Evolved mode has zero failure states

[Bru_Tus]

"For casual content it doesn't matter", that's a persistent and seemingly deliberate creative choice by the game director to treat normal content as "story mode". As far as not needing it in casual content, I disagree that there will never be cases where Sky High will impact a run. As far as rotational failures...are we referring to the way the game was 10 years ago or are we referring to DT? BRD songs don't exactly punish you in their current form compared to the new stack timer and its other failure points are mainly dps loss. I think across all jobs with the button loss, loss of things like DoTs/Procs, loss of two minute meta, we will certainly see a reduction of some failure points, but they won't absolutely cease to exist. I also think if we were at the point where DoTs were literally peak skill expression, that's a sad and desperate state of affairs to begin with and it's not an Evolved issue, it's a game designer issue.

Ultimately, it makes it hard to navigate these discussions because it's a conflation of all of the game's problems historically which makes it way more nuanced than extreme, absolute assertions allow for. Some of these problems were pre existing and covered in healer strike thread, meta threads, tank threads, and so on and so forth. They just existed in a "pre Evolved" context.

"It doesn't matter" in the sense that you can use it any time you want and likely will not impact your damage much, if at all, in casual content. The problem is that jobs were fun to play by themselves in HW in story mode content. That's the difference between HW/SB and now. We need to return to that era, minus the jank, because most of the content in this game is casual or "story mode", unless you're a raidlogger who does nothing but Savage and Ultimate. The jobs themselves have to be fun and complex. We can't rely on the content to carry it. Right now, evolved jobs look to be garbage in casual content.

Failure states are also relative. Some people think combo-breaking is a failure state. Some people think only death is a failure state. Some people think not doing TK monk in SB or a transpose line in EW is a failure state. I don't care what people define it as but there is barely any skill expression left in this game anymore at any level, whether it's HW-era combo-breaking failure states or EW-era 1% DPS from transpose line kinda optimization. It doesn't matter which you pick but right now a player turning off their brain and a player using 300% of their brain have within 5% of the same damage output on all jobs in 99% of encounters in this game.

Keep in mind 50% of the side content this studio can come up with is literal FATEs, or worse, attacking literal overworld mobs (early Eureka...). If the jobs are not fun this game is just flat out not fun because they are INCAPABLE of making good side content at the casual level.

[Bru_Tus]

This concerns me as well honestly. And something has felt missing with Paladin. The Atonement combo and Confiteor. It's just gonna feel comparatively dull. What has made Paladin so good for a long time has been its variety of things to press over 60s and it looks like they're truncating a bunch of it so that it's more like a barebones 40s rotation.

I don't know that a counter attack is quite enough appeal to lose what I currently find fun about it, especially when it seems there's nothing remotely challenging about achieving it.

In a similar way it feels like DRG will lose a lot of weaving and that's what I currently enjoy about it. It has positionals but it seems like they could probably all get nullified and I prefer the weaving part of it. I do like Elusive Jump but that also isn't enough and on that note they should bring back Spineshatter.

I currently play Paladin in PvP and even that feels more fun than what we are going to get with Evolved Paladin. I don't quite know how they got the same job and a similar task but ripped some of its attacks away for 8.0 and call it "Evolved".

I'm really worried that the way they designed Reborn mode is to double down on the idea that anything in this game that should engage your brain is quarantined into Savage and above content.

Counterattacks could be something incredibly important to optimize in Savage, maybe more than old Shield Swipe. If Shield Swipe is still a thing today, in just M12S there would be an incredible amount of optimization to be done to trigger shield swipes as an off-tank. But in casual content, like man, sometimes you can go through a boss with 1 raidwide every 2 minutes. Some bosses don't even have tankbusters. It would be the dullest thing ever to try to counterattack in casual content.

This bifurcation is horrible and I don't know how they think it's acceptable. Maybe because the playerbase has really changed and bifurcated itself.

[CidHeiral]

Preach said something on a video that stuck with me. Characters in MOBAs usually have only four buttons to ever press, yet they're some of the most deep characters you'll ever master in any kind of game, and it's because how variable each and every situation within the game is. If all goes well, evolved jobs may enable them to create true emergent combat design, which would completely change how XIV is played.

That is the case in MOBAs because you're fighting other human beings. There is no PvE boss design that could ever come close to emulating that. No matter how emergent the encounters end up being, nothing can make up for mindless job design.

Also, to use Dota 2 as an example since I unfortunately happen to have thousands of hours in it, all of those heroes have depth to them that require you to make various judgement calls during the match, and you can royally F yourself and/or your team over if you make the wrong choices. Even heroes with relatively simple kits still have to think about what items to make to counter the enemy heroes or prevent being countered like everyone else, and most of those items have active abilities tied to them as well. That depth is pretty much what people are asking for from evolved mode in this thread and elsewhere.

[CidHeiral]

I disagree. Did you get to play Veigar's Doom bots, Star Guardian Invasion, Extraction and Swarm? (All LoL) They were all lots of fun, with varying levels of difficulty and challenge. They were designed as mere temporary featured modes, and they all did very well. You can do a lot with PvE with only four buttons, let alone 8, 16 or however many Evolved ends up with.

The number of buttons doesn't determine how complex or interesting a character is to play.
Bloated hotbar =/= Engaging gameplay.

You misunderstood my post. The point was about gameplay depth and having it in equal parts between what you're playing as and what you're playing against, not the number of buttons.

EDIT: I just watched those LoL modes on youtube and they looked like pretty standard horde modes and a bot match. I'm sure they were fun but saying they're comparable to fighting real people seems like quite a stretch.

[ForsakenRoe]

Can't wait for later when evercold is released of how Japan is using Dragoon as an off-tank that can just soak a tank buster with Sky High.

Oh that'd be funny actually, if it becomes more 'standard' to drop an OT in favour of another DPS. It's happened to the Healers for a while now, so maybe it's time the Tanks were also 'replaceable' to the same extent (I know there's been a couple of no-Tank clears of things, but they're not done nearly as frequently as no-Healer clears seem to be). I don't think it's good that any role is 'replaceable', but it will be interesting to see if A: it happens to OffTanks and B: if said OffTanks try to rationalize how it wasn't actually a problem when it happened to other roles, but now that it's come for OTs it's 'actually a very serious issue with the game that must be addressed immediately'

Counterattacks could be something incredibly important to optimize in Savage, maybe more than old Shield Swipe. If Shield Swipe is still a thing today, in just M12S there would be an incredible amount of optimization to be done to trigger shield swipes as an off-tank. But in casual content, like man, sometimes you can go through a boss with 1 raidwide every 2 minutes. Some bosses don't even have tankbusters. It would be the dullest thing ever to try to counterattack in casual content.

I would imagine that they would solve 'it's hard to get counterattacks' by just making Intervention also give the proc, as it has the same 'timing windows' as Sheltron (at least currently, IDK what they'll change about either).

I think the bigger question, is that if we had Shield Swipe originally without the split, and we have DRK's TBN now as a pseudo-parry system without the split... why do we even need the split in the first place? It seems like it's just going to result in a similar issue to the Pure/Barrier split, where one side doesn't really function together properly in cutting-edge content (IE trying to do Week1 as WHM AST), and the other either 'works just fine if you have a bit of coordination' or 'is actually arguably optimal' (IE, SCH SGE having way more mitigative potential than 1Pure/1Barrier). I would imagine that, since OT needs to be able to survive in what is 'current content' right now, it needs 'at least as much personal surviveability as it has currently'. In which case, you could probably bring two OTs, double up on the Party Mit they supposedly have a larger focus on in their kit, and make any Mit Checks easier on the team, and any 'personal mitigation' challenges the game throws at a 2OT comp, they can overcome with Invulns, and/or externals like Protraction, Aquaveil etc. to shore up their defenses if needed

[Mikey_R]

Oh that'd be funny actually, if it becomes more 'standard' to drop an OT in favour of another DPS. It's happened to the Healers for a while now, so maybe it's time the Tanks were also 'replaceable' to the same extent (I know there's been a couple of no-Tank clears of things, but they're not done nearly as frequently as no-Healer clears seem to be). I don't think it's good that any role is 'replaceable', but it will be interesting to see if A: it happens to OffTanks and B: if said OffTanks try to rationalize how it wasn't actually a problem when it happened to other roles, but now that it's come for OTs it's 'actually a very serious issue with the game that must be addressed immediately'

We know OTs are about mitigating damage to the party, at least, that is what the slide implies, so a Dragoon taking a tank buster every minute isn't going to replace the group mitigation. The could be an argument that a Scholar/Sage could cover that missing mitigation, but since we do not know how the kits look, it is going more into speculation territory.

[Absurdity]

Oh that'd be funny actually, if it becomes more 'standard' to drop an OT in favour of another DPS. It's happened to the Healers for a while now, so maybe it's time the Tanks were also 'replaceable' to the same extent (I know there's been a couple of no-Tank clears of things, but they're not done nearly as frequently as no-Healer clears seem to be). I don't think it's good that any role is 'replaceable', but it will be interesting to see if A: it happens to OffTanks and B: if said OffTanks try to rationalize how it wasn't actually a problem when it happened to other roles, but now that it's come for OTs it's 'actually a very serious issue with the game that must be addressed immediately'

I think it's just as likely that the main-tank jobs get replaced, which makes this even funnier.

They have to design the OT jobs to be able to tank just fine, not just due to 4man content (which includes Criterion, so damage that actually hurts) but also because I doubt they will remove shared tank busters or "vuln-up" swap busters.
If they then also deal equal damage to the main tanks they will just be flat out better. More party support, adequate tanking capabilities and no need to "counter" bosses for their dps.

Overall that split seems nonsensical to begin with, not like evolved Paladin lost it's support despite being in the main-tank role.

We've seen with the dominance of SCH+SGE during quite a few raid tiers that this rarely works out as they intend it to.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think it's just as likely that the main-tank jobs get replaced, which makes this even funnier.

Oh I was thinking of like, going from 2T 4DPS, to 1T 5DPS

Especially since the DPS you're tagging in, can sometimes have a party mitigation of their own (RDM Magick Barrier, the Phys Ranged Troubadour and equivalents, etc)

[Turtledeluxe]

"It doesn't matter" in the sense that you can use it any time you want and likely will not impact your damage much, if at all, in casual content. The problem is that jobs were fun to play by themselves in HW in story mode content. That's the difference between HW/SB and now. We need to return to that era, minus the jank, because most of the content in this game is casual or "story mode", unless you're a raidlogger who does nothing but Savage and Ultimate. The jobs themselves have to be fun and complex. We can't rely on the content to carry it. Right now, evolved jobs look to be garbage in casual content.

Failure states are also relative. Some people think combo-breaking is a failure state. Some people think only death is a failure state. Some people think not doing TK monk in SB or a transpose line in EW is a failure state. I don't care what people define it as but there is barely any skill expression left in this game anymore at any level, whether it's HW-era combo-breaking failure states or EW-era 1% DPS from transpose line kinda optimization. It doesn't matter which you pick but right now a player turning off their brain and a player using 300% of their brain have within 5% of the same damage output on all jobs in 99% of encounters in this game..

If its relative then why is this thread throwing it out to agree on? OP's idea of it could be literally anything and that is my point. Job design and casual encounters parameters are also based on subjective experience and preferences. One thing we can say is party/solo DPS ultimately isn't solely based on direct action potency, so I am not seeing your point about Sky High until later in the post. As far as casual content its like...we haven't even seen a new encounter yet and the standard is in the toilet right now with any party comp all blind at launch casual clears???

The points about the skill ceiling are backed by data but I disagree on the solution, that it doesn't matter whether you are talking about HW vs EW levels of skill expression or rotation design. Your position here is leaving space for any given person to say "think of the dots and transpose and how good we had it". If Evolved fails, the solution is not Reborn mode, its something else entirely, some other new idea, or HW level rework. You say you don't care but you should, especially if your position is that what you are currently being offered further erodes the space between an optimizer and a casual, or whatever you want to call them. Isn't that proof in itself that it can and will get worse in the absence of well formulated and organized consenus.

Forgot to mention also the point about Sky High being "all DRG has", or weaving loss being a concern..skill expression isn't gone its just changing. We need to also see a. Final versions b. Encounters and c. All the jobs. I feel like this is where all these topics end up. Educated guesses and historical precedents can only take us so far.

[RaionKansen]

The main issue with the four evolved jobs that we have been shown, is that the execution of those job toolkits has very little way for actual failure.

BRD can just play its songs in whatever order without any constraint or consideration, it doesn't matter.
WHM can spam heals, it doesn't matter because it will be refunded on sanctuary damage.

DRG has some positional considerations, which is better, but far from enough.

The main issue people have with this is that it dramatically removes skill expression, which has been a recurring issue in job design since SHB at the very least.

We know that CBU3's design philosophy seems to be that everything should be about encounters, but I seriously question the idea that jobs should only have cosmetic identity. If evolved is just about bringing back identity through cosmetics, then you'd better be spending your precious devs resources elsewhere because it won't be well received.

As someone that wants to believe in the game evolving, I do hope that what we were shown last fanfest is going to be seriously reworked so that players can actually have engaging and unique job gameplay.

Dang did you time travel from 2027 to know everything about evolved mode?