The slow death of proc based jobs

[Valence]

It's a bad thing and I'm not having that discussion again, especially in this thread.

[Cynric]

Personally, I'm not really against more jobs using procs, but I don't think anything like how Machinist was in 3.x is really all that fun to me. I didn't find it fun nor engaging to spam split shot to wait for slug shot to attempt to gain clean shot. The less I would see the end of the combo the less I enjoyed myself, the most fun I had was when reload was up, and ultimately I decided not to continue playing it. Personally I prefer having singular ability procs over it being tied to an entire combo.

That being said, I do understand wanting something in the game though so hopefully they can implement more jobs that use procs in the future for those players like you who enjoy it. I just hope it isn't any job I want to play, or if it is the proc is only one or two abilities that are not tied to continuing a combo.

[Valence]

It was an egregious problem with 3.x MCH especially, which got made way better in Stormblood in my opinion. When Reload moved down to 30s recast instead of 60 and Quick Reload to 15s instead of 30 (which is huge), it literally changed the very feeling of it. Granted, Reload gave only 3 ammo instead of 5 like in HW, but with the 5 you also had to overwrite procs in the first place since the max was 3 not to overwrite anything.

HW: 7 ammo every 60s, meaning 30% of your GCDs benefitting from ammo use, but when taking ammo overwriting into account it went down to a dreary 20%.
SB: 10 ammo every 60s, which brought this up to 40ish %. On top of it it was a lot more spread since 4 of those came out of quick reloads, one every 6 GCDs. It was a good system that actually prevented to spamm fish for procs, unlike HW during mildfires (the ones not aligned with Reload). Reload was always here for every wildfire and didn't make them peter out due to huge rng luck, but granted a good welfare of base procs to work on even if you entered WF with little of them.

[Cynric]

It was an egregious problem with 3.x MCH especially, which got made way better in Stormblood in my opinion. When Reload moved down to 30s recast instead of 60 and Quick Reload to 15s instead of 30 (which is huge), it literally changed the very feeling of it. Granted, Reload gave only 3 ammo instead of 5 like in HW, but with the 5 you also had to overwrite procs in the first place since the max was 3 not to overwrite anything.

HW: 7 ammo every 60s, meaning 30% of your GCDs benefitting from ammo use, but when taking ammo overwriting into account it went down to a dreary 20%.
SB: 10 ammo every 60s, which brought this up to 40ish %. On top of it it was a lot more spread since 4 of those came out of quick reloads, one every 6 GCDs. It was a good system that actually prevented to spamm fish for procs, unlike HW during mildfires (the ones not aligned with Reload). Reload was always here for every wildfire and didn't make them peter out due to huge rng luck, but granted a good welfare of base procs to work on even if you entered WF with little of them.

While it does sound like stormblood was better for MCH, I personally don't like having RNG on my combo based abilities to go further in the combo. I don't think that's something I'll ever personally enjoy. I'd rather have access to my combo 100% of the time and have a chance to unlock an extra OGCD ability, over having access to particular combo pieces only even 70% of the time, and if the majority of my fun were to come from those times where I'm negating the % chance for a guaranteed proc, it makes me wonder why I have those procs at all.

Like I said I fully support them adding some more procs, I just hope they stay away from the combos and jobs I actually want to play lol. If in Dawntrail for example, they made all of the melee have procs for their combos (please don't), or honestly even just Viper, I probably would just take a break and play something else. I might *try* to enjoy Viper if it's combos were proc based, but I know myself pretty well, I'd most likely get bored and either switch jobs (sadly) or take a break and only sub every 45 days for my house.

[Rithy255]

COMBO JOBS
- PLD, WAR, GNB, DRK, SAM, NIN, DRG, RPR, MCH

BRANCHING COMBOS (rest have no branches)
- WAR (lol), NIN (lol), DRG

Branching combos did you Miss Samurai? (and monk kind of, I get monk works a bit weirdly, but it's pretty much the same thing).

I miss PLD having branching combos... we need more branching combos, 1, 2, 3 is a really bad design, I really don't like it especially on PLD

[Valence]

I seem to have misplaced samurai yes. oops.

[Rithy255]

I seem to have misplaced samurai yes. oops.

Fair enough, I was kinda confused as samurais main gimmick (other then casting lol) to me is the large amount of combo path gameplay it has.


my thoughts are that I'd like to see more combos on rotational jobs, Tank design suffers from this especially Pld/war used to be the more "gcd" tanks while gnb/drk are ogcd heavy, obviously warrior is very simple but I think PLD suffers a lot from not having that consistent combo path. Personally you'd think GCD's would matter more on tanks considering how weaving defensives is already core to tanks. I also might be bias here but I think GNB does weaving really well but DRK it doesn't really have the same feeling to me. But In general tanks like PLD/War, even DRK to a extent could use more gcds instead of adding ogcds or one button spam.

I'm fine with Reaper being Reaper, the rest of the melees I feel have pretty varied rotations and feels (even ninja). I do think melee Dps in general feels kind of over saturated, but I guess that's where the largest player base is, so it makes sense. I just hope viper does something really different. I'm kind of hoping that Viper is like a Proc melee, I doubt it but that would be something genuinely interesting and different.

[Taranok]

I think the community mindset on this filters down from speedrunning. If players aren't even willing to tolerate dice rolls on critical hits because they ruin their 'perfect run', how well do you think RNG procs go down?

I really enjoy RNG-based procs, personally, especially if you give players situational tools to help fish for those procs. Heavensward's DRK was a great example of this. But the playerbase needs a different mindset if we want to see these back.

I agree with this, but I only agree because I think the game is better because of job variety. Part of job variety is having proc-based jobs and set-in-stone jobs. My favorite examples of these 2 being Bard and Dragoon. They could not play more differently, and when I refer to a job as being 'procedural,' I am referring to jobs like BRD, as opposed to DRG which, while it can be argued as procedural, is very much not procedural in nature. Hell, BLM is semi-procedural and quasi-set-in-stone in rotation, it was an interesting middle ground before sharpcast was given 2 charges and a 30s cooldown per charge (Can we just delete the procs at this point if you're going to give them literally all the time and expect them to be used? I'd rather have literally any other class design than needing buttons devoted to this.)

Oddly enough, when I try to explain this difference to people who love using procedural jobs, often people who play WoW, they fail to understand the difference between procedural and set-in-stone. And how combo has a different texture to it than procedure. My biggest complaint against WoW is that every job more or less is a procedural job. And while I don't want every job to not be procedural, variety is the spice of life after all. I'd love for more job variety to be added. Even things as basic as a melee DPS that doesn't have positionals would be a welcome addition for people who like melee DPS, but despise positional attacks and can't stand tank gameplay (I.E. me.) Adding a procedural tank along the lines of DRK from HW as you brought up would also be welcome, as well as a more procedural caster than RDM. Sure, a RDM could just swap to bard, but if you want more procedural gameplay, RDM is the most procedural caster and, as brought up prior, isn't that procedural.

More variety is better, and people can enjoy RNG procs provided the burst is consistent enough (in a 2m meta) or, if we didn't have the 2m meta, it wouldn't matter as much.