Rotation Wish

[Post]

There are in game help guides that show up when you level THM, they explain Astral Fire, Umbral Hearts, managing MP etc.

Wasn't there an official guide (book?) with rotations at some point, and what SE had published was worse than what the community came up with for some jobs (I remember MNK was like that in Stormblood)?

I don't know about an official guidebook, but they definitely try to correct for 'unintended' rotations like early StB MNK. They generally seem to want all the rotations to be decipherable if you just read the tooltips, but due to the unexpected interactions between old Tornado Kick with the new Riddle of Fire and Brotherhood, that particular oversight happened.

It happens still today; EW SMN launched with resetting your Carbuncle to avoid Phoenix phase instead of Bahamut was stronger initially.

I like to joke that you'd think with all the reading the MSQ makes you do players would be more than prepared to figure out their tooltips.

But, the MSQ doesn't really give you much chance to practice your rotations anymore. When you're fighting, it's spamming your few AoE buttons on dungeon trash or dropping your rotation while trying to dodge a boss you've maybe never seen before (or even a solo duty boss with tons of AoEs and often no real DPS requirement), or more likely you're spending a couple hours talking a bit too long with rabbits while extremely tonally contrasted music is blasting just so they can claim that you didn't have to do any grinding in the story (while ruining their pacing). It's not all the players' fault.

I don't think making the barrier of entry lower for normal content helps, though. Not every fight needs an enrage timer, but, for example, literally every normal trial until StB had a mid-fight DPS check that at least required players to notice enemies other than the boss, change target, and kill it fast enough before the boss got angry. This, and the more common battle content to level up your battle jobs at least subtlely nudged more players to do more damage. The bosses because otherwise you couldn't pass, the FATEs just because you'd level faster the more damage you did.

And if players decide and devs agree that the only time that floor of job familiarity must be met is current expansion Extremes, then it's just that much harder for any interested new players to make the jump to that part of the game because they suddenly have all this work to do at once that they could have been doing little by little all along their journey.

[LianaThorne]

I don't know about an official guidebook, but they definitely try to correct for 'unintended' rotations like early StB MNK. They generally seem to want all the rotations to be decipherable if you just read the tooltips, but due to the unexpected interactions between old Tornado Kick with the new Riddle of Fire and Brotherhood, that particular oversight happened.

It happens still today; EW SMN launched with resetting your Carbuncle to avoid Phoenix phase instead of Bahamut was stronger initially.

I like to joke that you'd think with all the reading the MSQ makes you do players would be more than prepared to figure out their tooltips.

But, the MSQ doesn't really give you much chance to practice your rotations anymore. When you're fighting, it's spamming your few AoE buttons on dungeon trash or dropping your rotation while trying to dodge a boss you've maybe never seen before (or even a solo duty boss with tons of AoEs and often no real DPS requirement), or more likely you're spending a couple hours talking a bit too long with rabbits while extremely tonally contrasted music is blasting just so they can claim that you didn't have to do any grinding in the story (while ruining their pacing). It's not all the players' fault.

I don't think making the barrier of entry lower for normal content helps, though. Not every fight needs an enrage timer, but, for example, literally every normal trial until StB had a mid-fight DPS check that at least required players to notice enemies other than the boss, change target, and kill it fast enough before the boss got angry. This, and the more common battle content to level up your battle jobs at least subtlely nudged more players to do more damage. The bosses because otherwise you couldn't pass, the FATEs just because you'd level faster the more damage you did.

And if players decide and devs agree that the only time that floor of job familiarity must be met is current expansion Extremes, then it's just that much harder for any interested new players to make the jump to that part of the game because they suddenly have all this work to do at once that they could have been doing little by little all along their journey.

You can practice a rotation on a dummy easily imo, no boss or dungeon needed (unless you wanna use a dummy in explo mode which is a cool time).
As far as dropping stuff due to dodging, that's gonna happen until you learn the fight...doesn't mean you still can't get a janked version out rather than not at all and get some experience/comfortability with it.