Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[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.

[CelestiCer]

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

You're proving my point...
If Rotation doesn't stand in the way of better mechanic design? then there is no harm to be found by making Job designs have any ounce of flare/flavor and any skill or gauge interactions have some ounce more depth. Since it doesn't get in the way of any prized movement mechanic designs.

The argument that everything Job rotation is so simple and there for irrelevant? Sounds quite elitist. Like how fun Job designs? is beneath your existence to exist. Because it doesn't increase the difficulty? there for meaningless... Not everyone wants to do Ultimate or Savage to get the excitement of executing something difficult, to which finding something difficult is subjective.

Movement is tied to not dying. Square cannot or will not increase the skill-floor before Extreme and players don't want that content to be more difficult. Rotation/Job-Design/Skills however? can be made more Fun, have more depth without it coming at the cost of any Skill-Floor or Skill-Ceiling. Although many call this not relevant? I call it Depth/Flavor/Fun when Jobs are given just that.

Although " Fun in a Game through Job Design " seems to be valued so poorly by some... that it can be seen as irrelevant. I guess we have to value Perfect Balance of everything above that? Then we truly want to pursue Jobs being played with only 1 functional Skill that you can bash for everything cause that's where we'll end up. Then nothing is relevant anymore... except of course that precious movement.

[Valence]

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.

I personally don't care much about movement. I care more about positioning, and even more about tactical choices in what I use or the mind process of deducting what to prioritize in my resources or rotational toolkit. I understand that a lot of modern games go for arpg or hack and slash stuff, but that's not my jibe personally (and I'm not even sure the game engine is really designed for something like it anyway). But, that aside, we'll have the dummy conditions for casual and storymode, and the more challenging fight designs for the more challenging content.

I fail to see how both are mutually exclusive, but I do believe CelestiCer has a point: one is a constant no matter the difficulty mode or the content, the other is by nature dependent of the content or mode.