Rotations: Making them DIFFERENT

[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.