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

[Valence]

The removal of the orange puddle system started in Shadowbringers, if not earlier. The final boss of Holminster Switch has you looking at which arm is raised and the name on the cast bar. The final boss of Dohn Mheg has you looking at which way they're facing lest you get transformed. The first boss in Qitana Ravel has you looking which side of the boss is on fire and which totem outside of the arena is lit. Etc. etc.

I don't know why people keep acting as if the lack of obvious, early orange puddle telegraphs is some strange, new (mis)feature of Dawntrail. It's not. We're into our third expansion of this style of gameplay.

What's actually different, if I had to place a wager, is that failure is punished much more harshly in Dawntrail.

I'm not talking about specific cases, but as a generalization of the pattern. Else we could just say that visual cues have appeared right in ARR with Coincounter (before rework) or Giruveganaus. There are other examples in HW like Gowrow or the Ultima Beast.
But it's true that it started to appear more and more in ShB and onward, notably within the Nier Raids that are I think the main blueprint that's been applied everywhere else.

[Valence]

Honestly at this point I'm almost convinced that people arguing against job depth/complexity are either deadset thinking that jobs are as binary as DDR encounters, or that they genuinely cannot accept that they'll not fully master a job in more than 30 minutes even though they could coast by very comfortably at 80%. Especially since a big part of job complexity back then also revolved around management and decision making as well (tanking positioning, reacting to aggro, etc), and not an impossibly complex rotation. I'm not especially convinced rotations were a lot harder even back in HW, but that really depends of the job.

[Aravell]

I'm not especially convinced rotations were a lot harder even back in HW, but that really depends of the job.

I don't think any job rotation was even really hard at all, with the exception of MCH.

The meme of MCH requiring an engineering degree to pull off the opener didn't come from nothing after all.

[Themarvin]

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

Peak efficiency should not be based on the job, but the stuff you confront and need to learn to deal with, it is that part you clearly have misunderstood and it is also the reason why iLevel pretty much is pointless where as the hardest content should require the minimum possible ilevel that content and force synch to it, so can't eg. cheese the first Savage with having the latest Savage Gear either.

It is weak to propose weaker bosses and more difficult jobs to play, and on top of that you even take off quite the amount of additional development time as well as having to constantly balance all the jobs instead of just keeping it simple, but the boss as is much more difficult, and actually having to move much more and the likes.

[Supersnow845]

Peak efficiency should not be based on the job, but the stuff you confront and need to learn to deal with, it is that part you clearly have misunderstood and it is also the reason why iLevel pretty much is pointless where as the hardest content should require the minimum possible ilevel that content and force synch to it, so can't eg. cheese the first Savage with having the latest Savage Gear either.

It is weak to propose weaker bosses and more difficult jobs to play, and on top of that you even take off quite the amount of additional development time as well as having to constantly balance all the jobs instead of just keeping it simple, but the boss as is much more difficult, and actually having to move much more and the likes.

I don’t misunderstand I don’t agree with you. There is a difference there

And if they need to take more development time to balance the jobs it’s not like they haven’t got it in spades, literally no piece of DT battle content hasn’t died on launch so it’s not like they have anything better to do. Like how is that amazing “granular difficulty on the encounter” experiment going with quantum hmmmmm? Oh it has a 7% conversion rate on the 10% of people who have cleared floor 100 of the deep dungeon. What about forked tower?……oh it has a 11% conversion rate of people who reached knowledge level 20…….ooooh

Yeah fantastic showing for the lauded design of “easy jobs hard content”

[BlisteringFrost]

Peak efficiency should not be based on the job, but the stuff you confront and need to learn to deal with, it is that part you clearly have misunderstood and it is also the reason why iLevel pretty much is pointless where as the hardest content should require the minimum possible ilevel that content and force synch to it, so can't eg. cheese the first Savage with having the latest Savage Gear either.

It is weak to propose weaker bosses and more difficult jobs to play, and on top of that you even take off quite the amount of additional development time as well as having to constantly balance all the jobs instead of just keeping it simple, but the boss as is much more difficult, and actually having to move much more and the likes.

Why's it work for WoW then? You know. The MMO that FF14 was modeled after, by Yoshida's own admittance.

It's a staffing and money problem. Yoshi wants more devs but new staff means training is required. Current staff are already grossly, abusively underpaid to begin with so new staff isn't feasible either. It's a catch-22. SE needs to give FFXIV more funding but won't.

ActiBlizz -- and now Microsoft, to an extent, as ActiBlizz is a subsidiary to them now, are funneling money into WoW because they know it's a golden egg laying goose. SE knows XIV is their goose but they do not care.

[Azurarok]

I don't play WoW but doesn't that game typically ignore class balance and let the meta play out naturally while generally trying to make different classes shine in different content?

Not that FFXIV wouldn't benefit from that kind of approach, especially for a game that allows every character to play every class, though parts of the userbase would be screeching and clawing at the devs like they killed their family.

[Valence]

It's almost like the job/battle design team has been completely smothered to the whims of the encounter design team at CBU3. Beyond the crazy fact that they actually have two distinct teams working on those two things separately - which probably explains why jobs interact less and less with encounters...

[BlisteringFrost]

I don't play WoW but doesn't that game typically ignore class balance and let the meta play out naturally while generally trying to make different classes shine in different content?

Not that FFXIV wouldn't benefit from that kind of approach, especially for a game that allows every character to play every class, though parts of the userbase would be screeching and clawing at the devs like they killed their family.

Nope. Classes have never been more balanced than the last two most recent expansions. There were some issues in theory-craft before the Manaforge, Omega raid tier but Blizzard resolved them as quickly as they were pointed to these issues. You have to understand another thing with WoW is some of the balancing is skewed deliberately. They want some classes to shine ahead of others on purpose, so everybody has an excuse to try playing another class sometimes, or so their favored class gets to shine bright every now and again. So there's an average, and an above average. With the above average being whoever they wanted to pull ahead at that moment.

[Themarvin]

Why's it work for WoW then? You know. The MMO that FF14 was modeled after, by Yoshida's own admittance.

It's a staffing and money problem. Yoshi wants more devs but new staff means training is required. Current staff are already grossly, abusively underpaid to begin with so new staff isn't feasible either. It's a catch-22. SE needs to give FFXIV more funding but won't.

ActiBlizz -- and now Microsoft, to an extent, as ActiBlizz is a subsidiary to them now, are funneling money into WoW because they know it's a golden egg laying goose. SE knows XIV is their goose but they do not care.

WoW is an entire different game whether it has similar traces in other MMO's, and you know it, been listening to the same reply for like 20 years?

That you want to beat onto a dead horse NPC boss that has no mechanics but having to bash 20 buttons... then fine with me... I prefer many more scenarios and phases that makes it technically difficult to just beat the boss, and rely much less on meta that people desperately cling to in both wow and ffxiv...

I would rather like that the safe spots in fights is not always preset and you actually have to 'read' the bosses more and move to a position that could be entirely different than from any of your team mates and not job dependent either.