healing tools, so that isn't something that concerns them either. Infact, general consensus on jobs tend to be, they need to make them more complex. People hate the dumbing down. You say they should just trim the fat, but the fat is what keeps some jobs interesting in the first place. Both boss mechanics and job rotational complexity have to be balanced and making one of them too simple is just going to hamper enjoyment.

As for LBs, there is no reason a long cooldown couldn't be flavourful. However, one of the things with PvP is that every LB is unique, and has different utilities designed to be used in different ways. That sort of thing will not work in PvE and, depending on how you want LBs to play out, could even prevent a job from being used, just because it isn't useful. As a quick example, let's compare 2 made up tank LBs. One is purely defensive, one is purely offensive. The only thing that really matters is offence, how quickly you can take out the enemy. Reason being, all tanks are given enough mitigation tools to survive a fight, any extra is pretty much wasted, so, you take the extra damage. Ok, so, now we have 2 options, either make both tanks purely offensive, or purely defensive. If you make them both defensive, does this mean you should start making fights with this in mind? Having that extra strong tank buster forcing the LB usage? You have basically make a mechanic for a specific button there, not really all that flexible. You could make them both offensive, again, there is no reason why this couldn't be long cooldown action which obviously makes it flavourful to the job. Job flavour really isn't an argument for a mechanic after all.

Also, define 'playing well', what does that mean? Is it just that you hit things on the GCD? Well then, using Throwing Dagger is going to be just as effective as doing Ninja's 123, so are you really rewarding good play? How about also basing it on how long your oGCDs are sitting not used? Well, what about the fights where you might delay your 2 minute burst to better fit fight mechanics? Are you going to punish them for optimising?

Also, the 'get lucky with crits' is all down to the 2 minute meta and the insane damage you get from that period of time. If buffs were more spread out, crit variance would be less.

Square-Enix also routinely ignores healer complaints, so they are apparently just fine with very simple DPS rotations. Even actual DPS classes have very simple DPS rotations these days. It's nothing compared to pre-ShB designs. If you are participating in fights that actually matter, you are almost certainly a player of sufficient skill that your rotation is muscle memory and as such you have a near-zero chance of *meaningful* DPS losses from rotation errors. Breaking one or two combos across an 8 minute encounter is *not* going to tank your DPS to the point that you would prevent a clear from taking place.

No... what causes failed attempts is people dying or getting hit with DD. Outside of P8S (which Square-Enix specifically said was their fault for overtuning it), content is not and has not been so tightly tuned that you need 90th percentile performance from all/most players in order to clear it. Square-Enix clearly does not want players to be able to "fail" their rotation. I very strongly disagree with this design, but it is what it is. What they've done to WAR from SB to ShB to EW is probably going to be representative of what we can expect for class design shifts going forward into 7.0. Particularly since player reception and reaction to WAR has been *incredibly* positive in EW (how many memes did you see about "I'm the healer now!" and crap like that?)

For tank LBs? I dunno, man. You'd have to hash that stuff out. I think you'd probably just make all LBs just do damage in a flashy way, since tying an extra mitigation skill to proper DPS performance wouldn't work well for a lot of reasons. There's a ton of flashy, fancy attacks and spells classes in Final Fantasy have used throughout the generations, I'm sure they could pull from those to come up with something really neat for each class.

As far as "proper DPS performance" goes? It would probably be based on completing action combos, keeping GCD uptime, and things like that. It might be just as simple as having some base level of fill rate (say, 0.5% per sec, so you would charge in 120 sec), and then every time you use an action you get a tiny boost, and you get a slightly larger boost for using job abilities (Fell Cleave, Afflatus skills, etc) or completing weaponskill combo chains. Maybe healers would get a larger boost for using a damage spell, but only once every 5 sec or so (so like one out of every three GCDs) to help reward healers for DPSing? There's a lot of things you could do to softly reinforce proper play, and your reward for playing well (for certain definitions of "playing well" anyway) is you get to pop off your super flashy BIG NUMBERS button that makes a loud noise and spell effect everyone can see.

We've seen from the WAR changes, alone, that most players don't really care about nitty gritty numbers and performance metrics, they care about flashy spell effects and BIG NUMBERS or I'M THE HEALER NOW type stuff. To me, switching things over to a "personal LB" system seems like a slam dunk.