Do Something About Duty Finder Already

[ViolaCrossfire]

It is not SE fault. All is explained.

The challenges don't adequately punish this behavior and that IS the fault of SE. They could easily have you use these abilities in specific ways for the job quests but they are kept really easy instead. That bomb you had to kill for the MCH initiation quest? They say you have to use rapid fire but you can just use your normal 1-2 combo and it dies perfectly fine. Most of the time you just kill A or kill B and they just give you an unrelated skill as a reward. Meanwhile they get carried in dungeons and never get punished for failing to utilize the things the job has to offer. Heck, my friend leveled an AST to level 60 without ever using his cards because POTD punishes you even less than the normal game. That is creating giant gaps in skill and is bad game design.

[Kaethra]

The challenges don't adequately punish this behavior and that IS the fault of SE. They could easily have you use these abilities in specific ways for the job quests but they are kept really easy instead... That is creating giant gaps in skill and is bad game design.

Are you absolutely sure that they designed the game with the rotations we use in mind? Before you answer, look at EVERY bit of content you've done. All of the solo quests, FATES, Class Quests, Job Quests, Leves, Guild Hests, and so forth. Then add in the 1-50 4-man dungeons, 51-60 4-man dungeons, Alliance Raids, Main Scenario Dungeons, ect..

All of that doesn't require an optimal rotation. So I will ask again. Was the game designed with those rotations in mind? The fact is, whether you (or I for that matter, because I'm in same boat as you) agree with it or not, is that the game is NOT designed around it. Its optional. As much as we hate to admit it. Anything beyond the 123 rotation is optional for the majority of content. It just makes things.. more interesting when you use your other stuff.

If you're not convinced its a fact. Tally up all the content that can be completed by using a group full of peeps using 123 rotations. Compared to the content that cannot be completed that way. Its staggering. I'd dare say its 90% of the game. If not more.

I'm not going to disagree with you that it is bad game design. However, its not incompetence. It was a design decision to make the game that accessible. Though I will say this. There is content that requires a bit more than that. Expert Roulette and higher content will wipe if everyone's not pulling some weight. I'd say that I'd prefer if the difficulty of Expert was applied to Level 60 and Expert was a bit tougher. But its there at least.

My biggest complaint is the fact that Expert has only 2 dungeons available. And if I were playing since 3.0 that I'd have to wait so long to have it. Thankfully I skipped 3.0-3.4 and started right at the tail end of 3.5

But back to the rotations. I'm going to be honest with you. We made those rotations. Developers gave us abilities. And a basic 123124125 (depending on class) rotation to be augmented with other skills. But they didn't have a full rotation in mind. Just the bare bones and left it up to us to figure it out. This happens in many MMOs as well. But that is mainly due to developers and producers not liking the fact that only 5% of a playerbase sees the highest content in the game. They want to close that gap as much as possible.

Only Daybreak prides itself on having content that 'casuals' never see (and their producer is on record as saying 'casuals shouldn't be allowed to see top level content'). No one else wants to go there.

Again not disagreeing with you. Just pointed out a different point of view

[Ignnis]

Replying to the above post (on phone it can't handle all the txt well). Yes by extent we make the rotations but the devs have designed skills to be used in certain situations and are possibly intended to be used how we use them. E.g. Heavy trust should be used at the start (ignoring buffs like raging and blood atm) it's common sense to use it there so I'm going to assume that's what they intended. The issue arises when've you get people who choose to not use the tools offered, are ignorant of how to use them or just can't be bothered. They pull down he performance and are basically carried by the rest of the group. Most dungeons could be completed by all members doing the bare minimum 123 combo but I suspect at a certain point like brayflox their chances of success will begin to go down. I for one would not want to bare witness to a team of 8 players doing 123 in any of the raids, they've probably not complete dps checks and wipe constantly.

[alimdia]

Are you absolutely sure that they designed the game with the rotations we use in mind?

Not the entire game, but they definitely designed jobs with rotations in mind, every little thing you do was programmed by someone else beforehand, they also set the numerical value of skill damage and any bonus you get from using skills a certain order, it wasn't players that decided using vorpal thrust after true thrust would give you a combo bonus, it was the devs. It wasn't players that decided chaos thrust would be part of a third combo and give a DoT that deals a higher total damage than the full thrust combo, it was the devs. They designed heavy thrust with the intent that you would keep it up all the time, it wasn't some random elitist that came up with it.

They also fully know the theoretical max damage your class can do when played "properly", they use this value along with item level power to set boss parameters in raids and dungeons.

Don't think of developers as clueless, in themepark MMOs they design things to be played a certain way, while players can do things the devs did not foresee it doesn't mean the devs didn't at least try to come up with all scenarios how a job would be played.

[seraf]

Not the entire game, but they definitely designed jobs with rotations in mind, every little thing you do was programmed by someone else beforehand, they also set the numerical value of skill damage and any bonus you get from using skills a certain order, it wasn't players that decided using vorpal thrust after true thrust would give you a combo bonus, it was the devs. It wasn't players that decided chaos thrust would be part of a third combo and give a DoT, it was the devs. They designed heavy thrust with the intent that you would keep it up all the time, it wasn't some random elitist that came up with it.

They also fully know the theoretical max damage your class can do when played "properly", they use this value along with item level power to set boss parameters in raids and dungeons.

unforeseen consequences!

-Doton's Boss-

[dragonseth07]

unforeseen consequences!

-Doton's Boss-

"I've come up with the level 60 BLM abilities, boss."
"How do these work together exactly, Jenkins?"
"That's not my department. I just write cool tooltips and assume they can make something resembling fun."

I'm dying.

[Kaethra]

They also fully know the theoretical max damage your class can do when played "properly", they use this value along with item level power to set boss parameters in raids and dungeons.

I would like to believe this. But when I see abilities take a 20% buff or nerf or more. That lends me to believe that in theory, what you said there doesn't always work. And as a minor developer myself, I know it doesn't always work out that way. Its a good base. But we'd be deluding ourselves to think it always works that way.

If you need any examples, just look at when Holy took that potency nerf a while back. Used to be 260 potency without damage degradation on amount of targets.

[dragonseth07]

I would like to believe this. But when I see abilities take a 20% buff or nerf or more. That lends me to believe that in theory, what you said there doesn't always work. And as a minor developer myself, I know it doesn't always work out that way. Its a good base. But we'd be deluding ourselves to think it always works that way.

If you need any examples, just look at when Holy took that potency nerf a while back. Used to be 260 potency without damage degradation on amount of targets.

Well, of course. The best players in the world will always pull out things that devs can't anticipate. No dev is also the best player at their own game.

Having said that, the devs definitely aren't clueless. They design with play patterns in mind and have a pretty good grasp on theoretical outputs.

[Shougun]

I would like to believe this. But when I see abilities take a 20% buff or nerf or more. That lends me to believe that in theory, what you said there doesn't always work. And as a minor developer myself, I know it doesn't always work out that way. Its a good base. But we'd be deluding ourselves to think it always works that way.

If you need any examples, just look at when Holy took that potency nerf a while back. Used to be 260 potency without damage degradation on amount of targets.

To be that out of the loop is an issue though, this isn't just "players find the best, don't teach them instead". Devs should have an idea of ideal rotations already mapped out, and different contexts for each job with approximate end result calculations. Certain they do have some as balance would be significantly worse if they didnt.

Although it might be more accurate and helpful to run learning simulations of different situations to figure out the best rotations, and gear, and the strongest classes under those situations, you'll need to dedicate a computer to simulating them (as you add more players and different situations that will become the computer's life lol). Obviously these would be very specific situations which means you'd have to inject specific scenarios for a better understanding (until you built up enough to input basic dungeon layouts and boss scripts, which is later stage development) like what if the black mage couldn't sit in their ley line forever or the boss takes 15 second hiatus with nothing to attack. What happens if you have an AST, which class specifically would best help, if they use aoe or not, multiple AST, whose is the most complicated and by how much, etc.

From there you could both figure the most ideal rotations for given scenario, see if it wasn't something you intended, as well see a comparison of the other classes to each other both in solo situations and not (figure out best party compositions). And be able to answer fun questions like "how high does the high defense tank have to be to level out the damage loss?" - and then compare that to live data to see if its not a number problem but player's "mentality" is the problem. Like people may get excited about high aoe damage but what if the job had much higher single target damage and a majority of the fights didn't require that extra aoe damage because everything vanished on the single target, the machine would find out you could theoretically ignore the adds and burst the boss down and people might think Y job is better due to higher numbers when X is actually much better, and would lead to a faster clear even (very generic example but something that might appear shortly, I imagine more hardcore players would find it out and share that info though).

Some of this is already done in smaller parts for WoW with third party people, but obviously or at least hopefully, SE could employ a much more detailed analysis. They could even use these tools to figure out new abilities by examining the holes and filling them as appropriately as possible. Of course being these situations have no "player error" you'd have to design that in, and I imagine you should examine player's abilities and create models of error for different skill levels and then use those in the simulation of the jobs (to design appropriately difficult content) but also run a perfection simulation ("the literal best you could be"). This could reveal that certain jobs have much higher peaks but simultaneously have much lower average output due to player skill (leading to informed issues of complexity, end game expectations, and issues surrounding that, or just sometimes tell you that players have no idea what they're talking about and need to git gud.. haha).

All of this wouldn't be an overnight project but seeing as they intend to run the game for years to come with even more jobs.. might be good to be sure you /know/ when the players are right or wrong, and at least understand the issue even if its not addressed (sometimes I imagine things are made a little off kilter just to breath new meta into the game). Depending on how detailed and thus long the simulations are you could even run them against new fights to figure out the best combinations and if your content is favoring one job too much (of course certain unique ideas wouldn't fit readily.. and maybe just be easier not to make it fit). Since it doesn't have to be real time (like an RTS) the system doesn't really need to be snappy, can actually do highly accurate frame by frame evaluations.

Even if you didn't simulate it out to near perfection, the Devs shouldn't be like "oh wow, I had no idea the AoE spell would do a lot of damage in a high density mob situation wow.. who knew!?" lol. So maybe you're right and they don't have an idea, but they need to have one - just whipping stuff together and seeing if it works in a live environment is pretty bad. Sometimes I wonder if they do stuff a bit like this though and players just aren't playing to the right caliber, although 20% damage boost seems pretty heavy handed so maybe not lol. Even if a WHM had perfection in healing and cleric dancing.. Still seems impractical they could make up that 20% aoe buff.

[Kaethra]

Simulations?

I'm chuckling at that suggestion because design is so much less scientific than that. It really works like "hey this ability would look cool, lets see how it's used." Well not 100% like that but pretty close. There -is- a slight method involved with coming up with the basics. But after that, its a little haphazard. That is until the parses come in from actual player use. But again.. that's why you see such large 20-50% swings in abilities during patches and hotfixes. Instead of much smaller tweaks. Each production team has its way of doing it. And that depends if they have a mathematician on board or not.

The way they setup abilities in FFXIV.. well you've all have seen the patches. And 95% of content can be completed by 123, like I stated before. Until that changes, you're going to be hard pressed to convince me that they intended players to use 'optimal' rotations. I'm not convinced any of them know the optimal rotation for each class anyway. Or the skill speed sweet spot for certain classes.

Now if at least half of the 60 content at least required some measure of it. We'd be having a different conversation.