Please stop removing Damage Over Time effects from every job, add more complexity

[velswen]

With Summoner and now Paladin BOTH losing their damage over time effects this expansion, I want to make a post urging Square Enix not to continue doing this. DoTs are something that requires you to pay some attention to something outside of just if your cooldowns are ready.

It is an engaging part of gameplay, and often when these classes have their DoT effects removed, they don\\'t get an additional system to think about or juggle in exchange. I wish Paladin wouldn\\'t lose its DoT abilities, but if not, I wish these jobs would get some other resource to manage or thing to think about to replace it.

For the inexperienced player who can\\'t manage a DoT or feels inconvencied by it, it\\'s okay, because no content below Savage will typically require you to keep your DoTs up consistently to clear. But for the intermediate player or more advanced player, having another thing to keep track of can feel very satisfying and makes content more enjoyable across the board.

Simplifying jobs any further makes easy content (like dungeons) feel even more boring because there is nothing to think about. Please, please add more resources, things to manage, and thought-provoking elements to jobs instead of taking them away.

Casual players will always be fine because casual content doesnt require them to play the job to the best of their ability, but for intermediate and above players, the game can become worse because casual content becomes more boring.

Please, the jobs in the game have been simplified enough, start adding more complexity instead of taking it away.

[FireMage]

DoTs aren't complex unless you're managing multiple of them with conflicting durations requiring min/maxing. Not the case here, therefore not complex. NEXT

[flowerfairy]

I'm okay with DoTs like Goring being removed because I find it similar to Storm's Eye, but instead of a DoT it's a self-buff. Same with Sonic Shock and Circle of Thorn, the DoT itself doesn't really do anything (but one can argue about crit variance). It's just a cooldown to press.

But the DoTs that SMN and SCH had were a core part of their gameplay. There were multiple DoTs with different timers, and there were ways to interact with the DoTs, such as spreading it or attacks that get stronger the more DoTs you have on the target. So, I don't think PLD's DoTs were very complex to begin with, but I agree that SE has been taking away too much complexity and I'd like for at least SCH to get its DoTs back, but I'm suspecting the next job for 7.0 is going to be a caster with DoT management.

[Melethron123]

they're removing dots because the devs love making bosses invulnerable, so jobs that heavily rely on dots to deal damage get screwed by them

[Shurrikhan]

DoTs aren't complex unless you're managing multiple of them with conflicting durations requiring min/maxing. Not the case here, therefore not complex. NEXT

This is true, but trimming away at fixtures of potential complexity rapidly spirals towards having nothing at all.

Why have DoTs? Under present tuning, there are no rotational conflicts to optimize anyways! Scrap 'em.
Why have rotational conflicts? It's not like there's anything to leverage them anyways anymore... Scrap 'em.

[Payadopa]

I hate agreeing with Flamesorceress as much as the next forum poster, but they are right. One DoT garbage. I'd rather have a job that does DoTs. Also, jobs in general need more complexity.

[HyperiusUltima]

This is true, but trimming away at fixtures of potential complexity rapidly spirals towards having nothing at all.

Why have DoTs? Under present tuning, there are no rotational conflicts to optimize anyways! Scrap 'em.
Why have rotational conflicts? It's not like there's anything to leverage them anyways anymore... Scrap 'em.

I am in agreement with this thought, but we also must consider that it's not just rotational nuance - it also is about fight compliance and party synergy. PLD hasn't synergized well with parties since ShB dropped due to Atonement Drift, and having a rigid rotation based around forcing a 1-2s damage buff drift isn't something that synergizes well with other jobs damage-wise - the only thing they've ever had to run with was their party utility and their sustained damage, but even then that sustained damage was overall lower than other jobs.

[Shurrikhan]

I am in agreement with this thought, but we also must consider that it's not just rotational nuance - it also is about fight compliance and party synergy. PLD hasn't synergized well with parties since ShB dropped due to Atonement Drift, and having a rigid rotation based around forcing a 1-2s damage buff drift isn't something that synergizes well with other jobs damage-wise - the only thing they've ever had to run with was their party utility and their sustained damage, but even then that sustained damage was overall lower than other jobs.

That depends, too, in relation to DoTs.

A rotationally-excessive DoT (say, a 24s Goring Blade) allows for flexible space without forcing the job to be balanced around that additional potency-per-execute (since it only applies to two- or three-target cleave, at best, anyways). And the punishment of clipping a DoT (e.g., for sync with macrorotation) is typically far, far more lenient than the punishment of clipping a combo, since combos tend to be so back-loaded (damage per GCD skews heavily towards the end of the combo).

Moreover, a PLD could always just be tuned higher to compensate for their reduced ability to exploit raid buffs. Yes, they'd then be faintly overtuned in light-party content or relative to other tanks in a full party composition with minimal raid buffs, but the latter hosts zero serious (and rewarding) content anyways and the latter still wouldn't even be wholly competitive.

[Shurrikhan]

they're removing dots because the devs love making bosses invulnerable, so jobs that heavily rely on dots to deal damage get screwed by them

The effect of this is less (unique) than one might think.

The difference between the cost of uptime lost to a DoT-user and anyone else is, in essence, just the lower potency-per-execute of its otherwise high-ppe DoTs; the investment cost of its earlier GCDs. That said, the likes of a long combo would be just as negatively impacted. A boss jumping away into a CS just before RA-Atonementx3, Vorpal Thrust, or Gnashing Fang would be just as painful due to those GCDs being similar "back-loaded" in their GCDs invested.

That being said, they could always change the bosses from being invulnerable even to server-tick-based damage to merely invulnerable to wholly new damage events.

Tl;dr: Brief periods of boss invulnerability are not a sufficient reason to remove DoTs from the game.

[dspguy]

Removal of dots is just the continued simplification of the game. Eventually we'll get to the point where the game is like Just Dance, Theatrhythm or the twice-used Starlight Celebration minigame in FFXIV. We'll do our button press dance in a certain order and be graded on on how well we timed all of our abilities and be granted a score. If all 8 scores in the party add up to a certain number, you win. Otherwise, you wipe.