Ultimate Representation: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

[ForsakenRoe]

You do realize 75% of your GCD casts in that example of "engagement" are Glare, right? Not to mention it's an exaggerated example, because there are very few situations you need Asylum, Assize, Temperance, a Rapture and a Solace within a 30 sec window. Most of the time we're talking 85-90% Glare.

Ogcd's don't matter as much as you claim. If any dps was just mashing 1 button for their GCD, there'd be a riot, oGCD's or not.

We should remove BRD's DOTs and Refulgent procs, so it's just Burst Shot spam, and see how quickly people riot. Or maybe they'd be so grateful to Yoshi-P that it is now impossible to screw up their damage? Hell, there was a big fallout about GNB's CartCombo being made one button. People weren't happy at the time. I imagine the same would happen for a lot of DPS classes. Mudras removed and replaced with 'press this to instantly Raiton', forums would explode. Fell Cleave was getting to the point of memes, with 5 every 90s, until they broke it up into 3 per 60s. Every 3mins we only have one less, but the fact we do 3 in a row instead of 5 helps SO much with breaking up the repetition. Even if it's counteracted by the whole 'also use 2 more FC button presses on Inner Chaos'.

There's only been one time I can remember where 'press this button over and over' was interesting, and that's Legion, Warrior's Execute because of the Juggernaut artifact trait. A risk/reward system that made you hit harder and harder until either you died, or the enemy died. Imagine if we had a trait for WAR that said 'each time you FC, your next FC deals 5% more damage, this stacks infinitely, 20s duration' it'd be great fun, imbalanced as hell (top parses would have everyone purposely holding back just so the WAR could pad their stacks), but fun.

Give each Healer a different skill ceiling and let people play the one that has their desired level. Some people like playing Halo on easy, some medium, some heroic, some legendary. If the game only has easy, some people will get bored. If it only has legendary, some people will get frustrated and quit. The answer is to have all four and let players pick the one they want, and have a low barrier to entry for them to try another, so someone could, for example, start on medium and after doing that for a while and wanting more, swap up to heroic, or if they're feeling overwhelmed, step down to easy for a while.

After all that arguing back and forth, you finally say what I was saying (almost). I want 'WHM is Halo, SCH is COD, AST is Battlefield, SGE is Medal of Honor' (is MOH still alive?) Each has easy, medium, hard, very hard, by whatever names they go by. A WHM who is feeling overwhelmed can step down from Medium to Easy, but the difference is, they aren't forced to swap away from WHM in my version. If someone levelled to 90 as AST in your design, and was feeling overwhelmed and wanted to swap to something easier, they'd have to level an entire separate class. Which, isn't the hardest thing in the world, but it still takes time and effort. And some people don't want to for various reasons. I know a friend who has some RP thing she does, where one of her 3 characters only does '2H weapons', so BRD, DRG, DRK, WAR, etc. Another is 'magic only' so Casters and Healers, and the last is 'the leftover stuff' which, by coincidence, seemed to end up being 'two objects, one in each hand' so PLD, NIN, DNC, MNK, etc. Weird how that worked out. Anyway, yeh, forcing someone to level all the classes in a role, just in case they feel like they're unsatisfied with 'the current difficulty level', probably not good design.

Besides, even in something like Halo, you've got different skill ceiling levels. You can go through the whole game just rooty-tooty-point and shooty on Easy, yes, but you can also learn stuff to use/abuse like Rocketjumping. And then there's secrets like the skulls to collect that expect the player to use these more complex movement techs to get to. Or, in something like Metroid for example, at no point does the game tell you how to 'infinite bomb jump'. It implies you can chain two with good timing to 'double jump' with some puzzles, like an early one in Chozo Ruins in Prime 1, but not 'hey if you do it right you can actually do this infinitely'. 'ShineSpark' is a staple term of gaming now, but it's only taught to the player in a few of the games, like Super. In Fusion, sequence breaking using it gets a hidden easter egg dialog between two NPCs. You don't 'need' to know how to ShineSpark or IBJ to complete the game. But they allow you to do wacky stuff like getting the Space Jump Boots early in Prime 1, or Varia Suit early in Zero Mission, skipping the need to get some other upgrades. It's possible to do a '0% save' run, skipping all non-essential upgrades using creative application of ShineSparks and IBJs. It feels rewarding to the player to be able to do stuff like that, and is a much harder optional challenge than a 100% savefile run, due to you having only 1 energy tank. But again, completely optional.