Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Gserpent]

No, it just shows how some people can't see past a calculator. Personally, a job/composition could be bad but me and my friends would still play like that when it's fun. It is that simple. The only ones who say such and such isn't allowed are the ones who this game should not be designed after.

I'm part of a raid group and we look at numbers yet our mantra is everyone plays with what they are comfortable. Balance is important so every comp is viable. But it shouldn't be so important as to exclude literally everything else.

It's not "people," it's the fucking development team. It's a self-sustaining cycle of "we have to focus on DPS, we need to make sure DPS is tight or players will complain and we don't like seeing players complain," with the players on the other end (correctly) castigating Square-Enix if there's more than a 2-3% variance in DPS metrics between two classes of the same role. Because when DPS is literally the only thing in raids that you can actually control or influence, the fuck else is there to care about?

This is all *PURELY* due to the fact that fights are rigidly scripted with no real variance - they don't usually do HP gating (so you can't try to adjust your group's DPS timings to try and push a boss to the next phase to skip a mechanic you don't like, etc), they don't usually do adds in a meaningful way, mitigation is completely passive and has no real interactivity, and the same with healing...

When everything is so tightly locked down, literally the only thing that remains within player control is DPS. So *of course* players are going to fixate on it. And because players are fixating on it, *you* have to fixate on it.

They could absolutely break out of this mold by not being goddamn fucking cowards. But they are fucking cowards. They're so scared of angry players that they won't even share tentative patch notes a couple weeks ahead of patch date (which, by that point, all changes are COMPLETELY locked in, you're probably just tweaking potency values and you could just not put potency values in the notes or put them in with the explicit statement that they're just placeholders and they may change between now and patch day), because they did it once or twice and got yelled at.

If the various WoW dev teams are on one end of the scale, where they throw the baby out with the bathwater every goddamn expansion (or, at minimum, every time the dev team leadership shifts) because "old stuff is boring, we need new and Exciting(tm) things to put on the expansion box!", then XIV is firmly on the opposite end, where they'll ride the fucking ship beneath the waves before daring to do anything out of what they've been doing for the past several years.

I think that the XIV team needs to go back and review WoW's history, especially the period of time stretching from Wrath of the Lich King, to Cataclysm, and then to Mists of Pandaria. Cataclysm was a weird attempt to try and salvage the old talents/class systems without dramatically changing things, and while it was functional... it wasn't *great*? But with Mists, they said to hell with caring what grognards think, we're going to try something completely different that gives us room to design things differently and address problems that have been riding the game since 2004. Incidentally, Mists was also the first expansion to really swap around how tanking worked. Prior to Mists, tanks typically built and spent resources on dealing damage/increasing threat. With Mists, they started down the path of "active mitigation." Instead of spending your Warrior's rage on hitting things a little harder, you were instead primarily spending rage on taking less damage. You still had *some* skills that spent rage on damage, but these were primarily used in low-tier content or soloing, while when you were doing more challenging content, a majority of your rage spent was on defending yourself.

XIV could absolutely do the same, and might even benefit from it. PLD is kind of there with Oath Gauge being purely for defensive spells, rather than attacks? But it's like, imagine if Rampart was removed, your 30% cooldown was the only real "passive" and/or free mitigation you get (all WoW tanks in Mists did indeed have at least one big defensive button they could use that didn't cost anything and had a roughly 2-3 minute cooldown), and instead you're spending gauge to activate your defensive skills, and your oGCDs like Expiciaon, Upheaval, etc *generate* gauge instead of costing/having no interaction with it. Maybe you add a proc trait to one of the classes that's like Mage's Ballad for BRD, where maybe there's a 30% chance to knock 5 sec off the cooldown of your button after some event happens (successful autoswing, for example.)

I think there's a fucking *reason* that even in a game as volatile and mutable as WoW, active mitigation has remained the way of the land for ten fucking years now. Because it *works*, and it's way more engaging and interesting than the previous system. Maybe XIV needs to dust off those Gamer History books and reconsider their current course - after all, they had to copy WoW's homework to salvage 1.0, didn't they?

But we both know they won't. Because they're fucking cowards.