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

[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.