Black mage changes are probably my breaking point with this game

[HikariKurosawa]

Your entire argument boils down to any change that simplifies is good and when people push back against your opinion you just spout pointless “capitalism” “majority says otherwise” and other vapid nonsense. If changes towards the simple are always good why is SMN so unpopular again? Why can’t they make MNK popular? All they do is simplify and it just temporarily draws people from other classes. Like BLM’s rise has basically pulled directly from PCT’s numbers. What benefit is there to the overall community. If you like the changes then fine, but don’t act like you are the grand arbiter of general community sentiment. Just because the devs change something doesn’t mean it’s good by default especially when they get it wrong so often

Even this comment you haven’t said anything about why there was a compelling reason to change it. The devs say so is meaningless as they get things wrong all the time

Pretty simple, the job was overly punishing in magnitude compared to other jobs and wasn't able to keep up with the fight design unless you played the job in ways that went against the intended design of the rotation. It was the sole outlier in the game and now it's not.

[Supersnow845]

Pretty simple, the job was overly punishing in magnitude compared to other jobs and wasn't able to keep up with the fight design unless you played the job in ways that went against the intended design of the rotation. It was the sole outlier in the game and now it's not.

Three things

1) before 7.2 RDM and SCH were less mobile than BLM
2) in the same patch as this apparent “outlier” was fixed they made PCT LESS mobile by nuking its hammer combo to the point it’s less mobile now than BLM was in 7.1
3) your idea of “intended rotation” is entirely personal. To me the “intended” idea behind BLM is to use all your tools as you need them. Spamming a rigid standard rotation is the melee’s thing

So this decision has no internal logic, no continuity with the changes made to the other classes, SCH is still the least mobile job in the game and RDM is still dropping melee combos to not kill everyone.

Not to mention if you feel like you were constrained by BLM’s design then play SMN. All classes shouldn’t be equally accessible to the lowest common denominator simply because they want them because it leaves no room for people who want to optimise

[HikariKurosawa]

Three things

1) before 7.2 RDM and SCH were less mobile than BLM
2) in the same patch as this apparent “outlier” was fixed they made PCT LESS mobile by nuking its hammer combo to the point it’s less mobile now than BLM was in 7.1
3) your idea of “intended rotation” is entirely personal. To me the “intended” idea behind BLM is to use all your tools as you need them. Spamming a rigid standard rotation is the melee’s thing

So this decision has no internal logic, no continuity with the changes made to the other classes, SCH is still the least mobile job in the game and RDM is still dropping melee combos to not kill everyone.

Not to mention if you feel like you were constrained by BLM’s design then play SMN. All classes shouldn’t be equally accessible to the lowest common denominator simply because they want them because it leaves no room for people who want to optimise

Mobility =/= simplicity, immobility =/= complexity. Dunno what your point with all that is. Obviously there is "internal logic" to these perspectives as every single change the devs have made to BLM have been in line with pushing it toward playing a more rigid rotation. Which is just how every single job works in this game, not melee alone, but every single job. Even healers and tanks. Even raid encounters are scripted in the way mechanics come out, meaning the order of the optimal healer abilities and tank cooldowns is rigid.

I'm starting to think that you people just don't like FFXIV gameplay.

[Supersnow845]

Mobility =/= simplicity, immobility =/= complexity. Dunno what your point with all that is. Obviously there is "internal logic" to these perspectives as every single change the devs have made to BLM have been in line with pushing it toward playing a more rigid rotation. Which is just how every single job works in this game, not melee alone, but every single job. Even healers and tanks. Even raid encounters are scripted in the way mechanics come out, meaning the order of the optimal healer abilities and tank cooldowns is rigid.

I'm starting to think that you people just don't like FFXIV gameplay.

They actually said they changed it because “ We anticipate that future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells.” they said literally nothing about BLM’s supposed complexity

So the reason for the change has no internal logic across the classes because BLM wasn’t the limiting factor. Based on that what are these changes based on. You can’t claim these changes are good by default when the changes don’t even align with what the devs said they made the changes

And surprise surprise the 7.2 changes made PCT less rigid in a lot of its burst optimisation. So again if this change was about making classes more rigid they also apparently failed at that, how can changes like these be good if there is no logic behind their actions

[HikariKurosawa]

They actually said they changed it because “ We anticipate that future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells.” they said literally nothing about BLM’s supposed complexity

So the reason for the change has no internal logic across the classes because BLM wasn’t the limiting factor. Based on that what are these changes based on. You can’t claim these changes are good by default when the changes don’t even align with what the devs said they made the changes

And surprise surprise the 7.2 changes made PCT less rigid in a lot of its burst optimisation. So again if this change was about making classes more rigid they also apparently failed at that, how can changes like these be good if there is no logic behind their actions

They didn't reduce the complexity though, they reduced the magnitude of punishment(not frequency). Non-standard was already gone for a long time and has nothing to do with the 7.2 changes. You still have to transpose between phases if you want to be optimal. I think they should remove the transpose button entirely personally and just replace it with umbral soul when it is unlocked, but I'll never be playing the game at a high or organized enough level for it to matter so I'll just keep disregarding transpose in fights. It's a clunky thing and I don't enjoy it. You're actively encouraged by the job design to not transpose, yet it is optimal to transpose even though it feels way less fluid to transpose. If it were up to me, fire 3 proc from paradox and faster casted blizz 3 would be the way BLM went from phase to phase, but it's not up to me. Feels like some vestigial part of ARR left in the game, but it is what it is.

The 7.2 PCT changes are likely just a mistake, there's no way they wanted players to use regular abilities in lieu of motifs. That's called human error. The BLM changes suggest nothing of the sort and just bring the job in line with every other job: you fail to keep GCD rolling you lose potency, you fail to use a CD when it comes up you drift and lose potency. No other job gets absolutely restarted from zero as if they died mid-fight when they failed their rotation from having to focus on mechanics. It's to the point where it's like BLM players pre-7.2 were just masochistic weirdos and they can only enjoy the game if it is inanely punishing. Or they want to be praised or feel special for being able to stay on top of the ball. It's still the same thing, you just don't get punished to the same magnitude. Instead, you get punished to the same magnitude as other jobs. That's called balance.

It's really frustrating that people in FFXIV see simplicity as a bad thing, when they should see shallowness as that. The ideal class has extreme simplicity (say, 5-10 buttons!), but is deep in what it derives from that. For extreme examples of this design look to the various classes in many roguelikes or look to how your weapon(s) utterly change how you approach the game in something like Dead Cells, despite only need one controller-face of buttons to play. Depth is staggering, despite extreme simplicity of design. FFXIV is usually the opposite. Our classes are highly complex, with lots of buttons that all mostly do the same thing ("Deal X potency of damage"), some have years of additive individually tiny blips of mechanics piled on top (e.g. Enochian timer, Paradox proc, Thunder proc, Umbral Ice, etc etc), and yet achieve exactly 0 depth with that as all of this has a fully static solution.

Executing that solution well still feels great of course. Sure. Honing an individually mindless craft is still a commendable achievement. But from a game design perspective it's... not good.

Is new BLM any better in depth? Well, no. It's trivially more flexible, but not in a way that matters.
Is it any worse though? No, it removes some complexity that did nothing for the gameplay.

The frustration is understandable though in the context of equating complexity to depth. Sure. But I really think people need to introspect and figure out why they value complexity, something that is supposed to be a net-negative in gameplay design.

I agree and it's why I often bring up from software games. They make much more meaningful and engaging difficulty than the FFXIV team does despite only being 2-3 button games at their core. You could literally win at the hardest fights in from software games on a NES controller if the dpad did left joystick inputs.

I am half and half, I find the rotations in this game to be too complicated and find it takes away from the content design, but I also feel like I want it to be maintain a degree of intricacy to the rotational flow. I can appreciate the intention of having static scripted rotations, because it feels good to become fluent at repeating them and maintaining track of where you are in them despite the encounters always having a different rhythm to their mechanics and the movement within them. Personally I'd rather have jobs even more simplified and straightforward, but I don't want it taken too far. There is a goldilocks level of complexity.

I also think the game should have jobs that cater to your interests in being more RNG and more variable in their rotations, but I don't think every job should go that direction and I don't want the scripted rotations to go away. To me it feels like learning different pieces of music or something. The rotations feel iconic and meaningful, and it feels really good to execute fluently. Just, too much rotational demand and the encounters become too simple. It goes the other way too, too much encounter complexity with an overly complex rotation, and it just feels overwhelming and annoying. People seem to really understate how much practice you have to put in to become fluent at any rotation in this game. It's insulting to suggest that even SMN is simple to execute during an encounter. Both dismissive of the amount of effort people put in to learning to be fluent, and insulting to people who approach it as a beginner. But that's the mmo ego. The core audience no-lifes these games and acts like it all comes naturally. On top of this they constantly read online guides and practice at target dummies. I just like playing games personally, it's not engaging to me to spend hours at a target dummy.

[Carighan]

Mobility =/= simplicity, immobility =/= complexity.

It's really frustrating that people in FFXIV see simplicity as a bad thing, when they should see shallowness as that. The ideal class has extreme simplicity (say, 5-10 buttons!), but is deep in what it derives from that. For extreme examples of this design look to the various classes in many roguelikes or look to how your weapon(s) utterly change how you approach the game in something like Dead Cells, despite only need one controller-face of buttons to play. Depth is staggering, despite extreme simplicity of design. FFXIV is usually the opposite. Our classes are highly complex, with lots of buttons that all mostly do the same thing ("Deal X potency of damage"), some have years of additive individually tiny blips of mechanics piled on top (e.g. Enochian timer, Paradox proc, Thunder proc, Umbral Ice, etc etc), and yet achieve exactly 0 depth with that as all of this has a fully static solution.

Executing that solution well still feels great of course. Sure. Honing an individually mindless craft is still a commendable achievement. But from a game design perspective it's... not good.

Is new BLM any better in depth? Well, no. It's trivially more flexible, but not in a way that matters.
Is it any worse though? No, it removes some complexity that did nothing for the gameplay.

The frustration is understandable though in the context of equating complexity to depth. Sure. But I really think people need to introspect and figure out why they value complexity, something that is supposed to be a net-negative in gameplay design.

[Owyn_Addens]

It's really frustrating that people in FFXIV see simplicity as a bad thing, when they should see shallowness as that. The ideal class has extreme simplicity (say, 5-10 buttons!), but is deep in what it derives from that.

In my experience "simple" and "shallow" are pretty much just conflated terms. People complaining about "simple" jobs are complaining about exactly what you're talking about: a relatively static, "correct" answer that you bring into the vast majority of encounters. Whenever I see someone talking about "SMN is a simple job", that's usually what they mean.

Is new BLM any better in depth? Well, no. It's trivially more flexible, but not in a way that matters.
Is it any worse though? No, it removes some complexity that did nothing for the gameplay.

Respectfully I disagree. Back in Endwalker it felt like I had a huge branching tree of possible paths I could take through an encounter based on what resources I had, the state of my timer, and when I needed to move. Now it's just "oh it's movement time better hit Triplecast".

And just to pre-empt any "that was only non-standard, standard BLM is the same as ever" counterarguments: So what? Depth should be opt-in anyway, the same way that I can play Monster Hunter by chugging Mega Potions in between bouts of running up and hitting the monster directly in the face. Just because someone chose not to engage with it doesn't mean it wasn't there before and doesn't mean it's not gone now.