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

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

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

I still don't get how periodic effects can be such a non-issue for any other modern MMOs but apparently outright destructive for XIV despite its far slower and universal tick interval. WoW be running buttery smooth in 40-mans with far, far more (de)buff bloat.

But neither am I quite convinced that's even the reason for their being pruned. It seems more a matter of preempting likely complaints of poor UI by trying their best simply to remove most things that might complicate it.

(Why players can't simply separate Target Status Effects and place them near their own buff display and thereby make those trackers among the easiest things of all to track, though, I will likely never know.)

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.

I mean, wouldn't solo story instances be able to flex capacities other than damage-dealing just by having 1+ somewhat fragile partner NPCs with decently high damage and maybe a tiny bit of healing capacity, whom you can heal or keep aggro off of to keep alive? You could then easily apply a subtle modifier to those others to have them take and deal more damage based on the player's role without needing to have highly tailored fights. And conversely, if you do otherwise... what realistic application is there for heal-spamming or turtling in a (truly / NPC-less) solo scenario?

[Jeeqbit]

In theory, Cleric Stance merely caused one to commit to offense for at least 2 GCDs at a time, up from 1. That's literally just 1 GCD more. Which is already not particularly worth the apm bloat* or making a trap of half one's kit at a time for.

It's a risk-reward thing though and that's what was fun about it. Risk-reward type stuff invites you to become good at it purely by "getting a feel" for the timing and learning the situations the risk is worth it and that it's not. Knowing there was a risk forced you to care about doing it right.

Cleric Stance today absolutely would not work that way, simply because INT is no longer factored into a healer's offense.

Well the implication of bringing back Cleric Stance as it was in Heavensward would be splitting damage/healing between INT/MND again. However, I think bringing it back as it was wouldn't fit with their current design philosophy in the slightest, because risk-reward systems have to be a minor difference like how positionals have become. Probably a modern version of Cleric Stance would have to buff damage by 1% in exchange for losing all of your Healing Magic Potency stat. This way, if someone didn't want to risk it, they'd only lose 1% damage, but it still rewards min-max gameplay.

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.

I don't honestly feel that they "wanted" it to work a particular way. I think it was all just a shot in the dark. They didn't really know what they were doing when making ARR, so they just tried to make mechanics that made logical sense for the lore of the class/job and holy trinity concept, while adding in all the mechanics from other FF games like silence, sleep, elemental stats, etc. But it was throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks and most of it didn't lol. But out of that came the things that stuck which they had mostly fine-tuned toward the final tier of Heavensward into Stormblood.

For example, melee DPS had things like Fist of Earth, Keen Flurry and Featherfoot. They made sense from a lore perspective and you could assume when designing the game that melee DPS would tank adds in boss fights, but given they weren't tanks it ended up being mud that they threw at a wall that didn't stick.

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

Yes, true, often players just flat out ignored intended concepts so SE was like "ok, we'll remove it then" and didn't replace it with anything. Sometimes ignoring the intended concepts was to the detriment of a party somewhat, like how being in a DPS stance on a tank might sometimes make tanks unnecessarily squishy and I'd feel a little guilty about that in some fights. Because some fights, if I'm honest, my damage wasn't worth making myself more squishy for, but I did it anyway because I wanted to do more damage and then the healer had to heal me.

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.

I do wish they would do this for the MSQ. It can't be hard to do. The DPS checks have to be designed for a healer and the incoming damage has to be designed for a caster DPS. All of which makes MSQ duties a complete joke, especially when you have some item level growth.

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.

I didn't see this as a bandwidth thing. They just have phase changes in raids that affect DoT-centric rotation's DPS so they don't want this to be an issue anymore. Although they do have some issues with buff limits that have become apparent with the forced buff windows and especially large-scale raids like DRS.

[Shurrikhan]

It's a risk-reward thing though and that's what was fun about it.

For it to have been a risk, allies would have to die within 2 GCDs' time if not spam-healed by both healers, and those situations would need to not be easily predictable. Which... was virtually never the case for as long as Cleric Stance existed.

Probably a modern version of Cleric Stance would have to buff damage by 1% in exchange for losing all of your Healing Magic Potency stat. This way, if someone didn't want to risk it, they'd only lose 1% damage, but it still rewards min-max gameplay.

Given that even healer DoTs can make up a 10% DPS increase, it could easily go higher. I just still don't see why you'd want to bother. Until it has the potency (e.g., +15% dmg vs. +30% healing) to make a difference often enough to need frequent toggles and for those toggles to include some element of risk... it's just clunky bloat. And if you do make it see frequent use... it ends up filling up weave-space that could otherwise have been more varied per any other increase in APM (if that APM is the goal here).

Now, one could do a fair bit by reducing its CD to scale with GCD speed and by reducing its lock-in period to 1.5 GCDs or so... OR even by swapping it to a lock-out period (the CD begins on press but can be cancelled at any time so that you risk damage output by hitting it just before you'd need to swap it back off for a heal) --likely with a slightly longer CD like 2.5 GCDs-- but all that's still merely polishing a needless convolution with no net positives over alternate means of increasing APM in fitting manner for each healer job.

Sometimes ignoring the intended concepts was to the detriment of a party somewhat, like how being in a DPS stance on a tank might sometimes make tanks unnecessarily squishy and I'd feel a little guilty about that in some fights. Because some fights, if I'm honest, my damage wasn't worth making myself more squishy for, but I did it anyway because I wanted to do more damage and then the healer had to heal me.

I mean, if the healer had to lose more rPotency from having healed you that much extra than you put out, yourself, by dropping that mitigation, then tank stance would have been the right call, at least in those windows of highest damage intake. It just basically never was.

(Granted, that was in no small part because of how costly toggling tank stance was back then, making it near impossible to narrow tank stance uptime around just those moments of high incoming damage for any net rDPS gain given those costs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

[Gemina]

That would make the mechanic all the more pointless, though. And rather different (even further dumbed down) from what it was, as it previously had affected all but Benediction (from the point onward that Lustrate was made worthwhile on non-tanks as well by dealing healing potency instead of %HP).

If you make it not affect healing abilities, you remove the sole (even if tiny) aspect of decision-making it previously offered -- choosing whether to primarily attack or primarily heal with simultaneous damage-and-healing skills like Assize, Earthen Star, etc. and remove any pacesetting otherwise provided by oGCD CDs.

All that version of Cleric Stance would do, then, is punish the player for attacking fewer than 2 GCDs in a row or using an oGCD attack outside of that period... atop its past issues of packet loss- and Spell Speed-unfriendliness. You'd raise difficulty floor (or at least, annoyances) considerably for very little increase to difficult ceiling (if losing singular woven attacks can even be considered that).

____________

There's no reason for Cleric Stance to to follow the same procedure as before, when its context was hugely different due to attack spells and heals coming from different stats, instead of attempting to produce the same results (or what little among them could be considered net positives).

This is precisely my point. That it would be pointless. I'm not advocating for the return of Cleric Stance in current content. Quite the opposite. The reason why I say healing abilities would be unaffected is because that is how abilities that increase healing via healing magic currently work. Abilities such as SCH's Protraction and WAR's Thrill of Battle do not increase the potency of oGCD heals, so the reverse would also have to be true. And because oGCD heals are so abundant across the healers with the exception of WHM whom still primarily uses the GCD to heal, WHM is really the only healer that stands to benefit/suffer from such a design.

I don't think it could work as a role skill, but as a WHM exclusive ability, I think there is some potential there. Because Benediction already ignores any kind of penalty to healing and it is on such a long cooldown, their only other ST oGCD heal is Tetra and while they are getting a second charge come DT, it will be post lv90 and it doesn't really change that their oGCD healing capability is still limited in comparison to the other healers. Other oGCD restorative abilities such as Asylum, Assize, and Bell simply assist the WHM remaining on the offensive. What I am thinking is that Cleric Stance on WHM will be married to the Lily mechanic and help make it more dynamic and impactful. Much like before, Cleric Stance being active would essentially be the default stance for WHM, turning it off only when afflatus skills/GCD heals are needed, and then making sure to get back into it in order to pump up their damage to Misery and other offensive skills.

This would give WHM an actual gimmick, and some individuality among the other healers. I am by no means saying this is how the job should play. I am only thinking outside the box and tossing around some ideas to help make the job less vanilla while keeping its identity intact.

[Taranok]

I still don't get how periodic effects can be such a non-issue for any other modern MMOs but apparently outright destructive for XIV despite its far slower and universal tick interval. WoW be running buttery smooth in 40-mans with far, far more (de)buff bloat.

But neither am I quite convinced that's even the reason for their being pruned. It seems more a matter of preempting likely complaints of poor UI by trying their best simply to remove most things that might complicate it.

(Why players can't simply separate Target Status Effects and place them near their own buff display and thereby make those trackers among the easiest things of all to track, though, I will likely never know.)

On DoTs, the problem with them are 3-fold. One, DoTs are boring as sin to look at explicitly. You cast an effect, then you hawk a bar for an unknown amount of time waiting for the debuff to fall off, then cast it again, with no animation except when initially applying it. There is nothing else in terms of DoT gameplay, at least as far as DoTs themselves are concerned.

Two, snapshotting. You cannot teach the playerbase snapshotting, as a developer. Almost literally by definition, snapshotting is an exploit of how the servers are designed, and arguably cannot reasonably be considered to be intended. Snapshotting itself creates 2 problems beyond its nature as being an exploit. The first is, with proper snapshotting, you can absolutely break the DPS curve of your class. We saw this with Summoner in Heavensward. Where it went from as low as ~300 DPS from people who didn't know the first thing of how to play the class, which was a common problem of HW as a whole, classes being too hard to play (Skill floor too high, a problem that some classes, such as BLM, still have in EW,) to ~1800 for the dev-intended DPS, to as high as 2700+ if you exploited every last bit of snapshotting and bad job design. This also is an example that a skill ceiling too far removed from the floor is a problem. Do you balance it around the best players? The average? We have an example of devs nerfing a job mid-expansion because of them exploiting the job's bad design. Ironically, also stormblood summoner, where they nerfed wyrmwave because of the 11 wyrmwave rotation, forcing everyone to learn the player rotation or else do subpar damage, which was the entire playerbase that didn't discover this themselves, get told it, or read a guide on it.

The second part of snapshotting is that, because of how the snapshotting happens in the game, the devs cannot modify DoTs mid-application. We know for a fact they can extend DoTs, because Contagion existed before ShB, which also causes further snapshotting-related skill ceiling issues. But they can't dynamically change the damage, can't dynamically adjust the tic rate, and can't consume the DoT to explode it. Staples of other games, especially WoW.

Three, the devs do not report on DoT damage to the player's log, nor do they give any per-dot information. So even if you could adjust the DoTs mid-application, you won't get number explosions like you would on a druid that decided they wanted to cause their HoTs to last longer and tic twice as fast.

So, what we end up having is functionally an effect that may as well have a 15, 20, 30, 45, or 60s cooldown that just does the damage all at once. DoTs in the game are objectively just a worse version of a cooldown ability that does damage. Hell, if the boss jumps, you straight up lose your damage anyways.

Which means, the only form of DoT-adjacent gameplay where the rotation is chaotic and reactive (E.G. DoTs on separate timers,) the devs can only make a proc-based class. Which, in part due to netcoding, in part due to a lack of creativity on the dev's part, they just refuse to do beyond RDM/DNC/BRD. The other class with procs, BLM, basically hasn't been a true proc class since it got fire 4, even though it started as a proc mage. Anything else requires a complete rework of how the servers handle and report DoTs, which should be doable but is likely difficult considering the devs, not once, touched on this in the game's entire life.

Bonus point: DoTs and buffs have a maximum cap you can hit on a per-boss basis, and with too many DoTs and HoTs floating around, people will hit the buff and debuff cap. This happened in 24+ man content for debuffs, and in 8 man content for buffs (see: TOP.) Which are all extremely good reasons to rework the server code to begin with.

The opposite side of this is HoTs, which functionally behave the same way. Only HoTs are ruined by a separate problem, which is the buster meta. When you design all your fights around bursting down your DPS and/or tanks extremely fast one after another, you have to design your healers around bursting the team's life back up, and your tanks around being able to survive excessively high amounts of incoming damage. When measured in EHP, tank busters sometimes hit for over 200%, and you just can't have a sustain tank in such a meta.

You can, actually, fix the HoT and mitigation aspects of healing and tanking design, but the devs have dug themselves into such a deep hole that they're probably too far in to even consider needing to rework literally every fight in the game to open up variety on these jobs. Fixing the server for HoTs and DoTs would require a complete server damage and healing rewrite, which is problematic in its own right, but would be functionally mandatory if we ever wanted DoT gameplay to truly come back.

[Shurrikhan]

On DoTs, the problem with them are 3-fold. One, DoTs are boring as sin to look at explicitly. You cast an effect, then you hawk a bar for an unknown amount of time waiting for the debuff to fall off, then cast it again, with no animation except when initially applying it.

Wait, what? In practice, you reapply a given DoT to your (every) target once per X GCDs (be that slightly earlier or slightly later than the effect elapsing). We don't have fine-but-obligatory clipping options anymore to pace that with partial GCDs.

In ST, that's pretty easily managed without even looking at Target Status Effects, though they can provide visual cues for muscle memory that can augment or supersede in-the-moment decision-making -- such as seeing 7s vs. 4s left on your Higan just after your last loop before an Iai-TG, based on what uptime the fight cost you.

I'd argue that having those considerations, and actual risk of lost uptime, is far healthier for the game, though, and that soft CDs like DoTs (with up to X potency per use from giving equal or greater time than listed between uses, and up to X potency over the fight based on equal or lower than listed time between uses) allow uniquely well for accessibility (as you can't be so screwed over as a rigid CD might do) and skill ceiling (higher than rigid CDs, as you can make short-term sacrifices for long-term gains) simultaneously.

They're simple, yes, but shockingly good at what they do, especially in situations with multiple mobs with staggered time-til-death.

So, what we end up having is functionally an effect that may as well have a 15, 20, 30, 45, or 60s cooldown that just does the damage all at once. DoTs in the game are objectively just a worse version of a cooldown ability that does damage.

Except that they are at least soft CDs with additional use in multi-target and have higher available cognitive load. They offer the game considerably more than those rigid CDs would.

Moreover, we already know that many bosses in ARR and HW would still take tick damage (because they'd return at lower %HP than they left at) and, iirc, be affected by debuffs like Dragon Kick (because certain affectable raidwides would be affected even if cast while away) during their jumps, so it's not as if we're forced to waste those DoTs in those events.

Two, snapshotting. You cannot teach the playerbase snapshotting, as a developer.

To be fair, it is the far more intuitive assumption. If I'm to apply a bleed based on how hard I hit a target, most would expect that if I enchant myself to hit harder before hitting the target, that would affect the bleed, while if I bleed someone and then get angry or otherwise empowered enough to hit harder thereafter, well, the hit and therefore bleed is already done.

The second part of snapshotting is that, because of how the snapshotting happens in the game, the devs cannot modify DoTs mid-application.

Is that really "because of how the snapshotting happens", though? That seems more a matter, purely and simply, of spaghetti code, as other MMOs have no trouble (as you mentioned) having dynamic strength per tick and tick rates, both, atop snapshotted initial values.

all extremely good reasons to rework the server code to begin with.

And there we have it. That degree of spaghetti shouldn't be what we increasingly fetter the game to or around.