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

[Absurdity]

That is exactly what people have been trying to illustrate since what, Shadowbringers?

Before that we had a nice balance of both fight and job complexity, but ever since then it has been more and more tipping towards one side, especially since Endwalker. Jobs become increasingly more simplified which means the complexity of fights has to increase to compensate.

The problem is that this only applies to high-end content, because obviously you can't add savage levels of mechanical complexity and their precise execution to every fight in the game, but this leaves a majority of casual and story fights feeling both incredibly boring and unrewarding to complete.

But hasn't that always been the case? Yes, story fights and content that is supposed to be completed by the majority of players have always been relatively simple, but you had the jobs to make up for it.

[Ransu]

Thunder III is quite literally more complex than anything any other non-BLM job has

I wouldn't say its complex, but its drifts pretty damn hard which makes timing when to refresh while dealing with enochian kind of annoying.

[Shurrikhan]

HW has less positionals over the 10 step GCD than SB and later, 40% for HW as opposed to 50% for SB onwards.

Tangential, but... is that really the best way to look at positionals though? If your every skill had positionals, but every one of those was Rear, would you say that the job is significantly more complex for it than a job that has to move between Rear and Flank, even if less often?

That's not to say that movement is necessarily very large, but I would think the more appropriate metric would be the likely degree of movement required at any particular point.

At present, we use Any-Any-Rear-Rear-Flank-Any-Any-Any-Flank-Rear. We move twice per 10 GCDs. And it's entirely reliable, with no particular points where you'd have to look down instead of just automating it.

Back then, we had Flank[1]-Any-Any-Rear[2]-EITHER[2-3]--Any-Any-Any-Any-EITHER[2-4]. Per 10 GCDs, we could end up having to move up to 2 to 4 times, and with only the time after the skill's actuation to see which way we'd be moving following each 3rd-Step skill.

That's the same floor (if you somehow lucked out and always got WT after Chaos Thrust and F&C before Heavy Thrust), but a higher ceiling, of movement, and with greater urgency.

I would think that would be, then, the job with a greater emphasis on positionals even before accounting for the greater potency at risk per positional.

* Those positionals follow from Heavy (Flank), Impulse, Disembowel, Chaos (Rear), F&C (Flank) or WT (Rear), Phlebotomize, True, Vorpal, Full, F&C (Flank) or WT (Rear).

[Mikey_R]

Tangential, but... is that really the best way to look at positionals though? If your every skill had positionals, but every one of those was Rear, would you say that the job is significantly more complex for it than a job that has to move between Rear and Flank, even if less often?

...

As I stated in that post, I wasn't concerned about potential complexity arising from how different positionals interact with each other and potential movement, just the pure fact of, is this GCD a positional or not.

HW Dragoon was more complex in regards to positionals just for the pure fact they are RNG, you couldn't plan and so you had 2.5 seconds to see which one procced and move if needed.

However, it also isn't necessarily fair to just look at positionals and how they interact with each other, fight mechanics will also play a role in how you interact with positionals, can you do the mechanic whilst still doing positionals, or, do you need to use True North (which wasn't available in HW).

When you try and bring everything together and take into account every detail, it isn't a simple question to ask. However, since the initial comment was just, which one has more positionals, then all that matters is, is this GCD a positional or not, forgoing any deeper questions that might arise by digging deeper.

[Lyth]

ARR was probably the hardest expansion, given that the playerbase had only been playing the game for months rather than ten years. If you could go back in time and see your past self play, you'd probably be shocked at how poorly you used to play the game back then. And then you'd realize that you simply became better faster than the game became harder. The Warcraft playerbase was all about 'back in Vanilla' until players could actually re-experience it for themselves.

Anything that a player tries to highlight as 'rotational complexity' really isn't. This game is completely scripted down to the GCD. The challenge is never the execution, because MMOs hands down have the lowest mechanical skill ceiling of any game genre outside of turn-based strategy games. The challenge is the puzzle that you have to solve on each new fight on the optimal sequence of button presses and positioning. And that's where the real fun is.

[Shurrikhan]

When you try and bring everything together and take into account every detail, it isn't a simple question to ask. However, since the initial comment was just, which one has more positionals, then all that matters is, is this GCD a positional or not, forgoing any deeper questions that might arise by digging deeper.

Fair enough. It just felt like a question best taken in spirit than by the letter. Else you end up with an answer that's equally useless, such as in noting that BLM has the least average raw potency of any job (because raw potency doesn't factor in Astral Fire's whopping 80% damage bonus).

Anything that a player tries to highlight as 'rotational complexity' really isn't. This game is completely scripted down to the GCD. The challenge is never the execution, because MMOs hands down have the lowest mechanical skill ceiling of any game genre outside of turn-based strategy games.

Are we really making the case here that there's zero increase in execution complexity in going from, say, a WHM's or DNC's dummy rotation to a NIN's?

The challenge is the puzzle that you have to solve on each new fight on the optimal sequence of button presses and positioning. And that's where the real fun is.

But since Shadowbringers, only some 2 to 5 jobs even make alterations to their "sequences of button-presses" based on the given fight. Positioning, sure, but that's largely it. And if the difference between having to make fight-specific alterations or not isn't "complexity" anyways... then what puzzle is there?

If there is an actual difference in how long it takes to get that sequence down and/or whether one actually "solves the puzzle" to varies that sequence with different fights, that is what most people would call "complexity." Does that make particular job here all that complex? In any sort of absolute terms, no, but there are certainly differences.

And looking up which rotation to use for each fight at a given GCD probably still isn't going to be often failed or made a significant bottleneck... as just actually still doing that rotation perfectly while everything else is going off. The (difficulty of) execution does make a difference.

[CelestiCer]

It's very telling when you try to be reductive instead of offering something you think is complex instead as a counterargument

Yea this Melethron seems to be having a ton of hot-takes everywhere... same goes on the DPS section =u=;