7.1 Dragoon Changes Complaints

[Nikoto]

Guys, I swapped to Samurai. I'm having fun. Call me when Dragoon is fun again.

[HeavenlyArmed]

Take all our nastronds and give us 3 stardivers wuehaheuwhauehauhaheuahuah

This might be the scariest suggestion I've heard! It would certainly make the buff windows tighter >.>

[brinn12]

I thought the release of new expansions would always make jobs more complex, as the level cap increases by 10 and everyone gets new skills. It seems that time is long gone from this game. Every job is eventually going through the same process. VPR lasted like what, 2 weeks?

Yoshi-P himself said MMO players like feeling more powerful when they level up, but current job design feels completely disconnected to this statement.

[HikariKurosawa]

I thought the release of new expansions would always make jobs more complex, as the level cap increases by 10 and everyone gets new skills. It seems that time is long gone from this game. Every job is eventually going through the same process. VPR lasted like what, 2 weeks?

Yoshi-P himself said MMO players like feeling more powerful when they level up, but current job design feels completely disconnected to this statement.

That's not feasible game design for most people. It's inevitable that there will be a sizeable amount of people complaining, but the vast majority will want the game to taper out in busyness because it becomes unmanageable game design. If they continued to add complexity and busyness to the job design, encounter design would have to be completely watered down as a result.

Pretty much have to replace abilities and rework from now on, or prune and make new additions. Like taking out 2 nastrond and in the future life surge gives them room to add in my suggestion of high jump/mirage dive resetting cooldown during LotD and having upgraded versions. This would mean more oGCD variety and more jumping during our burst windows without bloating the input busyness.

At the end of the day, since people have this unrealistic expectation of jobs becoming increasingly complex every single expansion, they are going to end up disappointed. It's important to have realistic expectations if you want to avoid disappointment. Otherwise your future with this game is going to be pretty dour.

[HeavenlyArmed]

That's not feasible game design for most people. It's inevitable that there will be a sizeable amount of people complaining, but the vast majority will want the game to taper out in busyness because it becomes unmanageable game design. If they continued to add complexity and busyness to the job design, encounter design would have to be completely watered down as a result.

Pretty much have to replace abilities and rework from now on, or prune and make new additions. Like taking out 2 nastrond and in the future life surge gives them room to add in my suggestion of high jump/mirage dive resetting cooldown during LotD and having upgraded versions. This would mean more oGCD variety and more jumping during our burst windows without bloating the input busyness.

At the end of the day, since people have this unrealistic expectation of jobs becoming increasingly complex every single expansion, they are going to end up disappointed. It's important to have realistic expectations if you want to avoid disappointment. Otherwise your future with this game is going to be pretty dour.

I don't even want it to get more and more complex, I just don't want it getting more and more simplified. Going into EW from ShB the job got simpler, between the 2 minute meta and the removal of Mirage Dives from Spineshatter, it was very straightforward to line up Life windows with buffs, and all they really added was charges that forced you to hold spineshatter for 2mins and Wyrmwind, which doesn't require a ton of thought. Then in DT they remove Mirage Dive's interaction entirely, give us basically the same number of buttons to press meaning there is no added complexity, and now they decide it's still not enough even though this was already the simplest the job had been since the Stormblood? And again to the point of the original post, we're all sitting here talking about level 100 when playing the job in any content below level 90 is a total snoozefest after this change. You run out of buttons after 3 GCDs at 70. You run out of buttons after 4 GCDs at 80. At 90 you can get away with only doing one double-weave in your entire burst and still fit everything in. And so much of the game's content is stuff that isn't at level 100, to leave jobs in such a dull state for all that content is a serious oversight from the devs.

[HikariKurosawa]

I don't even want it to get more and more complex, I just don't want it getting more and more simplified. Going into EW from ShB the job got simpler, between the 2 minute meta and the removal of Mirage Dives from Spineshatter, it was very straightforward to line up Life windows with buffs, and all they really added was charges that forced you to hold spineshatter for 2mins and Wyrmwind, which doesn't require a ton of thought. Then in DT they remove Mirage Dive's interaction entirely, give us basically the same number of buttons to press meaning there is no added complexity, and now they decide it's still not enough even though this was already the simplest the job had been since the Stormblood? And again to the point of the original post, we're all sitting here talking about level 100 when playing the job in any content below level 90 is a total snoozefest after this change. You run out of buttons after 3 GCDs at 70. You run out of buttons after 4 GCDs at 80. At 90 you can get away with only doing one double-weave in your entire burst and still fit everything in. And so much of the game's content is stuff that isn't at level 100, to leave jobs in such a dull state for all that content is a serious oversight from the devs.

Everything you're saying is extremely subjective though, you have to understand this right? You never run out of buttons during combat. The rotation keeps going until the boss dies.

[HeavenlyArmed]

Everything you're saying is extremely subjective though, you have to understand this right? You never run out of buttons during combat. The rotation keeps going until the boss dies.

It isn't though. In terms of buttons, you should realize by this point considering how much I personally have hammered this point in directly to you, that I am talking about OGCDs. And yes, you do run out of OGCDs to press during a burst window. With EW and initial DT DRG that tended to only happen right at the end of the buff timer, but it did happen, and now with fewer buttons it happens faster, and as you get into lower and lower levels that happens faster and faster.

And complexity may not be exactly measurable, but it's hardly subjective. Having the exact amount of a resource that guarantees that every time buffs come off cooldown you willbe able to do your additional skills *is* less complicated than having too much or too little and needing to adjust to those circumstances to place those additional skills under as many buff windows as possible, and there is no person who will dispute that. And both of those are more complex than there not being a resource to manage, and those additional skills being accessed by pressing a button that has the exact same cooldown timer as the buffs you would be trying to align with, which again, no serious person would dispute. You can argue that Life Surge charges and Wyrmwind do add some complexity, but with Wyrmwind the entire thought process is "oh, my buffs will be back before I get another scale, let me hold this for a couple more seconds," which is not long-term planning, and with Life Surge it just amounts to press it twice under the stronger buffs and once under the weaker ones. Now, maybe some people will actually find that more complicated than needing to manage Gaze stacks to line up LotD and buffs, but I'd be shocked if that was a significant number of people.

[ovIm]

And complexity may not be exactly measurable, but it's hardly subjective.

To add to that, it is also an objective fact that classes have become more and more simplistic over the years instead of becoming more complex.

I think this was a deliberate move by the developers because they wanted to make the fights themselves the interesting parts of the gameplay instead of the rotations, but I could be misremembering that.

[HeavenlyArmed]

To add to that, it is also an objective fact that classes have become more and more simplistic over the years instead of becoming more complex.

I think this was a deliberate move by the developers because they wanted to make the fights themselves the interesting parts of the gameplay instead of the rotations, but I could be misremembering that.

So there are two parts to this. The first is a pre-Dawntrail interview about job homogenization, where Yoshida acknowledged that it's a problem, but stated that there has also been a tendency to develop battle content that is too safe in recent years. So what he said in that interview was that for Dawntrail in particular since they didn't want to change everything all at once and make it feel like a completely different game, that the team had decided to first focus on making more interesting and experimental battle content, and that significant changes to make jobs feel more unique would likely be more of an 8.0 thing.

The other is I believe a much older interview, which I wasn't actually able to find but did want to bring up because I remember it being discussed. In that interview or whatever it was, it was stated that the overall goal from expansion to expansion is to in most cases keep jobs at roughly the same level of complexity, particularly after the devs saw the issues that were caused by how complex jobs were to play in Heavensward. There was an initial scaling back from that in Stormblood (at least in their eyes, personally I do think at least a few jobs got more complex going into Stormblood and even Shadowbringers) and from there they wanted to keep things the same so players wouldn't feel overwhelmed. At least that's how I remember that question being answered, but again I wasn't able to find that interview, so there is a chance I'm not remembering things perfectly.

[HikariKurosawa]

It isn't though.

It is though, what you enjoy about dragoon is subjective to your preferences. Obviously you will run out of oGCDs in a burst window, that's why it's called a window. You want more activity in a burst window than I do, and that's fine. You like the game different than me. It's subjective.

It's pointless to discuss, it's like arguing about music preferences. It's hard to even engage with you because all you're doing is yapping about what you like and I can't relate on top of it being subjective to your own taste entirely. You are trying to argue preference. It's one of the weirdest things people do. I couldn't care less about what you like. I am just explaining why I like the changes, it's not an invitation to argue nor is it an argument to begin with. It doesn't make you smarter, it doesn't make me smarter. I just like the game to play differently than you do. I don't even care about why you enjoy the game or that you are disappointed. It's not your game, and you don't share the vision the developers do for the game. Maybe make your own game, or continue to throw a fit over something others are celebrating. They can't appease everyone and it's only a game. It's meant to be fun. If you want complexity, get into math or science or something meaningful. It's literally just a video game. They shouldn't be wasting people's mental capacity on something like complex rotations. Use your brain to make the world a better place, not to parse 99.