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

[Shurrikhan]

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..

I feel like you kind of have account for actual attempts at optimization, no? Else you look at chess and end up with checkers, so to speak.

And even now it's difficult to neatly compare the complexity of the two because they're so distinct (and the one, once looking at optimization beyond a one-size-fits-all APL, so quickly complicates itself beyond what can be pithily conveyed). WoW's is predominantly about adaptation and optimizing setups of windows (or, about picking the lesser evil in varying compromises, rather than there ever being an outright perfect option to stick to and keep rolling). XIV's is about maintaining a rhythm with very occasional alterations available to reduce desync or take advantage of a categorical difference (2-target vs. 1-target on MNK or PLD, different movement span lengths on BLM, etc., though that's far less often of note now).

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.

I think if there were two things I'd like XIV to take from other MMOs, is to stop using pretense of depth in place of actual decision-making, and to stop being so apologetic or contradicting about its class's/job's central tools and their weaknesses.

XIV's "combos" are just yet more DDR, just done with 1234 instead of WASD. There's an entertaining rhythmic element there, but one could still do more in that regard on DRG with 2 buttons for ST than with DRG's 7 currently thus spent (since 2 buttons over 5 GCDs could technically allow for up to 32 separate actions, a 16:1 efficiency), or at least allow for each to be an actual action (rather than all 7 allowing for only 2 -- 1 action per 3.5 buttons). Give it a third button actually used efficiently and DRG's combos would go from DoTC-FillerC-DoTC-FillerC to literally dozens of available combo strings at varying lengths.

But then we look at something like Huton, too. The skill was honestly fine as it was initially, precisely because it had no resets. At 70s, you could manipulate it around downtime (going from 1-in-3 NJs to 1-in-4), so long as you kept it staggered from Suiton. It was still your highest value-per-uptime NJ outside of an 8-man Suiton-TrickAttack. But then we add Hide resets, so now we're "screwed over" by mobs being pulled faintly too soon. We add a barely-rewarding finisher for the sole purpose of not using Huton, merely replacing one mode of optimization with another and turning Huton from a core skill to a pre-fight chore and, on balance, further punishment for dying. Then we spend yet another button on it via Huraijin? Why? At that point Huton may as well be replaced with a more situational no-CD Bunshin, with Wind-Chore itself getting the modern Greased Lightning treatment (-> a trait) and Armor Crush being replaced with a DoT combo. So many skills spent just to make the initial one that much less core or interesting. What other MMO does that?

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.

Whether the two are even linked or not comes down largely to semantics. A game can give a ton to do between burst windows while still having meaningful shared burst windows just as assuredly as one can have meaningful damage/healing/mitigation while still having a Limit Break.

We tend not to like underpowered abilities fluffing our APM, but at the same time, engagement/fun isn't typically just a matter of throughput. We could still have bursty damage profiles and have far more APM and many more forms of optimization available between our per-minute and 2-minute bursts even while keeping raid buffs as relevant as they are now.

It's mostly just that most present jobs won't see lulls as preparatory to bursts because they're literally unable to use that time for sync (too rigid of rotational strings, especially in terms of their length), job design is hugely opposed to building around any meaningful adaptation to chance and generally aims for accessibility [with a comfortable pretense of depth] first and ceiling a distant second, and encounters don't demand engagement with active attempts to prep/sync bursts anyways because (unshared/individually varied) downtime is so infrequent now. Neither is a wholly recent trend, but as that trend's rarely ever reversed or sidetracked itself, the extent of it is obviously at its most extreme right now.

[Gserpent]

I feel like you kind of have account for actual attempts at optimization, no? Else you look at chess and end up with checkers, so to speak.

Kind of? But outside of the actual math involved to ensure DPS metrics are roughly equivalent within roles, if you aren't tuning your encounters to require 90th percentile performance across the board, then does that 90th percentile performance even matter? Particularly in a system wherein so much of that remaining 10% of possible DPS is so reliant on critting the right skills at the right time. Good crits can quite literally turn a purple into an orange and an orange into a pink. I just don't understand the fixation on parsing that some folks have. I like to see a consistent upward trend of performance across a tier, but I don't really care about the numbers otherwise. If I can plot a graph and see a consistent upward trend, and I know that my group has had no substantial issues clearing (or at least none of my making), then I'm fine with whatever the game is doing.

So many skills spent just to make the initial one that much less core or interesting. What other MMO does that?

One that has been too reluctant to redesign things, instead preferring to adopt an ultra-conservative design ethos that only iterates on things and never redesigns them unless absolutely necessary. "5.0 design" has basically meant taking things away from the Stormblood versions of classes. In some cases this is consolidating things, and sometimes they replace one thing with another. But original design of most classes is still plainly visible... it's just been sawn off at the knees and elbows and sometimes they used stick tack to paste on gewgaws here or there.

I do agree that it's some kind of weird idea that complexity is depth, or something? I think they'd be much smarter to reinvent classes along the lines of their PvP system - figure maybe 12-16 buttons *in total* for a class, though not counting consumables or other random things you might add to your bars. Option to break combos up into their separate 1-2-3's for players that prefer that style. Look at Diablo 3 - you can do a *lot* with just eight buttons. WoW shows you another way to turn "few buttons but higher APM" into a thing through the use of procs and just generally shorter cooldowns for a lot of abilities. Guild Wars 2 is another example of few buttons but reasonable depth to gameplay. There's actually a lot of examples out there. I don't believe that Square-Enix is ignorant of them. I think that they've just adopted an excessively conservative development style, for too long, and it's starting to wear through in some places.

I mean, hell. Even before the EW revamp, I still preferred the PvP version of most classes to the PvE versions. And then the PvP revamp in EW proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are absolutely capable of designing interesting and engaging gameplay and classes with very few buttons. But I think they're terrified of having another Gordias, so they're staying very conservative with PvE design.

I agree it feels bad to have fluff/padding in your rotation for the sole purpose of APM padding, but a game with PvE this rigidly scripted can't really make use of empty space. I only hate padding when it's in the form of several different buttons. I don't really mind tapping Shield Slam every 6 sec and occasionally more often than that with procs in WoW. I don't mind tapping Expiacion every 30 in XIV. I'd be fine tapping it every 15 or every 10 or whatever, too. I think sound and visuals matter more than anything to keep rotations *feeling* fun, honestly.

I wonder if they could come up with some animation system that made minor adjustments to sounds and animations dynamically so that you're not always doing the exact same motions over and over? They've got a *ton* of high quality, unused animations in the game files these days owing to all the pruning they've done over the years...

[Shurrikhan]

Kind of? But outside of the actual math involved to ensure DPS metrics are roughly equivalent within roles, if you aren't tuning your encounters to require 90th percentile performance across the board, then does that 90th percentile performance even matter?

I'm assuming here that by "90th percentile" we're talking about getting at least some 90% of either theoretical or, more likely, "reasonably optimistic" levels of optimization, rather than just the ever-escalating/expanding gap of fflogs percentiles (essentially ultimately-player-versus-player PvE)?

If so, then... yes, but with a fair bit of flex, given that there it is a multiplayer game and there's therefore n levers of carrying/being carried, and that it's further complicated by gear acquisition and community feedback loops (see also 'jacking ilvl requirements up to 11').

For instance, let's say there's a fight that's tuned around an "80%" level of play (i.e., about Extreme level given its minimum ilvl requirement), here meaning that on average each must interact with 80% of the means of optimization to some "80%" mastery of each, and/or that ultimately they'll need to put out at least 80% of what their composition is theoretically capable of (yes, .8 x .8 would equal .64, but there are diminishing returns on the value of interacting with minutial optimizations).

That still gives reason enough, for many players, to be cognizant of a "tier" or two higher of player (going a step or two deeper into those diminishing returns on output for effort/learning invested), if only to carry their team. At the same time, though, others may simply insist that everyone grind or buy more gear, allowing it to be cleared at lower average relative performance across the group.

All that kind of depends on a(n un)surprisingly difficult degree of internal balance: for going a step further to feel rewarding, the rewards for further learning can't diminish too quickly, but if the rewards for learning are super linear (or, worse, if one only starts to, relatively rapidly, approach towards theoretical performance after having learned a bunch of less rewarding intro techniques/optimizations), then the game can be overly stratified or outright inaccessible, which crushes its accessible playerbase for endgame activities.

The floor needs to invite players quickly enough towards at least the mainstay ways of optimization in the game and have enough variety therein to attract various player types to engage with 'learning-as-a-game-itself', while the ceiling needs to have depth enough to hold onto players, or even ought to outright provide something in gameplay than no competitors can (even if most content isn't dependent on engaging with its entirety).

One that has been too reluctant to redesign things, instead preferring to adopt an ultra-conservative design ethos that only iterates on things and never redesigns them unless absolutely necessary. "5.0 design" has basically meant taking things away from the Stormblood versions of classes. In some cases this is consolidating things, and sometimes they replace one thing with another. But original design of most classes is still plainly visible... it's just been sawn off at the knees and elbows and sometimes they used stick tack to paste on gewgaws here or there.

While you're preaching to the choir there, so to speak, I feel like I have to caution against hyperbole, at least if we really want to understand what's going wrong. Simply put, "sawn off at the knees and elbows" may roughly describe very particular perspectives on particular jobs as a summary of those changes, but the individual changes will, the vast majority of the time, make sense, especially as a way of addressing stated player concerns. The core of the problem seems instead to be HOW their reiterative cycle is approached, which typically seems too much a "problem-solving" approach rather than a "generative" or "maximizing" one.

Far too many of what changes have negatively impacted job design would seem reasonable "solutions" to problems; the problem is the lack of attention to gameplay depth*. Job A has X problem; new skill Y is added to solve problem; job A now experiences problem X less severely, but also less interestingly.

*This is not to say that all complexity is depth, as much of the later replacements for former depth-adding areas of play quickly show.

We could describe the issue there variously as being under-informed about the actual bones and blood of a given job while plucking away at its "problems" (be they specifically noted about the job or noted across the few job designers as a shared area of potential concern/improvement), as just underexploration/underestimation of mechanics-in-practice compared to what was intended, or however else along those lines. WoW and occasional patches of B&S, GW2, etc., have had similar issues here and there, but it does seem especially part and parcel in XIV's job design -- alongside the usual expansion by expansion "just throw more stuff on there!" (as would lead to a good half of the new HW actions having no good reason to be separate buttons, if only because "New Skills!" sells better than "New passives!" despite the latter's being equally capable of gameplay effect -- depending only on their utilization, just as per active skills).

I'll likely edit this post later with a spoiler block to test my claim above and apply a relevant method for analysis, but this is already getting long and I want to comment on your final, highly enticing note.

I wonder if they could come up with some animation system that made minor adjustments to sounds and animations dynamically so that you're not always doing the exact same motions over and over? They've got a *ton* of high quality, unused animations in the game files these days owing to all the pruning they've done over the years...

This is something I have likewise thought about for a long time, though usually in the context of other MMOs where one would more commonly spam a single key for a bit (e.g., not just BLMs, healers, and SMNs). And I have seen dynamic variance to skills' opacity, size, or specific texture/particle layers thereof (though sometimes via mods alone) work wonders elsewhere.

Ideally, though, you'd want to contextualize it with those skills also actually hitting harder or with additional effects, etc., though, which in turn means building undermechanics that would better allow for open combos... which then already allow for that spam to be shaken up quite a bit. So, in some ways the near-necessary context would diminish the value of building such a system, but... honestly, still seems pretty worthwhile to me.