Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
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And that's fine...until you get to asking the question "What is clunk?"

Many people though SB SCH was clunky. But there were many people who LIKED having Eos Embrace macros. Was that clunk or was that a nuanced mechanic for skill expression? It depended ENTIRELY on who you asked.

Old SMN had a LOT of disjointed systems that barely worked together creating a clunky mess of a Frankenstein's Monster Job. A lot of people felt the pieces didn't make sense together and were awkward and annoying to try and work around. That they were fighting the Job more than playing the Job. Yet, to others, that was what they saw as skill expression and intrinsic to their enjoyment.

Old PLD was a technically involved Job where you also were fighting the Job mechnaics. Let's not forget the cursed -17sec FoF opener. It lacked consistent self-sustain healing in its rotation, and there were clunky things like whether or not you dropped Atonements. Yet to some people, these were all measures of skill expression and removing them was dumbing it down.

Boring is ALSO a subjective consideration, as you can again ask the question of "What is boring?" and get a lot of different answers that don't even agree with one another.

Saying "when it removes clunk it's good" is another way of saying "if you like it, you see it as good", since a lot of things that WERE clunky people LIKED and so the clunk being removed is still attacked.

I do agree, though, that there are such things as good complexity and bad complexity (and corollary to that, bad simplicity and good simplicity). But part of what I'm getting at is how subjective that is.