Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Kabooa]

I used to believe a lot of what they said until I *effortlessly* parsed orange in e10s, without ever having spent a moment practicing on striking dummies or anything like that.

"Effortlessly."

[Gserpent]

"Effortlessly."

Yeah, effortlessly. We did the mechanics, we did a cheese strat that was available because of our gear level and team setup to allow for some extra uptime, but other than that? It was nothing out of the ordinary. It was exactly the same as a typical reclear except for the cheese strat (which had some degree of failure rate, probably because we were messing something up, so we usually just did the mechanic or ate the damage down rather than fucking with that strat) and I magically got a shiny orange number.

I didn't practice. I didn't read up on strats or optimizations or things like that. I just showed up and hit buttons the exact same way I'd been hitting buttons the whole time I'd been playing that tier. People were acting like you had to be dedicated and work really hard to get orange parses, and here I was getting one by basically just mashing buttons?

Yeah, parsing is bullshit. It's absurd that it occupies so much design space.

World First for our very first Ultimate... featured a DRK at a time when DRK was at its very worst. His reasoning: "Idk. I just like playing DRK." The changes made would make no sense if they were being made just for the top tier, the theorycrafters, etc. And most of the ones actually going for an orange parse aren't the ones arguing over this or that job having 0.5% higher theoretical rDPS despite being the sole group for whom such differences would actually matter.

Nothing about Balance theorycrafters working out the best way to leverage Overheat turned it into the shallow shtick MCH has been since Shadowbringers. Nothing about their figuring out the best ways to open as Monk removed Greased Lightning. By their count, after all, it was already balanced; whatever "clunk" was there didn't matter to them, because they'd already accepted and worked around it.

I don't particularly give a damn about that community, either, but it's laughable that you could lay the devs' changes made over time towards accessibility-(even-if-at-cost-to-identity-and-skill-ceiling) at their feet.

Because literally *who the fuck else* are these changes *for*? Accessibility? That's a crock of shit, when they can't even bother to add friend or foe coloring to important effects in PvP and have *twice* now released a raid encounter that is best described as "orange on red on orange on more orange." Accessibility is why we *still* have to push 6 buttons to do what could be done with 2? Accessibility is why we still have a bunch of boring fucking buttons that we hit robotically every time they are available, with no nuance or variation, and which are literally nothing but "do a little more damage" and otherwise have zero interaction with the rest of the kit? If accessibility is the concern, then you need to be removing a lot of these boring filler buttons and reworking the entire combat concept around not needing to manage so many buttons.

Come off it, dude. "Accessible" is meaningless when you can literally set casual content to whatever you want it to be. You can quite literally clear dungeons and normals by doing nothing but spamming Heavy Swing over and over, using no other attack skills. and it's not even that hard. It will be slower but not to such an extent that it will be noticeable for most players. Normals are tuned around there being players (multiple players, in raids) literally not even achieving like 75% GCD utilization, much less doing an actual, proper rotation.

WAR in Shadowbringers was one of the simplest classes I've seen in any game like this, to the point that the training wheels memes were *almost* not a joke. But it still had *some* small amount of room for optimization, tanks still had *some* small amount of influence over fights with boss positioning and repositioning and such. But they removed every single iota of nuance from WAR's rotation and kit in Endwalker, and when they inflated boss hitboxes so precious poor little melee players wouldn't occasionally have to consider missing a GCD to avoid a mechanic to compensate for their higher base DPS, it also tended to end the idea of tanks needing to know where and when to position the boss.

Square-Enix are fucking morons, in this area. There's no other possible explanation for it. They are ruining their game's combat system for the sake of a demographic of players *that literally does not exist and never has.* There's no mythical group of players that totally wanted to get into savage raiding but just *couldn't* because 1-button healers and braindead tanks were just *so* hard to understand, or that 20th percentile performance on a DPS class to clear e9s with plenty of room to spare was just *so hard.*

Casual players are not and never have done proper rotiations. They don't even keep their GCD rolling. And they don't need to, because normals are designed to be absurdly easy. They don't need proper DPS. So who the fuck cares if these players are confused by their rotation and thus never do it correctly? It's not for them! As long as they can have fun mashing powerful, flashy things like Fell Cleave or More Feller Cleave when they light up and can occasionally string some 1-2-3's together, they're going to be happy. Give em some extra oGCD buttons to push every now and then and that'll keep them busy for a while, and they won't notice or care that they're drifting those buttons to hell and back and ruining their burst cycles.

The only reason you bother to make a proper DPS rotation in the first place is for the high-end players that want something to actually keep their minds engaged once they're through with progging a fight, since once you have the fight choreography memorized, you're not really thinking about it anymore, just doing rote memory recall.

But if you're going to do the automated/no rotation design, then they're sucking ass at it and they need to go back and copy WoW's homework again. Because a long time ago, WoW decided to go that route and as a result mundane combat in that game is a fucking *million* times better than XIV's. "Hit the button when it lights up" is not deep or nuanced gameplay, but it's not trying to be - it's just trying to keep you from falling asleep in your chair, and it succeeds at that. It's flashy and hitting the button when it lights up gives haha happy monke brain feelings, and that's all it needs to do. If you're going to go for a simplistic gameplay experience, then at least fucking do it right. Yoshida had the wisdom to copy several pages of WoW's homework once, and he needs to do it again.

[Shurrikhan]

...

Step 1: Look at the commonly understood explanation for why jobs are getting easier (based upon developer comments and who actually benefits from the given changes, especially within the scope of the given development philosophy). Promptly dismiss it.

Step 2: Create a hypothetical demographic of players, which you explicitly note "literally does not exist and never has."

Step 3: Instead blame the latter literally inexistant group, and by extension any theorycrafters, optimizers, etc., on the basis that despite their being the one group wholly unburdened by the "problems" SE addressed in their changes their optimizations must have dumbed down the jobs.

Step 4: ?????? Profit???

Not that it matters, but... wut, mate?

Because a long time ago, WoW decided to go that route and as a result mundane combat in that game is a fucking *million* times better than XIV's. "Hit the button when it lights up" is not deep or nuanced gameplay, but it's not trying to be - it's just trying to keep you from falling asleep in your chair, and it succeeds at that. It's flashy and hitting the button when it lights up gives haha happy monke brain feelings, and that's all it needs to do. If you're going to go for a simplistic gameplay experience, then at least fucking do it right.

But... almost no part of what makes WoW's combat decent comes simply from "hit the button when it lights up". It comes generally from their APLs being contextual to upcoming uptime. The only part "lit button go!" procs play into that is that there's an actual frequent difference there in playing around a 33% chance of a 100% effect proc vs. a guaranteed bonus effect of 33% strength due to skill interactions.

[Rolder50]

I didn't practice. I didn't read up on strats or optimizations or things like that. I just showed up and hit buttons the exact same way I'd been hitting buttons the whole time I'd been playing that tier. People were acting like you had to be dedicated and work really hard to get orange parses, and here I was getting one by basically just mashing buttons?

Sure sounds like *someone* in your party was checking The Balance and the like to figure out that these cheese strats were