Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[tearagion]

I said to match the same difficulty. If you make the jobs more difficult to play by making them more complex then in turn the fights become more difficult. I don't see how it would be possible to make jobs more complex and not effect the difficulties of a fight, without also changing the mechanics of the fight.

I'm going to ignore the obvious logical failure and just say: the fights would uhh stay the same man, there would just be a wider range of job complexity than there is now, allowing a wider variety of players to be more satisfied with combat at all levels. I'm not saying turn DNC into BLM, just add some more stuff at BLM level, and stop tac-nuking existing jobs every expansion.

I wouldn't consider BLM rotation difficult. It's the combination of performing mechanics while also doing the rotation that is difficult, and that is simply because your not allowed to move during most abilities. There are jobs with much more complex rotations but are easier to perform mechanics since they get to move (Ninja for example). This is the exact difference I am talking about. Difficulty is derived from the combination of the two aspects of the game not either in isolation. One inevitably effects the other.

if you're just doing standard sure lol, but that's why BLM is good, for the people who want to dive into the complexities they are fully able, while standard is still able to clear anything.

[Nobuyuki_Sanada]

I'm going to ignore the obvious logical failure and just say: the fights would uhh stay the same man, there would just be a wider range of job complexity than there is now, allowing a wider variety of players to be more satisfied with combat at all levels. I'm not saying turn DNC into BLM, just add some more stuff at BLM level, and stop tac-nuking existing jobs every expansion.

No logical failure, your just not understanding for some reason. Your job adds to the difficulty of a fight, so it logically makes sense that making your job harder to play makes the fight more difficult. If you think making something more complex doesn't also make it more difficult then w/e I'm not going to entertain that hypothetical. Go ahead and be insulting for no reason, sorry I ruined your entire day with a post lol

[Valence]

Another downside to static rotations is that from the lack of meaningful interaction between skills you need to have more buttons for the same level of engagement than a rotation that has varying degrees of priority/ rng in it.
Keeping a buff up with a 123 every 30s isn't meaningful interaction between 2 and 3, you do it because it's always the only way to go about it and it doesn't modify your gameplay. A chance of a skill resetting the cooldown of another skill does and there is a more constant need to pay attention and react as opposed to "I know I have to press 123 for 30s and then I press everything else in this exact order". It's generally better for button economy and the wasteful use of hotbar slots that SE keeps going for ("this skill... but aoe!", "can only be used after this skill... but on a separate button!") makes the whole issue even worse.
They're putting the car in front of the horse by going "Too many buttons, we need to prune, let's delete this skill" instead of looking at why they feel they have to add so many stale fluff buttons in the first place. And you wouldn't need 5 buttons with a flat "use on cooldown, it's free potency" if the other existing buttons had meaningful interaction, give choices and leave a skill ceiling.

This is incidentally why I find the RPR design this expansion to be completely mindboggling in nature. I guess they tried to do a MCH variant for melee with a basic combo with no branches, but on top of it reintroduced a mechanic that's been consistently sniped out of other jobs like DRG for instance (a buff/debuff to keep up with one button/skill that's not included into any mechanics related to the skillset, and which already is a prime target for deletion in one expansion or another make room for other things). And the whole single target toolset has been duplicated into its AoE version, with every skill having its AoE counterpart, which bloats the hotbars so much while the job actually has an extremely simplistic rotation. They've completely avoided on purpose with that job to use the more common design by now consisting into adding AoE falloff damage to a lot of abilities that are shared between the single target and AoE sets in most jobs (some more than others), and which dramatically reduces that unecessary button bloat.

I just don't understand what went into the design of that job.

[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.

[Nobuyuki_Sanada]

I just hate shadow/whorl of death. Give me another big hitting ogcd to weave in somewhere to make up for the dps loss from the buff and I'd be happy.

[tearagion]

No logical failure, your just not understanding for some reason. Your job adds to the difficulty of a fight, so it logically makes sense that making your job harder to play makes the fight more difficult. If you think making something more complex doesn't also make it more difficult then w/e I'm not going to entertain that hypothetical. Go ahead and be insulting for no reason, sorry I ruined your entire day with a post lol

the job and the fight are separate entities with separate difficulties, why you choose to conflate them is beyond me. sure they interact when combined, but a fight isn't itself harder because another harder job exists.

[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.

[Dyvid]

How long till job designs boil down to this:



Truth be told, when I played SMN prior to Endwalker I ran content for no other reason than I simply enjoyed playing the job. Now I find it boring and uninteresting. Only way I mess up is by pressing Primal-Single attack when I meant to press Demi-Singe Attack even though its the same command just two different buttons trying to make it look more complex.

I wouldn't be surprise that 8.0 they just give everyone the PvP skillset while patting themselves on the back.

[Valence]

BLM is taken in my statics, so I'm bored with my job while I'm doing difficult content. I don't think it's too much to ask for one more job at BLM's level considering the job count, and the current average job difficulty.

Maybe try MNK? And not at the unintended braindead DK spamm level, but at the optimization level. I do think the skill ceiling is very high when going for that, but maybe that's just me.

[tearagion]

Maybe try MNK? And not at the unintended braindead DK spamm level, but at the optimization level. I do think the skill ceiling is very high when going for that, but maybe that's just me.

I appreciate the suggestion and it's probably a good one (more so in an expansion without 99% melee uptime built into the fights perhaps), but my ping is too high to doubleweave on MNK gcd timers, which is a problem for another thread.