Famitsu Interview: Tuning encounters for healing

[Absurdity]

While I agree with your overall assessment. A bland fight design can be overcome with a fun job kit. What hurt Shadowbringers more than anything is the jobs themselves were dumbed down alongside encounters being simpler. That combination made many fights this expansion feel boring. If at least one aspect retained more complexity, you'd see far less complaining.

I'd go ahead and claim that an engaging job design is a lot more important than complex encounter design because it applies to all content. You can't make every fight complex because it would just frustrate the majority of people but if the jobs have enough complexity to them then even the inevitable boring fight can still be entertaining for the more skilled players.

[Dogempire]

The easy of optimization and high accessibility is due more to flawed fight design than flawed kit design. More complex kits would not really make fights harder to optimize nor make fights more engaging.

I disagree with this, limiting the strengths of jobs in certain aspects makes it so that a player has to work to overcome these limitations and ends up increasing the skill ceiling because of it.

- Melee jobs are limited by both their positional skills and their inability to stay in boss range 100% of the time, this causes people to greed GCD's and have to consider when to use their true north stacks as well as how to anticipate boss turning.
- Black mages have to know when they can pop their leylines so that they'll be in it 100% of the time while also working with keeping enochain up, their GCD rolling in moments of high movement, and how to manage their MP so they can toss out the most Fire
IV's under astral fire.
- Tanks used to have to manage their cooldowns and tank stance more smartly while watching their aggro meter, that way they could do the most damage possible while making themselves less of a burden to heal, and also not letting the boss start smacking the
dps.

Limitations to a job's strength are good, they make you have to play smartly, and making a job strong in one aspect and weak in another is what SE should aim to do with job design instead of making everything even across the board and eliminating any semblance of challenge when it comes to a job's kit.

[Ultimatecalibur]

- Melee jobs are limited by both their positional skills and their inability to stay in boss range 100% of the time, this causes people to greed GCD's and have to consider when to use their true north stacks as well as how to anticipate boss turning.

Which is complexity tied to fight design rather than rotation. Modern bosses don't turn anywhere near as much as 2.0 release bosses which could easily turn in random directions to hit random targets.

Positionals have become far less punishing and random as well. The HW Dragoon used to deal with having a random positional on the 4th part of their combos, a non-combo weaponskill that needed to be used roughly every 6th gcd with a positional, a 3 step combo that ended with a positional that the 2nd and 3rd parts of the combo inflicted a debuff and a dot with different durations, and required hitting the random positionals to maintain a gauge.

- Black mages have to know when they can pop their leylines so that they'll be in it 100% of the time while also working with keeping enochain up, their GCD rolling in moments of high movement, and how to manage their MP so they can toss out the most Fire
IV's under astral fire.

Fights have gotten a lot less mobile which punishes BLM less as well in addition to their increased mobility options and a less punishing Enochian.

- Tanks used to have to manage their cooldowns and tank stance more smartly while watching their aggro meter, that way they could do the most damage possible while making themselves less of a burden to heal, and also not letting the boss start smacking the
dps.

Not at all. Tanks have never had trouble holding hate when using Tank stance. In HW that "smart usage while watching enmity for increased dps" boiled down to Warriors starting in Defiance, abusing Unchained, an overhealing Equilibrium and a few Enmity combos before swapping to Deliverance at the start of the fight to generate a big enough enmity lead that neither tank needed to exit dps stance for the remainder of the fight as Str accessories and dps rotations would allow them to hold enmity. In StB it boiled down to swapping to dps stance after generating an enmity lead and then "circle shirking" on cooldown or after a swap to maintain and extend the enmity lead. Enmity troubles only really occurred at the start of fights when Samurai performed their burst without using Diversion before the tanks had generated their lead.

Cooldown management was also a case of fewer cooldowns relative to the number of tankbusters/heavy damage bursts in fights. Tanks went from dealing with tank busters roughly every 30 to 45 seconds with a 20% mitigation on a 90s cooldown, a 30% on a 180s cooldown and an invuln on a 180s+ cooldown to dealing tankbusters every 2 to 4 minutes with a 20% mitigation with a 15s to 30s cooldown, a 20% on a 90s cooldown, a 30% with a 120s cooldown and a invuln with a 4 to 7 min cooldown.