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

[Dulcia]

Please dont bring back job difficulty. Make jobs more distinguished and different from each other, sure, but dont mess with job difficulty. The game is already hard enough. Just do Arkveld ex on blm and try to not get your leylines fucked up or just try to have uninterrupted uptime. The mechanics that the recent fights present nowadays would become so frustrating if they made jobs more difficult.

A good example is Valigarmanda ex. The 2min window where you place the fire puddle stacks made it impossible for ninja to use tcj. Ninjas got so annoyed by that that tcj is now full movement. You can argue if that was a good change or bad change, but it was a necessary change so that ninja can keep up with how hectic and movement intensive fights have become.

I think difficulty isn't really the thing that people are wanting, its just that the way it is right now is boring. I think skill expression is what is being described as being desired, and that comes with distinguished styles of play with the classes and the like.

[Exinias]

I think difficulty isn't really the thing that people are wanting, its just that the way it is right now is boring. I think skill expression is what is being described as being desired, and that comes with distinguished styles of play with the classes and the like.

To be fair, this thread is titled "Bring difficulty back to job rotations" lol

[ovIm]

To be fair, this thread is titled "Bring difficulty back to job rotations" lol

That is why a game developer should not take complaints at complete face value, but instead try to understand what is meant. Humans are fallible, after all.
Most people, when talking about difficulty, don't mean difficulty, they mean engagement. they just lack the right words to properly describe what they mean.
The core of the issue is that jobs in this game have no interesting depth anymore, and are, in isolation, not very fun to play.
You can create depth with very few buttons, or keep things shallow despite having a lot of buttons.

Edit: and what Valence said in the post below here too, of course. Difficulty in this game is entirely dependent on the fight nowadays, which is an issue in and out of itself.

[Valence]

Please dont bring back job difficulty. Make jobs more distinguished and different from each other, sure, but dont mess with job difficulty. The game is already hard enough. Just do Arkveld ex on blm and try to not get your leylines fucked up or just try to have uninterrupted uptime. The mechanics that the recent fights present nowadays would become so frustrating if they made jobs more difficult.

A good example is Valigarmanda ex. The 2min window where you place the fire puddle stacks made it impossible for ninja to use tcj. Ninjas got so annoyed by that that tcj is now full movement. You can argue if that was a good change or bad change, but it was a necessary change so that ninja can keep up with how hectic and movement intensive fights have become.

People are asking to bring back a modicum of balance between job and encounter complexity.
And some are also begging to go away from the DDR action game model.

[Exinias]

That is why a game developer should not take complaints at complete face value, but instead try to understand what is meant. Humans are fallible, after all.
Most people, when talking about difficulty, don't mean difficulty, they mean engagement. they just lack the right words to properly describe what they mean.
The core of the issue is that jobs in this game have no interesting depth anymore, and are, in isolation, not very fun to play.
You can create depth with very few buttons, or keep things shallow despite having a lot of buttons.

Edit: and what Valence said in the post below here too, of course. Difficulty in this game is entirely dependent on the fight nowadays, which is an issue in and out of itself.

No, the original point of this thread is literal job difficulty. The exact complaint from op is "Bring back job difficulty." That's what I'm pointing out. Engagement is an entirely different concept.

If I said "I want my orange juice to be more acidic" would you respond with "Here's an apple juice"?

[Moonlite]

The game has enough jobs to have multiple tiers of playstyles. I think SMN could be even simpler reducing current buttons by probably 4 or 5. But then BLM could have 60 button rotation for the people who like that. And RDM could be somewhere in between.


If we got an expansion with no new jobs. But new playstyles it would probably be well received to start at least.

[Kishin12345]

People are asking to bring back a modicum of balance between job and encounter complexity.
And some are also begging to go away from the DDR action game model.

The combat reform has started with 7.2, 7.3 ish. And what i see is that they double down on DDR mechanics rather than reducing them. So i believe 8.0 will double down on that even more. So if you have job difficulty on top of that then that will not end well...

When i think about job difficulty HW instantly comes to mind.
Imagine your combo breaking if you dont hit a positional or reintroducing accuracy or managing a multitude of debuffs or dots in fights that hectic! I dont want to think about that. I hated Heavensward for that and thank god Yoshi admitted that job design in HW was not really great either.

But i would like jobs to be more diverse. Change the way jobs access their power rather than just filling a gauge, do something else for some jobs. I liked the way Summoners had to "earn" bahamut in order to summon him, but with the current fight design these "job mechanics" would just end up being clunky and frustrating in most fights. Either because of downtime, phasing or too much movement requirements disaligning your rotations

[Daralii]

The combat reform has started with 7.2, 7.3 ish. And what i see is that they double down on DDR mechanics rather than reducing them. So i believe 8.0 will double down on that even more. So if you have job difficulty on top of that then that will not end well...

When i think about job difficulty HW instantly comes to mind.
Imagine your combo breaking if you dont hit a positional or reintroducing accuracy or managing a multitude of debuffs or dots in fights that hectic! I dont want to think about that. I hated Heavensward for that and thank god Yoshi admitted that job design in HW was not really great either.

But i would like jobs to be more diverse. Change the way jobs access their power rather than just filling a gauge, do something else for some jobs. I liked the way Summoners had to "earn" bahamut in order to summon him, but with the current fight design these "job mechanics" would just end up being clunky and frustrating in most fights. Either because of downtime, phasing or too much movement requirements disaligning your rotations

It's almost like deciding to turn every fight into coked-up DDR in one expansion and then allegedly redesigning jobs in the next one was a really stupid idea.

[Azurarok]

I love how whenever the difficulty discussion comes up it's typically Heavensward that gets brought up as the example, when a lot of the folks asking for a return are typically referencing Stormblood.

[Kishin12345]

It's almost like deciding to turn every fight into coked-up DDR in one expansion and then allegedly redesigning jobs in the next one was a really stupid idea.

But do we even believe them that they can redesign 20+ jobs in one expansion? They barely manage 2 to 3 "job reworks" in 1 expansion