Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[CelestiCer]

An interesting conversation with a friend turned into a debate on Square's Job design direction. His views supporting Job simplifications, and I disagreed...

Job Design to me = Rotation/Combo/Gauge-management
Job Mastery is not NECESSARY to clear all content, but you're REWARDED with performance results. A feels good for the execution. Job homogenization kills this, of which plenty got reworked. The counterargument to support it? Complex Job rotations restricts Fight designs and mechanics. And I disagree...

Giving up Job gameplay/flavor/uniqueness...

• Simplify every combo
• Do away with every pet
• Kill Dots, to hard for the Dev's to manage
• Resource management dumbed down
• All AoE's become a Circle
• Reduce buttons cause Button bloat
• Remove Positionals
• Take the 2 min buffs and choke on it

Simplify-Homogenize-Rework-Optimize...
To the point jobs and their gameplay become unrecognizable. In exchange for the empty promise of better unique harder fight designs. Right...


You are the minority
The majority don't care to go to the forums they care about MSQ and comfiness. Job complexity isn't the appeal to them. Players flock to the easiest jobs and steer away from hard content. Square knows this and it works. The easier, the fewer buttons the better. Does that improve gameplay? doesn't matter. What matters are subscriptions. Encouraged Casualism. I just disagree...

Jobs to easy? Go Play Ultimate
YoshiP's famous inspired line i.e a cop-out. Enjoying Complexity shouldn't be limited to Ultimate. That's like saying " your job only becomes fun in Ultimate ". I prefer my Job to be fun around any corner. Fates/Dungeons/Roulettes/Extreme's, I won't be convinced that we are forced to play Ultimate to enjoy Job execution. I disagree.

I refuse to be told that Job simplification is necessary
To improve fight designs, attract subscribers, appease casual majority, and if you don't like it? Go play Ultimate, all for the good of the game? To me? It's utterly dumb to kill Fun gameplay. Passionate players who fell in love with their favorite jobs, and killing that? that's good for the game? I disagree...

Yet no matter how disagreeable anyone is? it is apparently good for the game, cause Square makes money doing it this way. And at the end of the day? that's not my job... Not my skills... not my game and neither is it yours. We can give opinions and feedback, that will most likely be ignored. It's Square's game.

Regardless of changes people dislike, I'll still have fun. But, I disagree that Job complexity, nuance, flavor needs to be given up. I used to Love the Job's gameplay. I really did. That passion got killed along time ago... Apparently and Ironically? for the good of the game.

Did you Lost anything your favorite Job used to have due to changes/reworks?
And is Job simplifications really the way to go?

[Kansene]

Neither complexity nor simplification are inhetently good or bad imo, it depends what they do with it.

I strongly dislike the notion of having 10 buttons that serve the function of "deal x amount of damage instantly" for instance, with the only difference being various cooldowns or them being procs or oGCDs.
Sure, it's complicated to juggle 40 buttons that all do similar things, but is it any fun at all?

Conversely, if you dumb it down too much, you end up with abysmal snorefests like the current healer "rotation".
That being said, I'm actually enjoying SCH the most atm. I can make some decisions with it that yield really satisfying results.
A nicely timed spreadlo combined with sacred soil and seraph feels really good to pull off when the massive, apocalyptic raid wide deals 0 damage!
It feels good to activate Expedient during mechanics that require lots of speedy movement! I chose to do that, and I'm helping!
Likewise, it's fun to help fellow tanks or even struggling non-tanks as a GNB, tossing them a HoT or using Heart of Corundum on them and watching their health spike up. Wohoo! I did that, and I'm a tank! How out of the box! More please!

Currently my favorite job ideas are stuffed into the RDM job, but I still have issues with it. They have an interesting idea going on with the mana building, and I enjoy dual casting. A simple proc that provides options. Do I cast a white or black spell? Or maybe vercure or verraise?
Where I think it falls apart is the part where you're still essentially just waiting for the same 2min window as everyone else every single fight, where you then dump everything. Dump 2x melee combo. Dump your charge-oGCDs. Your gap closers have potency so you dump those in there too.
It's like they have an idea for a really versatile job that can duck and weave in and out of melee, build up different kinds of resources for different purposes, and use their toolkit in creative and clever ways, then halfway in they decided "nah, let's make them a job whose job it is to hit like a wet noodle, build up gauge, then every 2 min they deal lots of damage, that sure sounds exciting"

How cool wouldn't it be if White/Black mana had different properties? What if you could build 100/0 mana, and you'd get 3 different melee phases based on whether you have 100/0, 0/100, or 50/50?
50/50 could be the bog standard melee combo.
100 black mana would give you a melee combo that chains black spells and puts a huge thunder DoT on the target at the end.
100 white mana would give you a combo that chains white spells, then I dunno, something crazy! Maybe you'd trigger a huge raid-wide heal or something.

Or maybe the melee combos would give you a resource at the end, which you could save, then use the resource when you need it:
50/50: Big AoE damage
Black: Big AoE DoT
White: Big AoE heal or shield

Decision making! Options! Woo!

[Kansene]

(cont.)
My idea of a good gameplay loop is: simple toolkit with lots of depth. What if you only had 12 abilities, but they could be combined in various ways to change how you play?
And what if bosses did more off the wall stuff?

Imagine if there was a boss who every so often took flight and started circling the arena, spawning adds that melee have to deal with while ranged take down the boss.
Ranged would save their burst for the air phase, and melee would build gauge/save burst on adds, then burst the boss on the land phase. What if as certain melee you could choose a big hit or a really long DoT that dealt more overall damage, and put the DoT on the boss before flight? Then use the big hit during burst?
That feels more fun and dynamic than "you have to time burst to 2 min windows the entire fight or you're bad"

Heck, a fight from 2007 in another mmo feels more fun to make decisions in than most FFXIV fights I've seen:

Phase 1: weak melee attacks, occasional mechanics. You're getting used to the fight, chill times.

Phase 2: starts dual wielding. Huge damage. Use your burst and defensives to keep alive and shorten the phase time!

Phase 3: hits with fists and floating weapons. Less intense tank damage but oh no, AoE has slowly filled the arena since the start! The tank must move the boss somewhere safe, and the raid must adapt!

Currently, both rotations and fight mechanics feel like memory games rather than decision making, and that's a bigger concern to me than 'complexity' tbh.
But that's ultimately a preference thing, many people love the rigidity.

I started going on about encounter design here because I believe job design and encounter design are intrinsically linked. When boss fights' whole deal boils down to "move correctly" and "make the DPS check or hard enrage", jobs have to be designed around those two concepts. And the way they are designed around them is honestly 99% the latter part. Deal consistent, high damage through the 2min burst window, that's the only thing jobs are required to do. Even tanks and healers' worth seems to be heavily based on damage output.

The fight example above shows a case where there's a "soft enrage" where burst is necessary. What if some boss fights had these soft enrages instead of a DPS check hard enrage? Where it's more important to use burst at specific points rather than just be consistent with the 2min timings? There actually is one example I can think of that kinda does this in a HW Alliance raid, it's been done!

Of all things, a certain fight all the way back in ARR comes to mind. You LB the hecking shard! That's fun! That's different! More of that please! Maybe if encounter designs get more creative with different ways to do fights, job design can start varying more, and some can be simple, some can be complex, and OH MY GOODNESS, MAYBE SOME OF THEM CAN BURST AT DIFFERENT TIMES???++

Disclaimer: I know "phase skipping" etc have been strategies in the past, like a certain HW meme, but this doesn't seem like the norm, or even a semi-common thing.

[Casti_EL]

I feel there needs to be a good balance between the two - make a job too easy and players will get bored, make it too complicated and players won't want to try it. Unfortunately everyone has different levels of skill - what's complicated to some would be difficult to others and vice versa.

For me, I really enjoyed the HW version of AST - I loved how the cards and system worked around it, but others found it too complicated and as a result the devs simplified it. I still enjoy AST but it's not as it was and now a lot of folk are upset about that too, resulting in another upcoming re-work (I hope they don't dumb it down any more). On flip side, I find BLM really complicated to play and don't enjoy melee classes as much either - others will say those classes are easy for them.

I think also simplifying the classes and aiming for this universal "2-minute dps rotation" for all just takes away class identity. The classes lose their uniqueness and just become a role rather than a class. Best example for me is Summoner - it doesn't feel like a summoning class anymore to me, rather than just a mage with some flashy looking abilities based on the weak mini-primals that pop up, put on a light-show then fade away again. I'd much prefer Summoner to be in the same vein as FFXI - give us a challenge to earn those summons, let them really fight alongside us, let them buff our friends, debuff our enemies and make us feel like true masters of the primal forces!

[Vinal211]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Homogenization is NOT a bad thing. It can be a useful tool for streamlining and balancing so as to not make certain classes the “obvious” choice in most content. The issue that comes with it is doing homogenization in moderation. And right now, the game design is heavily leaning towards streamlining and making everything play the same without giving us anything to make jobs feel different from one another. There needs to be things shared between classes, yes, because having everything play 100% different would be a hassle for balancing issues and for people who want to play everything, it runs the risk of too much to remember. But on the flip side, there still needs to be identity, something that makes the class stand out from others like it. And with the loss of certain actions, broken gauges that don’t mesh with one another, and the ever eternal push towards a 2-minute burst shared between everyone, there’s barely any job identity at this point besides the in-game lore and what weapons they use.

[Renathras]

Neither complexity nor simplification are inhetently good or bad imo, it depends what they do with it.

This.

And honestly, I think it's best for a game to offer both. That way, you get maximum appeal. It's fine to have a Job that is relatively unwanted and has only 2% of players playing it; it makes 1 in 50 people happy, and that's still a lot. They should have a few complex Jobs for the people that like that and simple Jobs for the majority (I think the majority DOES want simple; the forums are a pretty small subset of the playerbase and even r/ffxivdiscussion, when analyzing the Lucky Bancho numbers, decided they were the minority wanting more complex Jobs), with some flavors of middle for people that want something in-between.

There's no reason not to have that, considering each role in the game has at least 3 Jobs in it, and most have 4 or more.

Well, no reason other than the 2 min meta, but I think just about everyone hates that. Maybe the Devs will abandon it come 7.0, but who knows.

[Lyth]

...

The degree of 'homogenization' really depends on what your balance constraints are. Players want equity in damage output, burst profiles, defensives, self-sustain, and utility. The more constraints that you add, the fewer unique solutions that exist which meet those constraints. If uniqueness is important to you as a player, then there eventually comes a point where you have to be willing to accept that you'll be stronger in some areas at the expense of others. Some things naturally aren't negotiable (everyone needs parity on damage output, or else we just migrate to the jobs with a dps advantage). But would you trade off a bit of extra mobility in exchange for stronger self-sustain and knockback resistance? That's a bit more difficult to answer, and allows for more job variety.

Yet we've seen historically that players then start complaining about the differences. Where's my missing mobility tool? Where's my missing raise spell? It's a nice idea in theory for jobs to all have their individual strengths and weaknesses, but it only works if there's community buy-in to it.

[Valence]

They're homogenizing the wrong things:

- Overall gameplay facets (removal of party resource support, enmity, etc) instead of the removal of arbitrary job balance rdps discrepancies.
- Tank/healer mechanical rotations (all becoming the same) instead of the actual unintended designs slip ups like monk DK rotations, or transpose lines.
- Skill floors and accessibility (which is good) but at the expense of skill ceilings.
- Not every job gets dumbed down, but the big reworks tend to (like mch and smn)

[SomeGuy22]

Did you Lost anything your favorite Job used to have due to changes/reworks?
And is Job simplifications really the way to go?

When I started back in late StB/early ShB, I loved MNK because of its multiple oGCDs, the positionals forcing you to keep on the move, and, of course, because it fights bare-handed. Other than just feeling plain fun to me (I'm a sucker for anything that has you pressing buttons often), they also contributed to its job fantasy of being a fleet-footed, fast as hell underdog. Just a constant stream of damage that, while smaller than someone with a weapon, will add up in the long run.

In EW, I love monk because it fights bare-handed. That's it.

Streamlining gameplay is fine, but streamlining it to the point of removing parts of the job's identity (or making them outright unrecognizable like DRK or SMN) is going really overboard, and imo it has the potential to bite Square in the ass in the long run. If the fans' reaction to a rework of a job they love goes from "Oh, I'll miss current *job*, but I'm excited to see what they have in store for it!" to "please please don't make me hate it" is a sign that something's off.

[Payadopa]

It just doesn't work if you simplify jobs AND the encounters. Thanks to the ilvl creep you'll always be bored till you reach current endgame. If I had started the game now I'd have quit around mid-ARR. Dial back homogenisation at the very least. Fun gameplay > balance.