Combat system is beyond saving.

[SeverianLyonesse]

That's what happens when they aim to design a job that's "free of clunk".

See: SMN

It's beyond that. It's the fact that the entire game is designed around challenging players to dodge mechs and align buffs with seven other players. There isn't any room for buildcraft variety or skill expression or situational abilities or job specialties.

I actually think SGE and SMN are totally fine designs if we accept the very heavy limitations the game has set on ALL of the jobs. They are doing far better within FFXIV's dumb DDR no-scrubs paradigm than jobs like AST, DRK, SCH, MCH, DRG, and SAM which lose more and more of their identity over time.

[ty_taurus]

That's what happens when they aim to design a job that's "free of clunk".

See: SMN

I feel like "clunk" has become synonymous with "flavor" in FFXIV standards. Some flavors are bad, others are good, but FFXIV is all about removing all flavors without prejudice.

[Supersnow845]

It's beyond that. It's the fact that the entire game is designed around challenging players to dodge mechs and align buffs with seven other players. There isn't any room for buildcraft variety or skill expression or situational abilities or job specialties.

I actually think SGE and SMN are totally fine designs if we accept the very heavy limitations the game has set on ALL of the jobs. They are doing far better within FFXIV's dumb DDR no-scrubs paradigm than jobs like AST, DRK, SCH, MCH, DRG, and SAM which lose more and more of their identity over time.

How can you say that SGE is doing better than SCH when despite 8 stripping downs SCH is still near better than SGE on every front and SGE just poorly ripped its design from SCH

[ty_taurus]

It's beyond that. It's the fact that the entire game is designed around challenging players to dodge mechs and align buffs with seven other players. There isn't any room for buildcraft variety or skill expression or situational abilities or job specialties.

I actually think SGE and SMN are totally fine designs if we accept the very heavy limitations the game has set on ALL of the jobs. They are doing far better within FFXIV's dumb DDR no-scrubs paradigm than jobs like AST, DRK, SCH, MCH, DRG, and SAM which lose more and more of their identity over time.

Monk is a better example of modern job design that compliments the encounter design better. Summoner is ruthlessly inflexible and makes it very awkward to do anything that doesn't perfectly start and stop within a minute cycle. There's no way to smoothly delay a demi-summon phase, or cut it short. You live and die by that 60 seconds between each bahamut/phoenix. In the last dungeon pull before the next boss, it's about 25% cleared, but you've run out of gemstone summons? You can either burn your demi summon now and go into the boss midway through your rotation or you can stand there and spam Tri Disaster like a filthy healer.

[Zadood]

I feel like "clunk" has become synonymous with "flavor" in FFXIV standards. Some flavors are bad, others are good, but FFXIV is all about removing all flavors without prejudice.

I think it has less to do with job's "clunk" but more on not feeling rewarded when adapted to the said job's "clunk"

For example,

Job/Class A has zero "clunk" in it's own kit, and deal 900dps in 30 secs.

Job/Class B has "clunks" in it's own kot, and deal 1100dps in 30 secs

Now the question is,
Is it the Job/Class B's "clunks" worth learning and getting used to, just to have extra 200dps over Job/Class A that has zero "clunk"?

[Aravell]

I feel like "clunk" has become synonymous with "flavor" in FFXIV standards. Some flavors are bad, others are good, but FFXIV is all about removing all flavors without prejudice.

You can see this at work with the whole SAM Kaiten debacle.

The people who want Kaiten back have given a lot of varied reasons: Kenki management, nice animation, feels good to execute, makes sense, etc. Meanwhile, there are people who say they're glad Kaiten is gone because it's dumb and pointless.

And that's the main point of contention, isn't it? Something that feels dumb and pointless to one person is probably fun design to another, "One man's trash is another man's treasure" and all that.

That's why I think the dev team really shouldn't be gutting every job in the name of ease of use. After all, you can only play one job at a time. There's 19 jobs (soon to be 21), if someone hates how a job plays, there's so many others they can play instead of demanding that the job they hate be changed to cater to them, I'm sure at least one of the jobs would click (Well, they would have before all of them were stripped of flavour and nuance).

[Supersnow845]

“We made SGE for those who don’t like the kit interactions SCH has”

Players- okay great I still want you to change SCH but I won’t give you a reason why I still demand you change SCH

[ty_taurus]

“We made SGE for those who don’t like the kit interactions SCH has”

Players- okay great I still want you to change SCH but I won’t give you a reason why I still demand you change SCH

Except it actually went "We made Sage for those who were asking for more DPS options on healers (except we failed miserably, the people who wanted more DPS options on healers aren't happy with Sage, and the job is now popular because of players that wanted to play Scholar but without any nuance)"

[Emitans]

3 expansions from now critical hits, damage variance, and all procs will be gone from the game at this rate. Every job will be a list of actions you press in the same order and the only form of skill expression is if you can follow this preset list for 10 minutes or not.

[Gokki]

Except there is basically no compensation or correction anymore (same as there is basically no triage healing) you do the dance or you blow up. P12 is god awful for this.

[SNIP]

With super chain is 1 solution and if you get it wrong we all blow up. That raid design gets so stale because your optimisation is already done by a spreadsheet you just have to execute it

Yeah, that's encounter design problem, not combat system (they're closely linked of course). There are many variables in all of this and i feel it's more difficult than people realise.

People always claim that complex jobs can't exist with complex fights, but why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't there be a good balance between the 2?

If you take complex fights to the logical conclusion, you get what we have now. Fights with debuff overload that requires you to parse all that information within 5 seconds or less and execute it or your entire team blows up. Is that fun? Depends on the person, but I find that kind of design highly frustrating, it's also a bigger wall for less experienced players than harder jobs were.

[SNIP]

Edit: Come to think of it, even stack markers have been Endwalkerised, [SNIP], can't even choose to hypermitigate stack markers anymore.

It's just the devs designing encounters differently. I do agree that encounter design is stale because everything is in an arbitrary square or round platform and there's never any texture to it, like, why not design a fight on a train where the fight changes depending on which car we're on. A rudimentary version of this exists in the early Omega fights, but that is still basically a rectangle arena.