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

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Man, bringing WHM must be considered griefing universally then since 3.4 (except 5.0 specifically). How's that been going today? lol

[Supersnow845]

Creating 5 extra difficult jobs will completely break balance, and has been repeatedly proven acros many games.

If something becomes more difficult, it needs to reward that, otherwise no pro player will ever use such job, and the job will never become meta.
The less such job get used, the less optimized its use is going to be, causing its status to get worse, into a state were people will consider it trolling (look at what mch already faced).
In this case, the job becomes useless to exist, even if you use it in easier content, whats the point? Its not going to feel rewarding (and if it does, you most likely were dragging your team significantly down, effectively trolling them)

If however we make it reward its difficulty through being stronger, it now becomes mandatory to learn the job if you want to play at the top level.
It now will outperform all the alternatives, and people will now demand such job to be used, even if at the average performance level it isnt the best. Its damage compensates enough to still force it into any meta.
In this case, the other jobs become useless to exist, except in content where it realy doesnt matter what you play. But as meta demands this job, good luck using anything else in any PF content.

In PvP games this is compensated by hard countering certain jobs and allowing you to adjust for this. But in PvE, this is not an option, so usualy the results are quite static acros any tier.

The mere existence of WHM disproves the “meta boogeyman”

[Valence]

I assume it was an attempted joke about how MCH and SMN are the absolute worst jobs for it.

Yeah? Well, both of those jobs were also kinda shit for O7S back in their prime, and you know what? It was fine by me. Party could use their heads and adjust, and it created interesting strats (like pre-shielding the MCH before the first laser in case they get targeted and can't move because standing still, or tanks helping the MCH/SMN clearing their adds outside of their bursts).

This community and the dev team's obsession with damage performance on specific bumps on the road is and has always been absolute cinema. What matters is that all jobs provide equal opportunities for output on the average, not that some suffer more than others for specific parts of specific fights. Perhaps they could actually shine in others, you know? if we had other variables than damage that is.

We've come at a point where every party member is seen as an enemy precisely because of that mentality/design.

And there really doesn't seem to be an out. Hard fights and easy jobs? Got us bored hardcores and struggling casuals that left. Easy fights and hard jobs? Still gonna end up with bored hardcores and struggling casuals leaving.

No offense but this reads as someone that has never played through HW.

Right now there are 20.5 jobs that are simple “I want the difficulty to be on the encounter” and 0.5 “I want job difficulty” jobs

Are you saying if that number was bought to more around 16 vs 5 it would trigger a mass exodus of the “I want the difficulty to be on the encounter” players

Because that kinda sounds a bit selfish

Personally I'm gonna be selfish and state that no, I don't want the difficulty to be on the encounters, and unlike jobs, the problem with encounters is that I can't just pick the one that suits me.
At this point I don't give a crap to be honest, I do recognize that my priorities and enjoyment of the game are mutually exclusive with a part of the playerbase and I have no problem recognizing it's either them or me.
I'm confident enough in my positions that I do believe the older systems to be vastly superior either way, simply because they worked way better back then and nobody complained.

[Xieldras]

This community and the dev team's obsession with damage performance on specific bumps on the road is and has always been absolute cinema.

This keeps getting repeated to me whenever I criticise my current main's design: "But BRD does good damage! Aren't you glad about that?"

I don't really care about damage, if I did I would play a more powerful job. I just want to play a fun class that also offers decent support options. Though I do believe the interconnectivity between jobs in StB was better for teamplay overall.

All this to say: yeah I believe the systems pre-ShB were better all-around because it offered options in how you approached content. Right now? Not so much. If you get walled by a boss your only path forward is to bash your head against the wall until it breaks.

[Azurarok]

Creating 5 extra difficult jobs will completely break balance, and has been repeatedly proven acros many games.

If something becomes more difficult, it needs to reward that, otherwise no pro player will ever use such job, and the job will never become meta.
The less such job get used, the less optimized its use is going to be, causing its status to get worse, into a state were people will consider it trolling (look at what mch already faced).
In this case, the job becomes useless to exist, even if you use it in easier content, whats the point? Its not going to feel rewarding (and if it does, you most likely were dragging your team significantly down, effectively trolling them)

If however we make it reward its difficulty through being stronger, it now becomes mandatory to learn the job if you want to play at the top level.
It now will outperform all the alternatives, and people will now demand such job to be used, even if at the average performance level it isnt the best. Its damage compensates enough to still force it into any meta.
In this case, the other jobs become useless to exist, except in content where it realy doesnt matter what you play. But as meta demands this job, good luck using anything else in any PF content.

Even if a job is meta people won't force someone to use it if it was actually hard to do well with it. BLM did not have a high playrate despite it being the strongest caster in EW.

PCT was locked in for FRU because it wasn't nearly as difficult to use as old BLM and easily out-dpsed every job in content with downtime by a significant margin. There's a threshold for where the difficulty of a job prevents people from flocking to it even if it is meta.

[ForsakenRoe]

I know someone is going to bring up "but it wasn't like this in the past!" and then cite Heavensward or Stormblood and whatnot, but consider that if those days were so grand and perfect when it came to jobs and fight mechanics, why would Square-Enix literally ruin a good thing everyone seemingly found zero flaw in? Why hasn't every other expansion just copycatted the "best" job and fight designs ever? What exactly did the developers, or the community perhaps, say or do that caused this gradual and now seemingly inescapable shift into hard content/easy jobs?


I at least acknowledge that keeping things as they are isn't working, otherwise people wouldn't be leaving in droves citing difficulty or boredom, and that SOMETHING needs to change for both jobs and fights. But I don't know what the solution would be, I'm just not as inclined to believe the "old days" were the best ever or they would still be the "present day" with little or no changes. If anything I'm as baffled as you are why anything changed at all then.

Wouldn't be the first time that a company has had something that 'works', thought 'hey we can make this better' and then accidentally spoiled the good thing they had going for them. WOW got rid of talent trees and replaced them with... whatever the MOP-Shadowlands system was meant to be. One point every 15 levels (give or take) that you put in one of three options. And despite this simple choice of A, B or C, they still had talents that were effectively a locked slot due to being so unbelievably strong compared to the others, and some so unbelievably weak that taking them was trolling yourself. Like, here's a picture of the recommendations for an Arcane Mage in Legion (in Spanish), look how many of the rows are 'pick this one or you're just plain wrong'! In Dragonflight, they brought back 'complex' talent trees and players fell into two camps: Players who rejoiced and loved the return of being able to customize their builds, and players who don't care about such customization/just wanted to do the most damage, and so just used the wiki-recommended presets. So pretty much everyone either benefitted from the reversion to 'complex talent trees', or came out equal (by continuing to just copy what IcyVeins/WowHead says to use, as they previously did). The only 'losers' in the equation were Blizzard, as they'd have more numbers to potentially adjust each patch

Runescape completely overhauled their combat system and turned it into a hotbar-action MMO like WOW and FFXIV, a decision which subsequently resulted in the launch of OSRS, a snapshot version from 'before the bad change', which now has several times the playercount of the 'original'.

So yeh, I can absolutely see SE having the best of intentions when they implemented the changes they did, but the end result has given us the current situation. I don't think they could have predicted this outcome, either, but it's their response to the feedback from SHB and EW, to continue to double down in DT with even more 2min meta additions, to rework BLM to force it to conform to the fight design even harder, that's the biggest issue

How many mentions did we see, of how tough it is to do the 7.3 dungeon? That the second boss, the 'personal responsibility' jailers, was too hard for some players? Contrast that to how there was radio silence for other dungeons like Sohr Khai (3.3) or Swallow's Compass (4.3), I think there's a correlation between the 3.3 and 4.3 dungeons, that the 7.3 dungeon doesn't share: Jobs were the source of 'complexity' back then, not the encounter itself. And if someone back in 3.3, the supposed peak of 'complexity for the sake of complexity', wasn't feeling especially confident in their Job, they could 'opt out' of that complexity, eg a SCH didn't need to use any of their 4 DOTs (in HW), a WHM didn't need to use Cleric Stance to get the damage portion of Assize (and could just use it for the healing half), a Tank could just stay in Tankstance, etc.


Personally, when I say I'd like Job Complexity back, I don't look at any one expansion as 'this is what I want back'. Rather than 'HW best' or 'SB best' or whatever, I'd prefer more an approach akin to what WOW did in DF, or Runescape did with OSRS. WOW brought back the more complex talent trees, yes, but they're structured differently, allowing for far more customization than the original 'Oh you're a Warrior? Put 31 points into Fury and 20 into Arms' style vertical ones from Vanilla-Cata. Or in Runescape terms, OSRS's launch wasn't just a snapshot of the game as it was back then, it's had its own content updates that take it on a diverging path from the original run, with bosses, gear, raids etc. unique to the OldSchool version. So for FFXIV, rather than me saying 'I want SB back exactly as it was', I'd like them to use SB as the starting point, and diverge from the SHB-EW-DT design path, and take a different route. Some things they did going into SHB were for the best, such as removing Slashing/Piercing debuffs, those can stay gone

[Supersnow845]

The jobs being harder allowing the content to be easier is fine because the reason why people pushed back against EW was because both the jobs and the encounters were easy (or in the case of savage awfully designed body check fiestas)

People complained about the jobs in HW and SB not because the balance of job difficulty to combat difficulty was off (seriously that was never a complaint) it was that a lot of the jobs were clunky. This was true but this was arguably the origin of square taking the sledgehammer balance approaches they are now so well known for.

The jobs in SB had legit issues, agro relied too much on the NIN and shirk trading, piercing debuff was still too strong, WHM was gutter trash etc, but there was little desire amongst the SB playerbase to “solve” NIN having too much control over agro to be “hey what if agro just didn’t exist anymore” or “solve” healer design by saying “hey what if you had the DPS rotation of a level 4 THM”

Square nuked the jobs from orbit to fix minor grievances with clunky jobs and then had to over the course of ShB, EW and DT up the combat difficulty to compensate for the lack of job difficulty when the two used to be in right balance

Again it very much reads like you didn’t play during that time. Because you act like the great difficulty nerf of the jobs in ShB was widely liked or desired. People have grievances in SB about the jobs but it was nothing that necessitated ShB

[Themarvin]

The jobs being harder allowing the content to be easier is fine because the reason why people pushed back against EW was because both the jobs and the encounters were easy (or in the case of savage awfully designed body check fiestas)

People complained about the jobs in HW and SB not because the balance of job difficulty to combat difficulty was off (seriously that was never a complaint) it was that a lot of the jobs were clunky. This was true but this was arguably the origin of square taking the sledgehammer balance approaches they are now so well known for.

The jobs in SB had legit issues, agro relied too much on the NIN and shirk trading, piercing debuff was still too strong, WHM was gutter trash etc, but there was little desire amongst the SB playerbase to “solve” NIN having too much control over agro to be “hey what if agro just didn’t exist anymore” or “solve” healer design by saying “hey what if you had the DPS rotation of a level 4 THM”

Square nuked the jobs from orbit to fix minor grievances with clunky jobs and then had to over the course of ShB, EW and DT up the combat difficulty to compensate for the lack of job difficulty when the two used to be in right balance

Again it very much reads like you didn’t play during that time. Because you act like the great difficulty nerf of the jobs in ShB was widely liked or desired. People have grievances in SB about the jobs but it was nothing that necessitated ShB

We don't want easier content to be confronted with, you are just fishing for easier Savage, Ex Trials, Chaotic, Ultimate, so just drop it, it should be harder because people are being carried through the content now.

[Themarvin]

Indeed, this is something I bring up EVERY time the topic comes up when somebody suggests the "solution" is to just make some jobs complex and some others basic.

WHICH jobs end up WHICH though?

Every single time, like clockwork, you'll have people insisting their XYZ favorite job should be one way or the other. Healers being the apex example: Some SCH/AST/SGE mains be like "WHM should be the easy healer". What do some WHM mains think about that? "Oh no, not I, make it SCH, AST, or SGE instead." Meanwhile you'll have other WHM mains that WANT to be the easy one, but then also SCH/AST/SGE mains that want to be the basic one instead.

And that's JUST healers, it gets even worse with DPS with MCH being the biggest sticking point because some people want it to return being some kind of complex buffbot, while I personally don't want to end up "BRD with a gun" because I don't like BRD as-is (and DNC is... tolerable at best).

"Play something else then" they'll all scream, but out of 21 jobs, I only played 6 of them consistently in group content already (DRG/SMN/NIN/MCH/RDM/RPR). Telling me to drop even MORE jobs just so some sweaty can have fun while I get NOTHING isn't ideal for both parties in the same way that keeping a lot of of jobs basic isn't enjoyable to those wanting more complex jobs. Though I would also argue that "homogenization" is exaggerated because otherwise why am I not playing every single DPS job if they're "all the same"? Why is it that despite its "lobotomy" to supposedly make it easier for casuals that I hate playing DT BLM as much as EW BLM despite being the very casual they supposed made this change for? Why do I still adamantly avoid playing tank and healer despite being "dumbed down baby mode"?

I'm sure someone will argue that's a perfect example of how "making jobs easier didn't help, so make them harder again" but it goes beyond just giving a job more or less buttons to worry about, some of these jobs (or roles) at their very core just aren't fun to deal with personally, and I place a lot of that at the feet of their job gauges more than anything. (I still do not understand the freak that is BLM's for example, and then they added a SECOND gauge to worry about.)
snip .

So you want more the A teams and B teams it is horrible enough as it is now... oh no we can't do it at 6 minutes because of player x makes it be like 7 minutes, still leaving room for no enrage mentality, just drop it, the tools (jobs) should be easier to use but the content harder if anything and not able to skip any mechanics at all.

[Supersnow845]

We don't want easier content to be confronted with, you are just fishing for easier Savage, Ex Trials, Chaotic, Ultimate, so just drop it, it should be harder because people are being carried through the content now.

Maybe if the jobs weren’t so easy that half the jobs are completely meaningless then you wouldn’t be able to carry people through them. When was the last time the off tank and the regen healer were “essential meaningful roles”

And no I’m not fishing for easier savages, I don’t care about savage anymore because raiding in this game has become beige slop because…..again, the jobs are awful

You could make me fight all 6 ultimates stack on top of each other and it still wouldn’t make playing a modern healer fun. You cannot make the modern jobs good with the encounter