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

[ty_taurus]

I really don't get the argument about "erasing stress" that they make, it's not like a real job, you don't get fired for underperforming and you have infinite retries, what's there to stress about? I think it's weird if someone is so stressed about being able to perform optimally that they require every job to be optimal performance in 4 buttons.

I'm also just curious about where this hatred for even minute complexity is coming from. Casual players are not struggling with the game. If anything, the source of stress and struggle is coming from people not being able to do certain mechanics that are failing to prog savage. Getting roadblocked by limit cuts, debuff counting, body checks at the end of the encounter, etc... Honestly it's baffling that jobs continue to get simplified when the fights themselves aren't. No one's dying because Samurai had a cone AOE or Dragoon has 1 too many OGCDs in their burst window. Not in savage, not in ultimate, and certainly not in dungeons.

[ty_taurus]

I actually just had a memory of one of my first jobs unlocked a moment ago after typing that. You know what this job design approach reminds me of?

I worked at a Starbucks a long time ago where our manager had this terrible habit of trying to clean up the store's storage areas by throwing away things that we "didn't need" but actually did. Let me give you an example: We had these containers where we kept different powders and toppings like java chips or freeze dried fruit. One day, our manager decided to throw away all the extra containers that we "weren't using" so that we'd have more space in the back to store other things. Okay great, now there's a tiny bit of extra shelf space, but now it's a pain in the ass to clean the containers we were using because we didn't have any backup containers to empty those toppings into. We'd have to empty everything into plastic cups to wash and dry all the containers and refill them rather than just moving them into a clean backup container and washing the others for the next day.

That's what I feel like modern FFXIV job design is.

[Aravell]

I'm also just curious about where this hatred for even minute complexity is coming from. Casual players are not struggling with the game. If anything, the source of stress and struggle is coming from people not being able to do certain mechanics that are failing to prog savage. Getting roadblocked by limit cuts, debuff counting, body checks at the end of the encounter, etc... Honestly it's baffling that jobs continue to get simplified when the fights themselves aren't. No one's dying because Samurai had a cone AOE or Dragoon has 1 too many OGCDs in their burst window. Not in savage, not in ultimate, and certainly not in dungeons.

Honestly, it's bizarre that the dev team is incapable of seeing the very simple truth that more complex job design never held anyone back from clearing anything, it's always been mechanics failure that prevents a clear, and now they're doubling down on even more ways to fail mechanics.

Also worth noting that extremely simple jobs means that someone somehow not meeting the extremely easy to hit ceiling is now that much bigger of a burden. We can see it now in dungeons where the healer is idling and doesn't do damage, it makes the dungeon take so much longer because the healer refuses to mash one button. We can also see it in raids, someone not mashing their raid buff off CD every 2 minutes and drifting it will just cause the party's damage to crater.

It would be nice if the dev team would finally realise that the tank doing 20% less damage by not optimising and just camping tank stance is not the reason that party enraged on Thordan EX, it's because that one DPS died on every Knights of the Round mechanic and perpetually had 66% stats down.

[ArcaviusGreyashe]

I might come down as elitist on this one, but I really think you've lost the plot.

Harder jobs mean lesser average dps, except for people that are that much more skilled (The same people that already are a good amount of dps over the average joe, and a great amount of dps over casual players, using "simple" jobs), which means it's harder for average players to not get enraged on. So yeah, more complex job design does hold people back from clearing. Except if we're talking content with no enrage, which I think isn't the case.

We all have different ideas of simple jobs, but I assure you, NIN, BLM, even GNB and so on are not that simple. Honestly, the fact you're talking about "mashing" raid buff and drifting off the 2 minutes indicates you don't know your simple rotation well enough to really perform, and would significantly drop in DPS with a more complex rotation, which would in turn cause more enrages, and would prevent you from clearing as much as hard fights do.

Moreover, and this is subjective, playing a job must be fun, right, but harder mechanics are much more satisfying to clear than having a perfect rotation. I don't mind having more complex jobs, I'm all for harder content really, but trading those for simpler mechanics in raids... Yikes. That really would be a waste.

[Supersnow845]

I might come down as elitist on this one, but I really think you've lost the plot.

Harder jobs mean lesser average dps, except for people that are that much more skilled (The same people that already are a good amount of dps over the average joe, and a great amount of dps over casual players, using "simple" jobs), which means it's harder for average players to not get enraged on. So yeah, more complex job design does hold people back from clearing. Except if we're talking content with no enrage, which I think isn't the case.

We all have different ideas of simple jobs, but I assure you, NIN, BLM, even GNB and so on are not that simple. Honestly, the fact you're talking about "mashing" raid buff and drifting off the 2 minutes indicates you don't know your simple rotation well enough to really perform, and would significantly drop in DPS with a more complex rotation, which would in turn cause more enrages, and would prevent you from clearing as much as hard fights do.

Moreover, and this is subjective, playing a job must be fun, right, but harder mechanics are much more satisfying to clear than having a perfect rotation. I don't mind having more complex jobs, I'm all for harder content really, but trading those for simpler mechanics in raids... Yikes. That really would be a waste.

I think you’ve missed the point, this isn’t so much the rotation should be more complex as in longer or more confusing, it’s that the rotation should have more fail states and this should be compensated by having the encounter design become easier

Right now by and large almost all jobs really don’t have a significant fail state outside of drifting your 2 minutes. Things like OOM’ing on a healer or trick not applying the buff because you missed the back positional are just gone. Sure there is many ways to lose DPS outside of reaching a true fail state (such as letting astral fire drop off) but near every expansion they are being made harder to achieve

Meanwhile the encounters have gone way way too far towards “do the dance or blow up

Jobs should be given back some measure of fail state on their rotation that is actually meaningful but in exchange this should be compensated by having the encounters be made slightly easier. “Do the dance or blow up” is so boring compared to something like T8 which had 10,000 ways you could solve it based on your party comp and your consistency at pushing his tower phases

[Saraide]

A lot of this discussion is about content without enrages actually. Healers should be fun to play when doing roulettes. That privilege shouldnt just go to tanks and healers.

[Supersnow845]

A lot of this discussion is about content without enrages actually. Healers should be fun to play when doing roulettes. That privilege shouldnt just go to tanks and healers.

The reddit discussion forums are garbage for this

> “WAR shouldn’t be able to ignore the healer”
> “um who cares about casual balance. It’s casual content”
> “me, because all jobs should be fun in all content. Is that really such a foreign concept”

[ArcaviusGreyashe]

Alright, I take back what I said then, I agree on all jobs being fun being a necessity, and you convinced me on the coomplexity part.

[Aravell]

If I had a nickel for everytime someone told me I can't clear content, I'd have 5 nickels. I do so love it when people make assumptions.

Honestly, if average players aren't beating enrage, then that's a sign to practice more and try again. We don't need "hard" fights where anyone can mash 1-2-3 and clear as long as they can do the dance. When was the last time you even saw the enrage in an extreme this expansion? Those fights have a joke of a dps check.

Good game design would have both fight and job gameplay share the load of complexity. Shoving it too far to encounter design would get you Anabaseios, barely an actual dps check but wipes you instantly whenever anyone does something wrong. I don't think we've seen any case where fights are incredibly simple in harder content to make room for job complexity. For example, I wouldn't call O8S and O11S simple fights and the majority of jobs were harder to output high damage back then.

Maybe you can make a case for O1S being an utter joke, but that's more of an exception.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think TOP is a great example of 'taking the stance of 'complexity should come from the encounter, not from the job' to it's logical conclusion'. Take Party Synergy, for example. Doing the 'LPDU strat' (which is intended to make it more PF friendly)I have to:

Line up in two lines from north to south, based on THMR priority
Identify my Playstation marker
Identify if someone on my side has the same marker, the southmost of the pair adjusts and since I'm playing Ranged here that means me if I have a duplicate
Identify which 3 of the 4 Omega Clones are in a line
Identify if the Male has a shield or not (decides if it's in or out from the male)
Identify if the Female has BladeLegs or not (decides it it's 'in line with Female' or 'Cross shaped AOE to dodge')
Position accordingly within about 4 seconds of the clones appearing
Identify where the big eyeball is
Identify whether we have Mid Glitch or Far Glitch
Line up in spread positions to dodge the eye laser, with the formation respecting the Mid/Far debuff (using BPOG as the order from north to south, but if it's Far, the right hand side has to do GOPB)
Identify who has the two stack markers, and if they are on the same side, the southmost stack and their partner need to swap for the next part
Position around the central Female clone, to get knocked back to the safespots, respecting Mid/Far debuff

Finally, once the stack marks go off and the Males all do their funny spin circle AOE, the boss becomes targetable again. Look how much stuff has to be remembered, my PS mark colour, whether I have to swap sides, where the eye is, whether it's Mid/Far, all while doing the rest of the crap thrown at us. Compare that to something like UCOB. In fact, it can be quite easily be compared to something like Quickmarch Trio, since that also forces the players to dodge a 'line AOE through the middle'. However, the lineup for dodging that line AOE can be TMHR every time, the positions don't get randomly chosen. There's no 'adjust because someone on your side has the same symbol'. And the followup mechanics are always the same for each role. Healers get Earthshakers. one DPS gets an Earthshaker, three have to take a Megaflare stack. Tanks have to intercept Tempest Wing tethers. There's much less variance in what is required from each player, allowing them to focus on 'just their thing'. It doesn't matter to a Tank in that fight, which of the four DPS get an Earthshaker, because Earthshakers are not the Tank's 'thing'.

That's the issue with following the road of 'increase the complexity of encounters, and remove complexity from jobs so they're easier to play'. You end up with design like this, where the way they made it 'complex' in TOP is to just say 'sod it, everyone can get every potential position'. That's okay for in certain scenarios, like Limit Cut for example (you can get any of the 8 numbers), but it comes back with Delta, with Sigma, with Omega.

And to make matters worse, let's look at the opposite end of the spectrum, of a Savage fight that is meant to be 'the source of complexity' to re-balance the 'engagement' balance (since the Job doesn't provide much complexity). Take P6S, Hegemone, as an example. Once you know the fight, and you know that the moving spikes that do Plus/Cross AOEs have set formations for each time they appear (allowing you to find the safespot based not on working it out, but by seeing a certain 'thing' and remembering it from there). For example, in this picture:

I know that the X marked AOE tethered by a 'wonky' tether is what to look for, and the safespot will be the tile diagonally 'in' from that X marked AOE. I don't need to see any of the other AOE's positions, only find the 'wonky' tether, then the X attached, then the mechanic is resolved. There's no variance to it, it can be rotated, but you can always use that memorization technique to find the safespot. The rest of the fight also has memory techniques to work out where to stand, and so when you've done the fight a few times, and you're still farming it for something (eg alt Job gear) it is incredibly predictable, and so it's a bland and sluggish fight. It's not got anything interesting going on that brings that 'engagement', and because of that, it doesn't make up for the lack of depth in the Job gameplay.

Here's a metaphor, or an analogy. This is especially relevant to Healers, so let's assume it's a Healer job we're on about. Imagine that, for each player to be 'engaged' and 'having fun', there is a balancing scale. On one side is a weight, unique in size to each player, called Boredom. For one player it might be only 200g, for another player it could be 2000g. Let's take an average player who occasionally does Savages (later once Tome Gear has been obtained), does EX trials with their FC, and caps their tomes each week with EX roulette runs as needed. Their Boredom weight is 1000g. On the other side of the scale, both Job Complexity, and Encounter Complexity, two weights of sizes decided by SE, are applied to weigh that side down, to try and outweigh the Boredom weight. As Job Complexity gets trimmed down over the years by SE, the size of the weight has been also reduced over time. Where it may have been 750g in SB, it is now a mere 250g. Encounter Complexity, therefore, has to be 750g or more to match or outweigh this player's Boredom weight. If the encounter sucks (cough E7S, P6S, P7S, P11S to an extent), then the weight is also small, leading to a small Job weight, a small Encounter weight (say, 300 only because Cachexia exists), and their sub weights are not enough to outweigh the Boredom weight. So, the player ends up bored while doing said encounter.

To remedy this solution, I would propose that Job Complexity be returned, but as a more 'optional' kind of design. For example, where Healers currently have a DOT that is over twice the potency of their filler spell (SCH Broil: 295, Bio: 700), I'd do something more akin to this (taking SCH as an example):

Broil V: 300p
Biolysis: 35p for 30s (total 350p)
Miasmalysis: 1.5s cast time, 20p on cast, then 30p for 24s (total 340p)
Shadowflare: 120p, then 40p for 15s (total 320p)

Missing the refresh timing on a DOT like this would not mean losing '350p' or '320p'. Rather, since the DOT GCD was replaced by a Broil, the loss is 'the difference between Broil and the DOT total potency, divided by {total number of ticks}'. For example, let's say I don't refresh Biolysis for one GCD by accident. I cast Broil there instead. The potency I lost is (320 - 300) / 10, or an average of '2 potency'. This loss is also only a factor if the DOT is present at the end of the fight. If there's a situation where, for example, the fight ends 5s after a Bio refresh should occur, then skipping the application of the DOT is better, since you'd not get the payoff of the DOT before the end of the fight. In that situation, dropping a tick earlier doesn't actually 'lose' you a tick.

With all that said, the skill floor for something like the above is 'press Broil forever', dealing 300p per 2.5s, or 14400p per 2min. The skill ceiling, of refreshing all three DOTs perfectly on time, is 1400 (Bio) + 1700 (Miasma) + 2560 (SF) + 9300 (31 remaining GCDs used on Broil), for a total of 14960. A difference of 560p, across two minutes of gameplay. Less than two Broils.

As such, when it comes to the weights analogy, something like the above turns the Job Complexity weight from a solid weight, into a container. It's up to the player how much they interact with the complexity available to them in their job, (resulting in more or less water in the container), so if they are playing something like an EX roulette, and use their full complexity, it doesn't matter if the Encounter Complexity weight is low, like 100g. Because they're using their full Job toolkit to it's maximum, they've chosen to fill the Job Complexity container to weigh 1500g on it's own, and so it easily outweighs the Boredom weight, even though the Encounter Complexity is low.

Effectively, where we have 'the Encounter Complexity carries the lack of Job Complexity', I think it's much more sensible to have the opposite: 'the Job Complexity (optional) carries the lack of Encounter Complexity'. And to that exact point:

Maybe you can make a case for O1S being an utter joke, but that's more of an exception.

Isn't it interesting that we didn't have this kind of discussion about how 'lack of engagement' etc. when, by all observable metrics, Deltascape was horrendous for it, having both O1S (which was cleared blind on the first pull by some groups, I've heard) and O2S, which was equally monotonous to farm. The saving grace of Deltascape was that it had Halicarnassus, still regarded by some players (including me) to be one of the most well-designed Savage encounters to date. And it didn't do it with debuff vomit, all things considered it was rather simple by today's standards.

But anyway, the point I'm trying to get at: Deltascape should have caused just as much 'we're bored, give us more complexity' complaints as we have now. But it didn't, despite having more 'boring to farm' fights than we have now. The main difference, is that back then, our job kits were more 'complex'. Healers had more than one DOT (not you AST), SCH in particular had 2 DOTs, a 60s OGCD DOT in Shadowflare, and a 12s DOT that was instant cast, melee range and, when paired with an Energy Drain, a damage gain. AST had a card system that felt more dynamic, and was much stronger when it hit (5% damage on everyone, once per minute) but much weaker when it didn't (literally nothing because you can't draw Balance/Spear this pull). Stormblood had it's share of issues to address, but 'how many DOTs SCH has' was not one of them.

Rather, the comparative 'uselessness' of the Lilies for WHM should have been addressed, and AST's cards reworked to be less 'swingy' in damage (between 'all the damage' for balance, 'some damage' for spear/arrow, and 'no damage lol' for the others). I'd say the way to do that would be to give all of the cards damage, but the method by which their damage is dealt varies per card (eg Bole is via counterattacking (good for a tank), Arrow via increasing autoattack speed (to not screw up rotations), Spear/Spire as physical/magical damage increases (good for melee/casters), etc.)

The issue of 'casuals can't keep their damage going as a healer' is not addressed by removing all the variety in how to deal damage, because the main reason those casuals 'lose damage' is because they're not pressing damage buttons for whatever reason, be that movement or 'i dont want to deal damage im a healer'. The latter can't really be addressed since it's a mindset, but it also shouldn't be completely catered to design-wise. Rather, let those players who want to 'only heal', only heal, and they can clear any content in the game that doesn't have an enrage timer (so, 90% of the content the game has to offer). Then, to address the movement issues, by having more variety in buttons, shorter durations on DOTs, etc, it allows for more instantcasts throughout the fight that open up movement options.

As an example, let's take those previously listed DOTs for SCH. If I am meant to refresh Biolysis, Miasmalysis and Shadowflare, because it's a 2min window, but 6s into that window I need to move for about 5 seconds without stopping, then instead of just refreshing all 3 DOTs, I could refresh only Miasmalysis (as it has a cast time), then Broil, movement starts, Biolysis, Shadowflare, movement ends, cast Broil again. By delaying the refresh of the DOTs by a GCD, I allow for them to be used as the mobility option, losing much less damage overall (by the previously listed maths, 4p for Shadowflare and 5p for Miasmalysis), compared to the... what is it now, 75? 85? potency lost by using a Ruin 2.