The trouble with Job redesigns

[CelestiCer]

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

Fairly convinced you either didn't read and/or dodging my points or the thread topic for that matter.

The OP said " Job Redesigns " where Square failed to improve upon core mechanics of our jobs. Removing aspects and alienating core players of a job. Preserving Skill-Ceiling, means I am against Square removing more aspects and nuances of our Jobs yes. Quite on topic. Which I find a realistic request vs your request of a combat system overhaul... which also sounds off-topic.


You said " Most of what you're describing is just Muscle Memory ", implying it isn't difficult. In-fact you said my entire list of unrealistic difficulty additions is not hard, your words.

Yet now you're saying " Muscle Memory " is about creating barriers of entry? So 1st Muscle Memory isn't difficult, yet now it's suddenly too difficult when it suits your narrative? and my unrealistic list isn't creating barriers, to easy right? huh...


As for new players picking up and performing well at a job isn't about feeling threatened either. Heck you're practically describing me. I didn't join in 2015, I joined fairly recently and I picked up a job fairly quickly and decently.

Do you realize the contradictions in your post? I feel like unless you realize this, we're gonna go into circles until you properly read posts and quote points properly... lets just agree to disagree.

Meanwhile for sanity reasons, I'll go over here and... " face-desk " a little.

[Lyth]

Your rotation under target dummy conditions defines the skill floor, not its ceiling. It might intimidate newer players into thinking that the job in question is difficult, but it has little to do with skill expression. That typically comes out purely through maintaining uptime despite fight mechanics in this game, but that doesn't mean that you cannot also design interesting abilities that challenge a player mechanically. Intelligent use of movement abilities in movement heavy fights are a potential example of this. Hopefully that clarifies things for you.

[Shurrikhan]

Your rotation under target dummy conditions defines the skill floor, not its ceiling. It might intimidate newer players into thinking that the job in question is difficult, but it has little to do with skill expression. That typically comes out purely through maintaining uptime despite fight mechanics in this game, but that doesn't mean that you cannot also design interesting abilities that challenge a player mechanically. Intelligent use of movement abilities in movement heavy fights are a potential example of this. Hopefully that clarifies things for you.

That seems an rather arbitrary place to draw a line in the sand.

How optimized a target dummy rotation are we talking here? If every duration-based buff is held until just miliseconds short of where it'd cause clipping so long as it wouldn't push it back over another animation in some future in-fight use, is that still mere "skill-floor"? Perfect banking for X or Y composition's raid buffs? Still "skill floor"?

And how would flashing icons from RNG procs somehow generate more towards skill ceiling then, say, optimized drift per an EW Monk or ShB Samurai's rotation or a BLM perfectly exploiting whatever raid buffs it expects to receive? How does a proc one can react to optimally with just peripheral vision alone, using here or there until depleted, not likewise become "just muscle memory"?

[Lyth]

People love to overdramatize their experiences to make them sound more skillful than they actually are. Base human reaction time is measured on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, even for college level and professional athletes, and that's before you even factor in latency and animation locks. It's also longer for visual cues than it is for auditory ones. Your numbers are off by 3-4 orders of magnitude.

Fixed rotations are very much just muscle memory. If you add in more random elements to either the rotation or as branches in fight design, then you force the player to adapt dynamically rather than following a preset script. The simplest type of proc is where you just push a button when it lights up, but it could represent an actual branch point in your rotation if it's designed that way. The reason why we don't see much of this is because players already struggle with simple visual branching cues in fights as they are designed. Could you imagine if your rotation branched off dynamically based off of visual procs as well? No shot.

[Hezhi]

The reason why we don't see much of this is because players already struggle with simple visual branching cues in fights as they are designed. Could you imagine if your rotation branched off dynamically based off of visual procs as well? No shot.

I think that'd be fun and cool. Let me adapt dynamically, other games do it and its fun. Even in this game BRD used to have dynamic procs like that before and all the BRD nuts (poor souls) I know loved it.
Players dont need to be coddled. As long as the buttons on the action bars aren't convoluted and incomprehensible it's fine to allow people to make mistakes and struggle a bit getting the PERFECT rotation down. We're headed the opposite way of that, the path of static dumb rotations with no resources to manage and barely anything to potentially mess up, and a quick glance at the forum will show you that people almost unanimously hate it.

[LeonKeyh]

People love to overdramatize their experiences to make them sound more skillful than they actually are. Base human reaction time is measured on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, even for college level and professional athletes, and that's before you even factor in latency and animation locks. It's also longer for visual cues than it is for auditory ones. Your numbers are off by 3-4 orders of magnitude.

Because SCALE is important. We're sitting here talking about how there's something that is a 2 mile walk away and a 5 mile walk away and about how the 5 mile walk is much farther and you're jumping in and saying "The circumference of the Earth is 25,000 miles, a 3 mile difference isn't a lot."

We're not talking about playing professional sports, we're not talking about elite trained military, we're not even talking about _competitive skill-base focused_ PvP games like FPS's and MOBAs. We're talking about a hotbar-based tab targetted MMO. By the very nature of an RPG, a lot of the "skill" is replaced by character elements (class, stats, etc), "aiming" and "dodging" are just dice rolls based on your characters stats.

At that scale, the things that we're talking about are the difference between the skill floor and skill ceiling and they are _relatively_ more complicated/difficult/skillful whenever compared to lower players.

[Lyth]

Scale is important, yes. You're not performing actions on a 1 ms reaction time, because axonal conduction doesn't travel fast enough for that.

I'm not saying that you can't feel proud of learning your opener and core rotation. But how do you differentiate between players who are all able to do that much at baseline? I don't personally think that adding a '4' to the end of '1-2-3' is the answer. Some people now say procs and variability, others on the previous page say no. Hard to say, really. But the devs do need to think outside the box when it comes to skill expression.

[Dzian]

The other reason this doesn't work is because every job deals roughly similar-ish damage. Or at least has jobs in the different roles that can deal as much damage as the casters.

The whole point of a "caster" is that they're supposed to deal the most damage out of any dps. The drawback is that they're immobile and have to spend some time casting. Their damage also comes at the end of their cast rather than the beginning/ right after the button push like Melee.

The benefit of a Melee is that they can still deal 100% of their damage while moving. They have mobility but give up a bit of damage.

Anymore now a days everyone wants to deal the exact same damage as the next guy, so all roles now have to deal big burst damage. This gives "casters" a significant disadvantage with no gain over the mobile Melee.

Having Magic damage dealers with instant casts makes perfect sense in the modern day of gaming. Unless they're going to nerf Melee damage to compensate their Mobility vs the casters cast times, I don't see this trend changing.

And if in the next expansion Summoner's get Leviathan, Shiva and Lord Thunder Bread and their rotations are long hard casts, I'm willing to bet that you'll see a significant drop off in the amount of people playing Summoner. People like mobility. It's fun. Take that away and you'll see the same trend as Black Mage.

There's also a defensive element to this. With jobs also being roughly equal in terms of survival as well..

In days of old.
Melee DPS would hit hard, they could take a couple of hits, but had limited mobility. (Have to stay in range in order to do damage)

Caster DPS hit very hard, had almost no mobility, but could often take a hit via magic shields or control enemies with enfeeblements like sleeps or binds to keep them at a distance.

Then you had what was the hysical ranged DPS class. Bows, guns, bombs, etc. They hit super hard, were super mobile. But were incredibly fragile the slightest hit would kill them.

Back in those days these jobs were often referred to as the "Glass Cannons". super strong DPS jobs but took a lot of skill to stay alive.

These days it doesn't work out though as modern encounters are so scripted around timed and unavoidable damage, Shame really. some of those old school glass cannnons were hella fun to play

[Colt47]

Right now job changes are basically falling into two camps: Quality of life improvements or dropping complexity to try and get each job in roughly the same place. Not going to comment on the samurai change since I don't have a strong opinion one way or another with it. Melee feels like it is in a good place right now and the only thing that they might do whether people like it or not is maybe tweak dragoon. Honestly, the one lesson I've learned all these years is that the jobs that are the most complex tend to be the jobs that have the highest dps. Dragoon and Bard are two of them and DRK was another one for a bit there.

[butchersblock]

Right now job changes are basically falling into two camps: Quality of life improvements or dropping complexity to try and get each job in roughly the same place. Not going to comment on the samurai change since I don't have a strong opinion one way or another with it. Melee feels like it is in a good place right now and the only thing that they might do whether people like it or not is maybe tweak dragoon. Honestly, the one lesson I've learned all these years is that the jobs that are the most complex tend to be the jobs that have the highest dps. Dragoon and Bard are two of them and DRK was another one for a bit there.

Melees were in a good spot in Shadowbringers, not Endwalker (with the exception of Monk) and job complexity does not equal DPS. All the jobs are similarly easy to play with the one punishing job left being BLM who's not as strong as melees. DRK is also the 2nd easiest tank to optimize.