A plea for RNG and proc based gameplay

[Valence]

this fun you speak of, is it why so many people flooded to bard this xpac? oh wait...
RNG is not fun.

BRD used to be one of the most popular jobs.

[Kathryn]

BRD used to be one of the most popular jobs.

Yeah I dropped BRD after the procs were removed.

[Osteichthyes]

BRD used to be popular for a few reasons, mostly how well it synergised with DRG with both it's buffs and piercing vuln that it could apply, but more importantly, it was one of the only ways to get mp back for long time. Without a BRD you would just run out of MP. As it is in EW, BRD is still a RNG based job. At 90, your songs have an 80% chance of granting Repertoire, your Bites/Jaw have a 35% chance of proc'ing Refulgent Arrow. It still has aspects of it that are RNG.

I like the idea of RNG based jobs, but while they are nice when they work, if you need something to happen and it doesn't, it's just the worst feeling ever. It's like when you play DNC and just don't get any feathers, or MNK and don't get chakras, it feels like something is missing. However, if the job is designed around having a complete feeling while not getting procs, then it runs the risk of being too busy when they do happen. Another counter arguement is that proc based jobs are not skill based. They are inherently RNG, so the maximum potential of the job would heavily depend on something that can't be controlled. People who want a complex job may find that the skill ceiling is too limited, or is too inconsistent, by something that they cannot control.

Thinking back to AST, if you got AoE Balance, that was a massive dps increase, but if you didn't get it, most of your other options just sucked. But when it worked....

That being said, I do believe that having an amount of randomness can be fun, and should be incorporated in some jobs. The dopamine from when you get a proc is always a nice little thing. Like getting a Direct-Crit. It's just the amount of power that is being placed in those RNG systems have to be very carefully monitored.

[Cynric]

BRD used to be popular for a few reasons, mostly how well it synergised with DRG with both it's buffs and piercing vuln that it could apply, but more importantly, it was one of the only ways to get mp back for long time. Without a BRD you would just run out of MP. As it is in EW, BRD is still a RNG based job. At 90, your songs have an 80% chance of granting Repertoire, your Bites/Jaw have a 35% chance of proc'ing Refulgent Arrow. It still has aspects of it that are RNG.

I like the idea of RNG based jobs, but while they are nice when they work, if you need something to happen and it doesn't, it's just the worst feeling ever. It's like when you play DNC and just don't get any feathers, or MNK and don't get chakras, it feels like something is missing. However, if the job is designed around having a complete feeling while not getting procs, then it runs the risk of being too busy when they do happen. Another counter arguement is that proc based jobs are not skill based. They are inherently RNG, so the maximum potential of the job would heavily depend on something that can't be controlled. People who want a complex job may find that the skill ceiling is too limited, or is too inconsistent, by something that they cannot control.

Thinking back to AST, if you got AoE Balance, that was a massive dps increase, but if you didn't get it, most of your other options just sucked. But when it worked....

That being said, I do believe that having an amount of randomness can be fun, and should be incorporated in some jobs. The dopamine from when you get a proc is always a nice little thing. Like getting a Direct-Crit. It's just the amount of power that is being placed in those RNG systems have to be very carefully monitored.

It was also for quite a while literally one of the best jobs in the game. It had free movement, was super easy (mostly heavy shot spam and keeping buffs/dots up/responding to procs), and one of the only jobs that had a silence. Add on everything you said about Piercing synergy and mana/tp song. It's really easy to see how Bard was super popular, and it had very little to do with it having procs and more to do with synergy and ease of use.

Bard being so strong while also being easy to play is what led to its nerf in ARR. As well as the cast times onto P-ranged in 3.x to try to balance the role having the ability to freely do mechanics while also bringing super consistent damage. In truth a lot of people probably left Bard due to wanderers minuet (because the community outcry was insane back then) and stayed gone either because they quit or because other jobs came out that they were more interested in. By the time we had a bigger population join in Shadowbringers we had many more jobs in the role and overall for people to choose from, so it makes sense it wouldn't have been able to stay the most popular just from a logical standpoint.

That's not to say procs can't be fun mind you or draw in players. Just that Bard was popular for a lot of reasons beyond stuff like bloodletter.

[1313]

rng is bad design, no thanks

[Valence]

BRD used to be popular for a few reasons, mostly how well it synergised with DRG with both it's buffs and piercing vuln that it could apply, but more importantly, it was one of the only ways to get mp back for long time. Without a BRD you would just run out of MP. As it is in EW, BRD is still a RNG based job. At 90, your songs have an 80% chance of granting Repertoire, your Bites/Jaw have a 35% chance of proc'ing Refulgent Arrow. It still has aspects of it that are RNG.

I like the idea of RNG based jobs, but while they are nice when they work, if you need something to happen and it doesn't, it's just the worst feeling ever. It's like when you play DNC and just don't get any feathers, or MNK and don't get chakras, it feels like something is missing. However, if the job is designed around having a complete feeling while not getting procs, then it runs the risk of being too busy when they do happen. Another counter arguement is that proc based jobs are not skill based. They are inherently RNG, so the maximum potential of the job would heavily depend on something that can't be controlled. People who want a complex job may find that the skill ceiling is too limited, or is too inconsistent, by something that they cannot control.

Thinking back to AST, if you got AoE Balance, that was a massive dps increase, but if you didn't get it, most of your other options just sucked. But when it worked....

That being said, I do believe that having an amount of randomness can be fun, and should be incorporated in some jobs. The dopamine from when you get a proc is always a nice little thing. Like getting a Direct-Crit. It's just the amount of power that is being placed in those RNG systems have to be very carefully monitored.

BRD was also very popular in non optimized casual/storymode environments.

[Reimmi]

this fun you speak of, is it why so many people flooded to bard this xpac? oh wait...
RNG is not fun.

Bard is not played because of issues that are not related to its proc gameplay.
A major one which is fixed in DT, that you can't use songs during downtime which destroys your cooldown timings

[KageTokage]

I'm going to miss being able to multi-DoT enemies during wall to wall pulls to fish for more song procs, because the procs now being tied to the song ticking down now means you have a hard cap on how many you can get per song while keeping it RNG for whatever reason.

When you start getting into extremely high trigger rates like 80% it makes me question why they don't just axe the RNG entirely at that point.

[Valence]

Repertoire would feel utterly boring and mind numbing without rng, especially minuet. This would dramatically drop the skill ceiling of that song in particular.

[Connor]

It makes no sense to me that they create rng/proc based jobs, only to then delete all rng/proc elements from said jobs, without every having a replacement for people who liked the initial playstyle.

Which frankly seems to be just how things go in FFXIV. A playstyle is created, someone complains, devs go absolutely crazy removing all traces of said playstyle, then never attempt to put it back together properly. I mean, look at Summoner going from a DoT class to a ‘big hitter’ class. Like I enjoy the current Summoner (yes obviously I’m aware it has many, many, many issues) but I can’t fathom why they wouldn’t then take the pre-existing playstyle and apply it to a job that was more thematically/mechanically designed for DoT style gameplay.

Arguably Ranged DPS between Stormblood and Shadowbringers is another one; they went from being slightly supportive dps to copy-paste clones with the exact same raid buffs as literally every job in the game. If you liked supporting the party? ‘Fuck those guys’ seems to be SE’s response