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

[Gserpent]

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.

[SargeTheSeagull]

In all fairness using ret paladin of all specs as a comparison point is kinda unfair. That's like looking at stormblood white mage and talking about how bad stormblood was. Yeah, that one job sucked back then but generally SB was really good for most jobs. I don't know enough about the nitty-gritty of WoW's combat to really speak on it that much (only played for a few months and only played monk, paladin and priest at endgame) but overall I'd say WoW's class design is in a better spot than 14's jobs. At least tanks and healers in WoW all feel somewhat distinct and not like the same job with different animations. My largest critique of 14's job design is that aside from casters, most jobs are either a copy/paste of another within its role or just plain clunky and boring.

[Gserpent]

That's my chief complaint, too. I don't play WoW because I feel like retail is a massive cluster because they refused to just start making WoW 2 years ago, but I do like to observe design trends and things they do and they've really hit some home runs over the past few years with different class designs and being able to fit unique class feels and gimmicks into a system that, while not necessarily well balanced, is at least functional... and even if some classes or specs are weak at the top end, they're all perfectly fine for the content that the overwhelming majority of players participate in, which is probably the most important thing, yeah?

I think that designing the game around what parse-fixated players think... despite parses and everything they rely on technically not being allowed by the ToS... was a bad decision and I suppose it goes back to just how *bad* Gordias was. It's like the Square-Enix dev team has some kind of collective PTSD over how badly things went and are terrified of it happening again. I think there's a sliding scale, with something like "balanced" on one end and "unique" on the other, and XIV has maybe strayed too far on one end and it's sacrificing too much for it. I think the problems we're seeing cropping up purely as a result of the "2 minute meta" design shift in EW are indicative of them having gone too far in one direction.

I'm kind of curious to see what they decide for 7.0. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at brainstorming sessions. Yoshida and his crew are pretty good at their jobs, even if I disagree with them sometimes. I'm hoping they'll admit trying to cram everyone into the same box was a mistake, and are thinking about ways to back out of it.

[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.

[Mikey_R]

Square-Enix also routinely ignores healer complaints, so they are apparently just fine with very simple DPS rotations. ...

You have missed the point entirely. By over simplifying rotations, you make jobs boring to play and less likely to mess up, especially if you are simplifying it down to 6-8 buttons. You might have the rotation memorised, but can you do it in the midst of combat whilst dealing with boss mechanics? Even if you can, you are still engaging your brain to do it. Take away this engagement, and that is when jobs start to feel boring.

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.
...
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.

Nothing you have said here says it has to be a LB over a long cooldown. Cooldowns can be flashy too.

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.

Doing an AoE combo is completing a combo chain and it is shorter, so, will I fil my LB faster because of that? GCD uptime, technically, spamming Throw Dagger is GCD uptime, Job actions? In the case of Afflatus skills, you shouldn't use them if you have no healing to do. Afflatus Misery is currently DPS neutral if you can still hit the boss and a gain if you can't and use the Afflatus heals then. However, this idea would promote healing when it isn't needed, just to charge the LB faster. Seems counter intuitive for a healer. As for other job actions, different jobs use them at different rate, so some jobs are going to fill faster than others, which means the potential for a job to be able to get more LBs off in a fight, which is just going to lead to those jobs being more favourable. This is before we even get into the LBs disrupting your rotation, which potentially causes issues with buff alignment or resource generation. If it was more static, you could at least work around those limitations, but it would then need a static cooldown.

This is obviously also ignoring the facts that, the more you see a flashy skill, the less of an impact it has. If you were to see Final Heaven every 2 minutes for example, do you think it would still feel impactful after seeing it 5 times in a fight? Couple that with seeing Dragonsong Dive, Meteor and Satellite Beam at the same time? Even then, not every job should be all about the flashiness. Monk tended to draw people towards it because it wasn't flashy. Again, personal LBs will not work in the way you envision them.

[ForsakenRoe]

Doing an AoE combo is completing a combo chain and it is shorter, so, will I fil my LB faster because of that? GCD uptime, technically, spamming Throw Dagger is GCD uptime, Job actions? In the case of Afflatus skills, you shouldn't use them if you have no healing to do. Afflatus Misery is currently DPS neutral if you can still hit the boss and a gain if you can't and use the Afflatus heals then. However, this idea would promote healing when it isn't needed, just to charge the LB faster. Seems counter intuitive for a healer. As for other job actions, different jobs use them at different rate, so some jobs are going to fill faster than others, which means the potential for a job to be able to get more LBs off in a fight, which is just going to lead to those jobs being more favourable. This is before we even get into the LBs disrupting your rotation, which potentially causes issues with buff alignment or resource generation. If it was more static, you could at least work around those limitations, but it would then need a static cooldown.

Just to chime in, yes, we actually do purposely burn lilies when they're not needed for healing, to make sure we have a Misery ready for the 2min window, because using GCDs outside of raidbuffs to put a Misery into raidbuffs, functionally speaking, is transferring those 3 GCDs into the raidbuff window. Instead of getting 6 GCDs, it's kinda like we sneak 3 extra in there (Don't tell TSA). Now, I mostly don't bother with all that because I'm too scrub-tier to care, I keep forgetting, I prefer to keep the lilies for in case I need to heal unexpected damage, pick your excuse. I don't like the design, I think it's pretty dumb, but it's what we have.

Also in PVP, RPR LB is Enshroud, SMN is Bahamut, SCH is Seraph, and BLMs comes up so often it feels like a regular CD. Not every LB is MCH gun or WHM 'big laser', would we consider moving SCH's Seraph from being a 2min CD to being it's LB for this idea? Because functionally speaking, if 'playing well' gets us Seraph after X seconds, then it has an X second CD. In SB, we had WHM Lilies, the bad ones. They reduced the CD of certain skills, and we hoped to use them on Assize (because more damage), but they also worked on Tetra, Divine Benison, and iirc Asylum. Thing is, we never factored them in to any CD plans. If there was a raidwide at 1:00, then another raidwide at 2:40, and we were going to use Asylum to cover both of them, the fact Asylum just got reduced by 15 seconds because of Lilies was not a factor. We played as if the CD reduction never happened. So I think similar would happen here: The 'optimal play charge time' for the LB would become it's de-facto CD.

[Mikey_R]

Just to chime in, yes, we actually do purposely burn lilies when they're not needed for healing, to make sure we have a Misery ready for the 2min window, because using GCDs outside of raidbuffs to put a Misery into raidbuffs, functionally speaking, is transferring those 3 GCDs into the raidbuff window. Instead of getting 6 GCDs, it's kinda like we sneak 3 extra in there (Don't tell TSA). Now, I mostly don't bother with all that because I'm too scrub-tier to care, I keep forgetting, I prefer to keep the lilies for in case I need to heal unexpected damage, pick your excuse. I don't like the design, I think it's pretty dumb, but it's what we have.

That's something I actually had not considered and it seems...backwards to me (why waste healing when there is no healing to do), but, from a DPS point, it makes perfect sense and, if you didn't need the healing elsewhere, might as well go for the gains.

[Gserpent]

You have missed the point entirely. By over simplifying rotations, you make jobs boring to play and less likely to mess up, especially if you are simplifying it down to 6-8 buttons. You might have the rotation memorised, but can you do it in the midst of combat whilst dealing with boss mechanics? Even if you can, you are still engaging your brain to do it. Take away this engagement, and that is when jobs start to feel boring.

I'm sorry, are you actually arguing that executing muscle memory is engagement? For whom? The newest of new players?

This is obviously also ignoring the facts that, the more you see a flashy skill, the less of an impact it has. If you were to see Final Heaven every 2 minutes for example, do you think it would still feel impactful after seeing it 5 times in a fight? Couple that with seeing Dragonsong Dive, Meteor and Satellite Beam at the same time? Even then, not every job should be all about the flashiness. Monk tended to draw people towards it because it wasn't flashy. Again, personal LBs will not work in the way you envision them.

If that were true, there wouldn't be a thousand and one memes about Warriors and Bloodwhetting and Primal Rend. Or the millions of unga bunga MOAR FELL CLEAVER memes in ShB.