Quote Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa View Post
It's funny how you can just go on some irrelevant tangent and ignore the bigger picture concepts my post made while continuing to tunnel vision on one aspect of the game acting like it is the end all be all. If you want to engage with me, do it with reason.

Rotation complexity holds back encounter difficulty. You wanna strive for greater excellence? Maybe you'll have to get good at boss fights to do so now instead of just grinding away on a target dummy to make your rotation muscle memory. This is a win.
First of all, I will engage with your post however I please, you are not a main character in this forum. I went on a tangent here to take a jab of the way you used this line when it has been associated with game devs being tone deaf to what players want. I also intentionally did not want to go deeper in this discussion and only leave my bit, but if you insist...

Second, your comparison to Fromsoft games is a weird one that I could hardly even compare to an MMORPG, but even those games have a lot of skill expression in individual builds and executing your inputs of those builds. Yes their encounter difficulty and by proxy how you have to engage fights is higher and different, but that is because if that game's genre and reactive combat, at least from my experience.

Third, encounter difficulty becomes solved at some point and is omni-role, while individual skill expression from nuanced job kits and utilizing those in combat, especially with unique cases like TOP phase change setups like mentioned earlier, have higher satisfaction tied to it. That said, encounters have become aomewhat formulaic and until they actually do something about that I will forever be in favour of job skill expression. if I was forced to choose, leading into:

Lastly, individual job skill expression/difficulty and encounter difficulty are only at odds with each other because devs think they are. We had an expansion with a great balance between both of these with Stormblood. Jobs had many nuances, role mechanics were not trivialized and encounter difficulty was in a decent spot, neither too simple nor too difficult.