Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
What you're describing are the interactions around Holy Power, which have been the case since Holy Power was introduced to the class, not just since Legion. Legion merely traded a previously class-wide CD reset for Art of War (Exorcism) for a spec-specific one (Blade of Justice) while slightly amping Auras in place of Seals. I greatly preferred WoD Retribution, but it wasn't particularly more complex than Legion Ret, especially in PvE.

Ret centers around min-maxing spans of opportunity through minimizing waste uptime vs. performance while retaining later sync with macrorotational elements (Execution Sentence, Crusade, Seraphim, Holy Avenger, etc. -- all more numerous than before). It caps resources quickly, and gambles often but deliberately. Learn to min-max it, rather than sticking to just the Icyveins barebones, and you'll find it's far from "basic of basic," unless nearly every XIV job would fall even lower. Otherwise, you may as well say that BLM is skill-less and offers zero nuance.


What's fun about these two examples, moreover, is that both play more complexly for having removed that button. On Protection Warrior, it obliges one to track their auto-attack timer and to calculate the risk of wasting a Shield Slam reset by hitting another GCD just before an AA goes off. On Havoc Demon Hunter, it obliges offensive mobility usage that then frequently requires knowing to where the mob will be moved next and when the next mechanic would actually require its raw mobility (and from outside of enemy hitbox, without damage, to reach, or available from within it), both of which have a hell of a lot more cognitive load than an actual pure filler attack like Demon Bite or Devastate (and which Crusader Strike, as a CD with multiple available procs, is not).
I like those talents for another reason: less button mashing. While some players may like mashing a button constantly whenever there's nothing better to press, some would rather not induce RSIs by having to be constantly tapping 2 or whatever button you had assigned to your free, filler button. This is actually something that annoyed me when I played through Classic to 80 last month, having to almost constantly be hitting my Heroic Strike button in dungeons to dump excess rage. That's one change they made years ago that I wished they'd backported into Classic (yeah yeah #nochanges, miss me with that crap because some of the old stuff was just bad and I didn't need a refresher to remember why it was bad.) It let players slightly customize the way they played the game, and as you mentioned, it actually *increases* optimization opportunities. It's probably a DPS loss for smoothbrain casuals like me, since we'd inevitably do exactly what you're talking about and "waste" a Shield Slam proc because we aren't watching our AA timer, but that's acceptable for folks like me, because it's more convenient.

Anyway. I think you definitely could've made a case for XIV being more complicated to play back around SB and certainly HW, compared to WoW from Legion forwards, but these days? I think they're both almost entirely mindless, especially if you're talking about anything but 90th+ percentile play. They approach in different methods, but I think both are rather simple to play and do well at. In both cases, they focused on making encounters difficult primarily from having to react to mechanics and gimmicks, and not having to balance a tea tray's worth of buttons and memorize a 36-step flowchart to achieve competent DPS. I think this is, ultimately, for the better.

I do think that XIV could take a few notes from WoW, though. I don't think 1-2-3 static, unchanging fillers are particularly interesting, and I also think that the whole "plan out buttons to maximize raid buff advantage" thing has been discarded now that everything automatically lines up anyway. It was fun, having to tinker with rotations if you had a NIN, or things like that. But that time is behind us now. Unless Square-Enix plans on moving away from "2 minute meta," I think the next thing to do in class design is make the ~40-100 sec of filler gameplay between raid bursts more engaging and fun.