Rotations: Making them DIFFERENT

[vetch]

To hell with rotations, give me whatever 50BLM has going on.

[ty_taurus]

There's no reason WHM has to go 76 levels before getting 'AOE Lily spender'. In fact, there's no real reason for it to only get it's job mechanic (lilies) at 52 with Solace. For SGE, add Holos (the shield part) early, and upgrade it to have the mit later at current level. Or add Krasis-but-10% earlier to help Kardia feel like it does something. Physis1 and Physis2 is a good example of it being done 'right', I think. You get 1 early on, and at 60 it upgrades to 2 and gains the 'bonus heal%' effect on top. Do that more

Also once this next expansion's over, we're gonna be level 100. Halve every duty's level requirement, and cut our max level to 50. ARR becomes 1-25, each expansion is a 5 level bracket instead of 10. This helps populate the levelling process, as you'll be getting your skills-or-traits every level pretty much.

Regardless of how anyone feels about the EW rework of monk, something I think they really nailed with it was doing exactly this. The rework made sure to introduce core gameplay elements very early. Chakra is obtained at level 15 now, and you basically have your full rotation at level 50, which is what I think every job should have. Levels 15, 30, and 50 should each feel like a big step for every job.

The summoner rework also does this mostly well too regardless of the quality of the job as a whole. Having the Carbuncle Astral Flow available as an early Bahamut was a great way to make the core aspect of new Summoner available right away.

You don’t necessarily need a Physis be Physis II scenario involving two different animations (because animations are expensive), but just simply reduce the potency of other actions and then bring them back up later through a trait. I mentioned for dancer bringing Flourish down to level 50 and Saber Dance to somewhere between 50-60, but actually it should be Flourish at 30 and Saber Dance at 50. Fan Dance II is a pathetic “capstone.” (And personally I’d prefer to see Fan Dance I upgrade to II, stay ranged, but gain the AoE. Bloat isn’t a dancer problem, but I hate buttons bloat that exists for dungeon trash only.)

As for a level squish, there was a somewhat recent interview about making it to level 100 in the next expansion, and that we would probably stay at level 100 long term as it’s an iconic level cap for Final Fantasy. Afterward we’d look to alternative forms of progression.

[Post]

Well, if they stay at 100 maybe they'll finally fix leveling skill acquisition. I play a lot of MiNE stuff and it's unfortunate that much of the DPS portion of that content has been trivialized due to simplified rotations and, more importantly, massive potency bloat. In HW they had the foresight to include the option and give lasting replayability for old content, but this was hurt more than it needed to be in the wake of direct hit and ShB's potency values.

Credit where it's due, EW has done a better job at giving core rotational potency buffs from a trait between 81 and 90 for all jobs so it's not affecting older content, like physis 2. I just don't understand how they understood this during ARR (hence all the maim &mend traits) and just forgot afterwards. Maybe they didn't actually understand and still don't and just got lucky regarding not messing with old content too much this time around.

Jobs like SMN are not great in this regard because they already have basically all of their toolkits at low levels and are thus even more powerful at lower levels than max. I don't expect them to be able to balance jobs at every expansion cap, but being aware of how changing skills wholesale without traits would be a start. Also, SMN losing damage with Phoenix at 80 at EW's start and the fact that it still loses the ability to Summon Bahamut without a target from 70 when Aethercharge and Dreadwyrm trance allowed for it were signs they didn't really think it through entirely. I don't care if it's basically a misplay to summon without a target; a level 6 through 69 SMN shouldn't be faced with a more challenging DPS decision or execution than a higher level one, and I'm sure there's some edge case where a 90 SMN could get more use out of summoning early. That's what depth is, and it's what SMN or healers currently lack.


I think there's something to be said for allowing a job's rotation to at least get more involved as you level and not almost identical from 26 to 86 like SMN, but situations like BRD lacking one of their 3 songs at ARR level cap is a no-go for how the job is now designed.

[SenahPanipahr]

To hell with rotations, give me whatever 50BLM has going on.

Right?! It's weird that level 50 BLM feels more decision-heavy with mana than later levels.

I would love to see them develop that out and give WHM a mirror to it with its blood lilies and all, but even if we're lucky enough to get some actually "advanced" changes to Healer jobs, I suspect WHM will remain the simplest on account of Conjurer being a starting job. (In a way that's not directly comparable to Arcanist-into-Scholar.)

Well, if they stay at 100 maybe they'll finally fix leveling skill acquisition. I play a lot of MiNE stuff and it's unfortunate that much of the DPS portion of that content has been trivialized due to simplified rotations and, more importantly, massive potency bloat. In HW they had the foresight to include the option and give lasting replayability for old content, but this was hurt more than it needed to be in the wake of direct hit and ShB's potency values.

Credit where it's due, EW has done a better job at giving core rotational potency buffs from a trait between 81 and 90 for all jobs so it's not affecting older content, like physis 2. I just don't understand how they understood this during ARR (hence all the maim &mend traits) and just forgot afterwards. Maybe they didn't actually understand and still don't and just got lucky regarding not messing with old content too much this time around.

Jobs like SMN are not great in this regard because they already have basically all of their toolkits at low levels and are thus even more powerful at lower levels than max. I don't expect them to be able to balance jobs at every expansion cap,

I love MINE runs, probably my favourite thing to do in the duty-side of the game; but I'll be the first to admit it's a very janky solution to the problem. (Though jank is still preferable to the situation with WoW where it's basically impossible to experience old raids at the point they fit naturally in the story/levelling, nevermind in a state remotely comparable to release difficulty. Maybe if you're a streamer with a big following or have an extremely dope guild you can manage something through party sync? Idk the details of how that system works.)

You're right about the potency buffs though, I don't know why they needed to screw with older content like that. I can only speculate because I don't have the firsthand experience to back this up but: I can imagine Healing would be at least a little bit more engaging if potency increases hadn't made it so easy to replenish party health after the heavier raid-wides.

[fulminating]

War mitigation at 50: reprisal, rampart, arm’s length sometimes, vengeance, thrill (ehp and heal up)
Pld mitigation at 50: ,,, ,,, ,,, sentinel, sheltron, shield bash sometimes (but add low blow to everyone)
Drk mitigation at 50: ,,, ,,, ,,, shadow wall, dark mind (magic only)
Gnb mitigation at 50: ,,, ,,, ,,, nebula, camouflage, (does aurora count?)
Blu mitigation at 50: addle, diamondback, bad breath, ice spikes, mighty guard, toad oil, magic hammer, avail, cactguard, devour, chelonian gate, dragonforce (take 4 away if you meant by 50 not at 50 (I also think I’m forgetting one, but can’t tell what it is(not that it matters much, blu80 must be in a fortnight or so)))

As my data clearly shows, blu is the best tank at level 50. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
But yeah, really they messed up reworking warrior so many times and changing the healing at lower caps. Honestly I wouldn’t have thought drk was significantly better at 50, but maybe the damage compensates - Then again warrior gets a 440 potency combo finisher, which despite no ogcds should probably put it near the front of the tanks in terms of damage?
I think I would argue that warrior lacking the diarrhoea button functionality at 50 makes it more engaging than 70, even despite the ogcds. It could probably do with inner beast having some life steal returned to it, but frankly I don’t really think anything is good at 50, nor 90 really. I also remain unconvinced that there is much thought put into sub-level-cap balance - not only warrior’s different burst, but bard’s missing song, samurai lacking the positionals until 52 (possibly not true since shb) , dancer potencies up to ~cutter’s cry.

And ultimately healer rotations don’t change all that much after getting the dot. Not to the degree warrior burst changes. I don’t consider that a good thing personally. Certainly not in summoner’s case.

[vetch]

The thing about that list is that Sheltron is so good for 50 raiding, you should count it twice.

Tank DPS matters less in 50 MINE. Potency creep on the DPS jobs makes bringing a lower DPS tank with superior mits a much more attractive option. The content still puts out more damage relative to max HP than any other tier, and importantly, the shape of the damage is different. Holmgang is well-suited for soaking TBs in the current 'giant overmax hit followed by nothing for 5 seconds while your healers pump you back up' design meta, but Coils is often heavy damage phases with crit-enabled autoattacks mixed in -- for example, split-tanking in T1 or T10, I can just use invuln on PLD or DRK and the healers can almost ignore me, but if I tried the same on WAR, I would likely die without a last-second Benediction. If a WHM isn't present I might as well not Holmgang at all because the healers are going to have to pocket me either way. And having to heal your tank more often is huge in content where heals actually cost 1000MP.

Even DRK's Dark Mind finds more use in Coils than warrior's -empty mitigation slot-.

[Renathras]

I don't think pre-6.3 was particularly good at it, honestly. Maybe if we go back to SB? In ShB, you had Atonement change up the rotation, though it wasn't terrible in the sense it replaced a 1-2-3, but it was also weird in that you were supposed to drop Atonements, which isn't at all intuitive and there's no real way to determine that without using parsing/illegal 3rd party add-ons. That is, there was no way just using the game itself to determine that unless you're manually going to record videos of you with a target dummy for hours and then do the math all by hand.

It was even worse in EW. I remember the first dungeon I did after hitting 90 and playing with my capstone for a bit I kept exiting my caster phase into a Royal instead of a Goring, which was obviously wrong but REALLY annoying since that's what my muscle memory was for. It's one problem that BLM's have complained about for years that BLM feels horrible to play synced because of how your muscle memory works against you at lower levels. In PLD's case, it was literally anything that wasn't the current level cap (90).

New PLD feels much better to play at lower levels and less muscle memory working against you than pre-6.3 did. Post-6.3 feels like it builds on itself much better. You have the core 1-2-3, you add HS later but it doesn't seriously alter the cadence and works more like a "GCD oGCD" where you can use it kind of whenever you want in the rotation, and later you add -4-4-4 for Atonement, and simply swap back and forth between them. Requiescat is just an extension of Fight or Flight once it is introduced that "starts with a bang", but it's just pressing one button 4 times, which later evolves into pressing a different button...4 times, which isn't a terribly difficult transition to make. And your two oGCDs you still use at the same time from level 50 to level 90. The weird part is that PLD (despite its aesthetic) has no self-sustain in its core rotation until level 84.

Pre-6.3: At 50 you have 123 (and two oGCDs) with a 1 min burst. At 60, you swapped every 4th 123 to a 124 to apply Goring. At 70 you have two 123s swapped out to do a magic burst window with Req and Holy Spirit. At 80 you swap the final Holy Spirit to a Confiteor, and any 123 that comes after a 123, into 3 Atonements. At 90, you swap the 124 immediately following the magic burst to the Blades combo, and swap the 124 that was coming after the Confetior magic burst into a 123 instead.

Post-6.3: At 50 you have 123 (and two oGCDs) with a 1 min burst. At 54, you press Goring after FoF. At 64, you simply hit HS after 123 (with some flexibility that makes it nearly noobproof), and at 68 you hit Requiescat after FoF and do four HSs; 123 is still your filler. At 76, you press Atonement 3 times after 123, alternating the two combos. At 80 you press Confetior after Goring. At 90 you press Confetior 4x after Goring.

There's a lot less change post-6.3, and the changes are smaller. Going from "press 4 HS" to "press Confetior then 3 HS" to "press Confetior 4 times" isn't as much of a change as swapping every 4th rotation, alternating in-between rotations, or changing what combo you use when exiting your magic phase. While I get some people liked the pre-6.3 rotation better, this was not an advantage it held.

Again, I'll note that BLM which you praise here is one of the most generally maligned Jobs on this very point.

A far better example is RDM, which has its basic rotation by level 60 (the Job starts at 50, and ARGUABLY has its base rotation by 50) with its full melee combo by 50 and both Embolden and Manafication by 60. After that, each level cap just adds an extra attack onto the end of its combo. VerHoly/Flare at 70, Scorch at 80, and Resolution at 90. The other abilities it gains are utility stuff like Cure, Raise, and Barrier, niche things it actually tries not to use like Reprise, or spell upgrades that don't alter the ability use or rotation in any way (e.g. Verthunder into Verthunder III or Jolt into Jolt II). The core rotation of the Job is complete by level 70 at the latest, and arguably level 50 with everything after that being an additional stinger to its combo attack or a side utility ability that isn't part of its core rotation and muscle memory.

...and, obviously, SMN and Healers, which all establish their base rotations pretty early. Healers by level 4 other than some caveats with Plegma or Misery or Energy Drain, and SMN by roughly level 30, though the core concept is in place by level 6. These Jobs allow you to level from the start and pick up the muscle memory you need as you go by augmenting rather than rewriting how they play, which also leads into less trouble with muscle memory working against you when you get to level cap and sync lower level content. WHM is oddly the big exception here due to how Lilies work and how weird it feels when synced down to where you don't have them.

[TheDustyOne]

I don't think pre-6.3 was particularly good at it, honestly. Maybe if we go back to SB? In ShB, you had Atonement change up the rotation, though it wasn't terrible in the sense it replaced a 1-2-3, but it was also weird in that you were supposed to drop Atonements, which isn't at all intuitive and there's no real way to determine that without using parsing/illegal 3rd party add-ons. That is, there was no way just using the game itself to determine that unless you're manually going to record videos of you with a target dummy for hours and then do the math all by hand.

Actually, back in ShB you would drop a Holy Spirit in req and used Confit after 3 HS casts, buffed Atonement via FoF was stronger and with some planning (and enough SkS) you could fit 4 Atonements in a single FoF window. This could change from fight to fight based on optimizations, and wouldn't be possible if you started with the Req opener, but the standard FoF opener would do Atonement shifting.

I would also echo Roe here in that I think pre-6.3 PLD was much better at easing you into the rotation, albeit I think it didn't get "good" until lvl 68 when you finally get req > HS spam. But at the very least the basic flow of Goring > RA > RA > Goring was available by lvl 60. Then by 70 you had Req phase replace an RA > RA every minute with HS spam. Then by 80 you added a big finisher at the end of the HS spam and every second RA combo was Atonement spam instead. It all felt additive.

For current PLD, I actually find lvl 70 somewhat more enjoyable than 80 since I don't think Atonement fits into current PLD all that well. Atonement worked because it merely replaced a RA combo, and with some slight optimization, you could shift and move 1 of those stacks from an unbuffed window to a buffed window.

Current PLD changes rotation weirdly after you get Atonement, it goes from a pseudo 123(4) combo with HS spam every 60s, to having to use up those Atonement stacks, which makes the next HS proc feel delayed. Not to mention all that extra MP just goes to waste. Confiteor makes sense at 70, but then the blade combo makes Req nothing but blade fodder where before, it was your Holy Spirit phase with a big hit somewhere in there. It builds up the habit of "I should use this on Holy Spirit" to "Use 1 stack on Confiteor" and then replaces that with "only use this on Confiteor". Old PLD had a better Req phase IMO, it made sense for your HS phase to continue being your HS phase but with a big finisher at the end, then that big finisher does a RDM and keeps finishing.

[ForsakenRoe]

Old PLD had a better Req phase IMO, it made sense for your HS phase to continue being your HS phase but with a big finisher at the end, then that big finisher does a RDM and keeps finishing.

And that's why I'd make Req a hard hitting GCD (like 600+), that upgrades into Confiteor at 80, with it/Conf granting 3 stacks of the buff that makes Blades do actual damage. As it is now, Req is just... there, for the sake of being 'the button that makes Blades do not-trash damage', when it could be baked into Conf, and that frees up a hotbar space (PLD's already on struggle street for hotbar realestate anyway)

[TheDustyOne]

There's a couple of candidates for button consolidation on current PLD I can think of;

1: Combine FoF and Req
Self explanatory, we're already double-weaving them as-is

2: Replace Goring with Req
Goring feels vestigial and boring, whereas Req begins a new phase in the rotation, they're already on the same timer and get used close together.

In general though I just don't like how the blades combo works currently, I don't mind that they're big hits in succession, I just hate that it's all we use Req on. The magic phase in general is something I've always felt could do with a couple of tweaks since HS spam isn't all that interesting either, but current PLD just changes it from spam HS button to spam Confit button.

I'd rather just revert to old PLD, the only thing jank about it in this meta was pre-pull FoF, which could be fixed by removing FoF and buffing the physical abilities to compensate. If it really needed more burst, then we redistribute potency to the magic phase.

--

Anyway, I got thinking on "what if WHM had old PLD rotation?" and brainstormed something quickly:

Stone: (RA combo)
X potency, grants 1 stack of Thingy, up to a max of 3

Aero: (Goring)
Y potency over time, 18s

Water: (Atonement)
Z potency, requires and consumes 1 stack of Thingy

Requiesdog:
60s cooldown, XX potency, gives 5 stack of Updog

Glare: (HS)
YY potency, requires and consumes 1 stack of Updog

Banish: (Confit)
ZZ potency, consumes all remaining Updog stacks
Combo: Tornado

Tornado: (Blade 1)
XXX potency, Y potency over time, 18s, can't stack with Aero
Combo: Quake

Quake: (Blade 2)
YYY potency, grants 1 stack of Thingy
Combo: Flood

Flood: (Blade 3)
ZZZ potency, grants 1 stack of Thingy