Bring difficulty back to job rotations, not just boss mechanics.

[Nyastra]

Granular content would make skill floors lower, not higher. That’s why there was such a dichotomy in response to DT’s battle content over EW’s. Anyone who was above the skill floor for EW’s content liked the DT changes because at least some more stuff was happening, anyone below the skill floor hated the changes because the encounters now present hard floors for them

So the current design only works where there is a floor SOMEWHERE. If you make it too low you bore anyone above it, if you make it too high you exclude too many people. EW did the former and DT you could argue is doing the latter.

That’s why granular difficulty surrounding the jobs is the better design. You SHOULD be able to clear everything below extreme spamming cure 1. But if you have more than 3 brain cells and know that’s the least efficient thing you could possibly do then your job should present a ceiling you can willingly interact with up to your comfort level. Putting the granular difficulty into the job basically bakes quantum into every fight without them actually having to balance quantum into every fight. And it removes hard floors on encounters they raised to pander to people bored to tears by EW

I see what you’re saying, and put like that, the theory behind granular job-based difficulty does make sense ie. letting encounters remain the same while players’ effectiveness scales based on skill could solve a lot of the floor/ceiling issues. I get the appeal, and I agree it’s an elegant design concept on paper.

The catch, from a practical standpoint, is implementation. Adding that kind of granularity to every job across the entire game is an enormous design and balancing task, especially considering the millions of players with wildly different skill levels and playstyles. It’s the kind of thing that could easily introduce new issues while solving others, and SE would have to invest amounts of time and resources into testing and iteration.

So yes, it’s an interesting idea, but considering their track record with job adjustments, I’m not sure it’s a path they’ll go down? The other thing is — wouldn’t this also result in the thing they dislike? Further exclusion from Party Finders based on skill? I’m not an expert here, just thinking out loud. Who knows, maybe they surprise us and go this route.

[Supersnow845]

I see what you’re saying, and put like that, the theory behind granular job-based difficulty does make sense ie. letting encounters remain the same while players’ effectiveness scales based on skill could solve a lot of the floor/ceiling issues. I get the appeal, and I agree it’s an elegant design concept on paper.

The catch, from a practical standpoint, is implementation. Adding that kind of granularity to every job across the entire game is an enormous design and balancing task, especially considering the millions of players with wildly different skill levels and playstyles. It’s the kind of thing that could easily introduce new issues while solving others, and SE would have to invest amounts of time and resources into testing and iteration.

So yes, it’s an interesting idea, but considering their track record with job adjustments, I’m not sure it’s a path they’ll go down? The other thing is — wouldn’t this also result in the thing they dislike? Further exclusion from Party Finders based on skill? I’m not an expert here, just thinking out loud. Who knows, maybe they surprise us and go this route.

I mean this is how the game worked pre ShB. Go back and look at SB savages. They are hilariously easy from a mechanical design perspective compared to the modern fights with a few notable exceptions. And that’s because the jobs held the majority of the difficulty. It’s not like “meta” picks were any more or less prevalent back then (before anyone quotes HW PLD at me let me remind you that that was for HALF of one tier and PLD still wasn’t even the least popular tank in the half a tier it was useless. WHM has been useless since 4.0)

I doubt their ability to return the jobs to anything approaching their old iterations but the fact remains the current design is unsustainable so they have to do something

[Nyastra]

I mean this is how the game worked pre ShB. Go back and look at SB savages. They are hilariously easy from a mechanical design perspective compared to the modern fights with a few notable exceptions. And that’s because the jobs held the majority of the difficulty. It’s not like “meta” picks were any more or less prevalent back then (before anyone quotes HW PLD at me let me remind you that that was for HALF of one tier and PLD still wasn’t even the least popular tank in the half a tier it was useless. WHM has been useless since 4.0)

I doubt their ability to return the jobs to anything approaching their old iterations but the fact remains the current design is unsustainable so they have to do something

I can’t claim to recall pre-ShB content in detail, since I was still catching up and started playing shortly before its release. Plenty of changes likely happened just as I got into the swing of things, so I can’t fully speak to how things compared mechanically back then.

That said, I get the point. Granular job-based difficulty could theoretically then address some of the issues. I just don’t know if that’s the path SE will actually take, based on the current state of affairs. I know they need to do something, but I’m not sure they even know yet what that “something” is based off of a myriad of opinions and other current issues.

[Crafoutis]

I was playing the Monster Hunter X FFXIV crossover event, and fighting Omega legitimately felt more like Final Fantasy than FFXIV does.

I've got like, five buttons on a MH character, and they're far more complex than FFXIV kits. We don't need more buttons to have greater complexity, we just need a game system that can support a complex system. Tab-hotbar MMO's aren't the place to look for complexity.

[Dulcia]

I miss when you had technical things you could do like stunning bosses, silencing spells, putting status effects. I think there would be a lot more complexity to the game if we brought back basic final fantasy status effects. It would give the healers things to do besides pressing an oGCD heal and spamming one button attack. Putting status effects on bosses as well allows for different strategies that could make for unique gameplay. Ultimately that is the challenge though - FFXIV plays like a theme park and one can't guarantee the same experience if there are variables like status effects. I felt like that in recent dungeons failing DDR mechanics usually results in an effect like twice comes ruin, where you can mess up once but twice and you get off-ed. dungeons are expected to be played for a certain amount of time, and that limits skill expression as result, because players must be forced to play the content for the expected time.

Interesting choices are really what I would like. being able to make choices about my skills, about my stats, they removed all of that. It can be argued that no one was using certain skills, but I'd like to argue that this isn't the point; maybe its an illusion of choice, but the choice is still there and it feels good to explore. There is not really any exploration in FFXIV - no exploration in the world zones, no exploration in the dungeons, no exploration in skill expressions. If I could ask for one thing I would ask for the sense of Exploration and adventure to be returned.

[JMadFour]

It feels like the challenge has shifted away from the jobs themselves and into the boss fights.

not going to lie, I prefer this.

I'd rather fight the boss than fight my hotbars, and "playing piano to do dps" stopped being fun to me like 2 MMOs ago, which is why I gravitate to the jobs with more straightforward rotations or easier-to-understand priority systems.

I DO wish that the Boss fights were not as heavily scripted as they are. I'd love to see a boss with a 5-6 attack moveset, that executes their moveset in a random manner that forces us to be reactive instead of being able to plan a fight.

Overall, I will always prefer the complexity to be in the boss fight and not in the job rotations.

I miss when you had technical things you could do like stunning bosses, silencing spells, putting status effects.

I would like to see more of this, making most bosses completely immune to stun/silence after like level 45 was a mistake.

[Azurarok]

Lots of buttons and busy inputs don't necessarily make a job fun at least, knowing how DRG is right now as opposed to how it was in ShB or even EW.

They preserved the rotation for the most part but removed the mechanics backing the logic that built the rotation in the first place, so we just have a lot of noise and less flexibility.

[Supersnow845]

I think people really miss the point where they immediately associate job complexity as “fighting your hotbars”

Right now the jobs are unbelievably simple while also being overwhelmingly bloated…….because since every button is a variation on “do damage” it makes it so every button MUST be pressed somewhere within its cool-down period but each button itself doesn’t actually DO anything

A more complex job is actually liable to have less buttons or at least buttons you push to the periphery that have niche uses (SCH and PLD have shades of this in the modern game but are also bloated to hell with “essential” buttons”) because different buttons start having different use cases (note this doesn’t mean “drag out shield bash for deep dungeon and store it otherwise”). This is much more how the ARR jobs worked, HW leaned too heavily on “juggle insanely tight timer or your entire rotation falls apart” which COULD be argued was fighting your hotbars over the boss but the problem is when everyone is fighting the same boss with the same hotbars that offer zero skill expression then someone is going to be overwhelmed while another is bored. Putting all difficulty on the boss only targets an incredibly narrow range of players that fit that boss’s difficulty exactly; anyone above gets bored, anyone below gets walled or carried

[Themarvin]

Actually make the jobs much easier to handle... there is too much of it to be able to hit that 100% that some people apparently battle for.....

Too many buttons and most of them is rather pointless anyway for all jobs or just some peculiar filler.

More challenged all bosses in the game... so you can be at your peak, as long as you don't die to the mechanics... besides the game

[Daralii]

not going to lie, I prefer this.

I'd rather fight the boss than fight my hotbars, and "playing piano to do dps" stopped being fun to me like 2 MMOs ago, which is why I gravitate to the jobs with more straightforward rotations or easier-to-understand priority systems.

I DO wish that the Boss fights were not as heavily scripted as they are. I'd love to see a boss with a 5-6 attack moveset, that executes their moveset in a random manner that forces us to be reactive instead of being able to plan a fight.

Overall, I will always prefer the complexity to be in the boss fight and not in the job rotations.

The problem with that approach is that the game becomes unbelievably dull in any content that has been fallen below the current bar even in the current expansion. Even then, some people will reach points during prog where they can stop watching the game entirely because memorization and one person(who might not even be logged in) doing callouts in Discord is enough.