Are MNK and VPR on autopilot? Is job design all about bursts?

[mallleable]

I feel like MNK feels way less auto piloty than VPR, and I feel like it's because it doesn't explicitly tell you when to use Perfect Balance, which Blitzes to use where, or even which GCDs to be using for a Blitz combo. The line between filler, and burst is kinda blurred as well. Entering, and exiting, and executing a Blitz combo does require some knowledge about your filler rotation -- even with the new simplified system. There is a dialog between its filler, and burst. MNK also has an actual "fail" Blitz. Forbidden Chakras are also a random element in your filler rotation. Yeah, there is kind of an element of 'just follow the glowing buttons' for MNK, but it does not hold your hand.

This might be a take, but I don't think VPR is meant to to be a 'thinky' job instead primarily focusing on execution. The Reawaken combo transforming almost every action on your hotbar, and the oGCD combos within the Vicewinder combo makes me think this. In the future, I think I would want them to add more just tricky to execute actions to its rotation.

[Lyth]

In my view, viper compensates by having more complex combo routing than other melee jobs, as well as more positionals. I have always been confused by people proclaiming it the easiest melee job. Consider reaper, which only has a single 123 combo sequence compared to viper's strict 111, 112, 122, 222. It doesn't even have any positionals on that base combo.

There's also another factor, the fact that there's so much more to being good at this game than simply doing your rotation correctly.

A lot of players fall under the impression that just because they're performing a rotation correctly, they're mastered a job for all intents and purposes. I suspect this is why so many viper players were upset at noxious gnash being removed. To them, the base rotation already had zero difficulty because 'the UI tells you what to do', so it's like the job went from 0 to -1 difficulty.

To me though, if you crutching on the UI just to perform your base rotation in the first place, you are failing at the game. If you were learning to swim, it would be equivalent to the point where you just learned how to tread water. That's not mastery, that's the bare minimum. I'm fine with the UI helping people reach that bare minimum.

If you're looking at your hotbar at all, that's mental energy spent not looking at mechanics, or your party.

What if you had to track the teacups in Strayborough while doing your rotation? (No surprise, many people can't). That boss is a great litmus test for whether you can actually play a job unaided. What if your party member did something unexpected? Would you notice and adjust in time? What if it was your responsibility to solve a mechanic and give callouts? Suddenly, being able to refer to your hotbar to plot your rotation doesn't mean shit, if it means you're compromising other things.

Which is to say, that's where some additional difficulty with viper comes from. You either tax your limited visual attention, or use workarounds like memory or referring to your buffs to find your place in the rotation. I encourage people to think more holistically about what it means to be skillful at the game, because it's so much more than what buttons you're pressing in a vacuum.

It's not really surprising. Most people who post in here want to influence job balance, and new jobs are fresh competition. All of the past three released melee jobs have gone through a phase where a vocal part of the playerbase has insisted that they are the easiest jobs ever and used that as a pretext to complain about job balance. Eventually it all settles down and then the focus shifts to the next release. On the plus side, these negative comments about the job being 'too easy' probably also act as a deterrent to the dev team removing positionals from VPR, so there's always that silver lining.

The devs correctly anticipated that introducing in a new style of combo system would stump a lot of players. If you go back to look at the flurry of threads about the job at launch release, there were a lot of people confused about how the system worked and what sequences they needed to be pressing. While I think the UI implementation of Vipersight was underwhelming, I think releasing a job like this without UI guidance would have rendered it unplayable for most people trying it out for the first time. That's likely also the motivation for removing NG two days after launch, in probably the fastest new job revision that we've seen in the history of the game. You're right that this is really just about supporting players at the skill floor, because after a couple weeks I would expect most people to be able execute their combos from memory (or at least by looking at the active buff icon, if they're re-entering the combo sequence).

Melee is about execution at the end of the day. It doesn't really matter if you know the theory about how it works or the button sequence from reading a guide. It's a bit like knowing that pianist presses a bunch of keys in sequence to make music. There's even a guide telling you which order to play the notes. But at the end of the day, you're either someone who can play or someone who can't.

[Valence]

So in summary, would you say that job mastery in your opinion is essentially a fully muscle memorized rotational sequence?

[Myon88]

I think there are a lot of different aspects to what constitutes difficulty, so there's going to be a degree of subjectivity for everyone.

And all this nonwithstanding, it also doesn't preclude SE making the conscious decision to make certain jobs more accessible on purpose anyway. With reaper, sage, viper, and picto (especially picto), we're now 4/4 for jobs released in recent expansions being fairly well received on that front. It's definitely a deliberate decision on their part.

There was actually a decent discussion about metrics like that just yesterday over here, it's worth a skim if you're curious and have 15 minutes.

[jonimated]

There's definitely a larger discussion here regarding SE's current job design, and the community conversations around this design.

I think a lot of folks tend to conflate difficulty, complexity, and agency, all into one umbrella, and then use that to blanket state whether a job is easy or hard. I think SE tends to conflate these as well which has lead to a lot of failure with job design. It's just not that simple.

Launch Viper had agency, and some small amount of complexity, but wasn't particularly difficult. The 7.05 change removed that agency and complexity while retaining the low bar for difficulty and as a result Viper now just feels hollow. I think the same has happened to Monk since Stormblood, though at a slower rate. Stormblood Monk had complexity and agency, and some may argue a moderate difficulty floor. Over the expansions and updates SE slowly stripped all that out to the Monk we currently have. Again a husk of what it once was due to what I believe to be a fundamental misunderstanding of job difficulty vs complexity/agency. I'm sure a lot of players could apply this to their own job over the years as well.

I do think at a broader level SE really needs to take a step back and re-evaluate job design top down. Not for any particular job, but as a whole. imo we're in what I feel is the most stale place job design has been in since ARR. Which feels so bad when you consider Dawntrail has has some of the best designed encounters so far. It just feel so weird.

[Valence]

I think there are a lot of different aspects to what constitutes difficulty, so there's going to be a degree of subjectivity for everyone.

And all this nonwithstanding, it also doesn't preclude SE making the conscious decision to make certain jobs more accessible on purpose anyway. With reaper, sage, viper, and picto (especially picto), we're now 4/4 for jobs released in recent expansions being fairly well received on that front. It's definitely a deliberate decision on their part.

There was actually a decent discussion about metrics like that just yesterday over here, it's worth a skim if you're curious and have 15 minutes.

This is actually what I was trying to get at here, which seems to echo that reddit post.

You brought up an interesting perspective to me however since I have the radically opposed one when I come to appreciation of design, probably because my expectations from what the game gives me to play with are also diametrically opposed. I didn't exactly consider that we could push further the lopsided effect between job kits and encounter design, but the fact that you're essentially describing a system where a job almost becomes what you'd find in fighting games with muscle memorized patterns or long sequences (just over longer spans of time here) where what matters is memorization and recognition is interesting to me. It's definitely something that absolutely repels me, since what interests me is something that stimulates other parts of my brain, and let's be honest, parts at which I'm actually good instead of pretty bad. It also shows how further the shift has been radical over those past expansions and how my niche is becoming narrower and narrower.

On one hand you have this, right, and on the other it's caster DPS that offers a lot more freeform things but require you to map/excel sheet encounter by encounter to fit the script. Amusingly enough perhaps the part that the game has lost was something used to be found in rphys jobs somewhere... I don't know.

[WeakestZenosEnjoyer]

Monk falls into the bursty design framework they've relied on for almost all jobs like a crutch, job complexity is all during the burst roughly once a minute (unless you're DRK lmao or BLM with Astral Fire) and filler is supposed to be something you can do with your eyes closed (or more accurately, looking at the boss.)

Viper post-changes and new Summoner rebukes the trend by having no complexity in their bursts either, Viper has two entire damaging cooldowns and one of them isn't in burst and has charges with Vicewinder and Summoner just mashes 2 with full instant casts and presses oGCDs in whatever order they feel like.

[jonimated]

Viper post-changes and new Summoner rebukes the trend by having no complexity in their bursts either, Viper has two entire damaging cooldowns and one of them isn't in burst and has charges with Vicewinder and Summoner just mashes 2 with full instant casts and presses oGCDs in whatever order they feel like.

Summoner is an interesting beast for this discussion. It has quite possibly one of the most simplistic and easy-to-follow 2 minute rotation of any of the DPS jobs. It also has complete freedom of agency during it's "filler" phase when it comes to which primal to use when. These can be adjusted based on situation and movement required without affecting output pretty much at all. It's also one of the very few jobs which is almost completely unaffected by boss downtime. It has no gauge to build at all, so as long as you are hitting the demi-primals on cooldown the the rest doesn't matter. Even if you can't Summoner is still better off than the majority of other DPS since you can go straight into burst rotation with no buildup. The only other job I can think of that can do this effectively is maybe Ninja, but even Ninja has a minor gauge to manage.

It's a strange situation of interesting idea on paper executed poorly.

[wereotter]

Yes, I do feel like that SE has indeed chipped away at the filler phases of every job in order to only focus on the 2min bursts (and the mild 60s ones for some jobs).

I'm not 100% certain I would put this on SE. I've been playing long enough to have seen how every expansion every job guide was basically "here's how to adjust your rotation to everything fits into the ninja trick attack window"

We as players have been forcing ourselves into a 60 second burst meta for a decade now, even on jobs that were designed to be high sustained damage like monk and black mage had guides on refreshing certain skills or holding certain skills until trick went out. Cause and effect, we pushed ourselves into this meta, devs saw what we were doing and adjusted jobs to do this naturally to lower the skill floor for new players.

Honestly it was either where we are now as a community, or delete trick attack, and they probably figured this would have caused less player backlash. Trick was a key part of the ninja job identity.

[SieyaM]

Job design is all about bursts, and it became that way because when people were doing difficult content they complained that the jobs that had burst windows were hard to align with party wide buffs other jobs had. So now every job is on a 2 minute timer.