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.

[MagiusNecros]

Perhaps that's why, maybe they wanted to get away from their identity in FFXI and create something more appealing to a wider audience. The reality is, not everyone wants to sit and do mental math over what attack is better in each situation or consider cooldown drifting and things like that. Some people want to just sit down, push buttons and complete content quickly without too much thought behind it. The study I linked above basically shows that strategy/critical thinking in video games is on a downward trend. We also had sub jobs here originally but they were removed, most likely at the request of the player base.

I think times are just changing and Square is trying to future-proof for the majority and the incoming generations who are being raised on short-form media/TikTok (media that doesn't require much brain power to comprehend). Those who want something complex just might not be their target audience anymore.

Sure. On the same token though I never saw anything wrong with cone AoEs or Samurai Kaiten. Stuff like that made the jobs engaging to play and there wasn't any math to form out. It was pretty clear cut and dry. Use skill to buff the next skill or stand here for the most amount of cleave. Instead of making everything a circle or removing that extra step.

Now it's just Attack A now always has auto crit.

But you are correct they want to draw in a more casual crowd that isn't required to think. Been that way for a while. Started in Shadowbringers. The signs were there in Stormblood. More began to notice in Endwalker.

Subjobs in XIV was just some cheap Cross Class skills. Subjobs in other iterations of the franchise either had you use other jobs skills or had you acquire traits from other jobs to boost the primary one. This can be seen in many either through the multiclass systems, materia, gear, and of course in standard job based games an Ability Point System.

I'd say if XIV wanted to branch out(it doesn't) they could implement a Mastery Point system that served to increase the effectiveness of a base job. Whether it's simple DPS increases, shorter cooldowns, slef buffs by going through the rotation, stat increases, changes in gameplay, faster Limit Break gain.

And that you only would gain Mastery Points after max level. So even after you maxed your job you always have something to work towards. Cuz you know a lot of people say "I got nothing to do".

Or instead of a relic weapon as they do you have a relic questchain that involves you acquiring gear for your offhand slot or a new slot in general and it alters a skill to do something else to change how you play the job in a completely different way. And if players wanted to metagame and cry about it you could just unequip it and use the base kit.

All perfectly fine ideas. But hey if the goal is to make the game so accessible it becomes boring to play that's a dev choice.

[AmiableApkallu]

Does complexity not disappear once you have a certain level of mastery in that job?

It does not. Complexity is an intrinsic quality of the design. Your level mastery does not change that.

That's like saying calculus ceases to be complex once you have a certain level of mastery in it. Calculus is intrinsically more complex than basic, elementary school arithmetic. "Mastering" calculus does not change that.

[Zolvolt]

FF14 does not have room for complexity in job design. Every fight in this game is on rail road tracks. You get on you, you press your buttons in the mapped out way, and you get off. It never changes. Once you get comfortable with the fight you never have to think about things, you just do it the exact same every single time. If we add complexity to the game it doesn't fit into the "every boss is just one elegant dance" boss design. You can add variety by removing the 2m meta, but you can not add job complexity without changing how they design boss fights and how they design jobs.

Senix controls their balance also very very closely. The job balance in this game is so freaking good because theres no job customization, no different builds, no trinkets or set bonuses and with a game that only has 8 job slots, the balance has to be on point. It has to be. My prediction is this game will never add complexity to it's battle/job design. not ever. The complexity will always come from boss mechanics.

[Mikey_R]

It does not. Complexity is an intrinsic quality of the design. Your level mastery does not change that.

That's like saying calculus ceases to be complex once you have a certain level of mastery in it. Calculus is intrinsically more complex than basic, elementary school arithmetic. "Mastering" calculus does not change that.

What defines how complex something is though? What you consider complex, I might not and vice versa. So, is complexity something subjective or it is something we can objectively look at and if you can look at it objectively, what parameters are we using to define the level of complexity involved.

Whilst, yes, calculus is more complex than basic maths, we can both also agree that differentiating X^2 is vastly less complex than integrating ln(Sin[x^2]/Tan[Cos{X}]) or what other made up nonsense you can come up with that will be difficult to do. SO, where is the complexity line drawn?

[Zolvolt]

What defines how complex something is though? What you consider complex, I might not and vice versa. So, is complexity something subjective or it is something we can objectively look at and if you can look at it objectively, what parameters are we using to define the level of complexity involved.

Whilst, yes, calculus is more complex than basic maths, we can both also agree that differentiating X^2 is vastly less complex than integrating ln(Sin[x^2]/Tan[Cos{X}]) or what other made up nonsense you can come up with that will be difficult to do. SO, where is the complexity line drawn?

Complexity can be boiled down to how many things you need to juggle either simultaneously or back-to-back in most cases and in some cases having to play wildly different on a boss-by-boss basis. In FFXIV that ends up boiling down to snapshotting your dots and managing your job gauge. Micro optimizations add a hint to that, but they are generally nothing more than "hit abilities in this order instead" or "hold your cd and use it right before it comes off cd to get 2 uses back-to-back". The odd one will be like "you actually do more dps if you waste this amount of your gauge at this point" This game doesn't have complex systems either that require you to use different abilities or different cooldowns or play your job in a completely different way depending on the boss. World of warcraft is a good example of having that level of complexity in their job design with their current talent tree system, set bonuses, and trinkets. But it's also why that game's class balance is always so poor. There are always classes/specs that are shunned by the community because of this problem.

[AmiableApkallu]

Whilst, yes, calculus is more complex than basic maths, we can both also agree that differentiating X^2 is vastly less complex than integrating ln(Sin[x^2]/Tan[Cos{X}]) or what other made up nonsense you can come up with that will be difficult to do. SO, where is the complexity line drawn?

Complexity exists on a scale, a spectrum. There's generally broad agreement on the relative positions of things on this spectrum.

For the purposes of discussion, it's sometimes convenient to take a chunk of that spectrum and label it "simple", another chunk "complex", and so on. How that's done is more likely to vary from person to person.

[Mikey_R]

Complexity exists on a scale, a spectrum. There's generally broad agreement on the relative positions of things on this spectrum.

For the purposes of discussion, it's sometimes convenient to take a chunk of that spectrum and label it "simple", another chunk "complex", and so on. How that's done is more likely to vary from person to person.

I agree with this, however, to add on. Would you agree or disagree with the claim that after a person gains knowledge and or understanding on a subject, how complex they then perceive that subject could then change as a result and if so, would this shift it to be more simple, or, more complex.

[AmiableApkallu]

I agree with this, however, to add on. Would you agree or disagree with the claim that after a person gains knowledge and or understanding on a subject, how complex they then perceive that subject could then change as a result and if so, would this shift it to be more simple, or, more complex.

As someone gains knowledge of something, they may choose to reorder things on the complexity spectrum. Something that initially had the appearance of, say, "depth", might turn out to be quite shallow on further investigation, and vice versa.

Significantly relabeling which chunk of the spectrum is "simple" vs. "complex" is probably more akin to losing a sense of perspective.

[Aravell]

I agree with this, however, to add on. Would you agree or disagree with the claim that after a person gains knowledge and or understanding on a subject, how complex they then perceive that subject could then change as a result and if so, would this shift it to be more simple, or, more complex.

I think you're misunderstanding what people want. I don't think people want complexity that remains just as complex forever, because that's not possible. I think what people are looking for is complexity that grants repeatable engagement. Little things you can tweak here and there for each fight that makes you think, even after playing that job for years.

Things can remain engaging even after you build muscle memory of it after all.