Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Remember_The_Name]

The two have to exist in a balance, and it feels like it's skewed way too far in one direction at the moment

Absolutely.
When I was watching videos with retrospective of jobs in previous expansions, I understood that jobs had more complexity and depth. While not all implications were perfect (TP for example and much more), it was an interesting puzzle to solve even when doing HW and SB duties. And, while the encounters themselves were not that loaded when comparing to EW and ShB, such job complexity was balancing out lack of mechanics.

Yes, there was some jank, there were problems with aligning burst windows, tank stance dancing, freaking Cleric Stance, yadda-yadda. But figuring out the optimal way even through mentioned problems gave players abilty to express their mastery over the job and a sense of fulfilment when achieving the desired result! And the roughest edges could've been polished into a better version anyway.

But CBU3, with their weird shtick of overcorrecting EVERYTHING, decided to pick up the sledgehammer and whack some major mechanics and interactions the F outta the game. Healers took the biggest blow, unfortunately.

Now, with the jobs streamlined and homogenized, they are trying to compensate by making encounters more and more punishing, complex and strict. But it did not worked out that way. Instead, they made Savage into boring body check simulator, where one mistake results in a raid wipe or causes such severe consequences that it's better to run into the wall and start over.

And the satisfaction of playing the job correctly is not there. The rotations are pretty simple (unless you play God's favourite - BLM) and all buffs are perfectly aligned with each other. There is no depth anymore.

[Turtledeluxe]

And the satisfaction of playing the job correctly is not there. The rotations are pretty simple (unless you play God's favourite - BLM) and all buffs are perfectly aligned with each other. There is no depth anymore.

I laughed out loud.

But yeah- it's interesting when people say "well what do you mean when you say the game lacks job identity" or "what are your solutions" when the game's foundation has examples of it even if they weren't perfectly balanced or optimal. It's obvious that this scale of Job vs Encounter engagement has always existed and has simply tipped nearly all the way in the Encounter direction for too many jobs. When people say there are no new solutions-- There's a thread about new job abilities up right now. And I see players talk about their job rotations literally all of the time. The desire is there, the question imo is whether the devs will ever have the audacity to step on minmaxer toes again. Because that's what I think about when I read that thread-- "This sounds cool but the base of the game doesn't want jobs to be cool".

[Absurdity]

The desire is there, the question imo is whether the devs will ever have the audacity to step on minmaxer toes again. Because that's what I think about when I read that thread-- "This sounds cool but the base of the game doesn't want jobs to be cool".

This gets brought up every time and I have to ask, why would more job complexity step on min-max player's toes? I have only dabbled in optimization when I had fun playing my job but that was the biggest enjoyment I got out of it, optimizing my job gameplay for a given fight because it wasn't on auto pilot. I would assume someone who wants to min-max would like more complexity in their gameplay to actually min-max.

What is optimization now? When to delay the party's 2 minute window because there's downtime soon? Banking your free Edge of Shadow for the next 2-min window? Please, wake me up when there's actually anything interesting to min-max.

The only time I remember optimization actually having any real impact on my gameplay in Endwalker was in P3S as GnB (I assume other jobs with cleave could do the same) and only because I had to slightly adjust my rotation to pad my DPS on the Darkened Fire adds with Double Down.

[Turtledeluxe]

This gets brought up every time and I have to ask, why would more job complexity step on min-max player's toes? I have only dabbled in optimization when I had fun playing my job but that was the biggest enjoyment I got out of it, optimizing my job gameplay for a given fight because it wasn't on auto pilot. I would assume someone who wants to min-max would like more complexity in their gameplay to actually min-max.

What is optimization now? When to delay the party's 2 minute window because there's downtime soon? Banking your free Edge of Shadow for the next 2-min window? Please, wake me up when there's actually anything interesting to min-max.

The only time I remember optimization actually having any real impact on my gameplay in Endwalker was in P3S as GnB (I assume other jobs with cleave could do the same) and only because I had to slightly adjust my rotation to pad my DPS on the Darkened Fire adds with Double Down.

Yes but as I said in my previous post-- who are the people calling out for the changes to the jobs and the two minute meta? These are not people who want the game to be more fun-- they want job viability to an extreme degree and easy access to optimal damage output. This is the number one reaction anyone gives when people talk about jobs having more unique identity-- "well in 2.0 no one wanted warrior" etc. Obviously every game needs balance, but I'd argue XIV will not tolerate an ounce of risk out of fear of the 2.0 era or whatever.

And every time they cave to player demands "no one wants my job bc they don't have x", homogeny grows. This is what I said earlier-- original feedback isn't likely when players typically only think of rotations or dps in relation to other jobs that they perceive to be outpacing them.

And what do I mean when I say original feedback? I mean player ideas for rotations or deepening their role in the encounter. Those ideas go largely ignored in favor of steamrolling the jobs.

I live in constant fear that one day they're going to give BLM res or self healing. Pls don't.

[ForteNightshade]

Yes but as I said in my previous post-- who are the people calling out for the changes to the jobs and the two minute meta? These are not people who want the game to be more fun-- they want job viability to an extreme degree and easy access to optimal damage output. This is the number one reaction anyone gives when people talk about jobs having more unique identity-- "well in 2.0 no one wanted warrior" etc. Obviously every game needs balance, but I'd argue XIV will not tolerate an ounce of risk out of fear of the 2.0 era or whatever.

No offense but... you clearly haven't been around those circles. Even min maxers have been complaining about the boring job design and especially the two minute meta. In fact, it's downright reviled because now everything boils down to crit RNG. Didn't Crit, Direct Hit your blade combo? Whelp, sucks for your parse even though it's quite literally identical to your previous runs.

Very few higher end players, be they speed runners, parsers or simply hardcore players who raid log want "job viability to an extreme degree". That is a very common misconception. Do they have their preferences? Naturally. But they'll either play whatever's good or are good enough to overcome job deficiencies, provided they aren't too absurd ala tank balance for early Abyssos or 6.3 TOP in general. The issue is how the dev team has approached balance. You can have job design with healthy amounts of similarity yet still manage to differentiate themselves enough. Melee, for instance, mostly accomplish this. Ninja doesn't play at all like Dragoon nor do either play like Monk. Their far bigger issue is a lack of engaging gameplay outside the two minute window. Which is why you weren't seeing nearly as much criticism towards job homogenization in Shadowbringers despite it existing there too.

So why is the dev team balancing this way? If I were to hazard a guess. It's significantly easier when everything is largely similar, And with soon to be 21 jobs, the already understaffed design department simply has reached capacity. Sebazy has talked about it at length but for cliffnotes sake, we've essentially have the save 5-6 people working on job design since ARR. Couple that with the overemphasis on accessibility the last two expansions and you start to see why jobs have been dumbed down. They're easier to balance and more casual players can pick them up without much thought.

The reality is a game that wants every job to be viable at the highest level will always have some degree of homogeny. It's unavoidable. What is frustrating this expansion is despite placing so much emphasis on making jobs easier, we've seen some of the worst balancing decisions since Heavensward. Which leads me to believe it's a lack of creativity being the biggest culprit.

[Turtledeluxe]

Even min maxers have been complaining about the boring job design and especially the two minute meta.

Minmaxers aren't a monolith, but that rule applies to all posts on the subject. I've already explained in another post that you cannot make the assumption these "meta slaves" (I've also heard of them being called "s***tters") are all casual joes who just want easy access to big rewards at any cost. When we talk about this group, certainly a portion of them (if not a majority of them) have the wherewithal to discuss rotations, aDPS/rDPS, build crafting, etc. Yes, some of them are probably more casual players in the mix as well. There can be range of motivations for someone to prefer the two minute meta-- acting like some of those people aren't minmaxers because you have noble perception of minmaxing in RPGs is your preference. I don't agree and I do not need to know an alleged group of them to say that.

The reality is a game that wants every job to be viable at the highest level will always have some degree of homogeny. It's unavoidable. What is frustrating this expansion is despite placing so much emphasis on making jobs easier, we've seen some of the worst balancing decisions since Heavensward. Which leads me to believe it's a lack of creativity being the biggest culprit.

You could say every MMORPG wants this. I'd argue it's a waste of time because metas can and do form anyway based on highly contextual variables, in XIV and in most games. Yoshi P is on record as saying "we could do" , "we would like to do", etc., but they don't because of "players". I have already covered that it could be a creative issue or a resource constraint, but a. That's not my problem and b. They can fix it and they should.

Also it is avoidable, it's called listening to players and saying "I am sorry that does not align with our vision for the job, no". Circling back to the issue of "minmaxers", devs wouldn't be listening to the feedback about raid buff metas from casuals who likely aren't even aware of the two minute meta as a concept. Does that mean every single person giving feedback is a minmaxer? No, it does not. My original post about stepping on the toes of minxmaxers doesn't make this clear, but in that case yes I was using minmaxer because I was thinking about players whose feedback actually has the context and detail necessary to really be considered by the game designers. Not just people saying "I wannna win more".

[Aravell]

But yeah- it's interesting when people say "well what do you mean when you say the game lacks job identity" or "what are your solutions" when the game's foundation has examples of it even if they weren't perfectly balanced or optimal. It's obvious that this scale of Job vs Encounter engagement has always existed and has simply tipped nearly all the way in the Encounter direction for too many jobs. When people say there are no new solutions-- There's a thread about new job abilities up right now. And I see players talk about their job rotations literally all of the time. The desire is there, the question imo is whether the devs will ever have the audacity to step on minmaxer toes again. Because that's what I think about when I read that thread-- "This sounds cool but the base of the game doesn't want jobs to be cool".

As a former min-maxer, I quit min-maxing after ShB, EW just made everything worse. What's the point of trying so hard to optimise when the guy spamming Dragon Kick isn't far behind you? Why try so hard to align everything when the other guy can do just as well with Yukikaze spam? No one who enjoys min-maxing wants low skill ceilings and easy jobs with automatically aligning buffs. Most of the fun of min-maxing comes from playing around the content using your experience and skill on the job, it's not fun when the job basically plays itself and alignment is never an issue because everyone delays buffs together if the fight requires it.

I said before in a different thread, but I'm fairly sure that these changes only benefit the people who want to min-max but aren't good enough or don't want to try as hard. People who want all the rewards without putting in as much effort, they like simplified rotations, they like having all their buffs align without thought.

[ty_taurus]

As a former min-maxer, I quit min-maxing after ShB, EW just made everything worse. What's the point of trying so hard to optimise when the guy spamming Dragon Kick isn't far behind you? Why try so hard to align everything when the other guy can do just as well with Yukikaze spam? No one who enjoys min-maxing wants low skill ceilings and easy jobs with automatically aligning buffs. Most of the fun of min-maxing comes from playing around the content using your experience and skill on the job, it's not fun when the job basically plays itself and alignment is never an issue because everyone delays buffs together if the fight requires it.

I said before in a different thread, but I'm fairly sure that these changes only benefit the people who want to min-max but aren't good enough or don't want to try as hard. People who want all the rewards without putting in as much effort, they like simplified rotations, they like having all their buffs align without thought.

Personally I'm fine with "meme" rotations being viable. Maybe there's a more involved discussion that could be had about the actual balance of those builds and try and set what the ideal performance of those alternate rotations looks like, but honestly, FFXIV could really benefit from more variety in rotations that a single job can perform, and I'd toss that suggestion into the ring for more justification to restore complexity to many jobs. I'd much rather one job have multiple routes rather than each job being one specific route with no flexibility for anything else. If one job has a more challenging rotation, but there's an easier 'shortcut' rotation within that job's arsenal that's also viable for players who aren't interested in job complexity, then we could theoretically have a healthy environment for both parties. No more playing tug of war with the baby, we could actually share custody in a healthy way.

[Aravell]

Personally I'm fine with "meme" rotations being viable. Maybe there's a more involved discussion that could be had about the actual balance of those builds and try and set what the ideal performance of those alternate rotations looks like, but honestly, FFXIV could really benefit from more variety in rotations that a single job can perform, and I'd toss that suggestion into the ring for more justification to restore complexity to many jobs. I'd much rather one job have multiple routes rather than each job being one specific route with no flexibility for anything else. If one job has a more challenging rotation, but there's an easier 'shortcut' rotation within that job's arsenal that's also viable for players who aren't interested in job complexity, then we could theoretically have a healthy environment for both parties. No more playing tug of war with the baby, we could actually share custody in a healthy way.

Viable, sure. But stuff like the Dragon Kick spam rotation, Yukikaze rotation and Infinite Paradox rotation shouldn't be able to compete with playing optimally. I'm not opposed to these ways of playing existing, but I am opposed to them being as good as people who optimise their job to the highest level. Having meme rotations performing just as well as proper spreadsheet rotations just makes min-maxing pointless.

[ty_taurus]

Viable, sure. But stuff like the Dragon Kick spam rotation, Yukikaze rotation and Infinite Paradox rotation shouldn't be able to compete with playing optimally. I'm not opposed to these ways of playing existing, but I am opposed to them being as good as people who optimise their job to the highest level. Having meme rotations performing just as well as proper spreadsheet rotations just makes min-maxing pointless.

I would say more specifically that their relative output in contrast to the "proper" rotation should factor in the ease of execution. Difficulty is an aspect of balance that I think gets overlooked too much in XIV generally speaking. In other words, for someone who may have a hard time focusing on their rotation, Dragon Kick should perhaps be the stronger choice for that player, but for the player who can execute the "proper" rotation consistently, they will perform more effectively than the Dragon Kick combo allows. And again, we could talk more about the actual difference in Monk's damage rotation to suggest how those might be better balanced. A big part of it would be that SE would need to acknowledge that Dragon Kick combo is a thing, and start factoring in that rotation when considering how to balance it. It would also help if they perhaps listed "offical" rotations, like a "recommended rotation" tab somewhere that could lead less experienced players to understand both options.