Jobs should gain their core rotations much earlier

[ICountFrom0]

We used to have our full rotation at 50.

Sadly most of that got removed in order to remove bloat when the classes hit endgame.

Each time 10 more levels show up, something gets stolen from the early game.

[Moonlite]

I lean towards give the jobs basically the full dps kit by level 20. And just change the animations with new abilities as you level. Then add the single special skills later.

[Remish]

I lean towards give the jobs basically the full dps kit by level 20. And just change the animations with new abilities as you level. Then add the single special skills later.

At this point, why have leveling at all.

[CaedemSanguis]

-> Have a nice rotation very soon

-> Feel the evolution of your abilities

Pick one, there's no good answer

[Scruit_Bigtime]

my big grief is not having my gap closer on tanks at lower levels.

so often i'll go into a roulette, hit my gap closer hotkey and stand there doing nothing for a few seconds until i realise... "oh, derp"

[Rithy255]

-> Have a nice rotation very soon

-> Feel the evolution of your abilities

Pick one, there's no good answer

The good answer is having a proper rotation at level 50, Back in 2.0 ARR jobs actually had proper rotations, that was just slowly took out over time to make space for expansion abilities.

ARR should be the source of main "class progression" (for learning your class abilities) PLD for example should gain magic attacks (a core part of its identity), but that can be later expanded on with the holy blade attacks or any upgrades... The base class should feel somewhat similar from 50 to 90, as you'll be synching back and forward from those content, level 50 ARR shouldn't feel half complete for classes.

Not saying every Job should feel the exact same from 50 to 90, they should get upgrades, new defensive/utility skills, some exciting damage buttons, but at the same time a lot of jobs are hardly recognisable and are just practically unfun to play at 50

[Renathras]

They do seem to be getting better at this. Personally I believe every Job should have most of the "core" of its rotation by level 50. Considering the bulk of the game's content is 50+ roulettes and such). The core rotation (1-2-3 or DoT+nuke) should be done by level 30, ideally by level 15 when ques start. They should really move a lot of the oGCD stuff to later levels. For instance, PLD gets Fight or Flight at level 2. Before it gets the -2 in its combo or its AOE (levels 4 and 6) or the third hit of its core combo (26), and well before it gets stuff like its heal 58) or even its first mitigation (35). And you don't come close to getting its "true" rotation until at least level 68 when you first get Requiescat, but realistically not until 76 since you don't get Atonement until then. The first spell WHM gets when it gets its Job stone isn't Holy for AOE or Regen or Cure 3 for healing...it's Presence of Mind, something that in theory can be used as a healing CD but is almost always used for damage, but you can't do anything optimal with at level 30 anyway since you're around 20-30 levels before other Jobs start getting party buffs.

All that being said, you get some Jobs like WAR that essentially has its end-game rotation by level 50 (its upkeep buff, main combo, GCD rage spender, oGCD +50 rage button, and 1 min CD burst buff), where after that, mostly it just gets upgrades to abilities, gets Raw Intuition at 56 turning it into the tanking god, and gets death buzzsaw at 90. But most of these don't change the core gameplay itself other than 62 and 64 giving you some oGCDs to use on CD (Upheval) and cram into your burst phase (Onslaught).

SMN, for all it is attacked, has its core rotation mostly by level 22 (all three legos and the button that regenerates them and boosts damage), and by the latest, 60 when it gets Astral Flow for Dreadwyrm Trance, which is just low level Bahamut. Higher than that it just promotes and ups potencies, the party buff at 66, and the Primal Astral Flows at 86 (though only two of those change the rotation, and not by much since at lower levels you simply fill Slipstream and Crimson Cyclone/Strike's GCDs with 3x more Ruins instead.

RDM doesn't start until 50, but has essentially its rotation done at 60 when it gets Embolden and Manafication. Yes, it adds Holy/Flare (70), Scorch (80), and Resolution (90) after that, but they're each just "press one more button at the end of the melee combo", which doesn't really change the gameplay much, and only Holy/Flare is a choice anyway, the other two you automatically do no matter what.

SCH is pretty much, relatively speaking, "feature complete" by 60, if not 50, in terms of the playstyle, rotation, and so on, with the later stuff being more powerful versions and additional oGCDs, but they have the core concept of weaving oGCDs and the base DoT+nuke rotation as well as Ruin 2 for movement and Energy Drain for AF dumps all by level 50.

.

So some Jobs are better about this than others. I think WAR and SMN are probably the best designed in this sense right now (in terms of having their overall rotation and Job setup by level 50 where the later additions are relatively minor), with RDM and probably SCH being second from there. (Some other Jobs might make this list, I'm just not sure about them...like WHM is easy, but doesn't have its Afflatus abilities until the 70s.)

[Draken]

Even rotations are boring. Dodge the bad and keep rotation going isn’t engaging content.

I miss the days of situational awareness. Elemental counters, damage type changes, etc. for all the good YP did getting the game popular again, he is destroying the franchise with his over accessibility campaign.

14 and 16 are now too easy and dumbed down.

[Renathras]

I love current SMN. If they make it any more complex, I probably won't play it anymore.

Agreed.

You could just not press the added buttons and you have the same. I really like SMN conceptually but I absolutely don't like how it plays. lol

Unless the buttons do absolutely nothing, this is never a valid rebuttal. For example, suppose there's a RDM that doesn't like melee. While, yes, you could tell them to just not ever use the melee buttons, that means they're basically griefing every party they got into for encounters without enrages by making encounters take far far FAR longer than they need to, and for anything with enrages, make it somewhat impossible for the other 7+ people in the party to clear.

That's not a valid response.

The two points that seem to always cause issues with learning are too many OGCDs, or the rotation shifting significantly after a specific point like how old BLM used to be. The other problem that they have is that they got to find ways to cram a lot of controls into a smaller package due to the way the game is built.

Agree with this, too. Pre-6.3 PLD was annoying to sync because muscle memory would have you go Royal combo after the magic phase (since Swords put a DoT on the enemy that didn't stack with Goring), but doing anything level 89 or lower - one level before max level - meant upending your muscle memory entirely. BLM was in a similar boat (and I guess still kinda is), and I remember having a friend that would not run anything not level cap on their BLM because it would screw with her muscle memory.

Jobs don't need to be TOTALLY complete by 50, but they shouldn't be actively countermanding your trained muscle memory you've spent hours/days/etc developing at level cap.

Right? Why on earth is Sheltron level 35 while Raw Intuition is 56 and HoS/TBN are 68/70?

To be fair, Shelltron isn't a good ability until 82 when it gains the heal. Raw Intuition has the heal from the jump and upgrades (twice?) to be even more healy. Shelltron is just flat DPS (and when it was put at level 35, was only block chance increase, not flat damage mitigation).

I think think Summoners a case of a class that it's a basic design, that all was needed was ability upgrades for the most part after a certain point, which results it feeling similar at all levels. Which yeah I don't want for every job, it's fine for *some* jobs to be easy but old summoner players that actually enjoyed the job were the ones getting a bad deal here, It's good to have some easier jobs, but they should always be new ones instead of just making every job easy for every player... Not all Jobs should be designed to be easy for everyone. I hope SE makes a fair balance of difficulty for more jobs in the future despite current trends.

As a long-time SMN player who really likes new SMN was was kind of meh on old SMN by ShB (I liked it in ARR and HW, but SB and ShB just got progressively more Frankenstein's monster), I do hope the new caster is good for you guys. Hoping for Green Mage DoT Mage since I know a lot of people did enjoy that. Though personally, I find new SMN feels a lot better to play, but everyone has their own preferences and I respect that.

I do 100% agree with you, though, that it's nice to have a mix of easier and hard Jobs in the game so everyone can kind of choose their own adventure/level they want to engage at. I'm not sure they should always be new ones - some old Jobs were easy before, so it makes sense for them to be so now (RDM used to be a bit easier, BRD used to be considered easier, WHM was always considered easy), etc. And I think some Jobs starting at level 1 being easy is a good idea since a player that wants an easier Job shouldn't have to level to 70/80/etc before unlocking it; some that start at level 1 (ideally one for each role) would be a better idea. And some people who want harder Jobs want a new one from time to time, so it would suck if all new Jobs were the easy ones.

But I do agree with you that it's bad to pull a Job out from under people - and this goes both ways. Making SMN easy or making WHM hard would upend the people that played them before in a lot of cases, and that's not really fair to the existing players. I hope they don't do any major reworks like THAT going forward, just because of how alienating it is.

/looks nervously at DRG and AST...

[Darkobra]

-> Have a nice rotation very soon

-> Feel the evolution of your abilities

Pick one, there's no good answer

My answer solved both of those. It's amazing how many options open up when you can count to three.