Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Zairava]

snip

I'd argue that Living Dead isn't the best example for this. The most complicated Living Dead has/had is/was the functionality, which at most required that you actually read the tooltip and communicated with the healer about it if they don't know how it works yet. Being the simple "heal me for up to 100% of my hp in total and I won't die"

Being that how Living Dead actually worked/works was and still is simple for both parties. For the DRK using it it was just "Hope the healer can remove my debuff", and for the healer it was just heal your heart out and hope it's enough. Which isn't necessarily complexity in my eyes, since, to me at least, that falls under party coordination.

I feel like complexity is more tied to the skill ceiling. The easiest reference for this being Summoner vs. Black Mage in this regard. I'm still going to use DRK for my end of this discussion though.

A better example of dumbing down DRK is, you guessed it, the removal of Dark Arts and general mp 'management'.

Dark Arts by name got turned into a damage neutral proc off of TBN. In execution, it's just Edge/Flood of Shadow now. So instead of you being able to empower abilities, they just made it an attack in itself. This also ties into your mp 'management', which is essentially just build up your mp and then spend in your 60s/120s burst, keeping 3k in reserves for TBN. On paper it sounds like something is there, but when the only mp spenders are edge/flood and TBN, it's incredibly shallow. I feel like mp usage should be more prominent for more active management, and I could sit here and theorycraft about DRK all day, but this isn't the thread for it.

Delirium used to be a combo ender, then a resource generator via 50 gauge, now it's just Inner Release without the crit/dh attached.

Anyways, old DA and old mp management provided a high skill ceiling, especially during Heavensward when Darkside drained MP. That is where I would label much complexity being removed from the job because you really needed a deeper understanding with it vs. Living Dead now being able to be sustained by the DRK themselves (point being, it isn't any more or less complicated than it was before, it's really just easier to survive. You could just stand there and do nothing and it's essentially the exact same it was before it got the QoL improvement). I don't really think it's debatable that LD is much better as it is now, it was long overdue.

[Renathras]

I'd argue that Living Dead isn't the best example for this.

I disagree. And rather, I'd point to what you just did here as an example of what I mean. As I said, it OBVIOUSLY made something simple that was not AS simple before. Yet here you give a perfectly logical...but entirely "dodging the issue"...explanation to try and categorize it in such a way as to NOT call it dumbing down, when that is, in fact, what it did. It wasn't (and still isn't) a "read the tooltip" ability. Most people don't understand that it only requires restoring HP equal to the DRK's total health, not restoring the DRK to full health, for example. A confusion easy to make considering several Doom effects in the game work that way (dispelled by reaching max health), so it was an easy mistake to make. Further, logic would make people think the effect wouldn't EXPIRE (the unkillable effect) just because the undeath effect was removed. Yet it was so.

There was quite a bit of nuance to using it correctly. As it turns out, party coordination is a kind of skill, thus related to skill ceiling. But more than that, knowing those effects was the difference between knowing when and how to use it correctly and not, which IS skill ceiling.

I used that example because it was a GOOD example.

I don't think complexity is tied to skill ceiling. There have been some Jobs with complex rotations that were, nevertheless, somewhat easy to actually do. Conversely, there are some Jobs that are mechanically simple, yet have a high skill ceiling. BLM is mechanically simple. If you ever sit down and look at its main use rotation in a vacuum, it's one of the easiest in the game - something BLM mains often say themselves. It also has one of the lower APMs of all Jobs in the game. Yet it's seen as having a high skill ceiling.

That is, complexity isn't even connected to skill ceiling. While in theory, logic would have one think that a more complex Job will have a higher skill ceiling, this isn't ALWAYS the case. While the two can be correlated, complexity doesn't cause high skill ceiling, nor does simplicity deny it - if it did, BLM would be an easy Job.

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Now, we can talk about Dark Arts on the side, but again, this is proving my point:

Changes that people like (Living Dead) are justified while changes people did not like (Dark Arts) are condemned, when both are examples of dumbing down.

A second piece of this is that people tend to focus on DPS rotations AND NOTHING ELSE when talking about complex Jobs for the most part. Which is also the case here (LD vs DA). There is one particular exception to this, but only one in FFXIV I'm aware of, which is AST. AST has the easiest rotation in the entire game, and is the only Healer that has only two DPS buttons (Combust and Malific), yet is considered complex and with a high skill ceiling despite this. But for every other Job, people look at DPS rotations and kind of ignore everything else, including Tanking CDs and the like. Which is also why LD's change isn't considered dumbing down, despite being dumbed down.

...but I think the main reason is because of it being liked.

And I don't mean any of this as an insult. I just think it's a great example of how much people pick and choose what forms of "dumbing down" are and are not acceptable to them; partly by choosing to define things that they like as not dumbing down even though they very clearly are.

[Zairava]

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In theory, how it works now would be less simple because it has another layer to it now. Which...doesn't really amount to much, but it's there.

What I'm trying to get at here an ability being easier to use doesn't always equate to dumbing it down. Living Dead is an example of making something more effective while keeping true to how it worked before.

Living Dead still works the exact same except the DRK can just do it themselves. You're still timing it the same way (that, being using it before you would die). You're also still dying without outside support if you aren't able to get the GCD's needed. If you don't get that healing totaling 100% of your maximum HP, you are going to die, that hasn't changed.

In fact, the main difference between then and now is on the healers rather than the DRK themselves. Groups would need to plan around it if they didn't have a White Mage to no diff it. They no longer have to time the expiration of the debuff as close to the end of the timer as possible, either, thanks to Undead Rebirth. In this sense, it's dumbed down for everyone except the Dark Knight using it, since the DRK in question would already being using their GCD's upon using Living Dead anyway.

The discussion for why the removal of Dark Arts is met with such negativity is because it was a part of the job at its core. It was a tremendous part of the identity that got rinsed and 'replaced' with something that feels half-baked.

Tanking CD's aren't really met with it mostly because it may be seen as a non-issue outside of the rare occurrence it actually is an issue. Take Paladin's recent rework for example. If I remember right, blocking doesn't work on bleeds, and that's why Holy Sheltron got changed and Bulwark came back. There's the base mitigations that every tank has (the role actions, Shadow Wall/Sentinel, etc), then the rest are more towards the tanks themselves (WAR's self sustain, DRK being more on the defensive side, etc).

We could just not be seeing eye-to-eye here, though.