What makes a good Job mechanically?

[Shurrikhan]

Low floor, high ceiling.

Since the first often inadvertently helps the latter, that's not as hard as it might first seem.

Or, another way to put it, it's a kit where (A) the cost of any single failure is low enough, (B) the net reward for more complexity (itself a risk) is high enough, and (C) optimal actions are contextual enough... that most players aren't phased towards a singular or rote understanding of the job's intended playflow despite its components all being quite intuitive.



What I think a lot of people miss is that difficulty in terms of stringency or rigidity often harms (lowers) the ceiling as much as it harms (raises) the floor, despite there typically being a greater "skill gap" (or, variation in performance from successfully avoiding the most punishing fail conditions).

Personally, I don't mind a person flailing around getting some 60% of the throughput of complete mastery on that given job. What I mind is simply when the rewards of engaging with the minutia are so low, despite the much greater complexity in optimizing them, than the core elements that a player trying to actually optimize some part of those is likely to perform slightly worse (at least at first) than those following a painfully oversimplified/rote idea of what the job should do. We should feel encouraged to go that step more, but it's fine for it to have rapidly diminishing results.

:: Yes, there are some obvious analogs here to the "2 minute meta," prior to which there were a greater number of precise timings to match (your separate 1:00 and 1:30 raidbuff recasts, etc.) and therefore slightly instances of / opportunities for optimization, but the costs of failing each or especially the largest overlaps of raidbuffs were far less. While we want some performance gap, certainly, it shouldn't come all from something so simple or, especially, with little ability to be salvaged.

Of course, any discussion of kit is generally incomplete without also having a discussion of encounter design. Without some degree of stringency (without also being too stringent), and a total number of mechanics across the instance, enough for different job features/profiles/etc to see different results... kit differences and their affordances end up paper-thin.

[Zeastria]

I only know what i dont find fun:
- Upkeep on personal dps buffs/dots
- Filling up gauge/bar
- Positionals
- Long rotations
- A lot of skills with little use

[Zairava]

Low skill floor, high skill ceiling. There shouldn't be one single set rotation for every job. Players should be able to have fun playing the job at a non-optimal and an optimal level.

A job should be able to keep the people engaged with the moment to moment gameplay, and have kit interactions (think Dark Arts and Darkside for DRK (HW/SB), Eukrasia, Kaiten, BLM's MP pool and power between [Astral] fire and [Umbral] ice and, RDM's black/white mana gauge, Mudra's->Ninjutsu (also Suiton->Trick Attack and Meisui), WHM's Blood Lily, etc)

If this means that certain groups of players will not play the job because they do not like it at it's core, that is okay. Not everyone is going to enjoy every single job, you don't even see everyone enjoying every job now, and this is the expansion with the most streamlined, samey job design we've had to date.

[Payadopa]

I only know what i dont find fun:
- Upkeep on personal dps buffs/dots
- Filling up gauge/bar
- Positionals
- Long rotations
- A lot of skills with little use

So... everything? I guess you just want to stand in the same spot pressing 1. lol

[Renathras]

So... everything? I guess you just want to stand in the same spot pressing 1. lol

Please try to refrain from attacking what other people like/dislike, especially in this way.

You can always say what you want, but that's why that sentence starts with "Please". The thread is asking what you think is a good Job, and so other people are saying what they think is good/bad, and you may do the same yourself, but please refrain from attacking what other people are saying. (That also isn't everything, but that's an aside.)

Thank you in advance.

And thank you everyone for the feedback. I understand it's a complicated question, but I think it's one think most people agree is an issue with the game right now, so this kind of thing is where the Devs really need good feedback of what people like/want/think is good, but not in terms of "my Job doesn't do enough damage" (tuning) but rather design/feel/mechanics (tuning is, at the end of the day, just turning numbers up or down, but that doesn't change if a Job feels good to play or bad to play.)

EDIT:

Or, as Zairava said well here:

This right here. Make the jobs actually fun to play and worry about balancing after.

[Payadopa]

The current rotations are only as strict because meta slaves kept foaming at the mouth. Something something parse, so SE removed everything that got in the way of that and this is the result. Bland uniformity. Now you either have abilities that don't do damage and are therefore deemed worthless or you use them nonsensically like Earthly Star or any gap closer for damage only. SE should finally stop listening to people who think making a number go up more equals better gameplay.

[Zairava]

The current rotations are only as strict because meta slaves kept foaming at the mouth. Something something parse, so SE removed everything that got in the way of that and this is the result. Bland uniformity. Now you either have abilities that don't do damage and are therefore deemed worthless or you use them nonsensically like Earthly Star or any gap closer for damage only. SE should finally stop listening to people who think making a number go up more equals better gameplay.

This right here. Make the jobs actually fun to play and worry about balancing after. As long as the jobs can clear the content, let the sweaty parsers mald until they get their potency adjustments.

[remiff]

For me, an interesting job should be "unique" and not look like another job in its toolkit.

It should also offer an interesting resource management system that aligns with its design, provide unique synergies or support abilities if it is focused on support,
or if its toolkit includes support elements.

It should have a decent number of OGCD abilities that integrate well with its resource management.

Unfortunately, the game is following a trend of extreme homogenization, and jobs within the same role are slowly starting to become "the same," which is really what's hurting the game right now.

Comparing the jobs from Stormblood to those in Endwalker, and considering the fact that burst windows are on a 120-second cooldown, it's quite apparent how different the jobs used to be from each other before and how they had a real identity in their rotations, not just a visual one. I really believe that the battle designers should take a step back and restore PvE with a design similar to what we had in Stormblood.


It's clear that just by comparing the tanks and healers from before, you can understand how truly unique they were.
Scholars have lost most of their damage-over-time abilities and one of their fairies.
Astrologians have also lost their previous card management system, and all cards have become the same instead of fixing it by making each card unique and keeping the damage increase as a group-wide cooldown effect only.

[strawberrycake]

So I feel the main thing thats been said so far is job engagement and content engagement need to go hand in hand, if we take DRG and BRD in stormblood for example. During Omega you wanted to have a Ranged DPS usually BRD and DRG paired for their buffs and how they played off each other, around this time we saw some rather simple fights in Omega, such as Chadernook, a very tank and spank fight, infact, we also had Phantom Train that tier as well. These fights, normal and savage were VERY simple in design and what was required to clear, given the simplicity we had a lot of room for many unique interactions and synergy between jobs, such as how NIN would help deal with healer aggro, and provide slashing debuffs.

Now I ofc want to say these are very very small tiny details people usually looked over, but now, we don't even have that Tanks and healers are the only two roles to interact with the party and each other directly. If a fight is going to be a tank and spank, the jobs should have enough complexity to make up for what will be a simple fight that focuses simply on the damage needed to kill it, as well as the self same jobs providing a rewarding experience for mastering their kits and being able to adjust when a fight requires more mechanic focued management and resolution.

This is ofc primarily talking about how jobs are affecting one another as well as their reaction to content type or situations there within. An example of job interaction with their own kits is tanks losing emnity, and how we had two rotations built in, aggro and dps,how we had to maintain stances and adjust them accordingly, and how one with enough skill could forgo the use of an aggro rotation and focus strictly on their dps. We have no content to compensate for the removel of these types of interactions, we have no interactions between roles and jobs to rely on bar the basic tank and healer interactions that are standard if you want to clear, and the most tanks can do now is give the party single target mit which, if things are going right, doesn't happen.

We cannot talk about job individually truly, as the entire system for both jobs and content are currently overly simplified, and the jobs and content must play into the system, the system neeeds to be changed for any nuanced discussions to occur. In my opinion.