How will 7.0 make jobs even more dumbed down?

[TheMightyMollusk]

Hot take, jobs were never difficult in the first place. Having a ton of buttons to press doesn't make it deep or difficult, just busy. I'd rather the boss do more to make me pay attention than having to watch my hotbars all the time.

[Rolder50]

Hot take, jobs were never difficult in the first place. Having a ton of buttons to press doesn't make it deep or difficult, just busy. I'd rather the boss do more to make me pay attention than having to watch my hotbars all the time.

Having to be sure you don't accidentally break your combo or waste resources or whatnot while doing mechanics is what makes it difficult. Being on a job like Summoner inherently makes fights easier for you, since the job part plays itself.

On a related note, I saw a video the other day of a guy making a one button macro rotation for Summoner and parsing around 95 with it, so that's hilarious.

[Raikai]

Having to be sure you don't accidentally break your combo or waste resources or whatnot while doing mechanics is what makes it difficult.

I kind of hate they elected that to be the difficulty.

XIV in the end boils down to a game of 'test of your reflexes' to see if you can press your keys in time to get into the 2min meta instead of actively trying to make players think and adapt on the go depending on the situation. So and so that is pretty easy to see people literally spreadsheeting every GCD in a fight.

That causes fights to be really stressful while you're progging, but also really boring when you go for reclears. No in-between, and that's more egregious for healers.

Ironically, if you're looking for this kind of dynamic relationship with fights, PVP does have it. As a DNC in pvp, I find - very - fulfilling that one of the things that separate really good DNCs is good awareness of the person you should be Close Positioning with, to make the best of it. I really wish we could use CP like that in PVE, at least it would give more layers in the optimization field.

[Absimiliard]

Hot take, jobs were never difficult in the first place. Having a ton of buttons to press doesn't make it deep or difficult, just busy. I'd rather the boss do more to make me pay attention than having to watch my hotbars all the time.

This right here is on the right track. The jobs really aren't difficult. I don't even know that I would call most of them overly busy since FFXIV's jank servers required them to make the GCD twelve years long. The handful with an inordinate number of OGCDs can get pretty busy during their burst windows, but that's about it.

Hell, quite frankly, the two-minute burst meta itself is the real problem. The jank job design we've been seeing is just one of its symptoms.

Having to be sure you don't accidentally break your combo or waste resources or whatnot while doing mechanics is what makes it difficult. Being on a job like Summoner inherently makes fights easier for you, since the job part plays itself.

Most jobs are so static from minute to minute that you've little risk of dropping a combo or wasting resources if you even half know what you're doing, though. This is of course more difficult for people that tend to be overwhelmed easily or just tend to panic a little when faced with boss mechanics, but it's for the most part not a big deal otherwise. Bosses being designed to go full tilt during the burst window ends up being more of an annoyance than an increase to difficulty. It accomplishes nothing besides dragging the fight out a bit more, and even that really only affects with groups that aren't coordinated enough to keep their DPS up while performing mechanics for the most part.

[ForsakenRoe]

Hot take, jobs were never difficult in the first place. Having a ton of buttons to press doesn't make it deep or difficult, just busy. I'd rather the boss do more to make me pay attention than having to watch my hotbars all the time.

Hot take, I'd rather the complexity of the game's combat be more skewed towards execution of rotation, because if you have a simplified rotation and complex bosses, the 'challenge' is entirely on the part of the encounter, which leads to what we have now: the higher level of content you become accustomed to the difficulty of, everything below that starts to feel bland. I hate having to do EX roulette, because as a healer I have an extremely simple rotation, and nothing in there threatens me enough to require using my other buttons in any interesting way. Every pull I can go Krasis Physis Kerachole and then any one of Haima, Soteria, Panhaima or Holos, and the tank's ignoreable for 15 seconds. And then my job's done, and my 'damage rotation' is to use my Phlegmas, and then press Dyskrasia until the button breaks.

Maybe it doesn't affect DPS as much because they still have a rotation to do, but if the choice is 'BRD loses it's DOTs (and equal impact change to all other jobs), but now the savage fights can be even more complex because of the extra cognitive load that's freed up', that's a terrible trade, because when you go into say, EX roulette, your single target 'rotation' is boiled down to Burst Shot spam, and the encounters don't compensate with additional complexity because they're EX roulette fodder

[sharknado]

Hot take, I'd rather the complexity of the game's combat be more skewed towards execution of rotation,

Then you get some players doing 25-50% of the DPS other player can pull on the same job with the same gear and similarly with healers and tanks. The more rotation complexity you add the more personal performance will differ and the more players will want to group with the "good ones" vs the "bad ones"... Everything has its downsides.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Then you get some players doing 25-50% of the DPS other player can pull on the same job with the same gear and similarly with healers and tanks. The more rotation complexity you add the more personal performance will differ and the more players will want to group with the "good ones" vs the "bad ones"... Everything has its downsides.

I miss skill expression mattering in MMOs. I miss taking the time to gear or play well mattering. Even if that meant my output was 3X other players, or lower than some others when I was still learning.

[Shurrikhan]

I miss skill expression mattering in MMOs. I miss taking the time to gear or play well mattering. Even if that meant my output was 3X other players, or lower than some others when I was still learning.

While I agree in principle, I feel like I have to ask: What is the actual value in doing above the average (r)DPS necessary to clear? What is your goal for wanting to, say, increase the gap between a mere clear and perfect play from the latter doing almost 150% of the prior to some 300%?


Let's introduce two terms here, for ease of discussion. The % of a job's maximum value produced required to reach an amount that, averaged across a party's members, would just barely result in a clear would be its Clear Requirement. The amount of effort relative to perfect ("hyper")optimization (as used to hit its maximum value produceable) required for a job to reach that Clear Requirement would be its Effort Requirement.

So, increasing the Clear Requirement will of course increase the Effort Requirement, while increase the Effort Requirement while maintaining the same Clear Requirement means that we made each kit harder to play to a sufficient level through changes to the kit, rather than through the encounter (i.e., a reshuffling of the job's damage, nerfing the output of less engaged play).

Anything beyond what's needed (the CR) is, well, excess. At best, it allows one to make up for others' mistakes, so that the deviation between players in a party that can nonetheless clear can be larger. And that's the portion into which most of this expanded range in output would lie if going from a great player doing 33-50% more than a "can barely clear" player to doing 150-200% more than them, I would think?


In those or similar terms, what is it that you'd really want to see here? Would you like to see it get harder to clear, by each player needing to optimize their kit further (by reshuffling the value produced from proper play, so that effort and performance correlate more linearly)? Do you just want for some players to be able to carry harder (which in turn means other players being able to clear despite leaching harder)? A combination of the two? What are you looking for here?

[ForsakenRoe]

required for a job to reach that Clear Requirement would be its Effort Requirement.

I think you have found a series of words to explain the concept of Skill Floor and Skill Ceiling, just, framed in the context of 'relative to the content that is being done', no? Like, if you need to do 8k damage on a DPS to beat the dummy for P10S, then for that job, in P10S, the Skill Floor would be 8k damage. And if through optimization and skill you can reach 9.5k damage on the job in the same gear, then that's the Skill Ceiling. Right?

Though, I guess with how allergic to the idea of 'raise the skill ceiling, without moving the skill floor' some are, maybe using different terms for them might get through better lmao

[Shurrikhan]

I think you have found a series of words to explain the concept of Skill Floor and Skill Ceiling, just, framed in the context of 'relative to the content that is being done', no? Like, if you need to do 8k damage on a DPS to beat the dummy for P10S, then for that job, in P10S, the Skill Floor would be 8k damage. And if through optimization and skill you can reach 9.5k damage on the job in the same gear, then that's the Skill Ceiling. Right?

Though, I guess with how allergic to the idea of 'raise the skill ceiling, without moving the skill floor' some are, maybe using different terms for them might get through better lmao

Kinda, if unintentionally. Mostly using those terms because "Skill Floor" gets conflated between "Necessary output" (average of rDPS+aDPS while somehow accounting for the value of utilities) and "necessary input" (effort), and "Skill Ceiling" sometimes arbitrarily gets limited to just what cognitive load a given or average player is aware of the potential value/use of or just what optimizations aren't less consequential than mere Crit/DHit RNG, rather than what all optimizations are possible regardless and the cognitive load.

But, again, my question what he wanted from raising the minimum input and/or minimum output required (adjusting jobs to redistribute part of the reward simple optimizations to more complex optimizations and/or nerfing them relative to content) and/or raising the maximum input and output possible (increasing the excess throughput/effort available to jobs) in order to widen that gap between the worst and best parse, so to speak.

Is it simply greater "carry" (flipside: "leech") potential? Is it the redistribution, itself, of rewarded value per (complexity of) a given optimization?