Suggestion for NIN ability Huraijin

[Shurrikhan]

I would really love to hear your definition of button bloat to have a good laugh.

Using more buttons than is necessary to accomplish identical or better ends.

...Seriously, why are we making this about some arbitrary tipping point in button count?



If I give you 3 buttons for Glare that can be used in any order for the same potency, it's still just Glare... and thereby bloat, regardless of whether you have 3 other actions or 30.

In the same sense, there is absolutely no point in having both Huraijin and Armor Crush when you can just have either act as a Huraijin outside of combo and as Armor Crush (but with 30s Huton granted instead of just 30s Huton refreshed) after Gust Blade.

[Renathras]

and are especially rare from people who actually do put in effort into their gameplay

"it's too hard"

Low-key ad hominem fallacy says "What?"

I don't play with a mouse. I play with a controller. I can fit 16 buttons on a crossbar set, 32 on two. 30 buttons is 3 times 10, which is A LOT OF BUTTONS. It's a third of the way to 100. So the idea that Jobs need 35+ buttons or are "too simple" or "people not putting effort into their gameplay" is just stupid. A lot of games limit you to around 8-16 abilities, and those aren't accused of being too simple or of players being lazy. Just stop.

For me personally, about 29 buttons is where we should draw the line. That allow for Sprint, LB, and Potion to fit in 32, and 29 is still a lot of buttons. I'm not sure why "29 is too few...but 35 is just right" comes into play, as that's a difference of only 6 buttons.

PLD, SCH, and AST are CONSTANTLY getting complained about for having too many buttons. If you aren't seeing it, I'm guessing you don't read many people's posts on the topic over the last couple years. They aren't the only ones, but seem to be the most noted offenders.

I do agree not every Job is for everyone, though. But there also is an issue of, as the game has more expansions, new abilities are added. There comes a point where it's just too many buttons for ANYONE. Where that is depends on the person - for me it's 29, for someone else it may be 40 - but if we don't see some reductions/combinations in rational and intelligent ways, eventually we surpass whatever that is.

On controller, binding all single-target things (which is especially important for NIN due to burst), requires 17 keybinds, meaning it's impossible to fit them all on one hotbar set. And while one might consider having a "burst" and "downtime" hotbar set, a good deal of the buttons used in burst are also used in downtime (Mudras and Ninki spenders, for example), meaning that would require a lot of duplication to achieve, which then would require a THIRD hotbar set to fit in the rest of the buttons. Something I used to do in SB on PLD, btw. And it was every bit as annoying as it sounds.

Single target rotations should consist of around 16 buttons, more or less. Sixteen is not a massive shortage of buttons. Really think about how many that is. And that's the "active use all the time in combat and/or during burst", not including situational stuff like debuffing the boss (Feint), AOE rotations, or other situational stuff like Shukuchi or Hide or Arm's Length.

Add to that you're generally going to have another 4-6-8 buttons for AOE, and that many more situational abilities, and that gets you around 30 total buttons, which SHOULD be more than enough for most people and most Jobs.

You like 50+ buttons, that's great. But it's generally not good game design.

It also really is a keyboard vs controller thing, since I remember playing WoW with Keyboard and having 1-5, shift, control, and alt modifiers to those (20 altogether), 6-= (8 more buttons) of situational stuff, and then other hotbars on the side for professions (given, you didn't swap into those like FFXIV), mounts, foods, and utility stuff for the class like Mage teleports or Druid forms and such. But, it was frankly ridiculous having roughly 50 buttons across all my hotbars, and only around 15 of those were routinely used in combat, with another 5-10, depending on class, being highly situational. At least it made sense there, since WoW was more of an adventure game and I didn't need "Cooking" or "Eyes of the Beast" in an easy to reach button since...you know, I wasn't using that during my burst phase in combat.

.

It is fine if some Jobs have more. I'm not saying none can. But they should actually have value and justify their place on the hotbar slot, and you should really have down around 16 or so for high use and burst. That's a lot of buttons if you actually think about it. 1-0 and then 1-6 again.

.

It'd be one thing if I was asking for some huge change like "get rid of Ninki and all spenders" or "get rid of Mudras", but this is one button that does make logical sense to combine, not a great culling/gutting.

That said, my OP was just asking if there were any good reasons NOT to do it...and as far as I can tell from the replies, there aren't, and some others think the same idea has merit. That answers my original question.

So thank you to all the people who responded.

Using more buttons than is necessary to accomplish identical or better ends.

...Seriously, why are we making this about some arbitrary tipping point in button count?

And yeah, basically agreed on this.

[Deo14]

I don't play with a mouse. I play with a controller. I can fit 16 buttons on a crossbar set, 32 on two. 30 buttons is 3 times 10, which is A LOT OF BUTTONS. It's a third of the way to 100. So the idea that Jobs need 35+ buttons or are "too simple" or "people not putting effort into their gameplay" is just stupid. A lot of games limit you to around 8-16 abilities, and those aren't accused of being too simple or of players being lazy. Just stop.

You can go for 4x16 with gamepad as far as I know. If you don't want to learn to use 3rd and 4th hotbar, then you can still play on M+KB on consoles afaik.

What you consider lot isn't necessarily lot for others. For 3rd time, complains about button count are rare to see. Games with less abilities aren't necessary simple, you're looking at very, very small picture. In DotA you usually have 4 skills and 6+1 items, which can have active use, depending on items. So you have usually around 7 buttons. Yet the game is extremely nuanced and has one of the biggest esports there is. If you want to have MMORPG example, GW2 has roughly 2x less buttons, but 2x-3x times higher APM and more chaotic and faster combat.

FFXIV has very predictable and slow combat, so 30+ buttons is really nothing hard compared to other games, stop pretending it is. Once you combine executing your rotation flawlessly WHILE doing mechanics, that's where difficulty in FFXIV comes from.

For me personally, about 29 buttons is where we should draw the line. That allow for Sprint, LB, and Potion to fit in 32, and 29 is still a lot of buttons. I'm not sure why "29 is too few...but 35 is just right" comes into play, as that's a difference of only 6 buttons.

"Only 6 buttons". You can ruin job by just removing single button, Hydaelyn help us if they removed 6. Job design is already in dire state, we really don't need to make it even worse. But if you're talking about complete merge of AoE and ST, then I'm in. No reason to have ~7 separate skills just for trash packs in dungeons.

PLD, SCH, and AST are CONSTANTLY getting complained about for having too many buttons. If you aren't seeing it, I'm guessing you don't read many people's posts on the topic over the last couple years. They aren't the only ones, but seem to be the most noted offenders.

As for healers, it's not button count, but more about same buttons over and over. This is problem with healers, devs are clueless what to do with healers, so they just give them another batch of random healing skills everytime and call it a day. As for AST goes, I've just heard that it has bloated burst, as in too many actions and weaving.

As for PLD, people mostly just meme about it, there isn't many people who really do think he has too many buttons that would make it unplayable or anything. Sure, you could merge Intervention with Sheltron and FoF with Req, but in the end, there's plenty of skills you don't use even once per fight so it's whatever, you can just yeet Shield bash to the corner of hotbar and let it rot there. Too many buttons isn't really a problem if you just put situational ones on worse keybinds. In your case, just put them and cross hotbar 3 and you're gucci. It seems that you can shuffle them easily, albeit possibly less conveniently. But why would you need something super convenient for LB for example? It's gonna lock you in animations, so what's the harm in putting it at some 3rd hotbar. For PLD, you could put LB, Interject, Shield Lob (you should always hardcast HS instead of this), Shield Bash and Low Blow on 3rd hotbar. Then maybe stance and even cover, since that shit always comes in handy only when you don't have enough Oath anyway. There you go PLD that you can fit all important stuff on first 2 cross hotbars.

I do agree not every Job is for everyone, though. But there also is an issue of, as the game has more expansions, new abilities are added. There comes a point where it's just too many buttons for ANYONE. Where that is depends on the person - for me it's 29, for someone else it may be 40 - but if we don't see some reductions/combinations in rational and intelligent ways, eventually we surpass whatever that is.

But they do remove buttons. And they also remove all the nuances game has, so we might end up with net positive with button count, but game is overall easier, so it's trade off. I wouldn't mind having more nuances and less buttons, but that's not happening.

On controller, binding all single-target things (which is especially important for NIN due to burst), requires 17 keybinds, meaning it's impossible to fit them all on one hotbar set. And while one might consider having a "burst" and "downtime" hotbar set, a good deal of the buttons used in burst are also used in downtime (Mudras and Ninki spenders, for example), meaning that would require a lot of duplication to achieve, which then would require a THIRD hotbar set to fit in the rest of the buttons. Something I used to do in SB on PLD, btw. And it was every bit as annoying as it sounds.

Single target rotations should consist of around 16 buttons, more or less. Sixteen is not a massive shortage of buttons. Really think about how many that is. And that's the "active use all the time in combat and/or during burst", not including situational stuff like debuffing the boss (Feint), AOE rotations, or other situational stuff like Shukuchi or Hide or Arm's Length.

Rotation should consist of how many button job needs to play and feel good. There is 19 jobs in game, arbitrary limiting yourself in designing them based on crap like button count will result in further homogenization.

Add to that you're generally going to have another 4-6-8 buttons for AOE, and that many more situational abilities, and that gets you around 30 total buttons, which SHOULD be more than enough for most people and most Jobs.

You can make macro to swap between AoE and ST skills, I use it for some jobs and it's pretty cool. And no, 30 is not enough for most jobs, just as you can see in the picture of NIN's skills that I've sent.

It also really is a keyboard vs controller thing, since I remember playing WoW with Keyboard and having 1-5, shift, control, and alt modifiers to those (20 altogether), 6-= (8 more buttons) of situational stuff, and then other hotbars on the side for professions (given, you didn't swap into those like FFXIV), mounts, foods, and utility stuff for the class like Mage teleports or Druid forms and such. But, it was frankly ridiculous having roughly 50 buttons across all my hotbars, and only around 15 of those were routinely used in combat, with another 5-10, depending on class, being highly situational. At least it made sense there, since WoW was more of an adventure game and I didn't need "Cooking" or "Eyes of the Beast" in an easy to reach button since...you know, I wasn't using that during my burst phase in combat.

Everything is hard until you give it a try and learn it. I haven't touched gamepad in many years, so I can't speak from first hand experience, but I've heard that crosshotbar is actually amazing and some people use it even though they play on PC.

It is fine if some Jobs have more. I'm not saying none can. But they should actually have value and justify their place on the hotbar slot, and you should really have down around 16 or so for high use and burst. That's a lot of buttons if you actually think about it. 1-0 and then 1-6 again.

...

It'd be one thing if I was asking for some huge change like "get rid of Ninki and all spenders" or "get rid of Mudras", but this is one button that does make logical sense to combine, not a great culling/gutting.

But then NIN will still have 34 buttons. How do you plan to achieve yours truly beautiful 32 buttons max? We go back to the drawing board, since we need to gut NIN even more, just to remove those extra few buttons, since axing Huraijin won't be enough. Jobs already have set foundations, and most of them have 32+ buttons. Trying to remove buttons for some of your arbitrary number is the most boring, formulaic design you could go for.

I'm really confused what do you even want at this point. At first it seemed like you wanted every job to fit your ideal button count of 32, then you swapped to "It is fine if some Jobs have more.", and lastly you just want to settle on Huraijin, even though it seems like you don't even play NIN in a first place.

When it comes to 32 button ideology, that's terrible idea for many reasons I've listed. When it comes to Huraijin, neither me or you main NIN, so our opinions should have much lesser weight than opinion of actual NIN mains. They are the ones who should decide whether it's time to axe it.

[Arohk]

I would really love to hear your definition of button bloat to have a good laugh.

Dark Knight VS Summoner.
DRK = Button Bloat.
SUM = Fine

[wereotter]

a bit? I's the most bloated job of all.

Ninja is definitely bad.. but at least in my opinion, dragoon is worse. Ninja has 17 skills for its rotation (assuming you relegate forked raiju into the bin of niche use skills) while dragoon has 18 skills in its core rotation, plus both have the same cross class skills and buttons needed.

[Deo14]

While I think we're likely to agree on most concrete specifics surrounding the current state of jobs or what's easily visualized... I can hardly disagree more with this assessment.

When I consider which games tended to have the greatest diversity between their classes, they were usually with smaller toolkits that therefore had to be leveraged far more integrally.

Even if I consider XIV's closest neighbor (the game ARR's rework was explicitly based upon), WoW, jobs felt the most homogenous when their toolkits were at their largest.

That's not to say that pruning, by itself, is ever good; outside of an easy an obvious correction to a former terrible design that costs nothing to improve, pruning is almost always bad. But, working within creative constraints more often forces more vital and influential differences between kits than full freedom (which is largely just a euphemism for the ability to full back on the same poor inefficient, infrequently utilized, or otherwise poorly integrated designs for each job).

It's not as if our 32+ button jobs are ever going to be 6-8x as deep or diverse from one another as any two random 4 or 5-button LoL/HotS/DotA2/DiabloIV characters are...

Generally, what tends to allow for the greatest diversity is strong creative constraints with ultimately a bit of flexibility, and strong breadth and depth of shared undermechanics to act as featurable/actionable sites for kits' differences.

It's true that if you have too many skills (19 jobs times ~30 skills), they can start looking similar/overlapping. Half the jobs have essentially identical 1-2-3.

This made me think about DotA and I'm reconsidering what I've said. Heroes in DotA have usually just 4 skills, one of them often being passive. And that's what keeps them so distinct. Huskar is typical berserker, lower health = higher damage. Zeus has passive which deals percentage of target's health whenever he casts a spell, which makes him struggle less with high HP enemies, which are always problematic for casters (caster might not be right word, haven't played DotA in some time). LC gets/gives permanent damage bonus whenever she wins/loses her duel.

Obviously it's pretty far fetched to compare FFXIV and DotA, but there are some interesting things to take away from job design. You 100% can make 100+ very distinct heroes with usually just 4 skills. However DotA goes way and beyond with unique stuff. Mars' ulti makes small coliseum which enemies cannot leave. Tinker's ult refreshes his every skill and item AND it has just few seconds cooldown, so he teleports all around the map with boots of travel and spams his other skills/items, teleports back to fountain to refresh mana and goes back again. Void creates Chronosphere which lock everyone in it, which is one of the best counters for overfed carries. Silencer steals INT stat from enemies that died close to him. You get the point.

There is a lot of uniqueness there. But main reason why you can get away with such a creative design is because you don't need to limit yourself because of balance. You don't need every hero to pass some dps check, you don't need every tank to be able to survive every encounter somewhat equally. But FFXIV needs that. You cannot have a tank which deals 20% more damage than others, but also takes 20% more.

But I'm not sure about conclusion. On one hand, if FFXIV had singificantly less skills, devs will probably try to distinquish each job more. On the other hand, current depth of FFXIV's combat doesn't really offer much creativity. No stuns and other CC, no special effects. We're stuck with job gauges and cooldowns. Damage is everything, even if tenacity melds added some 20%-30% more overall defenses, crit/det/dh will still be preferable. So I guess the takeaway is that homogenization isn't that much relevant to button count, but to the fact that devs keeps restraining themselves just so everything is perfectly balanced. What could they do, however, while keeping balance, is to give every job some interesting and unique mechanic. SAM's Sen and NIN's Ninjutsu are great and fun job mechanics, but some jobs just don't have any. WAR just builds up very bland resource and then spends it. SGE's Addersting is interesting in theory, but it's 50% damage loss even if you do it correctly and it's reliant on incoming damage.

snip

I think your caps lock is acting up.

I take 1-2-3 as an equivalent of basic filler auto attack. I don't mind it, and I would much rather have that than to end up like healers with 1-1-1-1-1 spam. And yes, damage is all that matters in this game, so don't act surprised when 80% of skills, do in fact, deal a different flavour of damage.

[Shurrikhan]

But I'm not sure about conclusion. On one hand, if FFXIV had singificantly less skills, devs will probably try to distinquish each job more. On the other hand, current depth of FFXIV's combat doesn't really offer much creativity. No stuns and other CC, no special effects.

At some point, we get into a sort of chicken | egg spiral here.

Kits are simple because the game lacks any depth/breadth of undermechanics | the game lacks undermechanics because the kits are simple anyways.

As such, the most powerful constraints of kit design boundaries is a matter of what undermechanics can be added without breaking or devaluing existing content.

(Though, this is also where XIV breaks from other game's design philosophies regarding additions. Where another game might see the addition of Ninja as an available excuse to create undermechanics each for elements, Enmity, and stealth for the entire game, the addition of Astrologian as a means of adding manipulable gravity and ragdoll effects, Samurai as elemental-buffs-as-granularly-and-variably-spendable resource, etc., XIV tends to go "Oh, well now we can't have X, Y, or Z, either.")

Of course, an equal-sized half of that swamp is simply that XIV approaches the question of whether it wants to be alt-job-friendly and whether jobs should be interchangeable more with an eye on time played metrics / grind hours than on what it wants from the player experience in content.

If jobs were meant to be distinct but not quickly swapped for progression, for instance, then they should have high enough ceiling in both skill and progression (with alt-jobs never quite matching one's main but being easy to second-tier) that even a skilled player is worth taking even on a job less than optimal for a given fight, and what each job offers should not be so easily quantified (e.g., unlike when each comp still forms/sources the exact same strategies with no noticeably different twists). If meant to be distinct and quickly swapped, then we wouldn't need to so worry about parity on a basis of each individual minute/fine capacity, since one would main a role or armor class, not just a single job. But instead, we have nearly all the grind (short of job-by-job gearing) with none of the distinction.

To get to even half the things I'd want to see from XIV's jobs, both areas would have to be addressed: Rather than being content with what is (or, worse, pruning anything that wasn't implemented as well in practice as was hoped), job design would have to be willing to go beyond what content mechanics are available AND then the content would have to move to match it, or vice versa. And, we'd probably have to either drop the grind and/or drop the over-fine assessments of parity.

That being said, I have zero doubt that one could design with just 12-16 buttons kits that would have far, far more depth for each job than is currently the case. And the different ways they have to integrate those skills together under those button constraints would almost certainly make those jobs feel more distinct, not less.

[Deo14]

Dark Knight VS Summoner.
DRK = Button Bloat.
SUM = Fine

Comparing DRK and SMN doesn't really back up your words when you said that NIN is "I's the most bloated job of all.". Yes, there is a lot of pointless oGCDs for DRK, because it's terribly designed job which doesn't have any job mechanic/minigame like NIN and others have. Devs instead of making one, opted to just make it bland job all about oGCDs. Because of that, NIN is by no chance worse than DRK. At the same time, why do you call SMN "fine"? I can clearly see a Physick in there. It scales of mind, meaning that it's utterly useless and it's probably worst example of button bloat in the game. Sure, DRK's Carve and Spit, Shadowbringer and so on are just bland oGCDs, but at least they have some meaning. So this leaves me confused and wondering about your worded definition of button bloat, because those 2 pictures and 9 words didn't tell me much.

snip

This seems about right. You need more creative space to make more distinct jobs, but game has some philosophies, like jobs which are easy to freely swap in between, that limit this.

My personal problem with this approach is that enjoyment is reliant on encounters. If boss is striking dummy, then you're stuck playing half interesting job. If boss does some mechanics, then combination of it can make for some good gameplay. But then again, we find another problem, which is that anything below EX is breeze and too easy. And I bet that if we wanted to go deeper, we would eventually even find a loop in all of this.

[Arohk]

this leaves me confused and wondering about your worded definition of button bloat.

The Amount of hotkeys is what matters, not the amount of abilities.

i never play Summoner so i dont know why i even have physik in there to be honest(to heal in low level dunegosn perhaps?), i just wanted to give an example of the amount of buttons required.
The Summoner has a most of his skills consolidated instead of having seperate hotkeys for each summon and the related spells.

When it comes to Dark Knight, i really have not much of an idea how to reduce the bloat ther ebecause it is a lot of different skills that don't even combo of each other.
Just a quick idea:
Carve and Split can merge with Delirium. (Carve and Split gives 3 Stacks of Delirium)
Salt and Darkness can merge with Abyssal Drain.
That would already free two Hotkeys, but for how the Job is designed there isn't much to consolidate really.

Ninja suffers mostly from he same Problem, a lot of oGCDs that require a seperate hotkeys.

then you have Fleeting and Forked Raiju, which is simply terribly designed. Why would Raiton chain into TWO seperate abilities, remove one Raiju and combine both into one skill.

[Deo14]

The Amount of hotkeys is what matters, not the amount of abilities.

If those buttons can be consolidated without destroying the job, then yes. Iki should go into Ogi, but Kaiten should not be removed because it was fundamental part of toolkit.

i never play Summoner so i dont know why i even have physik in there to be honest(to heal in low level dunegosn perhaps?), i just wanted to give an example of the amount of buttons required.
The Summoner has a most of his skills consolidated instead of having seperate hotkeys for each summon and the related spells.

I mean, why should there be a button that is not worth assigning to a button? Plenty of people don't even know that it doesn't scale with th right stat, so they waste keybind on it, therefore, it's button bloat.

When it comes to Dark Knight, i really have not much of an idea how to reduce the bloat ther ebecause it is a lot of different skills that don't even combo of each other.
Just a quick idea:
Carve and Split can merge with Delirium. (Carve and Split gives 3 Stacks of Delirium)
Salt and Darkness can merge with Abyssal Drain.
That would already free two Hotkeys, but for how the Job is designed there isn't much to consolidate really.

My idea - remove garbage like Carve, Shadowbringer, Salted Earth etc. and add real GCDs that have some more in-depth mechanic than just building a one sided resource. I really don't think DRK should be oGCD oriented, all basic animations are very slow and it makes DRK look very goofy when he does 1/4 of animation and then it gets canceled by another.

Ninja suffers mostly from he same Problem, a lot of oGCDs that require a seperate hotkeys.

Which exactly? Mug and Trick Attack have different cooldowns, and I doubt they want to touch Trick Attack again after 6.1 backlash. Same with Kassatsu and Meisui. Dream Within Dream could be put into Trick Attack. After this single change, I might see something done with Huraijin and them merge ST and AoE. But other than that, NIN seem very good in comparison with other jobs, and it's definitely not "most bloated" as you claim.

then you have Fleeting and Forked Raiju, which is simply terribly designed. Why would Raiton chain into TWO seperate abilities, remove one Raiju and combine both into one skill.

It was like that in 6.0, but people hated it and wanted it separated. You can just use one if you want.