How will 7.0 make jobs even more dumbed down?

[Supersnow845]

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.

People still do that anyway, we have nothing rotations and all the jobs feel the same and people still won’t play them right

[Deo14]

To be fair, PLD is a prime example of button count and complexity being two very different things.

Yep, I don't say otherwise. PLD has a lot of buttons, but not much of a brainpower needed to play.

[Rolder50]

Gear Score, Raider.io score, not using auto-grouping in favor of manual with third-party scoring addon (and telling everyone how they suck and how their performance was trash, not inviting a job that isn't bis/meta/flavor of the month)... WoW has it, FFXIV does not. The game would have to decide - either pursue the single-player FF players they are doing now or switch to a more competitive-oriented MMO and face the inevitable "mandatory" add-ons and player gradation. WoW went all the way while FFXIV avoided making most of the decisions.

Just want to point out that gear score and raider.io aren't really a factor in WoW. When it comes to pug groups there are a few factors:

Item Level - generally just needs to be high enough to be reasonable for the content you are doing.

Mythic Plus score (if doing M+ dungeons), but mind that score is pretty much just a number representing how high you have timed keys; it's not a score of your DPS or anything like that.

High end raids - MIGHT look at parses, depending on the group leader. This happens in FF14 as well. FF14 and WoW parse websites are both made by the same person, ironically.

And besides, you say "not using auto-grouping" when Mythic Dungeons and all flavors of raid outside of LFR don't even HAVE auto grouping, at all. So clearly you are just spouting buzzwords you heard on twitter.

[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?

[SweetPete]

I just wanna summon Feo/Titania with my SCH. Give me that SE. It’s all I want. An army of fae fighting for me.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I just wanna summon Feo/Titania with my SCH. Give me that SE. It’s all I want. An army of fae fighting for me.

And... at the rate they've been going with this game... They'll give you the fairy from the Zelda series that verbally says "HEY! LISTEN!" every 10 seconds before a dialogue box appears stating what is plainly obvious... >.>

[Raikai]

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?

I find kinda funny that this whole thing of optimization barely matters in Savages and EXs because you can spend 90% of your prog without minding good dps at all, as it's only important at that last moment where you're cleaning up to beat the enrage.

I wonder how that whole mindset would change if XIV's encounter script's phases were triggered not by a static timeline, but by boss health percentages. This way, actually optimizing your game as you learn the phases would matter. It's also interesting on how, as far as healing is concerned, healers do need to optimize on the run if they want to speed up the whole team's learning process.

[Shurrikhan]

I find kinda funny that this whole thing of optimization barely matters in Savages and EXs because you can spend 90% of your prog without minding good dps at all, as it's only important at that last moment where you're cleaning up to beat the enrage.

I wonder how that whole mindset would change if XIV's encounter script's phases were triggered not by a static timeline, but by boss health percentages. This way, actually optimizing your game as you learn the phases would matter. It's also interesting on how, as far as healing is concerned, healers do need to optimize on the run if they want to speed up the whole team's learning process.

%HP thresholds have their own slew of propblems, especially unless the phases purposely push back damage intake or requirements to a later position in the new phase, but such would at least force more coordination (even if in a disproportionately PuG-unfriendly manner).

That said, I feel like a lot of parties actually do mind their dps even while still progging, especially if they know what the Enrage timer is. The more firmly they sync their actions to the mechanics, the more quickly you can turn knowledge into actual muscle memory, after all, so it often does make sense to go ahead and wipe if you wouldn't make Enrage anyways and you're still messing up a mechanic everyone 'knows' but few actually have down pat.