Thread: 7.0 DRG Update: Why replace Spineshatter with a dash? Draggons are supposed to jump.

I will say that those examples of "a lot more proc based" are all a lot of individual RNG, but few of them are examples of proc-based job gameplay.

It's highlighted in how you say that RDM kept some of it's randomness, that is true, whether you get a Verstone or Verfire proc is random, and the energy income is different based on that, yes. Does your gameplay change in a nontrivial manner? No. Your rotation is a static one, with Jolt being a fallback to the procced spell if those aren't available. There is a marginal difference because of the difference in energy income, but even in just 1 minute of gameplay the proc chance is so high that randomness in production makes ~0 difference.

This is maybe what I mean: FFXIV does not have proc-based jobs. And it never really did. It had jobs with procs, but those procs never centered the gameplay around them, quite the opposite, they were glue in the gaps between the static nature of each job (and hence once those abilities got sanded, the glue could be removed). There is no job that has as gameplay rotation centered around procs or randomness. Neither did old AST btw, as much as it gets carted out as an example of "good RNG" - that's not the same as non-static-rotation gameplay.

Now of course, static rotation isn't bad. At all. It's a staple of class gameplay in MMORPGs, it's just supposed to be one of multiple. Proc-based, resource-based, variable/random, those would be the other big 3 ones.

Though to be fair old AST sometimes got close to what'd be called variable-flow or dynamic-flow, as the amount of weaves needed to "fix" your bad draw could get excessive and push other gameplay elements aside. But importantly even that was questionable because there was no "win" you could likewise pull where you get extra powerful. You could just have a mess, or not. And you wanted the 'not', with 0 exception. There was never an "Oh good, I pulled absolutely rubbish, that's awesome!" because no meaningful improvement in power output came from a "bad" pull.

They had a chance to provide this with Viper, but very actively decided against it. So I guess it's safe to say that static-rotation it is. But importantly as long as it is, I don't think job design can ever become better than this constant slow devolution of weaving in an otherwise static context as fight design needs tighter and tighter tolerances to produce further content and more and more jobs need to be added with exactly 0 niches they could fill.

(sorry, back to topic now >.>)