Are ANY dps jobs allowed to remain complex?

[MitsukiKimura]

The problem I have with this whole mentality of making all jobs accessible is that there is no sense of accomplishment of mastering a favorite job. Sure you might get people to try out the class but the veterans might just put down the job and the newer ones who try it then don't like it will drop it even faster.

[Carighan]

The problem I have with this whole mentality of making all jobs accessible is that there is no sense of accomplishment of mastering a favorite job. Sure you might get people to try out the class but the veterans might just put down the job and the newer ones who try it then don't like it will drop it even faster.

More importantly it also reduces the shelf life of an MMORPG as with jobs being ultimately quite similar in how they feel to play (in content, not in a vacuum) as all edges have been sanded off that could make them feel different, the ability to keep being interested in the game by switching your main is removed. A staple of MMO play, usually.

[Valence]

Imagine a world where every job has an accessible core but complexity in depth and ceiling.
A world where you don't need jobs on training wheels existing alongside tryhard jobs that are actually meta. Although I guess the latter is getting slowly extinct now...

[reflettage]

I said this in another thread but feel it's relevant to this discussion.

I think it's okay if certain fights or certain mechanics are slightly easier or harder as certain jobs just because of how said jobs work. That doesn't automatically mean the jobs are flawed or need to change. A player's perceived difficulty of a given encounter at any given point on its timeline comes primarily from the cognitive load experienced when trying to harmonize the content's mechanics with their role+job's mechanics from moment to moment. Fights are largely scripted, which acts as a baseline for difficulty that the players have no control over. The baseline difficulty is what makes something like Savage feel inaccessible to someone who can barely get through their daily Expert Roulette, and that perceived inaccessibility is why Savage is completely optional content that gates nothing but gear + some mounts and achievements behind it. FFXIV's MSQ actively gates the rest of the game behind it, making it effectively mandatory for every single player regardless of their abilities. So how can the developers make certain parts of the game both accessible and decently rewarding for everyone? Well...they can't. A story-only casual player who plays a little bit every 6 months and a hardcore multi-legend who plays a lot every day have fundamentally different needs when it comes to deriving reward and entertainment from content. This means the devs either make multiple versions of every duty and force players to segregate themselves, OR they give players multiple ways to engage with the same duties. This is a multiplayer game, you want as many people engaging in the same content as possible. Jobs are the vehicles through which players engage with the game, so the devs need to offer a vast array of jobs that vary in playstyle, mechanical complexity, and physical requirements for execution. This enables a variety of ways to experience the game and its content, therefore making the game appeal to more people in general. Don't get me wrong, job potential should absolutely NOT scale linearly with difficulty. "Harder" is not synonymous with "superior" and a player's choice of job should be largely a matter of preference. I play BLM because I like playing BLM. Experiencing FFXIV content through a Black Mage lens is extremely enjoyable for me. On the other hand, I despise playing melee DPS. Idk why, I just don't like it. That's not something the developers can fix; they would have to turn melee jobs into tanks/healers/ranged DPS for me to possibly want to choose them over literally anything else. But I already have plenty of non-melee job options, I don't NEED to play melee jobs to engage with the game -- every single melee enthusiast, however, would have their favorite way of engaging with the game totally deleted for no reason.

[SalamanderIX]

Bard has so many systems, I often forget what they all are.
Not that it's important to know them all since a lot of them will just light up a button.. but still, it sure does have a lot of systems which I guess could be counted as complexity.