Pictomancer Appreciation Post

[Carighan]

Listen, if you're going to make statements like that you have to actually provide logic and reason.

Oh sorry, as per your reply in the other thread, should I have said I believe they need to be ripped out and reimplemented? Because then I can just forego providing reasonings and logical arguments, right?

Complaints without logic should just remain unspoken.

Wise words you should take to heart.

But I apologize, that's a bit crass a thing to say. As for the actual reason, it's the lack of gameplay implementation of the job's fantasy. These jobs do not convey their lore, and this leads to a problem. As MMORPGs as a whole age, they naturally drift towards more and more homogenization, a function of a playerbase that will only ever tolerate better balance (see us complaining about a 5% difference in damage output by now, back in early WoW you'd be lucky to be closer than 50% together...) together with a per-game increase of classes and specs as it ages creating a larger and larger pool of abilities and gameplay to fill.

From this comes the problem that given an ever-more-homogenized pool of gameplay, any derivation from this homogenized setup will result in an imbalance that is less and less tolerated. See Picto's downtime-resistance and how much it becomes a problem for Ultimate raiders.

Now to get around this, there are two basic approaches:

* You can just further homogenize, effectively turning jobs into functional mirrors of one another. To a degree this is what the devs have already done, what with the 120s burst window for everyone and the focus on a static rotation based around never-held (roughly, it's not perfect) CDs. This can only help to a degree because as the window for imbalance shrinks and your pool of classes increases, you can not extend this forever before having to resort to actual mirror-characters like in fighting games.
* You can differentiate classes on identity, fantasy and lore, but not on their gameplay contributation. This idea is basically smoke&mirrors, so long as your job seems to be doing something totally out there, nobody truly cares whether the profile of damage (or healing, or tanking) you provide is effectively identical to someone else's. This is something you'll effectively have to look at anyways as your game ages, and is usually done via a bolted-on system of subclasses or sub-specializations to differentiate already-homogenized classes again. WoW does this a lot and has cycled a lot of systems over its lifetime, for another still-running approach look at the Elite specs of GW2 which sadly seem to be stagnating by now.

The latter approach interestingly is quite flexible: It only matters that it seems to be unique. So for example, that a Summoner is no different than any other caster in what they do hardly matters, they summon giant entities that very much are instantly recognizable to anybody who has played FF games before, including that each of them does one big attack and then shoots off again.

This is why I said that the gameplay button sequences work well enough for some jobs (I wish we'd not all have static rotations but wow would that be a massive reworking of the entire combat system if they want to bring proper priority-based, resource-based and proc-based jobs in...) but the job around it should still be more or less hollowed out and re-implemented. Which does not mean a super-simplification like it happened for Summoner, that sometimes feels like they quit after the major big task and never realized there were 10+ more added to it when implemented the new version, but that the shift to an identity that befits the class fantasy in how their abilities are conceptualized, are implemented, are used during combat and how they look is a purely beneficial change to them. The previous mini-pet version just isn't what you think of when someone tells you "Final Fantasy Summoner!".

So compare for example the monk: Do you feel "Monk" when you bounce bounce around like a Pinball powerball on speed? Throwing individually weak punches at an accelerated rate? This is something shown as a singular attack for monks in many contexts, but they are rarely shown like this overall, that's more Ninjas or so. A monk would be somebody who is extremely evasive, who meditates, taking time, in fact attacks only very rarely, with absolutely devastating results. And the job quests even convey such a job fantasty! It just isn't in the implementation! That's the problem.