And the slow death of the RPG based battlesystem

[Valence]

The narrative that jobs are becoming the same lol. I ask you to explain why and you couldn't. I ask you to explain how you would do it differently and you couldn't. I'm not even sure what people like you want. Overly complex rotations that feel really annoying to execute, against a boss that has to be boring by design because the rotation complexity is so high? Rotations are more enjoyable and diverse than ever before, they removed a lot of annoying busywork that encouraged installing third party addons so the players could focus less on the boss and more on their annoying rotations.

Can you stop derailing the thread with this? It's actually annoying. The more I'm reading your replies, and the more annoyed at you I'm actually getting. Just stop?

[Shurrikhan]

Mechanic based difficulty is always going to create more unique and engaging encounters compared to rotation based difficulty.

Compared to rotations in isolation, sure, as those are what you do against striking dummies. Compared to a fight that requires significant adjustments to both the overarching rotations (2-minute loop) and to or within smaller strings, though? Not necessarily; the mechanics, if the kits so permit, can easily create more rotational complexity and the kits in turn make the fight feel more fulfilling (but generally in a way that, unless tuning is extremely tight, also doesn't come with the lesser accessibility of forming that engagement from [body-check] mechanics).

Personally, I'm fine with there being content in which mechanics are 80+% of the gameplay. My issue is that there's no difficult content for which all else isn't (almost) wholly eclipsed by the simple ability to perform mechanics. Arguably, there is only even one genre we'd consider crafted "content" (rather than mere mob-grinds) outside of that. We have MobGrinds, TrivialHallwaySprints... and then TrialsV1, TrialsV2 (Normal Raids), TrialsV3 (Alliance Raids' Raid Bosses), and TrialsV4 (Savage Raids), and TrialsV5 (Ultimate).

The short of it is that rotations (be they overarching rotations, tactics, or fine adjustments) can only be as varied as content allows, but in the pursuit of making the content's own mechanics as clear as possible, content has increasingly failed to give rotations anything to vary or be varied by, which in turn makes a fight feel that much more similar between runs, between a job's place among different players/compositions and consequent strategies, and in playing the fight across different jobs.

When using the same rotation for every fight, yeah, rotations would quickly lose their novelty. But, lacking much interaction between kit and the given fight, the various skins of in, out, left, right, clocks, cardinals, etc. also lose their novelty that much more quickly, making fights increasingly feel same-y.

I don't know what the perfect solution here is. Doubtless, fights would take up some constraints in efforts to better leverage kits. But without that, fights and kits both take far less time to lose apparent depth and uniqueness.

That being said, those constraints are nowhere near what you seem to be imagining.

[Valence]

Part of this just reflects how players have changed from 20 years ago. Progression isn't tied back to your community. You can find groups at your specific progression point with relative ease, and just jump into doing content on demand. As a result, we're less tolerant about waiting around for other people to work through their mistakes. Nobody wants to sit around and watch a so-called 'main tank' learn the pattern of cleaves on a fight or how to move a boss. You might want more intricate heal checks, but players aren't going to sit around and watch you learn how to manage your resources and figure out your timings in order to do so. Mechanic checks are more egalitarian. You're either at the prog point, or you're not and we silently disband. Your role choice doesn't matter.

While I did try to show how the genre itself is indeed moving into a certain direction and I agree with that, I think that saying this is a complete fallacy. I could say the exact same thing with healing: if your healer isn't healing properly and learning how to manage their toolkit in order through a fight, you'll wipe and people will get frustrated. Worse, if you have the same person constantly fucking up on a body check mechanic and blocking everybody from progress, it's the exact same thing. I do ask then: should we also completely remove healing, because if the healer is bad, it's frustrating for the rest of the party? Should we remove body checks, because if one person is bad, it's frustrating? That's a fundamental part of team based online games, so if people are trying to find ways to not have to deal with that (hint: it's impossible), then perhaps they're not playing the right game?

Or perhaps what you tried to hint at was that they're going down the road of balance between solo play and team play? That would be fair, but what we have right now already feels like almost a solo experience with the side effect that if someone else fucks up their solo experience on the side, it also wipes you... How is this better than an actually team based performance? That's what the game feels like at higher level those days.

[Valence]

Compared to rotations in isolation, sure, as those are what you do against striking dummies. Compared to a fight that requires significant adjustments to both the overarching rotations (2-minute loop) and to or within smaller strings, though? Not necessarily; the mechanics, if the kits so permit, can easily create more rotational complexity and the kits in turn make the fight feel more fulfilling (but generally in a way that, unless tuning is extremely tight, also doesn't come with the lesser accessibility of forming that engagement from [body-check] mechanics).

Personally, I'm fine with there being content in which mechanics are 80+% of the gameplay. My issue is that there's no difficult content for which all else isn't (almost) wholly eclipsed by the simple ability to perform mechanics. Arguably, there is only even one genre we'd consider crafted "content" (rather than mere mob-grinds) outside of that. We have MobGrinds, TrivialHallwaySprints... and then TrialsV1, TrialsV2 (Normal Raids), TrialsV3 (Alliance Raids' Raid Bosses), and TrialsV4 (Savage Raids), and TrialsV5 (Ultimate).

The short of it is that rotations (be they overarching rotations, tactics, or fine adjustments) can only be as varied as content allows, but in the pursuit of making the content's own mechanics as clear as possible, content has increasingly failed to give rotations anything to vary or be varied by, which in turn makes a fight feel that much more similar between runs, between a job's place among different players/compositions and consequent strategies, and in playing the fight across different jobs.

When using the same rotation for every fight, yeah, rotations would quickly lose their novelty. But, lacking much interaction between kit and the given fight, the various skins of in, out, left, right, clocks, cardinals, etc. also lose their novelty that much more quickly, making fights increasingly feel same-y.

I don't know what the perfect solution here is. Doubtless, fights would take up some constraints in efforts to better leverage kits. But without that, fights and kits both take far less time to lose apparent depth and uniqueness.

That being said, those constraints are nowhere near what you seem to be imagining.

You actually touch to a point I completely omitted in the OP, which is the total homogenization of fight models. Everything today is a variant of a trial, be it raids, criterion, or actual trials. Most pve today boils down to beat the crap out of a boss in a battle arena. Trash mob on the side is always the same, in the same amounts of packs between each walls in the case of dungeons. There is so little variation that when you actually get hard content with trash (criterion) it immediately feels like a breath of fresh air, and yet, it follows the exact same patterns between every criterion. When one thinks about it, why do they feel so constrained and forced to constantly have every piece of content following the same overused model down to a T? Having patches following a formulaic pattern is one thing, but fight models?


Just imagine the face of players the day we get a dungeon where the first boss waits for your immediately? And then you get completely different trash mob patterns, perhaps even randomized a little, some "gate bosses"? That's not a lot of variation, but even such a tiny thing would suddenly feel like playing a whole different game already, and it goes a long way showing how much the current formulaic, rigid patterns are oppressive. Why does every dungeon have to be 2 mob packs > boss 1 > 2 mob packs > boss 2 > 2 mob packs > boss 3? Criterion tried to backpedal a little and revisit the concept of trash, which is cool, but what do we get now? Interesting trash 1 > boss 1 > Interesting trash 2 > boss 2 > boss 3, every single time.

What the heck?

[mallleable]

You actually touch to a point I completely omitted in the OP, which is the total homogenization of fight models. Everything today is a variant of a trial, be it raids, criterion, or actual trials. Most pve today boils down to beat the crap out of a boss in a battle arena. Trash mob on the side is always the same, in the same amounts of packs between each walls in the case of dungeons. There is so little variation that when you actually get hard content with trash (criterion) it immediately feels like a breath of fresh air, and yet, it follows the exact same patterns between every criterion. When one thinks about it, why do they feel so constrained and forced to constantly have every piece of content following the same overused model down to a T? Having patches following a formulaic pattern is one thing, but fight models?


Just imagine the face of players the day we get a dungeon where the first boss waits for your immediately? And then you get completely different trash mob patterns, perhaps even randomized a little, some "gate bosses"? That's not a lot of variation, but even such a tiny thing would suddenly feel like playing a whole different game already, and it goes a long way showing how much the current formulaic, rigid patterns are oppressive. Why does every dungeon have to be 2 mob packs > boss 1 > 2 mob packs > boss 2 > 2 mob packs > boss 3? Criterion tried to backpedal a little and revisit the concept of trash, which is cool, but what do we get now? Interesting trash 1 > boss 1 > Interesting trash 2 > boss 2 > boss 3, every single time.

What the heck?

Hot take: player's insistence, and CBU3 following suit on w2w trash pulls stifles dungeon design.

[Shurrikhan]

Heretical position, I suppose, but why are we acting like “trinity-based roles” or “trinity-based gameplay” is necessarily good, let alone ideal? RPG mechanics in the sense of variety and immersion, sure, but the homogenizing of class/job/specs/professions to suit/leverage three rigid roles? That hardly seems a net improvement past a pretty low threshold, let alone an ideal to aim for...

Whether you are playing a trinity-based game or not, your core gameplay is simply an assemblage of (fairly) consistent mechanics and considerations. And you don’t strictly need Tanks, Healers, Damage-Dealers —let alone in that particular “trinity”— to have depth of mechanics related to each.

All that is needed for depth in tanking, healing, damage-dealing, etc. is significant sway and reliable effect from actions (that when I hit this skill that costs me damage, I can more than make up for that through the utility of suppression, distraction, etc.), not pre-allocated responsibilities.

Pre-allocated responsibilities are effectively just restrictions on what you can have that amount to, at best, a “QoL” measure to ensure that you spend far less time learning…

• What your party’s players are good at and/or tend towards,
• What a given fight needs (since it’s always doable with a standard composition),
• How to play new jobs of the same role (since the fights are designed around the a standard allotment of roles, not jobs), and
• How to play in general, especially if playing just one role (since per job you can only meaningfully interact with about half the breadth of player mechanics otherwise available to you).

That’s not to say, of course, that every non-trinity game will necessarily be more complex than a trinity-game. Obviously not, just as not every trinity-based game will be of equal complexity, nor every shooter, etc. But the model itself is less restricted despite being capable of everything a trinity model is if only players were willing to deal with a larger breadth of mechanics, more frequent and deeper periods of adapting to one’s teammates, and were okay with occasionally learning what all a fight might need (with some fights having wildly different conditions than just bringing a standard composition, doing the fight’s dance, and hitting one’s CDs and GCDs while hopefully at least needing to occasionally leverage what differences still remain among choices within the same job).

[HikariKurosawa]

Honestly just sounds like you're all bored of the game and looking for an external solution. None of what you're saying is valid in my experience. I get that you want it to be different than it is, but the criticism doesn't hold up the way you think it does. When your ideas are challenged too, you just do some weird deflection and throw out buzz words.

That one guy talking about old content being trivial when overgeared, I mean?? yes? That's how mmos work? Of all the mmos on the market right now, ffxiv is the only one that actually allows you to even re-experience old content at all without going far out of your way to do so. The fact that we can even fight nidhogg at level 90 and it be a fight is huge. Content in ongoing mmos will always have an expiration date. That's why they make ultimate raids.

To be frank it's just exhausting to even listen to anything you have to say. I feel bad for square enix if they even consider threads like this at all. Most if not all of your posts just scream jaded and burnt out.

[kayll]

The issue is the game isn't very innovative mechanically, they just copied a bunch of stuff from other MMO's "just cause" and never built upon what was initially there to become its own thing.

They removed some of this stuff over time, and never filled the holes.
So now you just deal damage, and then stand in spot X,Y and Z, for one boss, and then do the same for the next.

[Shurrikhan]

The narrative that jobs are becoming the same lol. I ask you to explain why and you couldn't. I ask you to explain how you would do it differently and you couldn't. I'm not even sure what people like you want. Overly complex rotations that feel really annoying to execute, against a boss that has to be boring by design because the rotation complexity is so high? Rotations are more enjoyable and diverse than ever before, they removed a lot of annoying busywork that encouraged installing third party addons so the players could focus less on the boss and more on their annoying rotations.

Jobs are indeed becoming more similar to one another over time. They have increasingly pruned unique considerations in excess of their role templates without those role commons/templates becoming equally, if at all, more complex. Many nuances previously available to certain jobs have now been removed from the game in entirety or replaced by duller, more fool-proofed versions (see DoT-optimizing weave lengths on NIN before mudras/NJ were GCD-ified; see use of AoEs for range in difficult uptime scenarios, as used by Monk in fights like T9/T9S or later DRG in Neo ExDeath).

Rotations are not necessarily any more enjoyable now than in earlier expansions. Such is subjective, but if you are to treat this as an objective and universal truth, then, here's a countering anecdote for you. I sure as heck preferred SAM's rotations in Stormblood to now. I preferred the kits of SCH and AST in Stormblood to how their kits today. I preferred the flow and at least occasional banking optimizations of ShB DRG to EW DRG. I'm not fond of Paradox and preferred when B4-less rotational weaves were contextually optimal and we didn't have the bloat of Xenoglossy vs. Flare, Firestarter procs were vital to sustaining Flare rotations, Thundercloud procs were more integral to mobility, etc. Heck, I'm probably in the minority in even considering Endwalker nearly on par with late Stormblood Monk. Endwalker rotations on most jobs aren't awful, but neither is there any evidence that rotations are by large at their best.

Job rotations are also certainly not at their most diverse, to the point that I wonder how anyone who'd have played since Stormblood could even seriously consider the claim. Look at how MCH rotated in Stormblood and compare that to now. Look at any of the tanks. Look at how BLM used to play even more diversely, or how SMN used to handle trash compared to now. We're at likely the least diverse period of the game.

Nor were most job's rotations significantly more "annoying" now than they were before. Some had higher floors, yes, but for the most part, the difference was in sort of mid-tier optimizations that made far better use of aspects acquired over the leveling process (instead of the shallowed and/or disjointed mess we've increasingly made of it since StB). Our overarching rotational optimizations are every bit as complex now as then.

Third-party combat assisting addons are almost entirely in the vein of button consolidations, not auto-rotation. Think PvP combos. That's it. And they're plenty frequently used even now, so I'm not sure how you get the idea that replacing more nuance-capable aspects with yet more flavors of "Press CD version 1 if 1 target, version 2 if more than 1 target" has somehow reduced the number of people getting rid of bloat where they can. If anything, because there's that much more bloat now within our obligatory keys (instead of the mere likes of cross-class Featherfoot or StB Cleric Stance) and there are fewer use cases for anything out of lockstep order, those addons have become that much more useful (more buttons saved, more value from saved buttons, and fewer ways for consolidation to go wrong).

Nor do rotations having more pieces to work with/from constrain boss design. Hell, if increasingly trimming or devaluing those unique bits of optimization previously available to jobs allows for so much more interesting fights, what the hell is going on with our tanking and healing, or any mechanics not merely "move here by moment X"? Fights have increasingly become striking dummy tests done side by side with shared/allotted dance steps and the occasional scripted bonus action.

[HikariKurosawa]

Third-party combat assisting addons are almost entirely in the vein of button consolidations, not auto-rotation. Think PvP combos. That's it. And they're plenty frequently used even now, so I'm not sure how you get the idea that replacing more nuance-capable aspects with yet more flavors of "Press CD version 1 if 1 target, version 2 if more than 1 target" has somehow reduced the number of people getting rid of bloat where they can. If anything, because there's that much more bloat now within our obligatory keys (instead of the mere likes of cross-class Featherfoot or StB Cleric Stance) and there are fewer use cases for anything out of lockstep order, those addons have become that much more useful (more buttons saved, more value from saved buttons, and fewer ways for consolidation to go wrong).

Defending stuff like this makes your entire perspective invalid and out of touch.