Does anyone enjoy duties where ...

[Bun_Vivant]

you're forced to fight as an NPC using a ridiculously simplified set of skills ?

I loathe these duties. Not just because they're immersion-breaking, but because they just are not fun IMO.

The Thancred-vs-Ranjit one is particularly bad.

[Taliriah]

Yep, they're awful. You spend all this time building up muscle memory to play whichever job you wanted to play and now you have to play some simplified version of some job you were never interested in the first place, using whatever awful pet bar keybinds (which are awful because they are out of the way in order not to interfer with your normal keybinds), and you have to go through this to be able to go back to your own character.

They should have done those as cinematics.

[Gullis]

Fun enough, and you only do them once. Only issue is that they can drag on for too long

Looking at you Ran'jit

[Bun_Vivant]

Fun enough, and you only do them once.

Unless, like me, you're an alt-aholic whose already pushed 6 characters to End-of-Content.
But even just once, they're a PITA and not part of our hero's journey.
Even if they were tolerable, I don't see that they serve any purpose but to waste our time.

[Carin-Eri]

Absolutely not, with the already mentioned Thancred Vs Kung-fu Grandpa being a particularly obnoxious experience.

The only one I'll say I didn't completely hate was playing as Hien Vs not-quite-Zenos.

[Eraden]

Mao agrees. Mao is BLMs. If Mao wanted to nots be BLMs, Mao would have nots been BLMs. Mao does NOTS like these kind of duties.

[Kaurhz]

I've done that duty in question yesterday on an alt, just as I have done the role quests for physical DPS on an alt for ShB today, and both are miserable, and I think they should be shorter for what they offer -- But I can also accept that many players also don't really have that level of comfort of familiarity to essentially go into a duty with a foreign job kit.

IMO, I would say either the following needs to happen:
- The kit offered by the duty should have some basic proc system embedded in it, so it at least breaks up that monotony. I don't think going from 1-1-1-1 to 1-2-3-1 necessarily solves much.

- The duties need to be shorter to compensate for the lack of flushed out actions.

- They need to be changed from actual duties to being something that is a cinematic.

Personally, I would go with either 2 or 3 from this list, rather than the first.

[Ancalagon_Blacktalon]

I am admittedly pretty fond of them, but they also bug me in that...daaammit why don't I get some of these cool skills that these scions have lol, some of them like Alisae and Estinien just straight up have stuff I don't have as those respective classes and it makes me kind of envious

[PercibelTheren]

I somewhat enjoyed some of them. The ShB Black Mage role quest was pretty OK, so was playing as Alphinaud. The Thancred-Ranjit fight though? It was way too long and tedious.

[Canadane]

I like them as a mould breaking changeup.
They're all super easy as the simplified movesets are overpowered by at elast 10x the amount they normally would be.

And it's nice to kinda feel how the other characters are doing in the story from their perspective. Something a cutscene just won't always be able to do.

It's also nice because too many people never play outside a single role. Back in the day we at least had cross-class skills to get people out of their comfort zone for a little bit. Now we have no motivation for this. It ends up with people not knowing what to expect out of other role types. And while playing an NPC isn't exactly a facsimile for that, it might at least get people to try after thinking it was something fun or cool to do.