Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Gserpent]

then there are people with disabilities who might want classes that have lower APM or fewer overall keybinds, etc

There are people with quite significant disabilities that have cleared ultimates when classes were much harder to execute than they are now. There's a pretty well-known speedrunner who runs some incredibly complex games and he does it using his fucking *feet.* I have personally played and raided with someone with some pretty severe mobility issues in their hands and arms and they still play *dramatically* better than the overwhelming majority of presumably able-bodied players out there.

I don't really think "but disabled people!" as a token excuse is viable. I do think that effort should be put into making things as accommodating for people with various disabilities as possible, but I frankly think it's a damned insult to act like "disabled people need classes to be brainless and homogenized so they can play the game too."

The problem so many people have, and apparently including Square-Enix's design teams themselves, is that *skill floor and skill ceiling are not directly linked.* While there's some amount of connection between them... a low enough floor will inevitably result in a lowered ceiling... it's not proportional. You can lower the floor and still maintain a decently roomy ceiling. As I keep referring to, WAR in ShB was a very good example of this - it needed a bit more going on, the ceiling was a little low, but the floor was *exactly* where it should have been and they shouldn't have fucked with the class in EW beyond the necessary changes to fit their 2-minute redesign.

WoW, in most of its iterations from Cata or MoP on forward (basically, where you'd say "classic" ended and "retail" began) is another fine example. The floor for any given class or spec tends to be quite low, but there's still a decent ceiling available to work within.

FWIW, a skill floor is "you must be this tall to ride." It represents a minimum level of knowledge and competence necessary to play the class as designed (e.g. not freestyle SAM, ice mage BLM, etc.) Meanwhile, a skill ceiling is the reasonable upper limit of performance for that class. Since DPS is the only measurement worth a damn in XIV, this would simply be the difference between "understands the basics but makes errors" and "makes minimal errors and optimizes every opportunity they get." You can have a low, accessible floor while still having room for optimization and improvement.

Moreover, because they quite intentionally design normals, Ex, and MSQ duties to be *extremely* generous... it wouldn't even matter if the floor was comparatively high to what we have now. Trying to freestyle SAM might cause you grief in savage and force you to actually learn how to play the class (climb up onto the floor), but it would be completely fine for normals and it would probably still be alright in Ex as long as you were performing mechanics correctly.

There was no damn reason for them to lower skill floors more than they already had with ShB, and even less reason to bring skill ceilings crashing down across the board. If they were trying to get more people to participate in savage (content where floor-level performance is the *starting place*, not where you should think "okay I'm good enough"), then maybe they should have gotten off their lazy fucking asses and put some actual damn teaching tools into the game instead of obliterating meaningful decision-making and class design. Even if a noob player *wanted* to "git gud" and learn to do things properly, they fucking can't, not without going outside of the game and consulting third-party resources.

It's frankly inexcusably bad design.

[Melethron123]

1st = there are different types of disabilities and different types of people, in case you've never noticed. one or two exceptions doesn't invalidate a rule.

2nd = i never said people with disabilities want "brainless classes" did i? i specifically mentioned APM and total number of keybinds.

3rd = the problem with "skill ceiling" is when it comes from mechanics and systems that are unintuitive to the players. "how can i maximize my lava bursts and overall number of casts in this encounter" is a great way to differentiate great players and good players, but when the skill ceiling requires using tons of macros (arms warrior in cataclysm) or literally ignoring your job design to squeeze more potency by tracking mana ticks with 3rd party software (like the current BLM transpose rotations), that's a problem.

4th = in case you mistook my argument: i never said anything about lowering skill ceilings being better for the game, i said jobs should be properly balanced to deal close enough damage to others of the same role. two completely different things.