Almost into 7.3, what you think about the *improved* encounter design?

[BigCheez]

If you really want to make the jobs "fun" you have to stack layers upon layers of procs so that there's constant decision making for the most opitmal DPS. WoW had this for a long time around Legion through BFA, but then the masses complain about the game being too difficult/confusing.

Procs help a lot but they aren't the only thing that can make jobs more engaging. They need to add more things to pay attention to in general with regards to damage rotations.

Procs, so we need to check if we got a proc after using an ability.

Non-30/60/120s cooldowns so rotations aren't the same loop over and over and over again. If we had some 20, 40, 90 and 180s cooldowns, things wouldn't come up at the same point every cycle and you would actually have to pay more attention to your cooldowns. Your opener, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minute burst windows would all be slightly different due to different abilities being on/off cooldown. And you'd have your pot back up for the full re-opener at 6 minutes. Amazing. It's almost like the game was actually designed with this in mind instead of being boring, repetitive, 1-2 minute loop slop.

Buffs to keep up and debuffs to keep on the boss are good because they just give us more things to track and abilities that we need to use to reapply them. Not sure why they keep getting rid of these. NIN losing Huton and VPR losing its DoT (that was in the game for such a short period of time that I can't even remember what it was called...) sucked.

Abilities that augment other abilities are good (Kaiten). Imagine having to make sure you have enough gauge to spend on an ability by the time another ability comes off cooldown.

We need more diversity between jobs too. Every job boiling down to "123, build, burst. Press your 30/60/120s buttons on cooldown" reinforces how boring the jobs are. You can't even change jobs to freshen the game up anymore.

TL;DR - they need to make the dev team go play WoW again.

[Raikai]

Procs help a lot but they aren't the only thing that can make jobs more engaging. They need to add more things to pay attention to in general with regards to damage rotations.

Procs, so we need to check if we got a proc after using an ability.

Non-30/60/120s cooldowns so rotations aren't the same loop over and over and over again. If we had some 20, 40, 90 and 180s cooldowns, things wouldn't come up at the same point every cycle and you would actually have to pay more attention to your cooldowns. Your opener, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minute burst windows would all be slightly different due to different abilities being on/off cooldown. And you'd have your pot back up for the full re-opener at 6 minutes. Amazing. It's almost like the game was actually designed with this in mind instead of being boring, repetitive, 1-2 minute loop slop.

Buffs to keep up and debuffs to keep on the boss are good because they just give us more things to track and abilities that we need to use to reapply them. Not sure why they keep getting rid of these. NIN losing Huton and VPR losing its DoT (that was in the game for such a short period of time that I can't even remember what it was called...) sucked.

Abilities that augment other abilities are good (Kaiten). Imagine having to make sure you have enough gauge to spend on an ability by the time another ability comes off cooldown.

We need more diversity between jobs too. Every job boiling down to "123, build, burst. Press your 30/60/120s buttons on cooldown" reinforces how boring the jobs are. You can't even change jobs to freshen the game up anymore.

TL;DR - they need to make the dev team go play WoW again.

I hate to compare both games but they're right.

Of course, the combat approaches are vastly different, but the idea is still there: In WoW, there's no such thing as a "2min meta" (well, not counting a Bloodlust window, but that's usually in the opener when somebody brings the buff), and classes there only have inwards mechanics - timers, procs, abilities that interact with other abilities, short time and long time cooldown management, utility management, resource management. None of those elements are unknown to XIV, we had them in some capacity in the past.

In short, it is possible to make the jobs work without a collective burst window happening every 2 minutes if they had interesting inwards mechanics. And even beyond that if we still had party buffers like AST, who brings it in short intervals, it would still add a layer of complexity in figuring out the best way to adjust to a card coming at you every so often.

[Shurrikhan]

Of course, the combat approaches are vastly different, but the idea is still there: In WoW, there's no such thing as a "2min meta" (well, not counting a Bloodlust window, but that's usually in the opener when somebody brings the buff), and classes there only have inwards mechanics.

Yes and no. That window isn't on a 2-minute timer and is more subtle, but there is a "pot(ion) window" (5 min), and maximizing synergy between short-lived (e.g., not 1+ minute) external buffs and skills exploiting them have been an important factor for so long as they've been offered -- even if that isn't often or in large numbers. Power Infusion is most noticeable among them today, creating balancing concerns for specs that synergize especially well with its added haste, but tanks regularly play around what external defensive buffs certain healers can offer, Innervation was also a necessity for many fights in the past, Unholy DKs buffed by Augmentation Evokers put a new ceiling on "broken", and even Night Fae Paladins and Priests in Shadowlands were generally selective about their party so they could max out their buffs.

Arguably, so long as tanks don't have stupidly excessive levels of Threat/Enmity generation and DPS have at-cost threat reduction available to them, the same is true of tanking. As long as there are worthwhile greeding opportunities but healers wouldn't necessarily have every GCD free for damage even when dealing with said greed, the same is true of healing. As long as there are DPS checks that are tight enough (in turn requiring a tight enough min to max ilvl range for the content), getting through consecutive precise DPS checks can even mean that your damage CDs are not just your own but must be leveraged as to minimize both excess and holding among those of your coDPS.

It's a matter of interconnectedness and fine tuning that has been lessened or lost in both games, often for its annoyance when mishandled being more frequent and palpable than its joys when well-handled, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, and I'd love to see some more consideration of such here.

In short, it is possible to make the jobs work without a collective burst window happening every 2 minutes if they had interesting inwards mechanics.

Certainly, and leaving even a few externalizable buffs at shuffled times (say, 30, 40, 60, 90, 120, 180) wouldn't even limit that despite giving a modest bit more min-max consideration for holding CDs (now that they're no longer naturally synced).

That said, the reason XIV lacks most analogous gameplay is simply because of XIV's "combo" system -- in essence, apart from some small instances of consolidation, the optimal way to reduce the number of choices per button (i.e., to maximize button bloat / have the smallest depth of gameplay per button-count).

While in Stormblood in earlier we were at least occasionally allowed some rotational variance surrounding the time left before the target would die, typal modifiers (can drop Dragon Kick in a Demolish string and only lose a total of 22 potency despite having gained 90 effective potency off an extra Bootshine, since only Demolish's initial/direct damage is modified), and more significant %recast reduction per gear's worth of secondary stat such that we could actually ramp up SkS enough to get in, say, an extra Full Thrust combo per Chaos Thrust combo (objectively worse, but still an option), and DoT timers not quite being auto-synced to rotation meant adjusting other factors to neither lose a tick nor waste a tick... for the most part, combos have always meant that the gameplay ceiling could never offer quite as much as a WoW spec could (even if the result might nonetheless happen into a more cohesive, nuanced, and/or rewarding package).

And for the rest, it mostly comes down to intentional simplification since the end of Heavensward. See, for example, how the likes of Bard was pushed from 57% (WB, VB, SS, level 50) to 43% (+ IJ, level 60) to 25% (longer durations, Stormblood) to 17% (no Straight Shot buff), to eventually EW+'s 6% rotational non-filler casts before Apex Arrow/Burst Arrow (or 13.8% non-filler with an AA/BA per minute). See how the loss of Fracture in Stormblood reduced the rotational strings available to Monk, or how Greased Lighting IV actually made Greased Lightning a far less interesting resource in Shadowbringers.

Now, to be clear, I don't particularly miss Straight Shot being a buff we needed to rotate in, and I was actually pretty happy with Endwalker Monk (it stumbled upon something pretty great, probably the best we'd had since late Stormblood), but there's no doubt that there's a fairly sledgehammer approach to placating what they see as what players will complain about -- an approach that doesn't typically do well, either, with imagining what interesting little flows and stochastics could take a very simple APL as found on Icyveins into an interesting spec/job design.

But sure, if we get rid of the fixation on systems that exist largely just to reduce thought-per-button and can actually imagine out in-the-moment play and purposely offer that more depth that can be held in a 2-minute job guide, yeah, we could definitely see some better job gameplay here on XIV, too. (How likely those conditions are to be reached, though...)