Discuss: Should new jobs start at level 1?

[ForsakenRoe]

"Yes, >80% of your actions are the exactly same, but you're now using a 30% longer sword, so we need to infantilize you again on the assumption you've completely forgotten how to play now that your sword is longer." Ehh... Nah.

Starting at lower levels also adds the risk of building 'bad habits'. How many people start believing that GCD healing is your main source of HPS, and that OGCDs like Tetra are 'for emergencies', instead of the community-accepted reverse? Sage starting at 1 would be absolutely bloody awful, and would get people thinking that Diagnosis is a skill that is worth using at any point. Instead, by starting it at 70, the player has Physis2, Ixochole, Druochole, Kerachole, Soteria/Kardia interactions, Toxicon for mobility, etc

If 'oh the onboarding is harder if the job starts at not-level-1' is the issue, the solution is not to lower the start level, it's to make a better onboarding process. The solo instances are a start, but they still need more work. Sage one tells you to use GCD healing, for example, iirc. Instead, it'd be better to have a fight where the catgirl tank says 'alright, let's fight this monster here. But to make sure you've learned how your Sage stuff works, I want you to try and do it without using Diagnosis once!' And this would be optional for the player, they wouldn't fail for using Diagnosis, but by prompting them to try it, they might realize that actually, Druochole is pretty strong. Taurochole has damage mitigation attached too. Soteria allows you to keep doing damage, and the Kardia healing is able to keep up much easier. And this would allow that player to build better habits re: how to heal, from the moment they start, instead of learning 'wrong' stuff like 'press Cure 1 for a free Cure 2 proc!'

[Shurrikhan]

I mean, a lot of that also just comes down to the game dealing with the excessive annoyance of failure (having to run back to the boss after a wipe, or previously having to wait on CDs after each wipe) solely by making failure itself nigh impossible in casual content (rather than just, starting people outside the boss room and adding some degree of time-based reward to mitigate the efficiency costs of particularly bad runs, so people don't just abandon and do FATEs for the 30 minutes).

If failure is impossible, you can't teach anything through the difference of whether X worked or not, since everything works regardless.



Having far tighter ilvl spans and higher base difficulty in leveling content would do wonders for its ability to teach. Of course, we also need to not completely invert how certain roles (especially, healing) function between late levels and those prior.

(Granted, accustoming players to greater difficulty would largely remove the threat otherwise posed by increased healing requirements and added complexity to downtime activity, which would in turn make for a lesser gap between that role's early and late levels.)

[SaberMaxwell]

I wouldn't mind the option to start the game as these post-ARR jobs at level 1. I often roleplay it out like they were that job the whole way along either way, and depending how stubborn I am gonna be I level to unlock them (excepting HW jobs ofc) before really doing story anyway.

[AmiableApkallu]

If 'oh the onboarding is harder if the job starts at not-level-1' is the issue, the solution is not to lower the start level, it's to make a better onboarding process. The solo instances are a start, but they still need more work. Sage one tells you to use GCD healing, for example, iirc. Instead, it'd be better to have a fight where the catgirl tank says 'alright, let's fight this monster here. But to make sure you've learned how your Sage stuff works, I want you to try and do it without using Diagnosis once!' And this would be optional for the player, they wouldn't fail for using Diagnosis, but by prompting them to try it, they might realize that actually, Druochole is pretty strong. Taurochole has damage mitigation attached too. Soteria allows you to keep doing damage, and the Kardia healing is able to keep up much easier. And this would allow that player to build better habits re: how to heal, from the moment they start, instead of learning 'wrong' stuff like 'press Cure 1 for a free Cure 2 proc!'

I'm not sure I particularly like these Cure 1 and Diagnosis examples:

• It's not the purpose of onboarding to counteract job design. The Freecure trait simply needs to be deleted.
• It's nonsensical to say, "Don't use X." Why did the game give X to you in the first place, then? Either X needs to be deleted, or the explanation needs more nuance.

For healers, the more helpful phrasing is something like, "In general, prefer using your Lily/Aetherflow/Addersgall and oGCD healing tools to Spells such as Medica, etc. <insert reasons why>"

The other thing is that the more prescriptive ("Play the job this way") the onboarding becomes versus being descriptive ("Here's what this ability does"), the more risk there is that the officially blessed way of playing the job fails to align with how the players think the job should be played. And I think that's a worse problem than players maybe stumbling into a non-optimal way of playing a job.