Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Marxam]

If they said that, it must've been several years ago. I think you could argue that was true in ARR and HW, but I think after Gordias they got so scared of repeating that disaster that they swapped it to "MMO first, FF after."

iirc it happened again in 6.2 when WAR and PLD where nowhere near as good in the dmg as DRK and GNB in p8s. Why there is such a large dmg discrepancy in the first place is befuddling, but regardless it shows the cracks in their 2 min meta. WAR fits nicely into it but still couldn't keep up and PLD was just a mess. It shows how their extremely safe design process has hindered some jobs and 100% crit DH will be the least of our worries. Though I wouldn't be surprised if PLD got 100% crit DH.

[fulminating]

with that mentality why do you play an mmo instead of a moba? job identity and individually is much more than "what buttons you press". DRK identity is being an edgy emolord, warrior identity is being a raging berserker, samurai identity is doing anime poses, etc

Paladin has the gladiator and holy knight stuff, warrior had the drain hp stuff and offence/defence trade thing, dark knight had fallen knight and dark arts. Scholar had tactical poison mage and faeries, summoner had tactical poison mage and primal stuff.
There’s only so much lipstick you can put on a pig.

[Melethron123]

Paladin has the gladiator and holy knight stuff, warrior had the drain hp stuff and offence/defence trade thing, dark knight had fallen knight and dark arts. Scholar had tactical poison mage and faeries, summoner had tactical poison mage and primal stuff.
There’s only so much lipstick you can put on a pig.

as far as i know, they're not removing those aspects from paladin
if you're referring to healing by attacking, i recommend reading storm's path and raw intuition/bloodwhetting tooltips. they also have equilibrium, for even more self-healing
the DRK job quests still have the whole "fallen knight" stories, and they still use dark magic
scholar still has fairies
well, the job is called "summoner", not "poisoner", which is probably why they redesigned it into the current iteration

[Payadopa]

Job synergy and identity was already being dialed back in ShB and it's even more pronounced in EW. "Synergy" is just another way of saying "every raid has the same expected group buffs through homogenization" and "identity" is verboten in a game where DPS is literally the only metric that's worth a damn, and therefore everyone must do identical DPS within a point or two of each other.

No, it just shows how some people can't see past a calculator. Personally, a job/composition could be bad but me and my friends would still play like that when it's fun. It is that simple. The only ones who say such and such isn't allowed are the ones who this game should not be designed after.

I'm part of a raid group and we look at numbers yet our mantra is everyone plays with what they are comfortable. Balance is important so every comp is viable. But it shouldn't be so important as to exclude literally everything else.

[Gserpent]

No, it just shows how some people can't see past a calculator. Personally, a job/composition could be bad but me and my friends would still play like that when it's fun. It is that simple. The only ones who say such and such isn't allowed are the ones who this game should not be designed after.

I'm part of a raid group and we look at numbers yet our mantra is everyone plays with what they are comfortable. Balance is important so every comp is viable. But it shouldn't be so important as to exclude literally everything else.

It's not "people," it's the fucking development team. It's a self-sustaining cycle of "we have to focus on DPS, we need to make sure DPS is tight or players will complain and we don't like seeing players complain," with the players on the other end (correctly) castigating Square-Enix if there's more than a 2-3% variance in DPS metrics between two classes of the same role. Because when DPS is literally the only thing in raids that you can actually control or influence, the fuck else is there to care about?

This is all *PURELY* due to the fact that fights are rigidly scripted with no real variance - they don't usually do HP gating (so you can't try to adjust your group's DPS timings to try and push a boss to the next phase to skip a mechanic you don't like, etc), they don't usually do adds in a meaningful way, mitigation is completely passive and has no real interactivity, and the same with healing...

When everything is so tightly locked down, literally the only thing that remains within player control is DPS. So *of course* players are going to fixate on it. And because players are fixating on it, *you* have to fixate on it.

They could absolutely break out of this mold by not being goddamn fucking cowards. But they are fucking cowards. They're so scared of angry players that they won't even share tentative patch notes a couple weeks ahead of patch date (which, by that point, all changes are COMPLETELY locked in, you're probably just tweaking potency values and you could just not put potency values in the notes or put them in with the explicit statement that they're just placeholders and they may change between now and patch day), because they did it once or twice and got yelled at.

If the various WoW dev teams are on one end of the scale, where they throw the baby out with the bathwater every goddamn expansion (or, at minimum, every time the dev team leadership shifts) because "old stuff is boring, we need new and Exciting(tm) things to put on the expansion box!", then XIV is firmly on the opposite end, where they'll ride the fucking ship beneath the waves before daring to do anything out of what they've been doing for the past several years.

I think that the XIV team needs to go back and review WoW's history, especially the period of time stretching from Wrath of the Lich King, to Cataclysm, and then to Mists of Pandaria. Cataclysm was a weird attempt to try and salvage the old talents/class systems without dramatically changing things, and while it was functional... it wasn't *great*? But with Mists, they said to hell with caring what grognards think, we're going to try something completely different that gives us room to design things differently and address problems that have been riding the game since 2004. Incidentally, Mists was also the first expansion to really swap around how tanking worked. Prior to Mists, tanks typically built and spent resources on dealing damage/increasing threat. With Mists, they started down the path of "active mitigation." Instead of spending your Warrior's rage on hitting things a little harder, you were instead primarily spending rage on taking less damage. You still had *some* skills that spent rage on damage, but these were primarily used in low-tier content or soloing, while when you were doing more challenging content, a majority of your rage spent was on defending yourself.

XIV could absolutely do the same, and might even benefit from it. PLD is kind of there with Oath Gauge being purely for defensive spells, rather than attacks? But it's like, imagine if Rampart was removed, your 30% cooldown was the only real "passive" and/or free mitigation you get (all WoW tanks in Mists did indeed have at least one big defensive button they could use that didn't cost anything and had a roughly 2-3 minute cooldown), and instead you're spending gauge to activate your defensive skills, and your oGCDs like Expiciaon, Upheaval, etc *generate* gauge instead of costing/having no interaction with it. Maybe you add a proc trait to one of the classes that's like Mage's Ballad for BRD, where maybe there's a 30% chance to knock 5 sec off the cooldown of your button after some event happens (successful autoswing, for example.)

I think there's a fucking *reason* that even in a game as volatile and mutable as WoW, active mitigation has remained the way of the land for ten fucking years now. Because it *works*, and it's way more engaging and interesting than the previous system. Maybe XIV needs to dust off those Gamer History books and reconsider their current course - after all, they had to copy WoW's homework to salvage 1.0, didn't they?

But we both know they won't. Because they're fucking cowards.

[Bsrking5]

Just wanna say right now, lol to paladin mains. I just know SE is about gut everything and make it a single bar tank with extra space for LB, mount, and a greeting macro.

[Payadopa]

Swearing is edgy.

And yet we had interesting job interplay till 5.0. We also used to have more interesting dungeons until the vocal minority declared having to spend 10 seconds longer in a dungeon is a hate crime. lol Granted, the fight design isn\\'t doing them any favours, but players are absolutely to blame for the sorry state jobs are in as well. The Balance discord is a testament to that.

[Gserpent]

And yet we had interesting job interplay till 5.0. We also used to have more interesting dungeons until the vocal minority declared having to spend 10 seconds longer in a dungeon is a hate crime. lol Granted, the fight design isn\\'t doing them any favours, but players are absolutely to blame for the sorry state jobs are in as well. The Balance discord is a testament to that.

Yeah, basically. I stopped going to The Balance at all once I both realized how far up their own ass those chronically online types are. I used to believe a lot of what they said until I *effortlessly* parsed orange in e10s, without ever having spent a moment practicing on striking dummies or anything like that. One or two steps beyond mashing buttons and I'm parsing a number that the system should say belongs to the best of the very best? Kind of a watershed moment. Made me realize that the entire parsing thing was a crock of shit.

I'll reiterate that Square-Enix are cowards. The number of players who *genuinely care* about parses, about the tiny differences in numbers, are so minuscule that they could kill all of their accounts tonight and probably not notice much of a blip in revenues. Yet these players are seemingly the ones they're building the entire combat system around. It's madness.

By their own words, it's allegedly a Final Fantasy game first and an MMO second. So why is it that in the combat content that comprises the overwhelming majority of gameplay that players participate in, my Dark Knight doesn't really feel like a Dark Knight?

[Kabooa]

I used to believe a lot of what they said until I *effortlessly* parsed orange in e10s, without ever having spent a moment practicing on striking dummies or anything like that.

"Effortlessly."

[Gserpent]

"Effortlessly."

Yeah, effortlessly. We did the mechanics, we did a cheese strat that was available because of our gear level and team setup to allow for some extra uptime, but other than that? It was nothing out of the ordinary. It was exactly the same as a typical reclear except for the cheese strat (which had some degree of failure rate, probably because we were messing something up, so we usually just did the mechanic or ate the damage down rather than fucking with that strat) and I magically got a shiny orange number.

I didn't practice. I didn't read up on strats or optimizations or things like that. I just showed up and hit buttons the exact same way I'd been hitting buttons the whole time I'd been playing that tier. People were acting like you had to be dedicated and work really hard to get orange parses, and here I was getting one by basically just mashing buttons?

Yeah, parsing is bullshit. It's absurd that it occupies so much design space.

World First for our very first Ultimate... featured a DRK at a time when DRK was at its very worst. His reasoning: "Idk. I just like playing DRK." The changes made would make no sense if they were being made just for the top tier, the theorycrafters, etc. And most of the ones actually going for an orange parse aren't the ones arguing over this or that job having 0.5% higher theoretical rDPS despite being the sole group for whom such differences would actually matter.

Nothing about Balance theorycrafters working out the best way to leverage Overheat turned it into the shallow shtick MCH has been since Shadowbringers. Nothing about their figuring out the best ways to open as Monk removed Greased Lightning. By their count, after all, it was already balanced; whatever "clunk" was there didn't matter to them, because they'd already accepted and worked around it.

I don't particularly give a damn about that community, either, but it's laughable that you could lay the devs' changes made over time towards accessibility-(even-if-at-cost-to-identity-and-skill-ceiling) at their feet.

Because literally *who the fuck else* are these changes *for*? Accessibility? That's a crock of shit, when they can't even bother to add friend or foe coloring to important effects in PvP and have *twice* now released a raid encounter that is best described as "orange on red on orange on more orange." Accessibility is why we *still* have to push 6 buttons to do what could be done with 2? Accessibility is why we still have a bunch of boring fucking buttons that we hit robotically every time they are available, with no nuance or variation, and which are literally nothing but "do a little more damage" and otherwise have zero interaction with the rest of the kit? If accessibility is the concern, then you need to be removing a lot of these boring filler buttons and reworking the entire combat concept around not needing to manage so many buttons.

Come off it, dude. "Accessible" is meaningless when you can literally set casual content to whatever you want it to be. You can quite literally clear dungeons and normals by doing nothing but spamming Heavy Swing over and over, using no other attack skills. and it's not even that hard. It will be slower but not to such an extent that it will be noticeable for most players. Normals are tuned around there being players (multiple players, in raids) literally not even achieving like 75% GCD utilization, much less doing an actual, proper rotation.

WAR in Shadowbringers was one of the simplest classes I've seen in any game like this, to the point that the training wheels memes were *almost* not a joke. But it still had *some* small amount of room for optimization, tanks still had *some* small amount of influence over fights with boss positioning and repositioning and such. But they removed every single iota of nuance from WAR's rotation and kit in Endwalker, and when they inflated boss hitboxes so precious poor little melee players wouldn't occasionally have to consider missing a GCD to avoid a mechanic to compensate for their higher base DPS, it also tended to end the idea of tanks needing to know where and when to position the boss.

Square-Enix are fucking morons, in this area. There's no other possible explanation for it. They are ruining their game's combat system for the sake of a demographic of players *that literally does not exist and never has.* There's no mythical group of players that totally wanted to get into savage raiding but just *couldn't* because 1-button healers and braindead tanks were just *so* hard to understand, or that 20th percentile performance on a DPS class to clear e9s with plenty of room to spare was just *so hard.*

Casual players are not and never have done proper rotiations. They don't even keep their GCD rolling. And they don't need to, because normals are designed to be absurdly easy. They don't need proper DPS. So who the fuck cares if these players are confused by their rotation and thus never do it correctly? It's not for them! As long as they can have fun mashing powerful, flashy things like Fell Cleave or More Feller Cleave when they light up and can occasionally string some 1-2-3's together, they're going to be happy. Give em some extra oGCD buttons to push every now and then and that'll keep them busy for a while, and they won't notice or care that they're drifting those buttons to hell and back and ruining their burst cycles.

The only reason you bother to make a proper DPS rotation in the first place is for the high-end players that want something to actually keep their minds engaged once they're through with progging a fight, since once you have the fight choreography memorized, you're not really thinking about it anymore, just doing rote memory recall.

But if you're going to do the automated/no rotation design, then they're sucking ass at it and they need to go back and copy WoW's homework again. Because a long time ago, WoW decided to go that route and as a result mundane combat in that game is a fucking *million* times better than XIV's. "Hit the button when it lights up" is not deep or nuanced gameplay, but it's not trying to be - it's just trying to keep you from falling asleep in your chair, and it succeeds at that. It's flashy and hitting the button when it lights up gives haha happy monke brain feelings, and that's all it needs to do. If you're going to go for a simplistic gameplay experience, then at least fucking do it right. Yoshida had the wisdom to copy several pages of WoW's homework once, and he needs to do it again.