Challenging Jobs + Easier content > Easy Jobs + Harder Content.

[Renathras]

current SMN shouldn't exist

Potato salad shouldn't exist.

Yet, we live in a world where it does. (Sadly.)

IMO I feel like end game as we see it was a self manifesting destiny of design choices, since someone decided they wanted to introduce hardmode end game bosses and realized that the loose system that was far more flexible made it a nightmare for them. Someone could easily cheat a boss dead or they make some boss completely nightmarish without realizing it because of some choice in the arena.

Agreed. Where you can see this most is PotD. Stuns, Snares, even Roots (though not sure many Jobs have those anymore...maybe NIN with ice release?) work there. So does Sleep/Repose, and even ROG/NIN's hide/stealth. So do items to cure various status effects. Come to think of it, so do those status effects (things like Pacify, Silence, and Frog). Further, if you watch the people that really know their stuff, they practice arcane arts like...enemy spinning, where you rotate the enemy around and around to interrupt its attacks, or even...*gasp*...Line of Sighting, where you can run behind a corner to gather enemies or interrupt their casts and moves (like the beetle charge and ram thing or various spells that must be targeted which you can cause to fizzle if you can run around a corner from the enemy breaking line of sight).

Different agro types (sight, sound [RP walk prevents agro], proximity, HP damage/"blood", and magic [casting any "Spell" type ability causes agro - mostly seen on Sprites in Eureka]) exist both in Deep Dungeons and in Eureka (and I think Bozja, though less pronounced than Eureka, I remember the undead/ashkin in the northeast corner of the middle segment of the first zone having blood agro causing long chains of pulls if you weren't careful), and Eureka and Bozja play around with status effects a bit. So does a lot of BLU exclusive content, and I still go back to 3rd Turn of 1st Coils when I want to test if an attack type is piercing/etc or not (the minibosses there throw up various debuffs, so you can test if attacks are various types by seeing if the damage is reduced when they have the buff against those damage types: Fun fact, Fleche and Contre Sixte on RDM are still Piercing attacks!). BLU lists the attack types in their spellbook and some are useful for BLU Carnivale (especially going for the achievements/bonuses), but other Jobs still have slashing, piercing, blunt, fire, earth, etc damage types, even though enemy weaknesses/strengths against them have long been removed, as have player elemental resistances or abilities that increase piercing/slashing/etc damage. While meaningless in most modern content, the abilities still are flagged to their various damage types. One reason RDM is good in PotD is one of the bosses (floor 70 or 80?) summons adds that are REALLY weak to air type damage, making Veraero useful for making short work of them.

ALL of this stuff still exists in the game code, and is still active in various parts of the game.

It just isn't used in general content because...it would make it harder to balance and stuff and allow for cheese strats, is my best guess. Imagine if you could still sneak through dungeons avoiding trash packs entirely, like sections of Arum Vale and Longstop.

[Tiramu]

I would go for harder jobs, less obtuse mechanics.

I feel like the game puts so much emphasis on creating complexity through mechanics as opposed to job design that mechanics can become this weird nonsense that are difficult, if not impossible, to read intuitively on first encounter.

They don't make a whole lot of sense in the context of the battle. You end up with this weird abstract stuff happening around you, and you need to either be told what it expects of you, or run it enough times that you notice.

I'm replaying on an alt atm and decided to do the Eden raids, I didn't really bother with them on my main so its pretty much all new to me.

Iconoclasms machanics just felt like nonsense, and I doubt its even that hard because only us first timers (there were 3 of us) seemed to be having any trouble. I think its just difficult to know what it expects from you - and that its intentional because its how they're creating challenge. Which of course, leads to very little challenge once you do know what its expecting from you.

I'd prefer the job kit to be more complex, and for mechanics to be more threatening and require skill to push through rather than just confusing you so that you dont avoid what you should avoid.

[Rolder50]

Pretty sure SEs approach is both easier jobs AND easier content, though.

[Jeeqbit]

current SMN shouldn't exist

I enjoy playing current SMN though.

[Colt47]

[...]It just isn't used in general content because...it would make it harder to balance and stuff and allow for cheese strats, is my best guess. Imagine if you could still sneak through dungeons avoiding trash packs entirely, like sections of Arum Vale and Longstop.

It really wouldn't be much of an issue if people could skip trash mobs and such. Generally speaking, the lack of interactivity in content is what really makes the game kind of boring overall. Housing is desirable because someone is interacting with other people buying and decorating the houses, even if it is a blood bath to get a house to begin with. Savage and EX fights, while fun, are sort of niche and only provide an illusion of getting more skilled at the game. Most of the time they are just showing off new danger zone patterns that everyone has to dance around and that's it.

Compare something like a new EX fight to Star Citizen adding physicalized crates and tractor beams... it's like watching one game just cut content continuously to try and be this super lean swimmer, while the other game is actively expanding the tools people have to do things and by extension, allows people to make their own fun. There's just no way to really make your own fun in FFXIV when everything is built the way it is now. I do not think people want more complex jobs and easier boss fights as much as having tools that let them tackle a situation how they want to tackle it.

[Renathras]

I do not think people want more complex jobs and easier boss fights as much as having tools that let them tackle a situation how they want to tackle it.

I suspect that's why people like Eureka/Bozja (Logos/Lost Actions), Deep Dungeons, and BLU. Each of those pieces of content allow players to interact with them in different ways.

[Aravell]

I feel that the premise of the thread is flawed from the start. We have people who enjoy both complex jobs+easy fights and easy jobs+complex fights, so the middle ground is likely to please the most people. There's no reason that we can't have moderate complexity in both the job kits and also the battle content.

A less-skilled player will always be able to survive and eventually thrive in a complex environment after enough experience. A hardcore player will never be able to thrive in a simplified environment, only tolerate it. Simplifying things hurts an entire portion of the playerbase and has a chance that they'll leave entirely because there's nothing left for them.

[ty_taurus]

I'm playing through the major event in Honkai Star Rail that I've been putting off for a while now, and there is a part of the event story where there's some dialogue that really hit home for me in regards to FFXIV, and I figure this is probably the most relevant thread to share this in. Simply put, there are creatures that are basically ghosts going around possessing people and causing mischief, and you're going around capturing and sealing them away. One of them is obsessed with destiny and tries to prove to you how everything is predetermined by making you play these Pokemon Ice Cavern puzzles with one solution, and your group sends a couple people to stand in the maze and act as new walls to prove that you can make new solutions. The conversation goes like this:

"You think that by calling on your companions for help, you created a new path out of thin air? You're just playing with semantics. I could weave a thousand routes for you, but they lead to the same destination--so what significance is there in having a choice?"

And one of the characters in your group goes:

"The universe is like jade tiles on a game table. When the tiles are shuffled, the outcome is already predetermined. Which tiles can be played, which tiles are leftover, what kind of hand the person next to you is trying to make--all of these can be determined through calculations. But if everything is just a calculation, the game loses its flavor. Randomness and adaptability, ambushing your opponent, twists and turns, the balance of the elements--it's a mix of calculations, unknowns , and loss of complete control that makes Celestial Jade the kind of game it is--and those are the same things that give life its color and vibrancy. Do my 'choices' at the game table mean nothing if I have a sure loss in front of me? No--the choices are what make the game meaningful in the first place."

I think from both the player side and the dev side, this game is too obsessed with the destination that we've lost sight of the journey toward it and how having choices and randomness can make the game fun regardless of whether you win or lose any given fight.

[Renathras]

We have people who enjoy both complex jobs+easy fights and easy jobs+complex fights, so the middle ground is likely to please the most people.

Not necessarily. I don't remember the name, but isn't there a "fallacy of the middle"? For example, a lot of people like water. A lot of people like soda. So you might thing "Let's make a drink that's 50% soda and 50% water, then the most people will be pleased with it!", yet in reality, that would please the FEWEST people, as very few people like watered down soda. Most people that like water would prefer the soda to the watered down version, and most people that like soda would prefer water to the soda'd down version.

Indeed, read some of the responses in this other thread like this one:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6389533

The problem I have with rebalancing to suit the midcore players is that for them to feel like they're getting a good challenging experience, you'd have to make dungeons 5 times harder than they are now, which would absolutely destroy your casual playerbase (people like me). When I hear people unironically saying that Sastasha is the same difficulty as The Dead Ends I shake my head because for someone like me, although I can get through both of them, from my point of view, they're night and day in terms of difficulty. I can't even imagine what the difficulty would be like if it suited the midcore population. I'd simply stop doing dungeons unless there was a very easy mode difficulty.

While there are times that the middle ground IS a good solution, it's not ALWAYS a good solution, as it's sometimes actually worse and less palatable to most everyone than the extremes are in some cases.

Your second paragraph also makes no sense. Less skilled people can survive and thrive in complex environments? Not always. There is no guarantee of that. And the next sentence defeats your own argument; if a hardcore player cannot thrive in a simplified environment, only tolerate it, then a middle ground solution is untenable since they would only tolerate, not thrive, in it due to it being simplified from what they actually require. That statement defeats your premise, does it not? And that's if we ignore the first part of that statement is not true (that less-skilled will survive and thrive) at all, either.

.

This isn't, btw, me opposing change (you know my view is part of each), but it is me noting that the "middle ground" is NOT always something that would satisfy the most people. Indeed, when it comes to this game, everything being simple would probably satisfy the MOST people. The question is, is that the metric that we should use, or is there not a possible hybrid solution that can be employed instead?

[Equitable_Remedy]

What many posters actually want—but will not say—is for game difficultly to be exactly calibrated to allow them to clear content but to prevent the maximum number of other players from doing so. This allows them to be counted amongst the elite but for that elite group to be as small as possible while still including them. There's also the phenomenon of people talking big on forums whether or not they have to skill to back it up in-game.