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

[Ayan_Calvesse]

As it stands pretty much all jobs have a "this is your next move" flow to them; there is not really any diversity in play between 2 players of the same class. I sounds like your asking "are the other classes always pointed to what to do next?" the answer is a soft "yes" - some classes provide less information but yeah thats generally the way dps works in FF - "this ability augments this ability" and so on - usually with a small amount of thought you can figure out your "flow".

Personally I'd love it if there was more creative ways to "solve for X" with X being the ideal damage rotations - it feels bad for example that Reaper HAS to do augments Gibbet/Gallows (as doing one triggers the other next time) but yeah I hope we see a significant change to the homogenous nature of jobs in 8.0

[Lyth]

There is no job in this game that's not got a burst.

That's not the point being made. Did you look at the graphs? Do you not think there's a difference between having a peak at 90k with a trough at 10k, vs. a peak at 60k with a trough at 25k?

PCT is the archetypical burst job. It's completely uncontested in this regard. The job has the highest damage on any single attack. What makes it slightly different from other burst jobs is that there's no ramp up time, because you get your motifs for free outside of combat. It's a bit like if Yoshi-p's preferred raid job was RPR instead and he decided that the job should start off with 100 gauge outside of combat. And without ramp up, you can take full advantage of your first potion window in a way that not every job can. That's why the job can do such high damage at 25 APM. You have insane burst on a few buttons followed by a minute and a half of uninspiring semi-AFK damage where you can grab a coffee and plug your motifs in the wall charger. That burst also why PCT has about 80% representation in the fastest clears compared to like 30% on VPR and 10% on BLM.

Jobs like VPR and BLM have burst 'in the general sense', but they're a lot more consistent in the damage that they put out. The main point is to punish uptime errors. That's also why focusing on burst is a bit strange. Burst is the most laidback part of the rotation, and you want to time your non-two minute Reawakens against mechanics where you're not going to get positionals off (but are going to be in melee range). They do punish you quite severely in terms of potency loss if you mess up the sequence, but it's just muscle memory and execution, like Mudras. You can look at jobs like this and say that the base concepts are pretty simple, in theory. But the test is if you can be consistent for hours, in 10-15 minute pulls, in a job with no mental downtime.

Another point worth noting is that burst asymmetry is incredibly difficult to balance. When you design fights that have intermissions without a target, you favor jobs with burst because everyone's timers are ticking down (and PCT can reset their motifs at their leisure). The dev team will likely ignore this until 7.1 when there will be a slew of complaints about PCT balance. And then they'll have to sit down and reconsider how motifs are designed.

Either way, the point is that VPR has burst 'in the general sense', and it looks flashy and exciting, but the whole rotation is weighted very similarly.

[Kalocin]

Seems more like every job has become so easy in place of rapid mechanics that the minor nuances are the only things that are actually able to be talked about. The truth is the game was always kind of easy and the difficulty was in timers+mechanics and not messing things up. The 1-2-3 being cancelled from a move was an intentional mechanic but even that's gone away. Every job is 2min burst, press some buttons repeatedly a few times until 1 min minor burst, do the same until big 2 min burst comes back. They're all the same. Viper and monk just get looked at now because they're the most obvious version of it.

[Lyth]

Nah. This is fairly standard fare for this subforum. This the melee equivalent of 'BLM is just F4 spam, amirite?' OP takes issue with regards to both positional gameplay and melee in general. Truth is, melee aren't the reason that physical ranged are being mistreated. It's just a byproduct of that archaic mindset from Stormblood onwards that physical ranged 'ought' to be treated as a lower tier of ranged gameplay because they don't have casts. I'd love for them to have parity, but they really need to take it up with their magical ranged counterparts. Leave us out of it.

[Valence]

They made it so scattershot giving 10 heat makes it worth ignoring the ST combo sometimes for certain fight optimisation. That's pretty much all they've done since EW lol.

I have yet to find such a fight so far. I'd like more optimization with scattergun though because it just feels good (I'm probably heavily biased by pvp here not gonna lie), but I don't really see it much into single target right now. The loss in potency is just too steep to justify it. Like for instance with a standard 2.5s GCD you can use it before the 4min burst to get combo neutral for it and do a back to back double hypercharge (like for the 2min window), but from what I understand it's still not worth the loss and instead you can just do the standard double HC with a filler shot in between as usual.

Back in EW or ShB, they changed Bootshine to proc a guaranteed crit after Snap Punch. Wasn't Bootshine a glowy button then too? This just seems to me like an extension of that.

Bootshine critting has been a thing since ARR/HW. It had little to do with Snap Punch, and everything to do that you were required to be in Opo form for it to trigger, and Opo form has never been guaranteed on Bootshine, notably by using it Formless. Besides Bootshine/DK being formless unless you use Form Shift before the fight or a Coeurl Form just before (like Snap Punch as you say), it's varied across all expansions how Perfect Balance worked, and sometimes it just left you formless after use, and in some other expansions (like EW) it allowed for a freeform use of any form where DK/Bootshine was guaranteed being under Opo and not formless.

Up until the end ShB/EW rework, Bootshine and DK actually never glowed even under Opo, because back then the devs considered that the buttons were usable at any time (which has always been the case) and glowy buttons on combos should only show that the next button could be used so only Raptor and Coeurl moves glowed. It makes more sense today since Raptor and Coeurl moves aren't accessible if you're not in the correct form anyway so everything that has a Form glows since then.

But, point is, the glowy button on Opo serves an actual purpose because Opo as a form serves more than just "it's the next button to press". What's changed for DT is that the glowy buttons also show you which of the 2 skills of each Form is the next correct move, which has never been the case up until now. That and VPR design is what prompted me to start this thread and muse over it.

I'm really confused about where this discussion about 'burst-focused jobs' is coming from. I think part of the problem is that people are automatically assuming that aDPS means burst. The correlation is much more tenuous than that.



Here are two jobs on polar opposite ends of burst vs. continuous damage. Both have roughly the same aDPS and rDPS in the same run (give or take a couple hundred rDPS/aDPS). But there are some obvious differences in burst vs. consistent damage. If you want to assess how much burst a job has, look at its peak DPS under burst. Don't look for surrogate measures. You can evaluate this directly.

You can argue that all jobs have some degree of burst, given the existence of two minute raidbuffs. Double Reawaken is flashy, but the bulk of VPR's damage comes from persistently maintaining uptime.

If you're referring to the OP, I think we're not speaking about the same thing. The OP was specifically about job design and brought up whether all the meaning and player agency in the design of certain jobs could only be found in the burst and not in the filler (on autopilot), and it certainly didn't talk about damage profiles at all.

Nah. This is fairly standard fare for this subforum. This the melee equivalent of 'BLM is just F4 spam, amirite?' OP takes issue with regards to both positional gameplay and melee in general. Truth is, melee aren't the reason that physical ranged are being mistreated. It's just a byproduct of that archaic mindset from Stormblood onwards that physical ranged 'ought' to be treated as a lower tier of ranged gameplay because they don't have casts. I'd love for them to have parity, but they really need to take it up with their magical ranged counterparts. Leave us out of it.

Please stop misconstruing my posts and make up random bullshit about what I say. If you truly misunderstood everything to the point of bringing up damage profiles, rphys (????) and consistently replying beyond the point of the OP, I'm ready to explain again, but then just ask? So far i'm sorry but all I'm seeing is a troll trying to push for unrelated agendas.

[rewd]

The VPR main got mad you called their job easy and on autopilot and started the usual tirade about how PCT and casters in general are the root of all evil and also killed their cat. To no one's surprise, I'd add.

[Lyth]

...

It's really hard to not see the thread as yet another one of the usual 'meleewalker' tirades that we've been seeing on this forum for the past three or four years, especially given your previous viewpoints around melee and positionals. If you had a genuinely constructive purpose in mind for this thread, I'd like to hear it. But I don't think referring to other jobs as 'being on autopilot' is a good starting point.

It's important to be conscious of what job damage profiles look like, especially for players applying raid buffs. A burst-focused job has higher peaks and lower troughs. This is not a burst-focused job.

[Supersnow845]

Genuinly how did we get from MNK losing its combo choice (or at least the illusion of it) and VPR not even caring about its combo arms anymore since the debuff got removed to PCT being a strong burst job

The OP’s original point is sound. VPR’s entire job is basically played for you, your only real “choice” is when outside of your burst do you want to dump your twinblade combos because with the removal of noxious your burst is now just reawaken spam. MNK is similar unfortunately in that your main choice these days is where to enter your combo with formless fist when you get it for free under perfect balance

This isn’t to say…….say MCH is any better given its also incredibly rigid but I think OP’s point was more centred on the fact that both VPR and MNK used to have a lot more actual choice about their combo flow that currently is basically exclusively SAM’s domain because of hagakure.

Regardless I’m not sure what this has to do with PCT’s burst profile

[Lyth]

Regardless I’m not sure what this has to do with PCT’s burst profile

'Is job design all about bursts' is both in the topic title itself and was the subject of discussion of the past page. It's fine if you want to talk about burst in the context of an actual burst-focused job like PCT, but it demonstrates a lack of knowledge to bring up a discussion of how jobs are 'too burst focused' in the context of VPR. I think a lot of people blindly look at aDPS without applying critical thinking around what the damage profiles actually look like.

Either way, most jobs might seem 'played for you' if you have a printout of the rotation taped to the side of your monitor. But can you execute the rotation in a practical raid encounter while being completely dependent on external prompts rather than memory and keybinds? Actually, I take that back. You could totally do that on a 25 APM job. Just don't try it on a 50 APM one.

[Carighan]

I mean, they're no more on autopilot than any other job.

Because, virtually all combat rotations in this game are static or quasi-static in nature. Meaning you can know 10, 20, 30, 100 GCDs in advance. And the only thing a glowie button or an autocombo does is collapse X of these GCDs into a single button that cycles between the skills. But functionally it makes 0 difference whether these are on the same button and swap out or do not, there's no variety either way. (In fact that's the big pro-argument for autocombos, there's no player agency either way so why even waste hotbar space on it for no reason)

The two exceptions would be Dancer and Pictomancer, and even those just slightly mess with it. Dancer due to the coinflips on just about every move and the genuinely random simon says order. Pictomancer because there's no truly fixed position for the motif paints.