Job Complexity and Difficulty

[ForsakenRoe]

I was doing the first Variant Dungeon 6 times for the Mog Tome event. On one of the runs, iirc the 5th, I got matched with a player who was on Dancer, but used exactly ZERO Dances. No Standard Steps, no Technical Steps. Despite this 'very clearly not optimal' gameplay from the Dancer, nobody mentioned it in party chat, no vote kick was initiated, etc. Because either people didn't notice, didn't care, or in my case, did notice and found it more entertaining than the content itself.

Like, if the jobs are more simple nowadays to help players reach a higher baseline performance/output, what's the explanation for the existence of players who don't interact with such core parts of the Job's kit, that it's in the name of the Job?


If SE balances potencies sensibly, you can reduce the amount of damage a player 'loses' by playing 'suboptimally'. Looking again at the SCH example I gave on page 1:

Broil: 340p
Biolysis: 370p
Miasmalysis: 360p
Shadowflare: 350p

If someone were to ignore all of the DOTs entirely, and just spam Broil, yes, their damage would be lower than someone who does make perfect use of all three DOTs. What would the difference between the two players be?

560p per two minute loop. They would lose less than 2 Broils worth of damage, per 2 minutes. For comparison, Savage DPS checks are built with some leniency in mind to allow Healers to GCD heal in early progression. My Week 1 Clear of M8S, I had like 46 GCD heals over the 14min fight duration, which averages out as about 6.5 GCDs lost per 2min (and that doesn't factor in that part of that duration was cutscene, so the actual 'Lost-GCD' count would be even higher). We still cleared the fight, and that's when gear was at its tightest, due to being Week 1. For comparison, the difference between a NIN's Hyosho Ranryu (or any other 4-digit Potency action, and boy do we have a lot of those nowadays) getting a Direct Crit, and being a standard hit, is MORE than that entire 2 minutes of 'lost damage'.

But the point of these numbers is not the DPS checks. The point is, if the damage lost from playing suboptimally (in this case, ignoring DOTs entirely) is made to be so low via potency balancing, it reduces the chance that toxic elitists will try to be toxic about lost damage, because A: it makes it more likely that they will cause just as much lost damage by trying to type angrily in party chat and flubbing their own rotation, and B: it makes them look even more cringe when they bitch about how the SCH is costing the party a whole 20 potency by casting a Broil instead of refreshing Miasma. And with the damage 'loss' being so low, who on earth would decide to run the risk of a GM talk/warning/strike on their account, when the time lost due to the suboptimal play is such a small amount?

[Nero-Voidstails]

as long as DPS is king and people just think about themself nothing will change jobs are so easy it doesn't take skills to play them anymore. healer have suffer so much that playing with a healer is more damaging then helping. the devs need to fix many thing yet they will focus on making thing easier or change nothing. at this rate most healer main will leave the game for a other MMO maybe wow guilds war even 11

[MartinFreeman]

Just do it how WOW does it. More customization options, different specs, and get rid of that shitty 2.5 gcd meta. And get rid of each class only being able to do fun stuff every two minutes.

[CidHeiral]

Just do it how WOW does it.

No thanks. WoW talents are almost entirely flat stat bonuses, cooldown/cost reductions, or isolated new buttons like "X does some damage and a stun." Even the new "Hero Trees" are mostly just "you do more damage." Talents can't make deep and interconnected changes to the class because the devs for the most part don't know which ones you'll have.

I can only speak for myself but when I'm asking for job complexity back I'm not asking for a pile of new buttons that have nothing to do with each other. I'm asking for the satisfying depth and interplay within the kits to return. That's one of the things that drew me to this game from WoW to begin with. DRG for example felt very interconnected in EW and now it feels like you're just rolling your face on your keyboard hitting a bunch of random unrelated crap. Adding even more of that through talents doesn't solve the problem.

And get rid of each class only being able to do fun stuff every two minutes.

This part however is 100% correct. The two minute meta sucks.

[MartinFreeman]

No thanks. WoW talents are almost entirely flat stat bonuses, cooldown/cost reductions, or isolated new buttons like "X does some damage and a stun." Even the new "Hero Trees" are mostly just "you do more damage." Talents can't make deep and interconnected changes to the class because the devs for the most part don't know which ones you'll have.

I can only speak for myself but when I'm asking for job complexity back I'm not asking for a pile of new buttons that have nothing to do with each other. I'm asking for the satisfying depth and interplay within the kits to return. That's one of the things that drew me to this game from WoW to begin with. DRG for example felt very interconnected in EW and now it feels like you're just rolling your face on your keyboard hitting a bunch of random unrelated crap. Adding even more of that through talents doesn't solve the problem.




This part however is 100% correct. The two minute meta sucks.

I don't consider Shadowlands, Dragonflight, or World Within as good systems. I prefer more of the talents from Cataclysm or before. Although there is some merit in Legion's, too.

[Shurrikhan]

No thanks. WoW talents are almost entirely flat stat bonuses, cooldown/cost reductions, or isolated new buttons like "X does some damage and a stun."

Too many of TWW's Talents? Yes. Most? Not at all.

DRG for example felt very interconnected in EW and now it feels like you're just rolling your face on your keyboard hitting a bunch of random unrelated crap.

Hot take, but...
Very little changed in the depth of the job; virtually only the skill floor was affected. Current DRG is effectively just EW DRG but with full Eyes upon entering combat and your Gier/Nost damage dealt over 2 casts per minute instead of 5. Though more punishing for not using your CDs more or less on-CD, it didn't actually offer any additional agency from that. You use High Jump as before. You use Mirage Dive as before. You use Geirskogul as before. Because there wasn't actual choice to be made between generating Eyes and dealing more immediate damage or anything else.

EW DRG didn't invite any sort of compromises the likes of what HW BotD could have given between F&C/WT access vs. more oGCD AoEs per GCD speed, downtime, and target-count before your next BotD CD. We just cycled our CDs, just as we do now, and just as we'd do even if we started with full scales, simply making sure to hit WWT within the first 5 GCDs.

I don't consider Shadowlands, Dragonflight, or World Within as good systems. I prefer more of the talents from Cataclysm or before. Although there is some merit in Legion's, too.

Cata and earlier talents, though, really were mostly stat-sticks. The current talent trees definitely give a hell of a lot more customization than WotLK's did, even if that comes with its own frustrations.

_____________________

That said, despite liking them more than disliking them on WoW, I don't want anything like WoW's talent trees in XIV. They're too much expense for too little punch, and there's no room to leverage that customization in our battle content anyways, so I'd rather some more essentialist/minimalist customization be produced hand-in-hand with some shifts in content design (without that simply devolving into build-flopping for different pieces of content). I despise when menuplay displaces actual gameplay.

[CidHeiral]

Too many of TWW's Talents? Yes. Most? Not at all.

You don't have to take my word for it. Anyone can easily see for themselves.

Hot take, but...
Very little changed in the depth of the job; virtually only the skill floor was affected. Current DRG is effectively just EW DRG but with full Eyes upon entering combat and your Gier/Nost damage dealt over 2 casts per minute instead of 5. Though more punishing for not using your CDs more or less on-CD, it didn't actually offer any additional agency from that. You use High Jump as before. You use Mirage Dive as before. You use Geirskogul as before. Because there wasn't actual choice to be made between generating Eyes and dealing more immediate damage or anything else.

EW DRG didn't invite any sort of compromises the likes of what HW BotD could have given between F&C/WT access vs. more oGCD AoEs per GCD speed, downtime, and target-count before your next BotD CD. We just cycled our CDs, just as we do now, and just as we'd do even if we started with full scales, simply making sure to hit WWT within the first 5 GCDs.

This is one of the wildest takes I've ever seen on this forum and that's really saying something.

[Aco505]

Hot take, but...
Very little changed in the depth of the job; virtually only the skill floor was affected. Current DRG is effectively just EW DRG but with full Eyes upon entering combat and your Gier/Nost damage dealt over 2 casts per minute instead of 5. Though more punishing for not using your CDs more or less on-CD, it didn't actually offer any additional agency from that. You use High Jump as before. You use Mirage Dive as before. You use Geirskogul as before. Because there wasn't actual choice to be made between generating Eyes and dealing more immediate damage or anything else.

The ceiling was affected too, especially on Ultimates although not exclusively. You cannot choose to do a double or early LotD if you need to due to the fight's timeline or the target dying soon. High Jump and Mirage Dive are not used like before, since they're just damage now and not gauge generators. This also has the effect of making the full kit feel disconnected since actions only deal damage and have no link between each other.

The current iteration is actually less punishing since you can delay your damage oGCDs as much as you can as long as they're still inside your buffs, which you can also delay and be alright unless the kill time severely cuts the burst window, and your burst is always given; there's no preparation or gauge stacking required besides WWT. This also has the effect of making deaths way less punishing than before.

Whatever optimization and ceiling left for the job is minimal (mostly reduced to MD/ePT and to a lesser extent WWT and LS) if we compare it to EW.

[Pip_Chick]

We need the jobs to be easy to start, but difficult to master. The jobs have to be fun and bring something to the table, regardless of the level of difficulty the content has. So, not just Ultimates are allowed to be "Fun".
We need the Trinity to be resurrected. Tanks need to tank, Healers need to heal, and DPS need to DPS. The game needs to be more than an easy-to-plan Dance Dance Revolution-type of content.
We need more interesting ways we approach content. Like Blue Mage, Summoner and Dark Knight were in FFXI, where you needed to go out into the world and interact with other aspects of the game. Granted, they don't need to be as annoying as killing 100 mobs with a, what was it, level 1 sword? But something like BLU getting their spells from overworld mobs, then going into dungeons and having fun with content.
We need more RPG elements to interact with the world.
For example, the overworld mobs are cool, but what if you could just go to a map, and during a full moon, you could fall into a solo dungeon? This could incentivise exploration. What if certain Jobs could find these dungeons easier? Something like the zone itself would be easier to navigate and find these secrets if you are a particular Job. Like in Garlemald, an RPR would have a better time exploring, while in Doma, a NIN would have the advantage.
What if doing certain EX trials would give SMNs a catalogue of Eikons to choose from, having them be reskins of the usual 3, but with different-looking spells (even if they function the same)? Like, imagine instead of Garuda, I can summon Ravana and have Ravana-themed spells?

The jobs also need to be more fun to play, specifically, play into their fantasy. We need something more interesting than Blue, Red and Green DPS. A WHM should have abilities derived from the elements, like stoneskin and their PvP ability of turning people into frogs. SCH need more DoTs and play into the tachtician role! Less heals and more shields, Eos should be the pet healing turret. DRK should have more mana and health management playing into the dark/death vigilante, who fights to the end for what is right. etc.

We need to demolish the homogenisation and let the min/maxers cry about it. There should be fights; certain jobs would be worse to play than others. They CAN get away with that, by the virtue of 1 character being able to play every job, one sucks in this content? Try another.
We should have more fun things to do, PvP is right now the place majority of Job fantasy resides, and I don't know how long that will be. Like seriously, let me pull every mob and polymorph it with a WHM! Let me yank mobs with WAR. Let me draw a fat chocobo who is bum-smacking the boss with a Picto. And so far and so on...

Wow, I went on a rant. But seriously, right now, the hardest part of playing any job is the fight to stay awake during content. Also, fix the scale and let us bring all of our new spells into older content. Just recalculate the potencies.

[Mikey_R]

I have been thinking a bit about these 2 posts, since they are the only ones that tried to answer the question of 'complexity' and 'depth'. The links in the quotes below are direct links to the posts I am referencing.

Post here

Post here

I think the main thing that stands out to between the 2 post is that you both seem to have differing ideas about what complexity and depth actually are. With Quuoooote saying mechanical depth is part of complexity and Shurrikhan saying complexity is real decision making, which can be seen as part of the cognitive load, which is described as Depth. Now granted, these are very simplistic oversimplifications to what was said, but that was one of the first things that stuck out at me.

Even looking at the posts deeper Quuoooote describes depth as how different mechanics interact with each other and cause friction, whereas Shurrikhan describes a similar concept, but calls it complexity.

Can you see how these sorts of discussions go nowhere when, even between 2 people, the discussion about what makes a job complex and what adds depth, whilst related, are different.

It also bugs me that a simple, objective description wasn't given. They are either described as 'look here, that is depth' or talking about cognitive load, which is a purely subjective stance. If I find one job easy to play, but someone else really struggles to play it, If I want the job to be more complex/have more depth, that is fine, but the other person says no, it is fine where it is. Both are valid points, but neither are helpful in the discussion as to what makes a job complex/deep.

If you were to ask me, I would answer the following:

Job Depth
The amount of mechanics a job has to juggle.

In the case of Bard, this is keeping track of DoTs, keeping up the song rotation, keeping on top of Repertoire procs, etc. In effect, this is purely a list of the mechanics on the job. If better fight design/job changes also allow it, this could include things like a non rotational gap closer/widener etc.

Job Complexity
This describes how the mechanics listed above interact with each other and fit together.

This is then when you get things like having 2 GCDs fighting for the same spot, so you have to make a decision, or Army's Paeon messing with your GCD speed so that Empyreal Arrow timing gets messed up, this would have been how the DoTs interact with the songs to get Repertoire procs etc. This how they both complement ach other, and create points of friction.

In my opinion, these are much better descriptors as they are objective in their meaning, there is no arguing based on how someone feels about something. However, I think the biggest thing here is that they are easy to understand. If we want to have productive conversations about these sorts of things, we don't want to bog people down with overly complex terminology if we can help it.