What happened to job inter-play? Was it any good?

[Valence]

read your post just now. I find the better I get at the game the more I enjoy unexpected chaos. This is why I enjoy alliance raids, especially ones full of people who do not remember anything from it but I know the raid well (I should really practice alliance raids I suck at minus that one that has quick math. I for the life of me cannot do quick math in my head and will undoubtedly fail at the mechanic. I could get 1 answer right, sometimes 2, though I rarely get them all right. I do enjoy math sometimes tho, just not when asked to perform it in the heat of battle with a short timer without something to write on). I have gotten into MINE content recently (Minimum ilvl, no echo) because older content has mechanics that are sometimes skipped over due to the sheer amount of damage output from potency increases and increases to stats that make things far less punishing when they hit. The entire party may end up on the floor but man, nothing beats a tram that would go again and again. I also like MINE content because it has been giving me a small taste test on what some harder fights look like when not outdone by item level.

I think I agree with much of of your post though I don't have all my thoughts gathered. I do wonder what a balance of collectivistic and individualistic design would look like in the game. Maybe interplay can be a fail state but also not always (maybe it makes life easier which could be enough) what causes it. Could be some fights ask for it more than other fights. I'm not experienced with anything outside of casual content so maybe this already exists to an extent (or in decent amounts) in harder content.

Reading a lot of the replies, all I can say is welcome to how schizophrenic this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

Either way, what we had had some kind of balance between collective and individual. It's never been a fully team synergistic game at all, let's not kid ourselves. And the amount of scripted things was still staggering, even if a lot less so since the whole had a lot more moving parts that could go wrong beyond just fight mechanics.

[Rekh]

Reading a lot of the replies, all I can say is welcome to how schizophrenic this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

Either way, what we had had some kind of balance between collective and individual. It's never been a fully team synergistic game at all, let's not kid ourselves. And the amount of scripted things was still staggering, even if a lot less so since the whole had a lot more moving parts that could go wrong beyond just fight mechanics.

Very much this. I'm here reading these replies as well going "so they love Shb/Ew now?"
No wonder yoship closed his ears/eyes to anything we have to say.

And a lot of these people are the same ones who were saying they're tired of homogezation and bland job designs.
Unfortunate that devs look at numbers instead of at logic. There are a few consistent people like you and I who keep it straight from A to Z.

[Mikey_R]

Reading a lot of the replies, all I can say is welcome to how schizophrenic this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

Very much this. I'm here reading these replies as well going "so they love Shb/Ew now?"
...

And a lot of these people are the same ones who were saying they're tired of homogezation and bland job designs.

To me, it is the opposite, the ones that are happy with the current design do not complain, or complain about minor things It is the ones that do not like the current design that say the level of homogenisation is bad.

[Rekh]

To me, it is the opposite, the ones that are happy with the current design do not complain, or complain about minor things It is the ones that do not like the current design that say the level of homogenisation is bad.

Forums are a microcosm of the entire community. It's not this left vs right dividing line that's so common in "west" countries. Those not complaining or complaining either quit the game or are still playing; and those from both sides end up at the forum as well.

[Jeeqbit]

welcome to how schizophrenic this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

I think a lot of people complaining about how it is now don't say it was bad back then actually. So people like myself point out that there were a lot of bad things back then, and that probably what they want isn't how it was, but something resembling the sophistication and action synergy there was then, but cleaner and better.

It's never been a fully team synergistic game at all, let's not kid ourselves.

Indeed, except really on a mechanical level in high-end duties. But when it comes to dungeons it's always been the case that an experienced player can shoulder most of the burden and carry people through.

But what we've kinda lost is the trinity ie. a warrior, paladin or probably any tank can just solo a dungeon at level 90, whereas earlier in the game if a healer wasn't there the tank was gonna struggle to get too far.

Very much this. I'm here reading these replies as well going "so they love Shb/Ew now?"

I don't know which replies you mean, but to clarify for myself, yes, I am quite happy with ShB and EW (aside from the lack of a Field Operation/social content/relic grind in EW which SE has acknowledged). However, most people on these forums usually aren't happy with ShB and EW, so I try to meet people half way.

For example, I can agree that the trinity in dungeons has lost its balance and tanks can even solo half way through some current extreme trials or that healers could use a few more attack mechanics or cleric stance. I can't complain about this as a tank main, because being powerful is great, but I can acknowledge it's not right when there is meant to be a holy trinity and that the teamplay just felt a little better in the past.

I could agree with there being a lighter form of sophistication from what we once had (ie. if tanks had a damage stance, it could be a 1% damage difference similar to positionals, rather than a 20% difference). But it is important for the implementation not to create a massive gap between veteran players and new players to where veterans are killing a boss in a fraction of the time it takes new players, because that isn't feasible to balance. I was never comfortable with the gap between veteran and new/casual players in the past, and it's so much better now.

As for synergy, I would kinda like for "harmless synergy" to return. For example, having both DoTs up on a Bard buffed the potency of Sidewinder. If the job is played the way it should be, then there is no difference at all to how it is now. Or procs coming from DoT crits. All these things make no material difference to how it is right now, it just makes it feel like you're rewarded for playing it correctly that's all.

Synergy in Role Actions as this post discusses, like Erase, Mana Shift or MP Refresh is also fair, even if most people don't use them. Since they are harmless if not used, but gave you a few toys to play with.

I like that jobs are more approachable, like how I've found Dragoon playable since Shadowbringers, ranged attacks don't interrupt combos and so on, but it is just being honest to say that jobs have slowly lost their uniqueness. I'm not complaining about that, I just don't want to deny the truth because then I'd be unreasonable. They also just acknowledged job uniqueness was an issue in the last live letter.

And when you think of playing a different job, it feeling different to play, at least a bit, is kinda important, otherwise what's the point in switching job? Animation differences are good and all, but if the functional differences have eroded, then it reaches a point where you only need to pick one job in each category whose animations you prefer. I at least want to be able to say "that one does shields, that one does heals, that one does regens" or "dragoons jump, the others don't". But if that isn't how it is for a role then it's fine, really, I'll just pick the job I like the animations of in that category.

[KisaiTenshi]

Reading a lot of the replies, all I can say is welcome to how schizophrenic this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

The biggest division was always the "dps stance/cleric stance bad" and "tank stance/healer stance good" camps. The way Yoshi-P wanted the system to work, and the way players from other games wanted the system to work were at odds.

This is how we lost interesting emergent gameplay mechanics in fights as well. Players figure out the best way to minmax DPS when they were NOT supposed to be doing that, and thus parts of the fight end up skipped or the boss dies too fast to get to them.

Would I like to go back to exactly how ARR or HW Cleric stance worked? Nope. That was an awful system because OTHER PLAYERS would demean you regardless if you used it or not. How should it have worked? Well if the MSQ was designed to actually care about what class or job you had, and not assume DPS, maybe jobs could have been designed to be interesting. But they can't, the MSQ does not let you play a tank or a healer in "tank stance" or "healer stance" the way it was originally designed.

How do I know? Because I played the entire ARR MSQ without using Cleric Stance in 2.0. It sometimes took multiple tries just to do some of those "talk to NPC, spawns enemy" quests. That's how far apart the DPS you did as a healer, and the DPS an actual DPS did that didn't have to do extra steps, when an actual DPS could knock that enemy down in 5 seconds. Tanking was pretty much the same, but had the advantage of not being as squishy from the armor.

What would have made this all moot was removing Cleric Stance and Tank stance and instead having that "built in" to the content. When you play these "solo" contents, it should have been from a "role play" setting, where the game expressly requires you to use your job skills (eg healing, tanking) to complete the instance. Even an express "DPS Stance" , "Healer Stance", "Tank Stance" switch would do this, where entering multiplayer content forces these switches on, and when these switches are on, you are supposed to use tank or heal, not DPS. When the content decides you are required to DPS, it then turns "DPS Stance" on all players. But for this to even work, there has to be things the healer is REQUIRED to heal, that are not always the party members, and likewise things the tank must pull enmity away from. That would require changes to all the content in ways that might not be fun at all if you are playing a healer or a tank, where you might be required to do something boring, while the DPS get to fight. It does not make sense in many pieces of the game for there to be friendly players tailing you, so why would a tank or a healer need to do anything but help their party?

I think that's where the question of DoT/HoT and other types of buffs matter, and we've largely lost most of them, due in part to how DoT ticks consume a lot of network bandwidth. The game would need to re-engineer how buffs and debuffs work, and that can be solved by having the buffs be one-time casts (eg like how Protect worked) that drop after a fixed amount of time or when cleansed, or one-time uses (like stone skin.) Same for debuffs. It's just unfortunate how most of the debuffs cast on a player can not be cleansed, and those that do, can usually just be ignored because the longest buffs are typically 1 minute. Imagine if the buffs and debuffs lasted the entire fight.