Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Valence]

Out of the whole post I just want to talk about this point right here. You say this change reduced complexity, I say it was a quality of life fix. I will preface this by saying I am not a dedicated Dancer by any means, however, in my experience in playing it, getting to the point where you used Flourish and still having a buff to use was problematic. You could use the buff and delay Flourish for the rest of the fight, or, overwrite the proc and this happened more in my limited usage of Dancer that it was starting to become a bit frustrating. Obviously, there might be something I am missing, but I can see why it was changed.

Which brings me to the main point I want to make. What counts as a reduction in complexity and what counts as a Quality of Life change? Going back to ShB, BLM got Despair as a single target flare option, so they needed a way for you to get back to UI smoothly, so Aspect Mastery was added. Come EW, Aspect Mastery is now gained at level 1. Now, it really isn't needed until level 50 when you get Flare as that is the first spell that drains all of your MP, but at the same time, I have been in situations where I haven't properly calculated MP and so end up with less MP than I thought and being unable to cast Blizzard 3 (at lower levels), so it helps there, but it has removed the need to worry too much about your MP. So, is this a reduction in complexity, or, a Quality of Life feature.

Maybe, Quality of life features for jobs ARE a reduction in complexity. Maybe some are and some are not. I'm sure there are plenty of examples that can be used either way, however, it (mostly) boils down to, the QoL feature changing something about the job that might have been considered a bit unintuitive or it just didn't flow right. So, in this regard, should a job receive QoL if it reduces complexity if it also means smoothing out the rough patches?

There is definitely an interesting discussion to be had there.

I never said it was not a QoL fix. It can be both a downgrade in complexity and a QoL fix. BRD adding charges on ballad procs or decoupling procs from crit, then from dots, is also a downgrade in complexity, yet it's QoL at least for ballad procs (but not really on procs from dots). The problem with SE is that they fix things (when they choose not to completely demolish a job and remake it from scratch), but then they shrug off the loss of complexity that results out of it. That's more or less the point I was trying to make.

Note on what you're missing: the way you dealt with proc overwrite in Flourish was to keep esprit in order to dump a Sabre Dance when you had no proc going, so that you'd not generate a proc just before the flourish ogcd. It added quite a bit of complexity to the rotation, but I'll be the first to admit that considering the volatile aspect of esprit generation it could prove extremely frustrating. Never liked it myself tbh and that's what kept me away from DNC, so believe me when I'm saying I don't hate that change, but I miss the idea of keeping something to dump before flourish in order not to generate a proc if there was none up, I just don't miss that something being tied to the gauge, it was just a headache like ShB MCH heat management before WF.

The real answer is that if one reduces complexity out of QoL actions, then one has to consider whether that complexity was just complexity for complexity's sake, or if it actually brought additional depth and value to skill play, which DNC proc overwrites actually did bring somewhat. Kaiten is another good example that a lot of players and the community seem to have grasped pretty well. Kaiten was removed for obvious reasons (was used with every iajutsu anyway, and proved to be just another button you pressed for every iajutsu, which was kinda bloatey), but at the same time it removed all the play around kenki management and made shinten spamm literally hell (on top of removing a cool looking skill that people were attached to).