Job Complexity and Difficulty

[Valence]

Well, it wouldn't be the first time I've had a higher-skill player tell me I deserve nothing, and the end result would be that I just don't get to play any ranged DPS at all I guess. Though if other vets of other jobs got their way as well, I'm not sure there would be usable DPS jobs left for me period as they slide backwards into... whatever they were before my time. (And since I don't play healer or tank, welp.)

You shouldn't be left with nothing but easy and boring jobs of course, but I shouldn't be left with nothing but hard and complicated ones either, especially when the content its self is already doing its damnedest to skill-check me out of doing most of it that I don't really want my jobs being difficult too.

I'm a little amazed that what you took out of this was that you should have nothing, and I should have everything. And I'm actually sad that you continue to introduce unbridgeable gaps between jobs that have to be easy and jobs that can only be hard. I do not subscribe to that mindset and that's not what my values about good job design align with.

I just want my MCH and my ammo back. Where did I say it had to have an unreachable skill floor?

Edit: like honestly, if Yoshida was actually serious about changing their philosophy to make content for everyone at every piece of content instead of doing some content for a small portion and another piece of content later for another small portion of people, then perhaps they could also apply this to job design as well.

Like I said before, playing optimally won't remain "optional" and players WILL try and force others into spinning the same number of plates they are on those same jobs, and with the the power to kick/mute/blacklist, there's already tools in place to filter out the sub-optimal at every level. It happens right now even, over smaller inadequacies in job performance, and most of those were noob traps made by Square-Enix themselves (like Freecure) where people literally don't know any better. But once the ceiling gets raised this community will simultaneously raise the floor of what they deem acceptable when the complexities cease to be 1% of the job's expectation that can be safely ignored, and instead are 40-50% or more that determines if the run is efficient or a slog (or even a wipe). PVP already has "community enforced scripts" as it were, we would just be bringing that to PVE as well, and anyone who doesn't follow is going to be labeled "lethargic" and be hit with every consequence that comes with it.

Maybe you have a static/premade/friend group/free company that you roll with that would never give you any sort of grief over performance, but I don't really have that benefit, and I'll never buy into the lie again that "nobody cares in normal content" after what happened to me in Ivalice.

You're assuming a lot of things about me. I only had statics for savage/ultimate raiding (and extremes on the way). For the rest I tend to play solo 99% of the time and queue with randoms. If anything it's in a couple of HC statics that I've been given grief over performance (learning speed performance, imaginary or real), not in casual content. But I do understand that I cannot speak for players that struggle in casual content because I don't, and perhaps the only thing I struggle with in casual is luigi's mansions first two bosses (as an ex hardcore raider, I genuinely do).

Now that's out of the way, I want to point out that 1) people generally don't shit on party members because that's a surefire way to GM talks and 2) in all my 10 years of XIV history the overwhelming majority of the casuals that Ive ended up running casual content with were passable to mediocre with their job performance, and some died all the time, and nobody gave a crap about it.

If you however refer to how players constantly shit on "Oh I had another cure bot in my roulette today" then yes, it happens all the time. The community is as shitty and insecure as any other online community even with the current jobs: if anything, when the jobs were more complex, we didn't have more of this, in fact, perhaps less because today people just use the convenient excuse that "jobs are too brainless to fail" or some nonsense like that. I also do acknowledge that I'm actually very worried where the log rot mentality is moving the community to, especially with the appearance of tools like tomestone, but overall that's something you will encounter in challenging content, something that you don't run. Not in casual content.

I'm also talking from a perspective of someone that have played through a time where things were more complicated, and the skill floor wasn't always very accessible depending on the job and guess what, it was the same in casual content, nobody gave a crap, and everybody shit talked everybody behind the scenes on their FC chat or whatever. Nothing has changed one bit in my experience. It's not a difficulty or complexity problem, it's a community/human/species problem.

[Shurrikhan]

And it's not as though your perspective isn't valid, given you can recall a time where "Square-Enix wasn't always like this" and believe they can do better if given the chance, while I don't have that frame of reference, I only have the last nearly 3 years of blunders and contradictions from them (and the community at large) and thus meet all these ideas with skepticism and pessimism, and assume harder jobs will happen while content also remains hard, leaving no room for my casual ass at all.

If you've already been limiting yourself to normal content where even half of optimal damage will easily get you through everything and half the effort of optimal play will already get you to 80+% of said optimal damage... why so much concern that the maximum damage (albeit with proportionately or more-than-proportionately increased effort) would increase on jobs currently considered and tuned by the devs as "easy" jobs?

Although there might for example be a couple more buttons to press, not pressing them would only leave you about the same as you were before, which would remain plentiful.

If you were at a tipping point, then those preferences could easily come into conflict, but we're talking about raising skill ceilings here, not floors, by stepping away from the "this job should only be allowed up to X degree of effort and therefore X degree of performance" concept that Yoshida himself says the game is tuned around. You'd still have increasingly diminished returns for increased effort / disproportionately high rewards for merely basic skill.

(That's not a critique, btw; imo, the game should be that way, giving just enough reward to meaningfully incentivize deeper engagement for those who feel comfortable taking that extra step with nonetheless minimal loss to accessibility.)

[Aravell]

Even if your personal intent isn't to raise the floor, other people will still demand everyone jumps to reach the ceiling anyway

In my personal experience back when jobs still had complexities, it was actually the opposite. People back then were far more hesitant to call others out on not playing perfectly because they themselves were not playing perfectly as well.

Even the high-end players found it hard to play perfectly, and that was the fun of it for me personally, the striving to reach higher, not like what we have now where you can pick up a job and figure out 90% of the job's potential after 30 minutes on a training dummy.

[Valence]

You said as much that you were a veteran that claimed precedence, which sort of implies I'm expected to step aside and let MCH be tailored to your wants even if it made the job unplayable for me, and I would need to move onto another job if it doesn't suit me.
The problem with this whole "just pick another job" thing that people keep trying to push with regards to why some jobs should be more complex though, is when the remaining jobs aren't appealing for one reason or another. Just a couple of posts down you have someone acting like I should be "grateful" for WAR/WHM/SGE/DRG/DNC/RDM even though of those the only ones I actively play are DRG and RDM (and I actually don't like WAR and WHM ironically enough, they're my least favorite tank and 2nd least favorite healer), or how they didn't stop to consider that there are WAR/WHM/SGE/DRG/DNC/RDM mains that DON'T want them to be the "easy" jobs and demand they be made complex too.

And as an added bonus, they once again blame casuals for current job design instead of it being based on hardcore encounter design, because we just can't have a topic about job discussion without someone blaming the casual boogeyman for everything that's wrong. When the next job change comes sweeping in, it's not going to be due to MSQ Ann & Andy, it's because the new Ultimate or the upcoming Quantum necessitated the change in Square-Enix's eyes, same as how BLM got changed right before a new Savage and Forked Tower, not because someone was struggling to "talk to Wuk Lamat" without tripping over their staff.
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Everything being deemed "too brainless to fail" only makes failure feel a lot worse because then one is left wondering how stupid or useless they are if they screw up and die on "sooo easy" content. It's a large part of why I stopped doing roulettes once ARF, Mhach, and anything Stormblood could pop up because I knew I'd be dead weight and I wasn't going to subject other people to carrying me, or put myself in the crosshairs of others who don't tolerate having to redo a fight. Admittedly, there's also solo content that I can't do easily (Deep Dungeons/Field Operations/Masked Carnivale), and where making jobs harder (because that's what complexity ultimately amounts to knowing Square-Enix's overcompensation) would just further narrow what I can and can't do in the game anymore.

With the way things are, only one of us is allowed to be happy with jobs, and understandably you feel like its your turn given the length of time you've been made to tolerate changes that you never asked for, but it's going to come with consequences for those who started with jobs in their current form, and some of us already feel like the game is hostile and unforgiving enough when it comes to skill floors via the content. Complexity is the salt you want so things stop tasting bland, but for others that salt is getting rubbed right into wounds that Dawntrail keeps on making.

And it's not as though your perspective isn't valid, given you can recall a time where "Square-Enix wasn't always like this" and believe they can do better if given the chance, while I don't have that frame of reference, I only have the last nearly 3 years of blunders and contradictions from them (and the community at large) and thus meet all these ideas with skepticism and pessimism, and assume harder jobs will happen while content also remains hard, leaving no room for my casual ass at all.

I'm not asking you to "just pick another job", I'm asking the devs to widen the depth of jobs so that everybody can tackle them within their own skill range.
I don't know how to tell it clearer than that.

If you struggle in casual content as to become a "dead weight", "being carried" and "having people redo a fight" , it's not because of job complexity, as playing your job badly doesn't mean jackshit in dungeons and whatnot. The people that struggle as you describe struggle because they get slaughtered by the DDR, period. So let's not try and hunt job complexity when the true culprit hides behind a different face.

I do get people wanting more forms of skill expression and showcasing it that comes with more robust and complex skills systems, but I'm not as interested in embarrassing myself when I inevitably under-perform because I can't meet and manage the same complexity. I wouldn't even dare attempt the hypothetically-complex MCH that Valence suggests, because the description alone they've posted about elsewhere sounds out of my depth, and I would just move straight to retiring as a MCH main.

Now wait a minute, I don't know which one you refer to, but it was also probably written from my perspective as to what I found engaging at a higher level with it. If you think what I wrote about it was required for the job to even function and deal damage (even if subpar), then I think you're mistaken. I'm sure I could also find ways to make current MCH that I find excruciatingly bland sound complex if I talk about uninterrupted 10 Blazing Shots segments, or even something simpler as desynced WF/hypercharge sequences.

Do you need to be able to do that to play current MCH?

[Aravell]

If DDR goes away and job complexity becomes the norm, it means new failure points will get created to compensate, and I don't want to be the guy who got people killed because I'm doing gray parse or whatever the lowest rank on that thing is.

If you really only do battle content up to alliance raids in terms of difficulty, then you will never wipe parties due to lack of damage.

They will never make any difficult dps check in regular dungeons or trials and any dps check in an alliance raid can easily be covered by all the other red jobs.

Personal damage only starts to matter in extremes and up, if people call out someone's damage in a regular dungeon run, then they're being a tool.

[MisterNublet]

if people call out someone's damage in a regular dungeon run, then they're being a tool.

Or people don't want to spend over twice as long in a dungeon because someone doesn't know how to press their combos or cooldowns.