An expansive look at the problems with current pve/combat design

[Zairava]

I think this covers about everything..feel free to mention if I’ve missed anything or details need adjusting that I’ve missed. Remember to discuss and not derail the thread for the love of the twelve.

Be prepared to read, this is going to be very long. I'm going to use spoiler tags to spare you the eye headache.

I apologize for not having much good to say here, just bear with me. PvE class design is my main focus in MMO’s, and it’s went downhill. Hard.

To preface, I still think the Ninja mudra rework in 5.1 and monk in 6.0 are two of the best reworks you put out in recent years. Current Black Mage is amazing.

Tanks:

In general, it’s understandable why you streamlined enmity, it’s so that you don’t have any issues maintaining aggro and so dps don’t have to worry about stealing it. What you didn’t need to do is make them mind-numbingly boring outside of Gunbreaker. I would have argued that Paladin wasn’t terribly boring before it’s rework, but I’ll get to PLD more in a bit.

Dark Knight: What in the actual hell were you thinking when you released this rework in Shadowbringers? We needed the amount of times we used DA reduced. We did not need:

• MP management being gutted. Making sure you just don’t fall below 3k MP because of TBN (which is damage neutral anyway, if the shield pops) and building MP for your burst is not active MP management.
• A near useless gauge for Darkside since you actively have to let it fall off on purpose unless the downtime is that long.
• Darkside going from one of the most interesting abilities any of the tanks had due to how it worked to one of the least paid attention to in the entire game next to undraw.
• All of the actions we loved removed:
  • Power Slash
  • Scourge (4.0)
  • Dark Arts
  • Sole Survivor
  • Dark Passenger
  • Blood Price (could have just been revamped)
• Delirium being an Inner Release clone, and with that, we ALSO didn’t need to be a near note for note Warrior copy outside of our burst window, which, even then, I repeat: We do not want Delirium to continue being an Inner Release copy. Do something else with it.
• One of the most boring downtime between bursts on any job in the entire game, at least warrior actually has it’s Storm’s Eye buff to keep track of.

Warrior: I’m personally okay if this job stays on the simpler side because unga bunga, but now we have another pressing issue. Warrior does NOT need Shake it Off to be this potent. We have healers to heal damage intake. Nerf. it. I couldn't care less about how much dps Warrior does unless it’s so low it can’t clear content. Nerf it’s party healing.

Paladin: This feels more like a clean slate to expand the job with. It’s pretty boring but it’s serviceable as it is right now before Dawntrail launch. However, it must be expanded upon in 7.0. I went into Shadowbringers thinking that Dark Knight was gonna be like it was temporarily, then was proven horribly wrong when Endwalker launched. Don’t do the same thing for both of them now.

Gunbreaker: This feels alright to me. I really don’t think we should have gotten a third cartridge, though. It’s by far the best designed tank currently.

With all of that said. You removed a lot from the tanks hands and keep letting bosses position themselves. This is my formal request to stop. You’ve already taken enmity management from us, let us at least position the boss in all forms of content.

Healers:

This is by far some of the most insulting healer design I’ve seen in gaming. Do you honestly believe that keeping the damage intake this low and giving them only one gcd spell for dps and a DoT for healing downtime is enough? I’m not going to comment too much on this, my forte is tanks, not healers. I’ll let the healer enthusiasts discuss what’s best for them.

So, with me using myself here. I’m an absolute atrocious healer in MMO’s. It has never clicked to me and it does not resonate with me. If even I can play healer and be bored out of my mind even in EX content (I’m not a hardcore savage/ultimate raider), that’s telling me there is a gigantic issue with your current design for healers. Even in high-end content, from Data that has been provided in the healer subforums, you use your GCD spell more than your healing spells. Even for someone who’s not great at this role, I can handle more.

DPS:

I’m not going to go into all of them, there’s way too many dps for me to reasonably consider putting them in what’s already going to be a massive wall of text. I feel like most are in a reasonably good spot identity wise.

Oh. Samurai. It has its class fantasy, too bad you removed something of major substance. You had multiple avenues of reducing button bloat, removing Kaiten was the worst possible route you could have chosen. Even if you wanted to reduce crit variance, you could have just made Kaiten make Iaijutsu have guaranteed crits, adjusted the potencies, and called it a day.

Summoner feels like an actual summoner now, but it really needs more to it. It’s flashy but it leaves a lot to be desired mechanically.

The Monk rework, as I've stated, is honestly one of the best reworks you've put out in my personal opinion. It's was fun to learn and is fun to play continuously. It's just the chakra system that need work now.

2-minute meta:

The 2-minute meta is something at the core of this entire issue. Making every single cooldown mandatorily fall into this one single burst window at 2 minutes, 4 minutes, 6 minutes and so forth has only resulted in ensuring that dps variance is at its absolute highest in this 2-minute window. It made Critical Hit even more dominant, making it the king stat for nearly all jobs, which, mind, was an issue in Shadowbringers as well since main stat materia was removed in Shadowbringers launch.

This window where every single buff falls into makes the damage during that window the absolute most potent and important damage in every encounter where dps checks actually matter. If you get bad crits or no crits at all, your dps plummets and can be the difference between a clear and a wipe.

It’s also worth noting, that if you die, you will now be permanently misaligned for the entire fight. Your dps is now gimped for the rest of the encounter. With odd burst windows at least you can realign, you can not do that here. You’ve essentially removed player agency and demanded they do it one way at one point in time in particular. Even just bringing raid buffs on a 90s cooldown back on more jobs with some jobs having offensive abilities on a 40-45s CD would help remedy this a bit.

This current form also severely limits how you can design the jobs. This must be here, this MUST be at this interval because it must align at the 2-minute. These Weaponskill/Spell/Ability cooldowns must be on this cooldown duration to conform to the 2-minute. Being able to get back on your feet is more enjoyable than being screwed out of raid-buffs for the rest of the fight.

Simplification Itself:

To get this out of the way, please don’t remove positionals. It does add some satisfaction knowing your getting more potency out of mastering your jobs’ kit in each encounter.

Stop simplifying jobs and reducing the skill ceiling. You have been doubling down on reducing individual job satisfaction since Shadowbringers with a few exceptions. Warrior, Black Mage, and Ninja…even if I’m still salty about Trick Attack being a self-damage buff instead of a party dps buff now. I’ll restate that I think the monk rework is fantastic, but the Chakra system needs work.

You will absolutely never please the crowd that doesn’t want to learn the job in the first place. They don’t care how it’s supposed to be played, they will press whatever their heart desires. The people who do not want to learn, will not learn no matter how hard you simplify a job. The only way to remedy this is to make the entire rotation on one button and essentially make the game play itself.

Casual players that like a particular job will adjust to how it’s designed, or they will move to another job they like playing more.

I’ll put homogenization in here. The people who complain and complain that their class doesn’t have X thing another job has will never be satisfied until every single job is a carbon copy of each other.

Removing every nuance a job has and replacing it with nothing but flashy animations results in a shallow job with no long-term satisfaction or substance. Black Mage is by far the most well designed job in the game. It doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it doesn’t have to. We have 19 (non-limited) jobs in the game, the joy of having so many classes/jobs in MMO’s and RPG’s is that they can be distinguishable from one another in their playstyle that appeal to each individual. Not every single person has to like every single job in the game, that is literally impossible to achieve because of subjectivity.

Making every job in the game have such a low skill ceiling leaves absolutely NOTHING for the people who want some sort of higher goal of mastery to achieve on said job. Fight design does not make up for this when it is a dance pattern you memorize and execute every time, especially in content that’s built to be mindlessly easy like MSQ content.

I really don’t believe boss hitboxes have to be unnecessarily large like they are in Anabaseios. Let us strive to get as much uptime as we can, making it so that it we can do it effortlessly removes the satisfaction from squeezing that one GCD in at the last moment.

There is a lot of warranted concern for the jobs in 7.0. I want my concerns to be proven wrong, and at this stage those concerns are festering to the other jobs as well. I know you guys can do better than what we currently have, you’ve done better design before. There needs to be steps taken back if we are going to return to something more enjoyable and satisfying for everyone. Show us you’ve been listening to feedback. They don’t need to have Heavensward levels of bloated and jank, I would enjoy having kept a lot of QoL brought in Shadowbringers (such as TP removal) but right now, this direction you keep pushing just isn’t it. I don’t want to keep being this negative about job and combat design, but it gets really hard not to be when everything that made it enjoyable to begin with keeps getting chopped away.

[Elucesta]

Very insightful, informative read. I enjoyed this and agree

[DPZ2]

This would have been a better post if the OP had just admitted they had an issue with the changes to Dark Knight and left everything else out.

I got that impression because (a) the OP's avatar is a Dark Knight and (b) they appeared to have absolutely no frustrations about any other tank.

Righteous anger, followed by blah-blah-blah-Kaiten-blah-blah.

Oh, and something about the 2-minute meta and uptime. Golly gee. Complain about bosses removing themselves from the field and messing up carefully(?) planned attack sequences and then complaining when bosses no longer disappear, are easier to hit (and those positionals no longer matter) and players attack sequences merge every two minutes ... What did players expect would happen?

[Zairava]

This would have been a better post if the OP had just admitted they had an issue with the changes to Dark Knight and left everything else out.

I got that impression because (a) the OP's avatar is a Dark Knight and (b) they appeared to have absolutely no frustrations about any other tank.

Righteous anger, followed by blah-blah-blah-Kaiten-blah-blah.

Oh, and something about the 2-minute meta and uptime. Golly gee. Complain about bosses removing themselves from the field and messing up carefully(?) planned attack sequences and then complaining when bosses no longer disappear, are easier to hit (and those positionals no longer matter) and players attack sequences merge every two minutes ... What did players expect would happen?

I mean, yeah, it's about the pve job and combat design, what did you expect? There are mistakes that they've made and of course I'm going to point them out. I'm going to list why too much simplification is a bad thing.

There was no reason to remove Kaiten, yes I'm going to call it out. Yes they've removed a lot from my main job, I'm going to call it out in a thread for PvE job design. Just making this yet another DRK thread would be completely pointless since I wanted to make this general post whether people interacted with it or not.

I have no problem with bosses disappearing, I never said that or I worded it poorly, I have problems with them automatically repositioning the boss for the tanks.

I mean, positionals still matter, they have the added potency. You don't HAVE to chase them, sure, but they still matter for those who enjoy the added layer of optimization. My main point with bosses being as easy to keep uptime on like in anabaseios is that it takes away the satisfaction of squeezing in that last GCD before you need to disengage. We have casters and phys ranged in this game, kind of takes part of an advantage away that the ranged jobs had. It doesn't really make sense for bosses to have hitboxes so large that it's not relevant where you're playing a melee or a ranged job.

I do have problems about the other tanks, I don't have to go too in-depth about it. I still think PLD can be expanded on and there's no way they are going to be releasing anything more with it before Dawntrail. My main criticism is that they're boring, that's speaking for all of them outside of Gunbreaker since it's the most active one.

For what it's worth, this is a massive post, I wasn't expecting a whole lot of engagement but I appreciate the bump lol

[Lyth]

The problem with phrases like 'the two-minute meta' is that it functions as a mental shortcut that prevents people from thinking or asking questions.

Burst has always been important in this game, and the design decisions around it have made certain jobs mandatory for entire expansions. Burst can't be balanced against sustain, because fights have downtime, which in turn allows cooldowns time to tick down. Having a short, strong burst works to your advantage, because you're punished less for downtime outside of it. If you want a good example of this, just think about WAR vs. DRK in Stormblood. DRK was perpetually at a disadvantage because it lacked the raw burst potential that WAR did.

Having variable recasts on burst windows doesn't work either, because not all recasts are created equal. NIN was a mandatory pick for most of this game's history because Trick Attack was a powerful debuff on a 60s recast, which meant that it synced up very well with everyone else.

So what has changed? There's no special advantage to bringing one job over the others, as far as burst is concerned. There's no concern about a 90s Brotherhood not syncing up well with a 120s Embolden. Harder fights are designed such that mechanics intersect with burst rather than during downtime. We're also starting to see newer jobs being designed around resource management rather than simple timers, which adds an extra layer to the execution and punishes deaths more harshly.

The people who push the idea of a 'two-minute meta' ruining their fun are actually the players who played jobs that benefitted the most from the old system. What we have now is a level playing field, and we see much more raid composition variety as a result.

One last thing - this one point about damage variance keeps coming up, and it's a reflection of the fact that some players are only concerned with their 'high score' and not their average performance. This is not a new complaint, nor is it linked to the changes around raid buffs (especially since the individual benefit of raid buffs has dropped off - Trick Attack used to be 10% every 60s compared to Mug's 5% every 120s!) WAR mains were complaining about damage variance even back in Stormblood, which is why Inner Release was changed to guarantee Crit/DH. This is not a real problem. It's a reflection of this community's obsession with having one perfect run even if they play inconsistently the rest of the time.

[Post]

I call bunk on that damage variance thing purely affecting parsers.

I dislike parsers as much as the next player because they are usually quick to throw away a fight attempt even if it's salvageable because they're less interested in succeeding than putting their name on a scoreboard.

But, if everyone's buffs always align, damage variance DOES matter more. If you crit more in the spot where you deal more damage, that's amplified. If you don't, it's already been shown to affect things to the point that certain jobs had to change to fit so that they weren't unviable in current raids.

Hell, they even had to reduce LB variance because they designed a fight for the first time that required you to use many damaging ones in a short period of time such that you could get unlucky and not meet enrage purely because of that variance.

Burst and synchronization have always existed but they have a hell of a lot more impact now that every job is designed to contribute or capitalize off of it, and it certainly affects how the battles on the whole are designed. I think many reasonably dislike those changes.