Yet another SMN thread: SMN is the only job that doesn't have a gauge/proc management

[Eorzean_username]

[...]but then eventually it dawned on me that it's okay to have some degree of failure with your rotation during progression, simply because (generally) you don't have to dps to your best with any job until your party gets to see the enrage. If anything, it's more important that you land those Addles and use your Manashield where you should.

Yeah, this is interesting to point out — it's certainly the sort of thing that a lot of the more "skill-fixated" players try to argue, and to a degree, it's a legitimate point: many players worry more about the perfection of their rotation than is, objectively, numerically-necessary just to "win the game".

This opens up a bit of complex commentary, so I'll spoiler-tag it to prevent creating scroll-clutter.

To some degree, I think the "skilled segment of players" has kind of created the feedback loop that led us here — years of passive-aggressively complaining about, memeing, and mocking players who aren't "in the loop" on optimal practices leads the broader playerbase to become self-conscious and overly-concerned about small mistakes and "parse colours", which then causes the developers to try to calm people down by just removing the ability to make mistakes. Which, of course, is definitely "easier" than trying to make human beings stop being prideful and egotistical towards their "lessers" after they become skilled at something.

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But that's certainly not the only factor — there's also just human nature at play.

I think that most people simply do not want to be told, "Well, you're doing it wrong, but your performance is still adequate enough to not fail completely" — which is what most of the backhanded assurances given by Discords, etc, tend to sound like to players who are trying to gauge whether they're playing correctly.

This creates a general atmosphere where, regardless of how true it is, most players tend to see the game's Jobs as having only two outcomes: "failing" (non-optimal) and "succeeding" (optimal).

And I think a lot of players just do not like the idea that they're "failing" compared to the "ideal" rotation, even if the ideal rotation is not objectively necessary just to clear content.

This is why I think it's not as simple as a lot "skill-focused" players try to make it seem — the argument, "Well, let's just make the Job harder, because you'll still be able to clear content with the easier rotation".

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First of all, most guides won't even explain the "easy" rotation — because most guides want to teach you the "correct" way to play, and in the FFXIV community, that's interpreted as maximizing your damage potential. The people who make guides inherently see no reason to explain how to play at a mediocre level, because they assume that people can accomplish that on their own.

So when someone goes looking for a guide to their Job, it's all or nothing — they either get exposed to things like Optimal Drift and Alternate Lines, or they get nothing at all. If someone does try to make a "consolation prize" guide, it's usually not shared very broadly, and also usually dunked-on heavily by a lot of the "skill-focused" playerbase, because... again... it's imperfect.

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And second of all, "good enough" is just not what most people actually want.

Players don't want to think, "I'm playing the crappy version of my rotation, because it's easy, and that's what I can handle!"

They want to think, "I'm playing my rotation correctly, and I'm doing well as a result!"

The first perspective may be more realistic, but the second perspective feels far better to someone in terms of having emotional fun while playing a game.

This is why players will gravitate towards Jobs that they feel that they can intuitively play "correctly", and become averse to Jobs that they feel like they "fail" too frequently or too easily.

Let's say there's two Jobs, "Job A" and "Job B".

Job A is easy to play optimally, but has a low damage ceiling.

Job B is hard to play optimally, but has a high damage ceiling.

Let's also say that Job B played poorly ends up doing about as much damage as Job A played optimally.

I think most players will gravitate towards Job A, by a significant margin — because they don't care about their actual raw numbers nearly as much as they care about their parse colour (which has been conditioned by the community using things like "gray" and "green" as potent insults), as well as just not feeling like they're constantly messing up and failing... because that's psychologically-unpleasant.

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This is something that I think the argument, "Just make it more complex — if you don't like it, you don't need to do it", fails to take into account: people would rather decisively-succeed, than struggle and fail constantly, even if the numerical outcome is identical in both cases.

[Payotz]

First of all, most guides won't even explain the "easy" rotation — because most guides want to teach you the "correct" way to play, and in the FFXIV community, that's interpreted as maximizing your damage potential. The people who make guides inherently see no reason to explain how to play at a mediocre level, because they assume that people can accomplish that on their own.

So when someone goes looking for a guide to their Job, it's all or nothing — they either get exposed to things like Optimal Drift and Alternate Lines, or they get nothing at all. If someone does try to make a "consolation prize" guide, it's usually not shared very broadly, and also usually dunked-on heavily by a lot of the "skill-focused" playerbase, because... again... it's imperfect.

Eh. This isn't really true. In fact, I'd argue that majority of the raiding community actually gravitate towards "good enough" rotations.

A lot of guides for BLM for example, are pretty much basic guides that don't advocate for "Advanced Rotations" at all. They mention it sure, but they don't demand you master it to clear content, in fact I remember that some people was even kinda discouraging it if you were new since if you fuck up transpose lines, you lose a lot of damage compared to you just doing the Standard rotation.


I don't really know where this concept of "Oooh Raiders demand everything to be perfect and they only use the most optimal of rotations and strats" came from when the most popular PF strats are typically labeled as "Braindead, PF-Safe, Consistent" and not "High Uptime, High parses" (Hello Ilya Light Rampant ). The vast majority of raiders go with "good enough" for clears, and only in the cases where they want to go for parses/speedkills or just general improvement is when they look up "Advanced" Tips.

Like there's a big difference between average raiders like you and me and Gods.


The only reason why it just seems that they're only teaching the "hard" rotation is because in most cases, that is the only rotation. A skill ceiling being introduced would just give people gameplay variety. Something to optimize, change, and execute differently. You can't do that if your job really only has one rotation, like Tanks, most Melees (except RPR to an extent), Physical Ranged, SMN, and Healers.

It's not really got anything to do with "Pride" or anything, we just want more ways to play our Job. What's wrong with that?

[Raikai]

I think that most people simply do not want to be told, "Well, you're doing it wrong, but your performance is still adequate enough to not fail completely" — which is what most of the backhanded assurances given by Discords, etc, tend to sound like to players who are trying to gauge whether they're playing correctly.

That's exactly why I stopped interacting with that Balance Discord quite some time ago. Used to approach them with basic questions of (in the case of BLM specifically) best ways to recover from mistakes during prog. I thought I'd get something like "Save the Swiftcast to reactivate Astral Fire in case you drop it by accident" but in fact all I got from most of their MVPs or something were different variations of "Just plan better", which is obviously not helpful at all and quite a toxic take for someone asking such entry advice. Planning better is always what everybody is trying to do, especially BLM players.

I just don't really understand the fixation with perfection during progression, even in cutting-edge groups, because there's literally no gain. Even the 'mini enrage' phases with adds always have a pretty lenient dps check midway through a fight. To this matter, I really understand (and even appreciate) the lack of supported Damage Parsers on this game, because I'm sure that having them would validate "polite" kicks based on the excuse of someone not pulling their dps weight, even though the party didn't even see the second half of the fight yet. It makes me wonder if Squeenix somehow devised a way to block those damage meter add-ons, and thus invalidated the whole fflogs parsing culture, if the general mindset would change.

I also find interesting how, as a healer, I could experience both that AND the opposite of the point of view at the same time (lol). Healing do matter in prog, because without it we can't move the fight forward, and it's visible when you don't do well healing the fight's script (again trying to solve mechanics) and jarring because people eating avoidable damage in Savage adds more to your bill rather than theirs (again because the damage down debuff is kind of irrelevant until enrage checks) as more healing is required. And YET you also get the pressure of keeping up with your dps uptime even on prog situations - last static I've been a part of in ShB pulled that one on me, and one of the reasons why I got adverse for healing harder modes nowadays, if not a reclear that I have basic mastery of the encounter.

I think most players will gravitate towards Job A, by a significant margin — because they don't care about their actual raw numbers nearly as much as they care about their parse colour (which has been conditioned by the community using things like "gray" and "green" as potent insults

Ah, A is Summoner and B is Black Mage certainly! Another answer on why the former is so popular.