Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Gserpent]

Let's assume for a moment that the players' (not devs') lessons learned or obsessions formed won't soon be forgotten or dissipated. What kind of gameplay would you like to see that would make playing around raid buffs less prominent? And what would actually change, in practice, between your vision and what's present now?

That's easy - no more raid buffs. Period. You might have your own personal buffs, but when and where you use your buffs is entirely up to you, and your knowledge of the encounter. Involving raid buffs is clearly too much trouble to keep it in, even if it's against class fantasy to remove them (really, only Bard and Dancer have always been "buffing jobs", the others have often had buffs but it wasn't their core focus.)

The reason for this is simple - it completely unchains fight design and dramatically increases skill ceiling across the board, without touching kits *at all* aside from adjusting potency and buff values to account for them only affecting you rather than everyone. It's not a coincidence that a lot of major mechanics are specifically timed to happen around a 2 minute marker in fights (typically within 10-20 sec on either side of the line.) So this leads to not only player DPS but even arguably the fights themselves being more generic and boilerplate than they have to be - simply because you know that every 2 minutes is when players have to actually pay attention to push lots of buttons, so you need to put something in that stresses their ability to do that easily.

When your DPS is up to you and you alone, the ceiling is improved. It *might* be possible to incorporate buffing classes, but maybe only if they buff a single specific player and not the entire group - it's *probably* easier to manage power creep that way, and it also makes fight knowledge/optimization relevant for those buffing classes. Different classes will have different damage styles, occurring at different times, and potentially adjusted to compensate for fight mechanics. You would determine who you buff with your bard song or dances or cards based on that information, and it will vary somewhat from group to group because it's less likely that every fucking Dark Knight plays exactly the same (because now it's not decided for you, when you hit your damage buttons.)

As long as the *floor* is low and accessible, and normals and Ex's continue to be tuned and balanced accordingly to be basically impossible to fail and very generous with recovery opportunities, respectively, then you can do things that add layers and depth to hard-mode content. I think Square-Enix needs to stop treating their players like morons, and I also think that *hard-mode content should come with the expectation that you will need to put some fucking effort into learning how to properly play your class and adapt it to the fight's mechanics.* I think this dumbing down of gameplay was done to try and encourage more people to play savage, given how much effort they put into those encounters, but it's costing the game too much from a design standpoint. It needs to be walked back. Especially since raid kits and dungeon kits are the same, and if you're forcing everyone to fit into square holes for the sake of DPS balance in hard mode raids, you're fucking over players who want more cool things they can do in dungeons. Let tanks and healers pick from a selection of skills that serve to let them do more damage in a variety of ways, let DPS pick skills that let them soak some hits or sustain through some hits (maybe even with rewards for timing them correctly, like a 3 sec buff that gives you a fat bonus if you take damage during it.) Sounds messy, but it would be a way to make non-raid content a little more fun and less goddamned boring without messing with raid tuning. I think I'd just rework the entire fucking skills system from the ground up if I was going to go to that kind of trouble, though, and not just try to staple things onto a turd...

Insofar as making classes more active, you could accomplish that simply by reducing cooldowns of oGCD abilities across the board. Instead of 450 potency every 30 sec, change it to 225 every 15 sec. Same potency per minute, but now it's an extra button to push every 6th GCD (so every other combo) instead of every 12th... which *also* happens to raise the skill ceiling very so slightly by introducing more opportunities to drift, and possibly less tolerance for drifting. Given the speed of the combat system, I think 15 is about as low as you'd want it. You could also do a skill with two charges on a 30 sec cooldown, etc. There's multiple ways you can add "more buttons to push for more excited monkey brain," but they're currently doing none of them.

Square-Enix, your players are not nearly so fucking stupid as you seem to think they are. But most of them *are* misinformed, because you lazy jackasses can't bother to put useful tutorials or teaching tools into the game. Why's it gotta be the players' job to create and spread third-party information when y'all could just fucking do it yourselves?

[Shurrikhan]

That's easy - no more raid buffs. Period. You might have your own personal buffs, but when and where you use your buffs is entirely up to you, and your knowledge of the encounter. Involving raid buffs is clearly too much trouble to keep it in, even if it's against class fantasy to remove them (really, only Bard and Dancer have always been "buffing jobs", the others have often had buffs but it wasn't their core focus.)

The reason for this is simple - it completely unchains fight design and dramatically increases skill ceiling across the board, without touching kits *at all* aside from adjusting potency and buff values to account for them only affecting you rather than everyone. It's not a coincidence that a lot of major mechanics are specifically timed to happen around a 2 minute marker in fights (typically within 10-20 sec on either side of the line.)

I'd have to argue in return, though removing raid buffs would not unchain fight design, because it still would be chained to the remaining CDs (just with a slightly greater emphasis on some jobs being screwed over more than others) and increasing skill ceiling independently of individual kit designs... isn't a bad thing. If anything, though raid buffs aren't any exemplar I'd follow, that I expect the game would be more fun if it had more such cross-player interactions.

That said, I do think you overestimate its impact. Apart from on jobs like MNK, almost nothing changes between optimizing damage alone and optimizing damage under raid buffs; at most, a GCD's worth of oGCDs are delayed slightly further.

When your DPS is up to you and you alone, the ceiling is improved.

They're not zero-sum, though, and gameplay wasn't changed much at all.

As long as the *floor* is low and accessible, and normals and Ex's continue to be tuned and balanced accordingly to be basically impossible to fail and very generous with recovery opportunities, respectively, then you can do things that add layers and depth to hard-mode content.

Wouldn't raid-buffs pass muster under that warrant? On nearly every job, the floor is low and accessible, and no one needs to operate any differently over the presence of raid buffs until Ultimate -- short of maybe double-Solar/Lunar/Optimal Drift stuff for the rare overtuned Savage fight.

Insofar as making classes more active, you could accomplish that simply by reducing cooldowns of oGCD abilities across the board. Instead of 450 potency every 30 sec, change it to 225 every 15 sec.

Completely agreed.