Pictomancer Appreciation Post

[SweetPete]

Y'all gone get this job completely nuked in 8.0. Just like SCH got in 5.0. PCT will be utterly destroyed and rarely anyone is gonna play it. I'm just gonna chuckle when it happens.

[HikariKurosawa]

This is going to be tricky, considering that all but ~3 current jobs (Red Mage, Picto, Summoner) have massive and deep, underlying, conceptual issues. Their gameplay in button presses might be alright, but the job you control via those is entirely unusable from a balancing POV and more or less needs to be ripped out and re-implemented. And even those three are only superficially okay, except, as you say, Summoner. Which conveys their job fantasy extremely well, it just needs "more". Mostly more summons that aren't Bahamut-From-Wish.

Listen, if you're going to make statements like that you have to actually provide logic and reason. You can't just bold words like "massive" and "conceptual" and expect people to understand where you're coming from. In what way is the job design "entirely unusable" from a balancing pov? For what reason does it "more or less" need to be ripped out and re-implemented? How are those three only superficially okay? Where are you even coming from with this post? Complaints without logic should just remain unspoken. You need to be able to convey your actual reasoning and logic if you want to make any meaningful contribution to the discussion.

It feels a bit weird reading that current jobs are complicated, compared to their much older versions...

Point out where I said they were complicated relative to their older versions in this thread though. All I am saying is that jobs and their execution mid-combat in this game are way more complicated than people give them credit. If the game has become boring for you it's because you no-lifed it like crazy or have played for many many years.

I can beat the final boss of elden ring dlc while falling asleep at this point, I've done it hitless several times on the highest ng+ cycle without using a broken build. Do I think the game is easy because I have come close to mastery of the combat? No, it's extremely complex. That's just what it means to be a practiced human.

[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.

[Valence]

Point out where I said they were complicated relative to their older versions in this thread though. All I am saying is that jobs and their execution mid-combat in this game are way more complicated than people give them credit. If the game has become boring for you it's because you no-lifed it like crazy or have played for many many years.

I can beat the final boss of elden ring dlc while falling asleep at this point, I've done it hitless several times on the highest ng+ cycle without using a broken build. Do I think the game is easy because I have come close to mastery of the combat? No, it's extremely complex. That's just what it means to be a practiced human.

You wrote that they were complicated. I am not saying that they're easy or difficult (I'm leaving that for individual appreciations), I am saying that it feels weird to read this when I come from a background where they used to be more involved. I am sorry if I made it sound like "you should git gud" or whatever it may have sounded like. The game has not become easier, in fact, since the difficulty has merely shifted more onto encounters.

In fact it is funny you saying the game has become boring to me, because while it certainly has become boring to me, it's for wildly different reasons mainly related to taste. If anything, the game has become easier and harder at the same time for me: easier, because it's very formulaic and we've been dealing with the same legos for encounters for years and it makes it easier to learn when you've seen this since forever, and harder, because it's focusing increasingly into memory games, execution, DDR, and fast visual puzzles more than ever, and I kinda suck at those. My mind just glosses over it because I don't like it.

[HikariKurosawa]

Holy yappamoly.

All those words just to say nothing.

[fulminating]

Monk’s one hour is 100 fists, 45s of haste. Greased lightning is built up through hitting the enemy, making yourself faster and stronger with each cycle through your stances. Monk’s animations typically* have multiple impacts, bootshine and six sided star having 3 apiece, combo, howling fists, raging fists, asuran fists, tornado kick, shijin spiral, stringing pummel, maru kalu and dragon blow all hit 2-8 times.

Summoner is just a complete mess without elemental interaction. Likely even a step down from egi smn. Nothing has a niche anymore**, carby only has token commands. It’s barely even a mage.

Speaking of messes, adding a faerie to scholar has severely confused its identity from the established one in other ff games. Nice that they tried something even if it dates from a time when they thought they’d be doing pets.

* I don’t know about the weird new animations, I’ve been trying to pretend they don’t exist.
** admittedly the niches of single target, tanking twoish and aoe didn’t exactly encourage varied use, but neither does casting them all in order.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

I think summoner being reworked was actually a good thing. I wasn't around for the summoner before rework but I've watched videos on its gameplay and it was not what I would call a final fantasy summoner. What we have now is iconic and clearly a summoner.

What I hope they do, is make something like green mage that brings back the dot based gameplay for people who enjoy managing dots. Managing dots is not the identity of a final fantasy summoner though, and the game desperately needed something that was more approachable.

I agree with you though, they should be extremely careful about changing existing jobs. It's better to implement new jobs for new ideas rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater just to appease people who are unhappy with what currently exists.

The rework may be a good thing but the way they did the rework wasn't. They reworked smn and have it fit the "ff summoner" idea ppl had sure but that is all they did to the job, There is nothing interesting about smn other than "press button, see light show happen.' Its rotation is the easiest and most boring one in the game and it as has the depth of a kiddy pool. Sure ppl like you may be happy with it being that way but my point was is that it cost players like myself a job. I went a whole expac with nothing I really liked playing bc the devs decided to delete the one I loved. I went to rpr to raid in 6.0 but I didn't LOVE rpr, it was ok job, and had some fun with but not the same fun I had with SB and ShB smn. That was my baby, that was the job I spent years mastering and getting good at and now its gone just so ppl could have their pretty little lights and they summons that don't do anything but jump on screen for few secs to do an animation and leave. They even made carbuce useless and I never forgive them to making my lil guy a minion.

[Carighan]

The rework may be a good thing but the way they did the rework wasn't. They reworked smn and have it fit the "ff summoner" idea ppl had sure but that is all they did to the job, There is nothing interesting about smn other than "press button, see light show happen.' Its rotation is the easiest and most boring one in the game and it as has the depth of a kiddy pool. Sure ppl like you may be happy with it being that way but my point was is that it cost players like myself a job. I went a whole expac with nothing I really liked playing bc the devs decided to delete the one I loved. I went to rpr to raid in 6.0 but I didn't LOVE rpr, it was ok job, and had some fun with but not the same fun I had with SB and ShB smn. That was my baby, that was the job I spent years mastering and getting good at and now its gone just so ppl could have their pretty little lights and they summons that don't do anything but jump on screen for few secs to do an animation and leave. They even made carbuce useless and I never forgive them to making my lil guy a minion.

Yeah although it's conceptually so close to working well mechanically. We got a bunch of buttons each minor summon can override, they just need to not be different variants of "just nuke", rather I'd sort them as:

* One is slow casts (3.0s-3.5s) with high damage (the only one that keeps the DPS level of the major summons).
* One is all instant casts but low damage, this summon emphasizes mobility.
* One is fast (1.5s) casts but medium damage, this one always has some form of utility.

Then have at least two summons per "slot" and make them work differently mechanically albeit sharing the role. Maybe Leviation instead of Ifrit always has line AoEs (and hence no separate AoE button), etc. Then a few seconds before the major summon ends the minor summons "fill up", and you can see the selection you randomly get. As each one works differently mechanically but shares the role, you got an assured combat performance, but not an assured combat gameplay. You got to react to that.

And this'd all be done with +3 summons (something everyone wants anyways) and a bunch of ability swaps and potency changes, no major reimplementation. Oh and removal of fake sword bahamut, because it should have never existed in the first place.

[Valence]

Holy yappamoly.

All those words just to say nothing.

Did it make you angry? You asked a question, I replied. Sorry if you didn't like it.

[HikariKurosawa]

Did it make you angry? You asked a question, I replied. Sorry if you didn't like it.

Wasn't replying to you.

I will though, rotation based difficulty is just worse than encounter based difficulty. If the main form of difficulty is in rotations, then content becomes boring and stale permanently after you grind the training dummy enough and make your rotation muscle memory. Because once your rotation is muscle memory, doesn't matter how complex it is, you're not having to think about it at all. The content is still going to be balanced around the complexity of the rotations though.

When difficulty is primarily from encounters, it only becomes boring or stale after you have grinded the content enough. By that time there is either new content, or you are playing a new game while waiting for new content because you no-lifed the game too hard.

So yes, the game has become harder where it counts, and easier where it should be easier. They couldn't make encounters engaging enough with old job design.