The problem with Tripling Down on Shadowbringers Job Design

[Mikey_R]

You yourself said you were offered a sarcastic answer. I assumed you were discussing SCH because it was a multiple dot job, I didn’t provide input on that you are the one who said you were provided a sarcastic answer

It was actually a jab at the one person who responded to my initial post who said 'Having more than 2 buttons to press'. Which was clearly not said in good faith and yet has 16 likes (as of this post).

And when I said reverse I didn’t mean reverse statement I meant the reverse argument. The idea that complexity exists on a balance between all in the job and all in the encounter. You are arguing that complexity comes from the encounter as the job becomes instinct, I said your own logic of instinct taking over can be applied to the reverse argument that instinct can take over on the encounter once you have done it as well. Therefore the statement “once you get good things become easier” becomes a totally moot statement because it can be used to argue both sides of a diametrically opposed argument

They aren't diametrically opposed, they are 2 sides of the same coin. They both need to function together to make something fun.

Difficulty has to come from both sides or you wind up on the healer situation. If every job pressed 11111111111 then you could make most savages as hard mechanically as TOP because there is no job difficulty. Encounters should facilitate differences in job complexity to lead to differing results. The best example of this is T7 (if anyone even remembers T8 at this point). The fight isn’t excessively mechanically challenging but it does challenge your kit and force you to solve it different ways which plays into what each job offered at the time. Your rotation wasn’t static and played into each other

I never said otherwise. In this case it is encounter design enabling the strengths and weaknesses of each job. You also have to remember this was in a time that jobs were much simpler and less emphasis was placed on pure damage. But more bosses with ways to change their behaviour, or more RNG mechanics. One thing I noticed throughout EW, if an extreme encounter has a mechanic that is either, say a donut or point blank AoE, the first time might be random between the 2, the next will always be the other. Why not make that second on RNG as well. Things like that. I've talked in the past about changing stuns/interrupts to change damage profiles of attacks rather than straight up stopping them etc.

There is also the question of casual content that must be included in the discussion as pushing encounter difficulty above all else makes casual content beige as hell for any job

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Job complexity and encounter complexity go hand in hand. Yes, you need fights that are easier so that people can get through the story, but no amount of perceived job complexity is going to make that encounter more exciting to do, especially if you are used to doing extreme/savage/ultimate fights.

As for job complexity, no, I'm not looking for something that's eternally complex, because that's not feasible. What I'm looking for is something complex to master that is also consistently engaging. A small example of an engaging mechanic would be RDM, the engagement comes from watching your Fleche/Contre Sixte timers and deciding whether or not you have to use Acceleration to prevent cooldown drifting at that moment. Reacting to RNG is also something consistently engaging.

As a RDM player who only plays it casually, I took this as a bit of an easy thing to look at. Assuming you do not have time for both Fleche and Acceleration in the dual cast window, surely, there would be one that is better and so that one would be prioritised.

Now, I didn't get an answer to that question directly, I literally spent 5-10 minutes on the balance discord, I did find something else out that I hadn't considered and that is the parity RDM has between hard casts and insta casts and the fact it flips every time you do a melee combo. This might not seem like much but it is important if you want to maximise your 2 minute windows. You would assume you need to enter the 2 minute window on a certain parity, so coming out of 1 melee combo and having the parity flipped means you would need to flip it again. Acceleration and Swiftcast can both do this. This could also be a case of lining up your oGCDs, if you know they line up with one parity and not the other, swapping to a certain parity before hand could mean less drift in the oGCDs. Then there is also movement to consider etc.

Now, again, I am by no means a RDM expert, I only play it casually so I have no idea how much this impacts someone, however, assuming it is relevant, would this class as complexity? It would also be nice to know if this is something high level RDMs actually consider.

Obviously there's a 'puzzle' aspect about jobs. You need to figure out mechanics, which are superficially complex even nowadays. Most jobs seems unintuitive because the game does a really bad job with its tooltips, but with a few days of practice one might get it. Beyond that is what we don't have, which is engagement as job complexity.

I do agree with most of your post and it highlights what I have been trying to get at. Just increasing job complexity won't solve anything.

However, I will disagree with your point on jobs being unintuitive. I would say most jobs are intuitive if you go about learning them the right way. Most jobs just build on what came before, so, learning the level 50 rotation is a good baseline, learn up to 60, shouldn't be too hard, they just build up on the 50 rotation, up to level 70, again just builds on top of it, then 80, 90 and soon 100. That is really all there is to building a basic rotation that will get you through all pieces of casual content. The good thing is, once you have this knowledge, and you plan to go into Extreme/Savage/Ultimate, since you already have the baseline knowledge, it will be easier to parse the recommended rotations.