The trouble with Job redesigns

[Nizzi]

because for some reason it is that important to them. I guess in the end you can just talk about how magnificent old SMN was

Yeah man I can't imagine something being important to you in a game we play for thousands of hours and invest large amounts of our free time in. Clearly nothing should be important to us and we shouldn't care, right? That's the enlightened philosophy of the true XIV fan, just don't care about anything and you'll be happy when they kill the things you love!

I'm not sure if you meant this to come off as callous as it does but yeah, are people just not supposed to be sad that something they loved is taken away from them? This genre of games isn't like other games; when they change and rerelease old Final Fantasy games, it doesn't affect my ability to go back and play those as they were. Whenever they change jobs radically in this game, it is impossible for me to ever play it like it was again. Are we just not supposed to care and go "oh well! lol!!" and move on?
Things like this are why Scholars talk about their DoTs, ASTs talk about their old cards, BRDs talk about Foe's and Refresh, etc etc. Sure, we can say that that's just how MMOs works, but that doesn't mean we have to accept changes that alienate us from the things we love and enjoy.

Regardless of your opinion on whether or not new SMN is good, the fact of the matter is that they did indeed alienate players who had been playing and enjoying this style of gameplay for years. There's not anything like it in the game anymore. What should they play now to get that type of gameplay?

[CelestiCer]

Job design is affected by FFXIV innately not being competitive.

Zero in-game Ranking/Leaderboards accessible with a press of a button. Square is allergic to competitive formats. It's not a " Good or Bad " it's their " Direction ". The downside of 0 competition means nothing in-game encourages players to become the best possible player " they " can be.

This results in simply the following

• Players who don't know what their doing
• Players not knowing proper rotations
• Players oblivious of mitigation skills
• Players enticed to learn bad habits
• Players can't and wont read debuffs
• Players not knowing about adjusting their HuD's
• Players neglecting Food and Raid buffs
• Players just wanting a dorito and damagedown strats
• Players becoming lazy and irresponsible

Partially Square is to blame for making the game as lazy and comfy as possible. Near nothing to push players to struggle to improve in-game even if there is a desire for it like FFLogs, where players compete even against their Own past performances. All of this affects " Job-Feedback " which will inevitably affect " Job-Simplification ".

How much " Comfier " can we silk wrap players to be " Pillowed " into the average content that is already made of " Fluff? ". And this direction this " Hominization " just hurts the game in the long run.

Design Jobs with a friendly easy barrier of entry, with a high skill-ceiling for skill expression. If Square keeps lowering the skill-ceiling? it alienates dedicated players, and only encourages players to not improve just to be more lazy which encourages even more Job-redesigns for more simplifications. Idk where this is even a good thing to make anything dumber...

• Chess with removing the Knights and Bishops
• Starcraft with removing workers just passive income
• League of Legends with removing all passives and Q button
• Black Desert with removal of grabs and half of Anti-CC
• Revelation online removing half of all Crowd Control
• Dart-board with removing half of the scores numbers and making the rest all 20
• Basketball with removing traveling rule
• Tekken with removal of Korean backdash

Game is more accessible yeah... and more boring and dumber, what does that do? this doesn't improve anything.

Is Competition required for good Job Design or Players to improve,... No

But without Competition of any kind in-game? means there's even less standing in the way of Square making job designs more and more and more simpler, easier, less depth, less complex, less nuances, more and more braindead.

[Lyth]

Many of the things that people put forward as 'raising' the skill ceiling generally don't. Being able to execute your job's opener and rotation consistently under target dummy conditions is a fundamental barrier to entry, sure. I absolutely agree that there is more that can be done in-game to give newer players feedback and help them improve. There's been talk about a 'Hall of the Intermediate/Expert' for years. It would be great to get players to do damage on a target dummy and replay it back to them showing places where they dropped buffs or held cooldowns for too long. You don't have to provide numerical feedback on which they can potentially be judged in order to help people improve. Perhaps allow them to specifically select recurring raid mechanics to practice while doing so. The majority won't bother with it, but there should be opportunities for those who actually seek it out.

But your rotation defines the skill floor, not the ceiling, especially when you've been mashing out the same button sequence for hundreds of hours. The only way that you're going to challenge players through 'job design' is if you design actions which actually require mechanical precision to use. Movement abilities. Skillshots. The sort of things that define skill expression in MOBAs. Otherwise, you're entirely dependent on fight design, which is the direction which we've moved towards.

[LeonKeyh]

snip

It really depends on what you consider the skill floor. I think most people understand it as "the bare minimum you need to complete the content" which is definitely difficult to define in a cooperative game, but I think that we'd mostly agree that it's fairly low. I'm sure that most content can be completed by just using the 1-2-3 combo, so anything more than that is at least.... a little skill expression? lol

I understand your point though. Skill expression is better...expressed...based on reacting to things that are happening. A Static "press these buttons in this order" offers a very low skill ceiling having mistakes be the biggest source of differentiating performance rather than pure skill. But even so, the skill expression is minimizing those mistakes while also keeping your GCD running. Which right now, as you pointed out, is mainly relying on the encounter itself, not the job design. The only real exception to that is BLM because the job design is so ingrained in how you interact with the encounter. Melee DPS USED to have positionals for a level of skill expression but that went from "Somewhat important" to "Not important" to "Negligible" to "Oh wow, I didn't realize it could matter even less."

Fact of the matter is that creating room for mistakes isn't a good way to increase the skill ceiling, but that's pretty much the only thing that is left. The game design based on 1 minute and 2 minute burst windows doesn't do a great job at lending itself to reactionary content when it comes to DPSing. Not saying it's _impossible_ to do with the current design, it's just more difficult. Skills are either "use when available" or "use in burst window" and for most things it's well... both.

[Dyvid]

Many of the things that people put forward as 'raising' the skill ceiling generally don't. Being able to execute your job's opener and rotation consistently under target dummy conditions is a fundamental barrier to entry, sure. I absolutely agree that there is more that can be done in-game to give newer players feedback and help them improve. There's been talk about a 'Hall of the Intermediate/Expert' for years. It would be great to get players to do damage on a target dummy and replay it back to them showing places where they dropped buffs or held cooldowns for too long. You don't have to provide numerical feedback on which they can potentially be judged in order to help people improve. Perhaps allow them to specifically select recurring raid mechanics to practice while doing so. The majority won't bother with it, but there should be opportunities for those who actually seek it out.

But your rotation defines the skill floor, not the ceiling, especially when you've been mashing out the same button sequence for hundreds of hours. The only way that you're going to challenge players through 'job design' is if you design actions which actually require mechanical precision to use. Movement abilities. Skillshots. The sort of things that define skill expression in MOBAs. Otherwise, you're entirely dependent on fight design, which is the direction which we've moved towards.

What is hard to some is easy for others. Jobs should be designed to offer different playstyle within the Job Roles. Take ARR Melee for example: You had Monk that was about fast GCD and Positional, Dragoon was more of a straightforward DPS, and Ninja had a combination mechanic of DPSing. This kind of design allows player to gravitate toward mechanics they enjoy to play.

[CelestiCer]

...But your rotation defines the skill floor, not the ceiling, especially when you've been mashing out the same button sequence for hundreds of hours.

I define " Skill-Ceiling " of rotations by anything that increases the total amount of

• Actions Per Minute (APM)
• Variety of buttons to press
• In more then just 1 specific pattern

Needing to press 1-2-3 isn't as difficult as pressing 1-2-3-4 and so on. Subjectively, you might find FFXIV's job-design not as skill expressive as reactionary gameplay as equally as I find Checkers not as skill expressive to Chess.

The " Skill-Floor " however I define by " Players skill-requirement to clear Average Content ".

Players can with beyond minimal understanding, pressing buttons in random orders clear the average content because Square literally drags our dead bodies through the finish lines. That's FFXIV's Skill-Floor, Thus...

Many of the things that people put forward as 'raising' the skill ceiling generally don't.

What players have suggested in general " isn't " requiring a master's degree in physics, forcing players to purchase PC's with a 100 Dollar MMO-mouse that has 2nd mini-Numpad attached to it... What players have put forward, is to have the Skill-ceiling stop dropping, preserving the skill-expression they come to love.

Instead players see their jobs being changed, reworked like the skill-ceiling is being " Demoed". We're not asking a rework overhaul of the entire game system where we want unrealistic difficulties like

• Adding Blocking and Guarding
• Adding unavoidable attacks that can only be dodged through dashing and rolling
• Rear and flank defense negatives for your own Character
• in-build Crowd Control and Anti-Crowd Control system in our jobs
• All skills 100% be Non-Tab-targetable, requiring more precision
• All jobs now Manage a 3rd/4th/5th and 6th resource bar
• Cast Bar progression of al enemies are now all hidden
• Adding more positional-bonuses then just Rear and Flank
• Tripling the APM requirement to clear any content
• We lose Exp and Levels upon death of any kind
• Our gear breaks 6x faster now

Maybe all of the above plus reactionary gameplay requires more skill, but we're asking the bare minimum of Square to not... how to put it lightly... " F-king our Jobs with unrequested redesigns "

Cause reactionary gameplay might be more skill-full? but you know what's also less skill expressive then the current FFXIV we have? Having the job's of players be ruined and turning it's gameplay into this -> " 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 "

[Lyth]

...

Sometimes it can be difficult for players to objectively tell where the 'difficulty' comes from. To take your historical MNK example, in ARR and HW, about 40% of MNK's damage came from auto-attacks. That might strike you as strange, until you remember that prior to 3.4, auto-attacks were directionally based. That's why if you watch videos of good tank/melee players from that time period, you'll see them glide around mobs due to strafe-locking. This was not a skill differential, but rather a performance differential - if you knew the correct techniques on how to maintain uptime, you were gifted a bigger reward for doing so then than you are now. It was just a barrier to entry so we could feel good about ourselves.

Generally speaking, the more time that you've invested into a particular job, the more you will subjectively perceive it as high skill. That's not exclusively an ego thing; you just have a deeper understanding of the job than you do the others, and every time investment carries an opportunity cost of mastering other jobs.

...

Most of what you're describing is purely muscle memory. If you've spent enough time in a fight, you generally don't even need to look to see when specific abilities are coming off cooldown, when a buff needs to be refreshed, or what positional you'll be on during a particular mechanic. It's just auto-pilot. You could probably do it with the HUD off at that point (which is pretty fun to do, but you do have to trust your knowledge of the fight). I personally think that having a higher APM is fun (I wouldn't say 'high skill', but it does feel good to perform well), but then you do end up running into a lot of complaints about clipping issues and animation locks because of how this game handles weaving.

I do think that 'changing up' the pattern and adding in an element of randomness is good, though. Procs actually do force you to do some decision-making on the fly. This game does try to bring in the occasional 'skillshot equivalent' with ground targeting, but most people just end up creating a placement macro that converts it into a generic 'on target' effect. That's not to say that clunky ground targeting is the only way to do this; there are plenty of movement skills that require you to become good at eyeballing a distance and a faced direction. I found your list of 'unrealistic difficulty' additions to be kind of entertaining, because most of them wouldn't even be that hard, perhaps just intimidating for newer players.

Bottom line, if you want to see more procs that dynamically change your rotation, I could get on board with that. More clever movement mechanics are always good. But I think that the vast majority of the 'skill expression' dependent on the fight design, rather than in typing out the lyrics to 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' on a target dummy until you can do it semi-conscious and blindfolded. You will of course get reddit bragging rights for having an extra '4' attached to the every '1-2-3' that your job puts out, if that's your endgame, sure.

[Mikey_R]

I do think that 'changing up' the pattern and adding in an element of randomness is good, though.

Not everyone wants randomness in their rotations though. Make every job have random elements and you can potentially force people out. Of course, the reverse is true, make all jobs have a strict rotation and you will also force people out.

This is why you see a wide variety of randomness in the jobs from Dragoon and it's very strict rotation to Dancer who has a ton of Procs to track or Bard where the procs affect the rotation differently depending on the song currently being played.

[CelestiCer]

(snip) Most of what you're describing is purely muscle memory.

Definition of Skill

• the ability to do something well; expertise
• to use one's knowledge effectively
• readily in execution or performance

Sounds like repetition to get good at something, skillful, almost sounds like...
" Muscle Memory".

Skill is subjective, endless argument going down that road. I am aiming my points towards the thread topic " The trouble with Job redesigns ".

Square obviously aims job-redesigns to be simplistic and homogenized, and that's all I am advocating against. The problem doesn't lie at how much less or more Muscle Memory you need or not for this game no, but needing to press less for the sake pressing less doesn't make this all better either.

(I found your list of 'unrealistic difficulty' additions to be kind of entertaining, because most of them wouldn't even be that hard, perhaps just intimidating for newer players.

Then again, FFXIV's difficulty as far as I am sensing to you is just too easy. Thus... if you want to suggest a complete overhaul of the gameplay/job/fight designs to be astronomically complex to meet your lofty standards? you can have fun with that. I gave my examples taken from other (mmo)games that you of course wouldn't find challenging.

If I set the bar to low with requesting Square to stop

• Redesigning Jobs to be simplistic and homogenized
• Stop dropping the Skill-Ceiling we had/have

versus your

• I want FFXIV's game design to be overhauled entirely
• I want fights and job rotations to have more randomness

Then I am very sorry for requesting something realistic... and not setting my request at... GodGamer? cause I do enjoy FFXIV's difficulty, I just do not agree with their direction of Job redesigns.

[Lyth]

Actually, your post doesn't have anything to do with the OP, which is questioning who the target audience for these reworks are.

I'm actually not offering a commentary on 'difficulty'. If you want to challenge yourself, there are always ways to do so. It's not like you can 'run out' of ways to improve if you're interested in doing so. What players are usually asking for when they talk about 'difficulty' are ways to distinguish themselves above others. But that's not about 'skill expression'. It's about creating barriers to entry. You shouldn't feel threatened that someone completely new to the game can pick up your job and put out a decent performance on it after practicing the opener and rotation on a target dummy. And that's really the extent of the challenge that basic rotational hurdles offer. There has to be something more than that on the table if you want to talk about skill expression. It's a worthwhile discussion, but you haven't addressed it.