Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Lyth]

Why is the rotation the focal point, though? Once you've established what you need to do under target dummy conditions, every fight can be reduced down to a variation of that ideal scenario. It doesn't matter whether your rotation has four steps or forty. If rotations bore you now, they would have equally bored you in Heavensward.

The key differentiator has always been fight design, not job design. If players are uncertain whether it's possible to obtain more uptime or not, then you have an actual performance differentiator. And that generally happens when you are given interesting positioning and movement mechanics. The perceived difficulty change after Heavensward has nothing to do with circular AoEs (?) or loss of pet management (???) as was suggested in the OP. It's a trickle down effect from the fact that bosses are designed to position themselves and move in a scripted and predictable fashion to assist you with doing damage.

Somewhere along the line over the past few expansions, fight design feels like it has shifted away from a Trinity based design where boss movement is controlled dynamically by your team (i.e. tanks) in response to less predictable fight conditions to an ARPG type design where the fight designers script the events and movement completely. But job design hasn't reflected that change. Every fight is a target dummy fight, interspaced with standardized intermissions. If boss movement is going to be predictable, then there needs to be a lot more forced movement, not static phases of hitting bosses while watching their cast bars tick up. This also means that players need more interesting movement tools to keep up with increased movement demands.

[Sparkthor]

Why is the rotation the focal point, though? Once you've established what you need to do under target dummy conditions, every fight can be reduced down to a variation of that ideal scenario. It doesn't matter whether your rotation has four steps or forty. If rotations bore you now, they would have equally bored you in Heavensward.

It's exactly my thought, but I wasn't able to express it this way.

On a side note, i think people judge HW as harder than EW is because ressources today are well know and almost instant. Also fight balance is way better and we didn't have any more dps gear locked content (Like Alexander 12 was). Hell, even P8S got nerfed even if people pass it. And today we got guides for every Savage fight the day of the release. And i think this is very impactful on how the game is perceived today : as most people don't even try to understand fight but just copy/paste guides, if they don't use mod to do it for them.

[CelestiCer]

Why is the rotation the focal point, though? Once you've established what you need to do under target dummy conditions, every fight can be reduced down to a variation of that ideal scenario. It doesn't matter whether your rotation has four steps or forty.

Then the counterpoint would be " Why is movement the focal point, over rotation? "

Countless mechanics are resolved with solely movement. Before Extreme? its a snooze-fest making Job execution the focus for Fun. I for example don't value Ultimate difficulty as Fun as I do my Job's gameplay. I tried Ultimate, and the Fun of its difficulty? doesn't outshine the appeal of a fun Job to me. Once Job gameplay is focused to be made shallow in exchange for how exciting gameplay can be around the ASWD/Movement buttons? Now everything becomes boring because you cannot make movement anymore difficult before Extreme. You can however? make Job's have depth and flavor without it coming at the cost of raising the skill-floor, nor raising the skill-ceiling to high.

As for thinking rotation stands in the way of making mechanics? I see no proof of that. If Square wants to make fights where the bosses are hard to hit? they will. Positionals to big of a deal? you get bosses without positionals or even a wall boss. Wanna go a step further? heck they will make it so you cannot hit the boss to focus on movement and execution of mechanics. So I see no proof of rotations or our Job having any ounce of depth or flare or flavor standing in the way of it, aside from perhaps the 2 min raid buffs regarding how well you need to execute that and balance it against DPS checks.

[Payadopa]

Every job is VERY easy to figure out an efficient rotation on, you don't need the balance to clear anything in this game. Even BLM you can get through pretty much every encounter in the game, with good contribution, just by playing standard and using triple/instants for movement. You say that you think a mix of simple and complex jobs would be ideal, but then the "ideal" scenario you actually describe is a mix of braindead and simple.

That's how I do it. I just read my tooltips and give my training dummy a good beating. Lo and behold, I "do my job quite well" (or so my friends tell me as I'm on PS5) and bosses die. Unless you are doing world first etc you don't have to make it more complicated than that. I even use Stone, Sky, Sea or whatever it's called in EW. lol

[Rilifane]

That's how I do it. I just read my tooltips and give my training dummy a good beating. Lo and behold, I "do my job quite well" (or so my friends tell me as I'm on PS5) and bosses die. Unless you are doing world first etc you don't have to make it more complicated than that. I even use Stone, Sky, Sea or whatever it's called in EW. lol

I agree that you don't need Balance/ other tools to do fairly well, it's mainly for the small details that make the difference between good and optimal that you'll likely be lost without some outside source.
But to be fair, a lot of people say things like "I can keep uptime perfectly well without balance telling me to!" and then you look at their kills of something and notice they're sitting at something like 85% uptime, misaligned buff, missed several uses of cooldowns, have several broken combos and so on. They'll not suddenly do better because they also read on balance that uptime is important, that's not the point here.
The point is that people thinking they're doing well and proudly announcing that they know everything they need to and do well without any outside source (and often tend to subtly put others down who do use these sources) have been found to be a far cry from that more often than not both ingame and on the OF etc.
It has resulted in many people being sceptical when someone says "Nah, fam. I play my class well without any outside source. Lol who needs balance, just use common sense hurrdurr" even though you can definitely do pretty well by just reading tooltips. Not optimally, no, that's a number cruncher thing and you'd have to do more than just glance at a tooltip. But well? Definitely.

[UkcsAlias]

"Nah, fam. I play my class well without any outside source. Lol who needs balance, just use common sense hurrdurr" even though you can definitely do pretty well by just reading tooltips.

Tooltips are not an outside source! Outside sources are things like wiki's guides and forums.

And they arent always good as a source. A lot of people believe in certain things to be the right thing even if they arent.

If you only have 85% uptime consistently, yet you rarely ever wipe. You are still doing something right. And maybe that is the part that you arent the one to die often. Uptime doesnt consider all methods of consistency in it, yet they can matter more. If your uptime is normaly 100%, but certain boss mechanics targeting certain areas causing you to die, and that is pure RNG, then you are still less efficient. A single duty is not going to reveal someones general performance.

And then there is also the part that some people play while drunk, which can reduce efficiency as a result. But even there, the way they compensate can matter a lot. Most content is designed for casual play, and therefor does support such behaviour.

Even i play leviathan extreme while having some drinks for fun. I might be slightly less efficient in damage, but that fight is mostly about avoiding deaths as a group anyway, at which point damage is just something automatic.

[Rilifane]

Tooltips are not an outside source! Outside sources are things like wiki's guides and forums.

And they arent always good as a source. A lot of people believe in certain things to be the right thing even if they arent.

If you only have 85% uptime consistently, yet you rarely ever wipe. You are still doing something right. And maybe that is the part that you arent the one to die often. Uptime doesnt consider all methods of consistency in it, yet they can matter more. If your uptime is normaly 100%, but certain boss mechanics targeting certain areas causing you to die, and that is pure RNG, then you are still less efficient. A single duty is not going to reveal someones general performance.

And then there is also the part that some people play while drunk, which can reduce efficiency as a result. But even there, the way they compensate can matter a lot. Most content is designed for casual play, and therefor does support such behaviour.

Even i play leviathan extreme while having some drinks for fun. I might be slightly less efficient in damage, but that fight is mostly about avoiding deaths as a group anyway, at which point damage is just something automatic.

I never claimed that tooltips are an outside source.

And are we really using "Well, some people play drunk" as an argument? You completely missed the point. Or rather every single point in my post and read things into it I never said, on the contrary.

[tearagion]

I agree that you don't need Balance/ other tools to do fairly well, it's mainly for the small details that make the difference between good and optimal that you'll likely be lost without some outside source.
But to be fair, a lot of people say things like "I can keep uptime perfectly well without balance telling me to!" and then you look at their kills of something and notice they're sitting at something like 85% uptime, misaligned buff, missed several uses of cooldowns, have several broken combos and so on. They'll not suddenly do better because they also read on balance that uptime is important, that's not the point here.
The point is that people thinking they're doing well and proudly announcing that they know everything they need to and do well without any outside source (and often tend to subtly put others down who do use these sources) have been found to be a far cry from that more often than not both ingame and on the OF etc.
It has resulted in many people being sceptical when someone says "Nah, fam. I play my class well without any outside source. Lol who needs balance, just use common sense hurrdurr" even though you can definitely do pretty well by just reading tooltips. Not optimally, no, that's a number cruncher thing and you'd have to do more than just glance at a tooltip. But well? Definitely.

I don't think poorly of people who want to game from the shoulders of giants so to speak, but my point was: to claim that it's beyond the average player to do some math in a spreadsheet or infer basic rotational concepts, and that that is a good reason to keep jobs at a MCH-or-lower complexity is asinine.

[CelestiCer]

A metaphor? I just don't like my steak bland and well done.

I personally do not see the excitement in requiring to intricately " move " my knife perpendicularly through the bland steak... Juggling my plate as to " move " my jus that's on my plate to coat my well done steak through convoluted " movements"... holding my spork with my toes and using that to somersault flip my flavorless steak into my mouth.

Listen,... I go to a restaurant if the food is good. Idc about it having a ballpit entrance with spikes, parkour defect escalator, with donkey-kong trampolines to get to my table and a toilet with monkey bars to get to it for the excitement. Idc if you wanna have your eating experience while surfing on a skateboard, that's completely fine. I just want the very fundamentals to be good and flavorful, the food.

Same thing, I go to a game? I am interested mainly in what I get to play. That is my character, my class, my Job. And god forbid that some people have a favorite Job like they do favorite dishes. Everything else I know is going to be secondary, because if my Job has depth, is flavorful, is fun? everything that is PVE combat will be fun.

• Raiding not as fun? my Jobs are still fun.
• MSQ not fun? my Jobs still fun.
• Sidequests not Fun? hey my Jobs still fun.
• Dungeons kinda easy? my Jobs are still fun though.
• Fates boring? got my Jobs still being fun.
• Not enjoying PvP? guess what? in PvE my Job is still fun.

Once my Job has its complexity taken away, has zero depth, is simplified, is hollowed out, is made not fun to play? or the focus is not on making my Job as fun to play?... now suddenly everything becomes a lot less fun.

I understand that people want to make it rocket science? how its limited by fight design or by balance or dear god the skill floor and the humanity of it all! on how our fingers will suddenly combust from all the fun buttons we get to press!

And Fun is subjective... as is a burned steak tasting amazing being subjective. Can definitely make the content better though, not going to argue that. But no amount of movement in some " Just Go Play Ultimate " narrative (coughs Yoshi-P)... is magically going to make my Job from less fun to more fun anywhere I take my favorite Jobs.

[Lyth]

...

Rotation doesn't get in the way of mechanic design. It's just not relevant.

After many hours of gameplay, pretty much any rotation is going to be simple if all we have to show for it is target dummy conditions. Oh good, a cast bar. Target dummy. Oh no, a mechanic, partial target dummy, if I'm expected to actually do something with it. I can at least respect Valance's point because procs can force you to think about your rotation a bit. But let's face it, if you're playing this game even semi-casually you're going to have mastery over at least one job rotation, if not more, and most of this is just going to be reflex.

The reason why movement mechanics are fundamentally more interesting is because that's why video games are visual and not text-based. You use Hakaze is a text-based game. I use a gap closer to perform a skillshot teleport to a particular coordinate and teleport back to maintain 100% uptime is visual-spatial. The former bores me to death, but the latter is the main reason why I still play this game after nearly 10 years. And historically, in fights where tanks actually had some control over boss movement, movement was a critical part of gameplay. Fights like A7S were exciting for me personally historically because there were a lot of random movement elements that you had to react to on the fly while trying to keep perfect uptime.

I have nothing against the move to more of an ARPG design personally, but ARPGs are typically designed with a lot of movement in mind. So you could have a very scripted fight, but every job/class needs to have a lot of abilities that allow them to respond to highly mobile bosses. Not bosses that are cast locked for five minutes while we do target dummy rotations on them before breaking to do some DDR mechanic. It's that blind transition between two fight design styles (Trinity vs. ARPG) that's the problem, more than anything else.