Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Whalaqee]

I might not be understanding quite what you are implying here, however, the DoT ticks from Eukraisian Dosis do not trigger the effects of Kardia, only the initial hit does.

Sorry misremembering for that one specifically. I guess my mind gave them too much benefit of the doubt since it was a new job.

[Renathras]

...

You're pretty much right, though your view is not generally shared by the forums, so...but you're right. Especially about this:

I would MUCH rather have more interesting and difficult challenges then a job that is designed to be complex...just to be complex.

The encounter should be the obstacle....not the job getting in the way.

It's why I support the idea of different Jobs within a Role (no Role has less than three) having an easy/simple, medium (or two), and complex/hard Jobs in it. That way, people who want to run their faces through coals can choose to do so and those that don't want to do that and want Jobs that aren't nerfted and gimped and clunky to the point they barely even work can simply choose the other Jobs. Everyone wins.

EDIT:

Even by reading all post, I really struggle to find the past game more complex/deep other than more messy and tidious.

Can someone take some time to explain what they mean by "Simplification" ? Maybe we just disagree, or maybe we didn't talk about the same things.

It's honestly a lot of rose tinted glasses. For example, SB WHM had two DoTs instead of one, and they had awkward durations instead of the clean ones we have today. One was 15 or 18 sec and the other was 18 or 21, I don't remember which. It was frankly annoying. There was also Aero 3, but that was mostly used in AOE by people for a long time since it wasn't clear to people if it was a single target gain or not. WHM today still has the spam nuke and DoT, and traded Aero 3 for misery. So in effect, it lost one DoT and a lot of clunk. And don't get me started on SB's version of Lilies - they were not like today, they just reduced the CD of abilties used by 5% or something, and to generate them, you had to cast Cure 1/2 on targets. That was also true of Confession stacks from Plenary Indulgence. It made no sense at all. WHM in ShB was far better. SB WHM sucked so bad.

If you really really go far back into the past? apparently you have Bozja/Zadnor like skills that jobs used to have. Cleric Stance and really archaic designs.

Bozja/Zadnor recycle names, but not abilities. Cleric Stance didn't work the same at all. It was an annoying mechanic that swapped your MND and INT stats, and cut healing by 20% on top of that. So when you were in Cleric, you couldn't heal except for % healing effects like Benediction or (in ARR) SCH's Lustrate did a flat 25% heal and Eos's heals weren't affected by it. Nor was Stoneskin. So SCH's remember Cleric way more fondly because their kit actually kind of worked with it. Oh, and the best part was, it was a toggle and had something like a 5+ second before you could cancel it, meaning if you activated it and then the boss got a string of crits on the tank, you were just hammering Cure 2 and hammering Cleric so you could turn it off as soon as it was up so your Tank and party didn't wipe. And if you hammered it too much, you could accidentally reactivate it.

Cleric is the single most rose tinted goggles ability that I've ever seen in MMO history. Such a horribly bad ability that some people think was the height of Job design, it's ridiculous.

[SpartanPawnch]

To me, the biggest problem with job simplification is the inevitable reduction in gameplay variety. During the large content drought at the end of ShB, I was able to continue playing actively without the game getting stale by trying out different jobs for easier content. I already knew the fights inside and out, but having meaningfully different stuff to worry about for each job spiced them up just enough to keep them from being boring.

Unfortunately, I don't think I would be able to do the same in Endwalker. As a current MNK main, right now the only job that changes up content in a meaningful way for me is BLM.

Given the fact that the majority of the community only plays casual content, making some jobs more complex would be a benefit to its longevity. Having something to improve upon is a good reason to come back to content you would be bored of otherwise. At the same time, DPS requirements are very low to non-existent, so messing up a complex rotation or dying does not affect your ability to clear in any way.

[Sparkthor]

I've trully have the feeling that's what some people call "more complex" appears to me as "more broken".
-> About healer, Scholar was as off healer in ARR, because it only have a healing pet and 5 different skills from Sumoner, and Lustrate was a fix max HP heal to make it usable with cleric stance (if I remember right)
-> I don't think having 3 combo path to be that different from having just 1, for warrior using Storm Eye, Storm Path, Butcher Block over and over is not more complex than just having between Storm Eye and Path.
-> Back in HW Warrior have the feeling it was supposed to be some kind of OT, has he got very poor magic mitigation (it's 1st defensive ability was a def boost, and could be catch by others, and the second one was bloodbath as self sustain). I would also say Raw Intuition was extremely broked as Parry only work on physical dommage, and it's not like Camouflage which got a basic dommage reduction effect.
-> At the beginning, DRK got shadow shield, which was just a rempart with different name. I would love to have each tank having it's own version of rempart with side bonus, however i can understand it's extremely low on priority.

In a nutshell, to me, jobs were neither hard or complex back in time. Different for sure, but harder to play/execute ? Not to me.

[Lyth]

Performance differences are the product of both knowledge gaps and technical skill gaps. If you want performance to actually reflect player technical skill, you need to simplify the former and add depth to the latter, which is the opposite of what this game has done historically. Turn off tank stance and turn on Cleric Stance. Use STR accessories over VIT. Strafe lock your target to land directional autos. Established players love these sorts of differentiators because you exclude a portion of the playerbase from being competitive purely on knowledge alone. But you're not measuring player skill.

Many other game genres outside of MMOs are weighted in the exact opposite direction. Having map knowledge in an FPS game will give you a competitive edge to a certain extent, but a complete novice with superior aim can still outclass you on raw mechanical skill alone. As they should, because that's the entire point of the genre. Ideally, players should have a relative clear picture on how to excel without having to do a lot of additional research (i.e. stay on the boss as melee, keep casting as ranged), with precision movement actions and bullet hell tier dodging being the primary determinant of their uptime. The rotational mechanics are entirely fluff (you're going to memorize the GCD by GCD play by the time you're done prog anyways), and how hard you get pushed is very much dependent on fight design. If you want to build up the technical difficulty of jobs, then what we really need to see are more complex movement and evasion actions and fights that force you to use them to their full potential. That's why MOBAs can get away with five buttons, of which one or two might be entirely dedicated to movement.

[Payadopa]

To me, the biggest problem with job simplification is the inevitable reduction in gameplay variety. During the large content drought at the end of ShB, I was able to continue playing actively without the game getting stale by trying out different jobs for easier content. I already knew the fights inside and out, but having meaningfully different stuff to worry about for each job spiced them up just enough to keep them from being boring.

Unfortunately, I don't think I would be able to do the same in Endwalker. As a current MNK main, right now the only job that changes up content in a meaningful way for me is BLM.

Given the fact that the majority of the community only plays casual content, making some jobs more complex would be a benefit to its longevity. Having something to improve upon is a good reason to come back to content you would be bored of otherwise. At the same time, DPS requirements are very low to non-existent, so messing up a complex rotation or dying does not affect your ability to clear in any way.

I agree. Either make the battles challenging (like current content savage) or the jobs (that you end up playing a lot of easy content with). Who cares if you play casual in most content anyway. The problem is SE expects us to redo old content for exp, tokens or what have you yet it is pretty shallow.

[Valence]

It's why I support the idea of different Jobs within a Role (no Role has less than three) having an easy/simple, medium (or two), and complex/hard Jobs in it. That way, people who want to run their faces through coals can choose to do so and those that don't want to do that and want Jobs that aren't nerfted and gimped and clunky to the point they barely even work can simply choose the other Jobs. Everyone wins.

Everybody wins? What if they turn the job you love into a babymode difficulty? You are supposed to win too?

Performance differences are the product of both knowledge gaps and technical skill gaps. If you want performance to actually reflect player technical skill, you need to simplify the former and add depth to the latter, which is the opposite of what this game has done historically. Turn off tank stance and turn on Cleric Stance. Use STR accessories over VIT. Strafe lock your target to land directional autos. Established players love these sorts of differentiators because you exclude a portion of the playerbase from being competitive purely on knowledge alone. But you're not measuring player skill.

Many other game genres outside of MMOs are weighted in the exact opposite direction. Having map knowledge in an FPS game will give you a competitive edge to a certain extent, but a complete novice with superior aim can still outclass you on raw mechanical skill alone. As they should, because that's the entire point of the genre. Ideally, players should have a relative clear picture on how to excel without having to do a lot of additional research (i.e. stay on the boss as melee, keep casting as ranged), with precision movement actions and bullet hell tier dodging being the primary determinant of their uptime. The rotational mechanics are entirely fluff (you're going to memorize the GCD by GCD play by the time you're done prog anyways), and how hard you get pushed is very much dependent on fight design. If you want to build up the technical difficulty of jobs, then what we really need to see are more complex movement and evasion actions and fights that force you to use them to their full potential. That's why MOBAs can get away with five buttons, of which one or two might be entirely dedicated to movement.

I hate this thought pattern. This clearly comes from somebody that enjoys shooters.

I enjoy strategy. Let me study my classes, it's also part of the skillset here. I'm not asking them to make jobs have their own Transpose Lines madness (i'm way too small brain for that), but I want meaningful depth, not just something based on aim and reflexes.

Rotational mechanics become GCD by GCD play for jobs with no rng. That's probably why I play stuff like BRD I guess. Combos are dumb.

[Lyth]

...

I enjoy a lot of game genres. My main issue with the current design is how scripted many fights feel. That can be exciting during prog when you're still figuring things out, but it feels like there's no real decision-making that occurs mid-fight. I like variable elements, be they branching mechanic patterns or proc-based actions. I agree that combos are uninspiring design and have nothing to do with player technical ability. But the main purpose is to keep your baseline keystroke pattern less tedious over many hours of play, not to keep you challenged.

I think interesting movement abilities is the way forward, because they add visual/spatial technical challenges to fights that are traditionally only about timing and nothing more. And there are plenty of game genres out there that make use of this sort of gameplay, from ARPGs, MOBAs, RTS games, and naturally FPS. You can argue that this strays into skillshot/aiming territory, but if the consensus is that this is a problem because it's too 'difficult', then the very premise of this thread is flawed.

[Renathras]

Everybody wins? What if they turn the job you love into a babymode difficulty? You are supposed to win too?

What if you like simple Jobs and they tune the Job you like to complex?

What if they're all made complex and then people that like simple have nothing?

It's the closest option possible to everyone wins. Any other option means more people lose than win.

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As for the study classes - the problem is when Jobs are complex enough that everyone has to read The Balance to figure them out. Ideally, players should be able to just read their tooltips and basically figure out the optimal rotation. It might take a little thought, but the information should be there and the optimal rotation should be understandable by doing so. No Job in FFXIV really does this, but some come closer to others. For instance, SMN is MOSTLY this way (if you can understand Garuda's faster GCDs mean slightly more damage from them), as is RDM and WAR and New PLD, and most of the Healers, particularly WHM (once you understand what a buff window is and that Assize isn't a healing tool/can pretend Assize doesn't have a healing component). Many of the others do not.

When the typical answer for how to play correctly is "Go to The Balance" not "It's pretty understandable, pull up your Actions & Abilities tab and I'll walk you through it right quick", that's a problem. If it was a few Jobs, it wouldn't be so bad, but it's honestly most of them. Then it's less "Let me study my classes" and more "Let me study The Balance guide".

.

Personally, I prefer "all of the above" solutions. There's no reason there can't be some Jobs representing each.

[Elizasylen]

I like simple, I play WAR DNC SMN and WHM I think they are neat and kind of awesome.