Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Renathras]

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.

Not at all. Tell me, without consulting the Balance, what's the optimal way for RDM to use Manafication? Is it on CD or not on CD? Should you hold it for Embolden? Should you hold Embolden for your melee combo? In the opener, do you use Swiftcast and Acceleration? How may Accelerations do you use? Which do you use first, Fleche, Contre Sixte, Corps-a-Corps, or Engagement/Disengagement and WHY? Which of Engagement/Disengagement do you use, and also WHY? How many weaves do you fit and where/why do you use them there? WITHOUT going to the Balance, can you answer these questions?

The answers, btw, are:

Manafication on CD is considered optimal provided you're ensuring you aren't overcapping mana to do so, Embolden on CD (unless the boss becomes untargetable) to keep lined up with party buffs is optimal, you should NOT hold Embolden for your melee combo, you use Swiftcast AND Acceleration (but only one) in your opener, at the same time, and only one is consumed for the first cast (generally Thunder) and has priority over Swiftcast for the spells it apples to (Thunder 3, Aero 3, and Impact) over Swiftcast being consumed, and you do this to ensure you have a proc of the non-finisher (Holy/Flare) mana type so when you use your combo and use the lower mana finisher, you leave the melee combo with both procs up, and you only use that one Acceleration in the opener, you use Fleche because it has the highest damage and has a short CD, and using it early will allow it to come off CD JUUUUST before/as Tincture ends, to get it under that extra buff damage. Contra Sixte, Corps-a-Corps, and Engagement are next in that priority, and you use both stacks of Corps-a-Corps and Engagement, and use Engagement over Disengage specifically due to the latter having animation lock; in the ideal opener, you use both after the third hit of your melee combo, so the opening of distance is irrelevant, it's strictly an animation lock argument. You can only weave single abilities between melee abilities because of their shorter GCDs, as doing double weaves would cause clipping, which is why the ideal is to double weave after the melee combo itself and in between the spell part of the finisher; Enchanted Redoublement has a longer GCD, allowing for two weaves. This is, collectively, why your oGCD use is Fleche after 1-, Contre Sixte after -2, and then double weave Corps-a-Corps/Engagement after -3 and again after the Flare/Holy, then Fleche as it comes off CD, weaved in after the Doublecast spell, third one of those (sixth total GCD) after ending your burst combo/Resolution.

JUST reading the tooltips and not the theorycrafting site, you have no way of knowing basically any of that. Even the theorycrafters didn't get those things from reading the tooltips, they got them from running various simulations and test runs on target dummies. And keep in mind...RDM is one of the least complex and most simplistic Jobs in the game, and there's already a lot going on there you can't get "on your own" in a realistic way for most of the player base. Maybe you are secretly Commander Data, but the vast majority of the game's players are not.

AND this is just the opener. While openers are pretty intense and important, that's not even the whole of the rotation, such as mini-burst phases that some Jobs have (like NIN at 1 min marks), reopeners after a boss was untargetable, and the filler phase, which for some Jobs is pretty simple, but even there, you need to think in terms of what's coming up and when and thinking ahead based on that. Again, NONE of that would your average player, or even most above average players, get just from reading tooltips.

No, it's not "a mix of braindead and simple". It's asking that some things not be convoluted to the point you need myriad spreadsheets and AI and/or add-on tool assist to figure out.

A lot of people love to say how "braindead" Jobs are...while using add-ons and theorycrafters to do the work for them to figure it out. At that point, all you're doing is very basic priority system understanding and dumb monkey muscle memory on a target dummy for a few hours. Of COURSE things are going to seem easy and braindead when you have other people and illegal crutches doing all the work for you.

Some people LOVE to say this because they seem to think it makes them look good somehow, but it's really inane.

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Most average players - indeed, even most ABOVE average players - cannot come up with optimal rotations or openers on their own, and they are, in fact, needed to reliably clear some content. And I'm not even getting into preferred melds/stat priority or breakpoints or any of that stuff, which is an added layer on top of that.

When you do your own theorycrafting and play without benefiting from any add-ons (note, this includes using add-ons for theorycrafting or referring to research done by people that do - the Balance folks use add-ons to determine their optimal stat allocations and rotations), THEN you can talk about Jobs being "easy to figure out" and "braindead".