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

[Valence]

'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.

See the problem is that we keep explaining to you what the OP means but you're still stuck on reading a bunch of words that your misunderstood and don't seem to be willing to get past the title of the thread. Still completely missing the point and digging more instead of stepping back and reconsidering.

No matter if a job caters more of its damage into its burst or if it's a bit more spread out, one of the points of the OP was, again, on the rotational design that seems to only care about bursts and not filler gameplay. I was talking about design meaning and agency, and not damage profiles.

I've never thought for a second that any of FFXIV's combat jobs were about 'choice.' You're not typing out a poem about your feelings around the encounter. You're executing a rotation. That means that there is one single best sequence that you execute pull after pull with machine-like precision. When you're clear ready on a fight, you generally can point at any specific mechanic and recall the exact GCD sequence that occurs at that point. That's how predictable the fight design is. Playing a faster job means that there's more of a focus on mechanical execution.

Then you'd have thought wrong. We used to have more of those jobs that were actually, indeed, about occasional choices based on rng, and MCH comes to mind immediately as one example. DNC used to be in its first iteration in ShB as well with flourish prep. Current BRD and DNC still have choices and triaging to do during their bursts even if DT added more fixed state buttons that reduce the rng somewhat. You cannot just print out a script that would autoplay on BRD or DNC because of rng. And within proc rng design, there is also two different levels: level 0 being what we have with DNC and BRD procs which is essentially about pressing the glowy button when it procs and isn't very different from autopilot 3 steps basic combo; level 1 being GCD triaging depending on procs (seen in BRD and DNC bursts); and level 3 being overwrite and pattern recognition based proc gameplay which removes entirely the autopilot of "just press the glowy button when it lights up" (seen in old DNC and old MCH, and perhaps at lower level in some RDM acceleration iterations).

MNK as exposed in the OP also required the player to know at which step of the rotation they were and identify the next button according to a leaden fist buff, a self buff and a dot. Right now the job does this choice for you with glowy buttons. What I didn't consider and was exposed to me as an alternative view of the problem is that those jobs have been simplified so much that they're now perhaps expecting you to go above the glowy button autopilot in order to not even glance at your hotbar once you have everything committed to muscle memory. Maybe that's what melee is all about, and maybe that also explains the radically different views we all have on what a job rotation should be, and why I main rphys and not melee even though I ironically enjoy playing MNK more today since as a more casual MNK player I was unable to deal with the filler cycle without the glowy button (could do 2 forms but not 3 at once). Which leaded me to ponder if the changes they made to the job for DT weren't actually addressed to players like me, that didn't main the job because of their inability to deal with the complex, fast paced rotation of the filler cycle.

But if people are telling me that the handful of MNK players that played the job actually managed to do this without the autopilot glowy buttons before just because they had committed everything to muscle memory, then first, props to them because I couldn't even be arsed (to each their own), and that would actually explain why the job clicked with so little people.


Either way, I still found some of the replies in this thread enlightening and it made me think more about what kind of players and design profiles roles tend to have, where casters tend to be more about fight mapping and planning (mechanics memory), melees at least the new ones try to be as minimalist as possible with a guardrail so that people can just muscle memorize its main cycles without a care, and rphys... well, it used to be something else, let's just leave it at that. And don't get me wrong, I appreciate that those different potential profiles help defining roles outside of an otherwise too homogenous dps group.