SE isn't hearing the community RE: Job Feedback & Simplification

[AllenThyl]

They're all the same mechanics with the same basic spread/stack/spread/donut legos DDR with a boss in the middle of a circle. There is no novelty or variety except for M6S, which is the only highlight of this tier, and is actually not even something new because we used to have those kinds of encounters in the past.
I feel like I'm arguing with people that have their nose literally in the grass and trying to tell me how this flower is different from the next, while to me it just looks like the same piece of grass.

It's always funny to see how you abstract away all flavor and mechanical difference from encounter design, yet do not abstract job design to the same point of "just pressing buttons in the correct order". I asked you in the other thread, but I'll ask again, what's the alternative? Everyone just standing there doing their "ultracomplex" rotations that you want back? You are playing an action MMORPG where movement and actions are expected to be performed at the same time (the lvl 6 hammer beaks in Central Thanalan were the earliest mob I could find doing an aoe cast with an orange indicator), with bosses trying to reduce player's hp pool by doing a variety of attacks to force players to engage their job kits and to move. To force people to move from one area or another, there has to be some mechanic to facilitate the necessity of that move, either by making parts of the arena unsafe (line or circle or cross or donut aoe, puddles, pizza slices, rivers, knockback, line of sight), or requiring everyone to move together to a spot (stacks, towers, debuffs, baiting, meteor placement, tethers), or away from another (flares, towers, debuffs, tethers, baits). You complaining about this is like complaining that new shooter games always feature the same old boring shooting. Maybe it is indeed time you start to reconsider whether this genre is even the right kind of gameplay for you, maybe some turn based strategy is more to your liking.

[Carighan]

Yeah that's just absurd to say, "oh they're all the same".

If that's genuinely how you perceive it, then you really ought to consider whether you're "done" with FFXIV. Because the entire game seems to have lost all joy and flavor for you, as you no longer even perceive the art/flavor/design/style, which is after all a giant and crucial component.

[Supersnow845]

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People saying “this is the only way it can be” just make me think that most people are arguing from the position of their entire raiding experience starting in ShB.

We have roles for a reason. Because they are supposed to do different things. The role separation is not just to decide who gets what position it is also there to actually divide up implied responsibility for mechanics. This is why people like 6’s add phase despite how unbalanced targeted cleave is currently, because different roles are actually doing different things

For example why do we have physical ranged if there is no mechanic that requires or prefers a ranged player to properly bait it as a form of mechanical execution. Why is the obvious answer to their belief that casting is restrictive to remove casts rather than go “hey we have two other DPS roles that have free movement why don’t we design the mechanic to allow those roles to weaponise their mobility to assist the caster”. The melees have more health, why don’t we have them soak something that does more damage or alternatively have certain mechanics designed to push other roles away the melee can tank with their HP (like untelegraphed chariots). The only mechanic in the last 3 years that was explicitly designed as a healer mechanic they straight up made the boss untargetable which made optimising damage and healing on the mechanic completely worthless and made the mechanic boring for everyone else. Tanks still basically have no ability to actually intervene or perform a mechanic that actually involves some kind of intervention that isn’t just a boring old wildcharge dressed up with a new name

There is so much design space with raid encounters and 14 just doesn’t do anything with it. Instead every fight is a mechanical dance that treats every role the same. Why is in 99% or mechanics the only difference between a caster and a melee whether they do the same dance 2 yalms away from the boss or 15 yalms

[ovIm]

Yeah that's just absurd to say, "oh they're all the same".

If that's genuinely how you perceive it, then you really ought to consider whether you're "done" with FFXIV. Because the entire game seems to have lost all joy and flavor for you, as you no longer even perceive the art/flavor/design/style, which is after all a giant and crucial component.

Honest question, and I truly mean no shade: you don't see how everything we do repeats itself and how we keep getting the same mechanic hidden under a different coat of paint? Cause I can give a few examples here where they do in a very obvious way. Unfortunately, that's only normal mode because I retired from savage, but I hope they can get the point across.

M1N and M5N both have half room cleaves, that require you to stand one one side, and then swap to the other. Yes, M1N sometimes jumps a few meters to the side beforehand, and yes, M5N repeats one attack 1 or 3 more times before switching sides, but it is fundamentally the exact same mechanic. Same with the frog dancers - you either stand left, or you stand right, depending on which arm they have lifted.
The frogs that slide around the arena turning parts of it into an AoE limiting your safe zones? Thats in P8N as well.

Both M4N and M8N summon 4 copies of themselves that lift a glowing arm indicating which half of the arena becomes the "get hit" zone.

I could go on if I were to keep looking deeper into older and current mechs, but I hope you still see my point here. Art/Flavor/Design/Style is without substance here, whether the rock glitters pink or shines yellow, its still a rock. Sometimes, CS3 sneaks in something new, and those things oddly enough get praised to high heaven (see: M6S). And back in ARR/HW, some of the mechanics in Dungeons were just as creative. Not difficult or complex or deep, but more interesting and innovative, in case the argument of "but what about Extremes/Savage" comes up.

[ovIm]

People saying “this is the only way it can be” just make me think that most people are arguing from the position of their entire raiding experience starting in ShB.

That may be because a lot of players may have only started during ShB. They did not experience the fun of %HP based fights back in ARR (which allowed you to push or bait mechanics), how the route your team took in T2 mattered, how the fight rhythm could change based on when you fed the Gorilla in Hullbreaker. Assigning team members different tasks in a fight based on their role or class because team composition affected others somewhat. Mechs the Morbol room in Void Ark right after the first boss, which mostly works with add spawns instead of AoE's (lot of it now trivialized due to gear and skill changes, yes) are not in the mind of people anymore.

Or its because they lack the creativity to envision mechanics that are not a variation of "stand there". I know I have a hard time coming up with something, but I am also not a game designer.

[Qyoon]

It's always funny to see how you abstract away all flavor and mechanical difference from encounter design, yet do not abstract job design to the same point of "just pressing buttons in the correct order". I asked you in the other thread, but I'll ask again, what's the alternative? Everyone just standing there doing their "ultracomplex" rotations that you want back?

- More boss with adds : recently they added some and it's a cool addition since AOE are a thing

- On a healer standpoint more boss with dispell to do, saw they once in the chaotic with the doom thingy.
It can easily be done on regular boss with poison, blind ect and if healers don't dispell , potions are a thing.

- More verticality and playing with the terrain, being in a room with flame throwers or something on the walls , stairs or platform to climb while the floor is some deadly liquid you have to run from.

- Encounter with tools / vehicles that you gotta use to defeat the boss or it's adds. They existed in the past

- having to move things around in order to complete a mec

- More boss fight that aren't about just killing the boss but more about protecting / escorting something

- Maybe fights where you have to protect a zone from waves on mobs.

- Having to use the controls ability that exist and are useless atm.

- You can have 1-2 people inside an arena, with 2-3 others outside having to help them by doing something else.

I don't know just something else than : if you stand here you are dead. You could even do both for hard content ! Most of those exist in the game and are not exploited at all. Maybe it's time for the return of players having a role that is something else than dps, action does not always mean dps.

Right now the gameplay is just about mashing button while running around a memorized path, it's no better than standing somewhere executing a memorised order of skills.

[Valence]

It's always funny to see how you abstract away all flavor and mechanical difference from encounter design, yet do not abstract job design to the same point of "just pressing buttons in the correct order". I asked you in the other thread, but I'll ask again, what's the alternative? Everyone just standing there doing their "ultracomplex" rotations that you want back? You are playing an action MMORPG where movement and actions are expected to be performed at the same time (the lvl 6 hammer beaks in Central Thanalan were the earliest mob I could find doing an aoe cast with an orange indicator), with bosses trying to reduce player's hp pool by doing a variety of attacks to force players to engage their job kits and to move. To force people to move from one area or another, there has to be some mechanic to facilitate the necessity of that move, either by making parts of the arena unsafe (line or circle or cross or donut aoe, puddles, pizza slices, rivers, knockback, line of sight), or requiring everyone to move together to a spot (stacks, towers, debuffs, baiting, meteor placement, tethers), or away from another (flares, towers, debuffs, tethers, baits). You complaining about this is like complaining that new shooter games always feature the same old boring shooting. Maybe it is indeed time you start to reconsider whether this genre is even the right kind of gameplay for you, maybe some turn based strategy is more to your liking.

What do you mean? Current job design is definitely pressing buttons in the correct order with the notable exception of DNC/BRD's burst sequence (and it's been slowly thinning up due to the introduction of more and more static, non rng 2min nukes on both jobs...), and BRD, DNC and RDM's fillers (rng which is, literally braindead since it's mostly about pressing what glows those days, but it's rng that randomizes the order of buttons, so it technically qualifies).

It's always been a problem with XIV job design overall, but we used to have a lot more agency in that regard, namely:
1) more rng jobs for starters depending of the expansions (MCH, BLM, SMN, AST, and you can even add DRG and DRK because yes, th2ey had rng at some point too even if not much).
2) more involved rng with actual layers of agency and choice during fillers beyond "just press what randomly glows up", notably on MCH and AST.
3) tank enmity stance dancing, which depended on party comp and other players (skill, gear, efficiency...).
4) tank target debuffing/mitigation notably in HW, included in their base combos.
5) HP based mechanical triggers that desynced the rotational script from the mechanical script of the encounter.

I don't know which other thread you refer to, but it's possible I missed it in the middle of your declarations of love over that Nael saga? Either way, if you had played before SB, you'd understand what you miss beyond the DDR you mention, because believe it or not, the game used to be a lot more balanced between its action based elements and its RPG elements. You have probably at least noticed how much less complex and involved older encounters are with floor geometry, right? That they do have other things beyond this is another story, but it's not always easy to see for someone that never went through it back then and what I regularly hear is that "old content is a snoozefest because the boss throws a couple of telegraphs and that's it".

Yeah that's just absurd to say, "oh they're all the same".

If that's genuinely how you perceive it, then you really ought to consider whether you're "done" with FFXIV. Because the entire game seems to have lost all joy and flavor for you, as you no longer even perceive the art/flavor/design/style, which is after all a giant and crucial component.

I am asking if you're actually serious when you say this? I do love my art/mood/whatever (I literally worked for a while in the game industry on the art side), but are you truly telling me that it's ok if a game is "all flash little substance"?

[AllenThyl]

People saying “this is the only way it can be” just make me think that most people are arguing from the position of their entire raiding experience starting in ShB.

No, the argument was that it's "all just same old stack or spread". And that is a degree of abstraction, that removes every possible flavor from fight design. And it's hypocritical that this kind of abstraction is only ever done somehow for fight design, but somehow the old job kits were magically "complex" and totally not reducible to "press the right button at the right time". That's like saying "every story is just some characters doing something", invalidating with a single stroke all the stories that could ever be told. It's destructive nihilism, and for the developers, there is nothing of value that can be extracted from such feedback, ever. It's just melancholy for melancholy's sake. And that's how many of the posts of the "veterans who were there" that are "discussing" class and fight changes come off, a bunch of bitter people marinating in their own Weltschmerz, because things "ain't how they used to be".

We have roles for a reason. Because they are supposed to do different things. The role separation is not just to decide who gets what position it is also there to actually divide up implied responsibility for mechanics. This is why people like 6’s add phase despite how unbalanced targeted cleave is currently, because different roles are actually doing different things

See how you didn't even engage with the actual argument that was being made, that every boss fight is "just stack or spread with different coats of paint", and that this is somehow bad? Here is the thing, I give you all your mythical job design and complex rotation and whathaveyou for your vision, will the game or will it not require players to move at certain times to certain spots in the fight? Will or will it not result in there being a "correct" button for every class to push in every single situation?

There is so much design space with raid encounters and 14 just doesn’t do anything with it. Instead every fight is a mechanical dance that treats every role the same. Why is in 99% or mechanics the only difference between a caster and a melee whether they do the same dance 2 yalms away from the boss or 15 yalms

There is no design space left if we follow Valence's logic, because movement while simultaneously pressing action buttons is the core activity of this game's combat system. If players engaging in that very activity is evaluated negatively, then there is absolutely nothing that can be done for this game except to turn it into a completely different kind of game. Which are out there, those other games, with the other kind of gameplay. Thousands of them. At some point, you gotta take some personal responsibility for your own consumer choices.

[Supersnow845]

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You are taking valence’s point so hilariously literally to the point you have actually completely missed their point. They aren’t saying “the fact that you move is bad game design” they are saying “the fact that in the modern game the only way that mechanics resolve themselves is move here->something resolves->move here->something else resolves” is tired and limiting to encounter and job design because it removes every other facet of potential encounter design (the “everything is just stack and spread” is proxy for mechanics being solved by them just exploding around the player as the player moves in a calculated dance)

This is why M6S’s add phase is being so highly praised; because the resolution of it doesn’t just involve moving around in a calculated way while the mechanics go off around you. It forces you to move the mechanics around you

If you take valence’s point as simply “the fact you have to move is bad” then yeah sure their point seems strange, but that’s because that’s not their point

[AllenThyl]

- More boss with adds : recently they added some and it's a cool addition since AOE are a thing

Yes, but they have been done before, and by the logic of "it's all just same old", it is therefore nothing new and as such bad design.

- On a healer standpoint more boss with dispell to do, saw they once in the chaotic with the doom thingy.
It can easily be done on regular boss with poison, blind ect and if healers don't dispell , potions are a thing.

Oh, you mean like Crush Helm from The Thunder God in Orbonne Monastry, or the very same mechanic from p12s phase 2? Or the concussion debuff (stun) applied from tankbuster right before the second Odious Croak on Zuro Roggo in The Antitower? Or the Freezing Debuff in e8s? Or the poison debuff that has to be dispelled with the potions in the chests on the final boss in Hullbreaker Isle (Hard)?

- More verticality and playing with the terrain, being in a room with flame throwers or something on the walls , stairs or platform to climb while the floor is some deadly liquid you have to run from.

Oh, you mean like in e4s, where the platform splits into high and low level areas? Or like in m6, where the area changes into a forest landscape that has bridges and water and the water provides a lightning resistance down debuff but increases fire resistance, while in the next phase the water becomes a torrent and now applies a dropsy debuff? Or the Cuchulainn boss in The Void Ark where you have to step onto the raised platforms to not get splooshed by the boss AOE?

- Encounter with tools / vehicles that you gotta use to defeat the boss or it's adds. They existed in the past
- having to move things around in order to complete a mec

True, however, it turns out, players do not really like picking stuff up or exchanging their job kit for something else during a fight. That's why the design shifted to mechanical resolution for the same effect. I.e. you need to spawn an add in p5s, and instead of just jumping into the add spawning machine, there are towers that if unsoaked spawn them, so you leave one tower unsoaked to get that one add you need. Instead of jumping into the "flying machine", the boss will simply debuff you a flying debuff, that will send you flying. It does the same thing, but a lot more fun than just clicking some doohicky in the middle of the fight. Objects to create line of sight are also generated by resolution of mechanics, like in EX4, instead of one player having to go and pick up something to place the boulder.

- More boss fight that aren't about just killing the boss but more about protecting / escorting something
- Maybe fights where you have to protect a zone from waves on mobs.

For one, escorting quests are the bane of video gaming. I know there are a few examples of games that managed to make them actually interesting and engaging, but I don't know any of them from the top off my hat. However, in this game, it will also always come down to attacking some target one way or another, even if there is some kind of "protection" going on. The 2nd boss in Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard) has you protect an NPC from waves of explodey balls while attacking a boss. Garuda has the stone pillars that are damaged by boss attacks (cleaves, aoes), that need to be intact for later mechanics. Same goes for the stones on the final boss of The Dusk Vigil.

- Having to use the controls ability that exist and are useless atm.

E8S, M6S, Deep Dungeons.

- You can have 1-2 people inside an arena, with 2-3 others outside having to help them by doing something else.

That "doing something else" though always has to be engaging with their job kit, and that means some enemy to dps in some way or another, always, because that's literally the core gameplay of this game. It's not like this hasn't ever been done, A4 yoinks people to a different platform, A12 has portals that need to be resolved, Castrum Lacus Litore has a parallel mini-fight with Lyon during the final boss.

Right now the gameplay is just about mashing button while running around a memorized path, it's no better than standing somewhere executing a memorised order of skills.

And yet not a single one of your ideas would change that, at all. Even if you put vehicles in, the vehicles will have some predetermined set of skills. Even if you change job design to some priority system (and despite what quite a few people here think, all job designs are already a priority system, you people just can't abstract enough), for every given moment and situation, whichever action is the most likely to facilitate the successful (and fastest) completion of the fight will be the correct one.