Job Complexity and Difficulty

[Quuoooote]

Hi. For those who don't know me, I'm Quote, and I am a huge proponent of increased job complexity in Final Fantasy XIV. In the wake of Forked Tower's release and the discussion surrounding its difficulty and player disappointment, I've had a few thoughts that I wanted to share about it. I know I'm a little bit late to the party, but I'll have to settle for that since I lost forum access due to being unsubbed. Better late than never, right?

To preface, I think it's important to establish exactly why job complexity is so important. I've made a few posts (links here!) on the topic before, if you care to read them, but the general tl;dr gist is this: Jobs having greater depth like they did in HW or SB-era XIV provides a lot more longevity for both general casual gameplay and for raiders. In the former case, individual jobs will take much more time to fully optimize and master, creating both skill progression and extrinsic motivation to keep playing for however many hours mastery takes. In the latter case, raids will be more evergreen when greater gameplay variance exists between different jobs and greater room for self-improvement exists on individual jobs. If this quick explanation leaves you unsatisfied, I encourage you to read each of the posts linked at the beginning of this paragraph for more detailed write-ups that might do a better job at convincing you.

Okay, so what does this have to do with difficulty? And more specifically, Forked Tower? Well, the developers have gone on record before stating that job complexity and mechanical difficulty are supposed to correlate: if overall difficulty is a balance between the two, then the easier jobs become, the harder raids will need to become to compensate. I think this has affected the game more than people realize, and will continue to do so until jobs are fundamentally changed to make the balance between the two more even again. If a given piece of content is 'easy' and jobs are also easy, then it makes the content unfulfilling. Dungeons make a solid example, because most people probably find them highly uninteresting and boring (if you like them or find them hard, then that's great!). More importantly, however, if the developers are operating with this dynamic in mind, then it explains why content releases feel 'unbalanced' and lopsided towards high-end raiders. Anything created with the intention of being 'easy' has an inherently short shelf life because simple jobs can't create meaningful or interesting ways to interact with the content in question, and that in turn likely causes the developers to gravitate towards producing higher end content that has greater longevity.

In other words, the whole 'casual vs. hardcore' argument isn't as simple as the developers catering to one demographic over the other; it's just the natural byproduct of unengaging jobs that content will naturally shift 'up' in difficulty to compensate. To me, Occult Crescent is the worst of both worlds because the casual overworld grinding is much too tedious and boring due to individual job gameplay being weak, but the endgame Forked Tower content is also too 'hardcore' and asks too much in requiring external organization to even access reliably — the balance of job complexity and difficulty is completely off. One end is dull, and the other is inaccessible.

How do we fix the problem? Reintroduce greater job complexity, and finding the middle ground becomes much easier. Casual or 'easy' content will become much more tolerable for advanced players if they have a lot of spinning plates or job mechanics to engage with to distract them from simple mechanics, and raids can also shift away from the "DDR" approach that many seem to dislike because more focus can be placed on managing job mechanics instead of fast-paced 'dance' movements. If you like Eureka's Logograms or Bozja's Lost Actions over OC's Phantom Job system, then you can extrapolate that thinking to how FFXIV's jobs function and hopefully appreciate how greater depth makes for a much more entertaining and dynamic gameplay experience. 'Hard' jobs is not the end goal. Engaging jobs, though, open up the design space a lot.

If this resonates with you at all, please consider making your voice heard for the promised 8.0 job revamp by asking for greater depth in our gameplay while you have the chance.

[Supersnow845]

I’ve been harping on for years that with completely neutered job kits that difficulty becomes a “exactly fit the narrow range of encounter difficulty this was balanced around or suffer” and that leads to everyone feeling like they have less content

So yes +1 from me, the jobs should be the sliding scale of difficulty by which you interact with the game.

[Shurrikhan]

So yes +1 from me, the jobs should be the sliding scale of difficulty by which you interact with the game.

How so? And what should that then mean for encounter difficulty?

What's the sweet spot for each, and how much should the two interact?

If we consider 'Optimal Gameplay' with these Potency values as '100%', 'Optimal Dawntrail SCH' would be about 99%, and 'These Potency values, but you only press Broil and ignore the DOTs entirely' would be about 98% effectiveness. Every DPS check would be clearable with these hypothetical values, without touching a single DOT. Optimizers would still want to use the DOTs, because their goal is to deal as much damage as possible.

This would be the equivalent of a player splitting their filler into 3 buttons and hitting them in order, screaming internally if they ever skip ahead or repeat... as an equally pure nothingburger option. You will never be able to see a <2% gap over crit variance. You will never wipe to enrage over even 5% of healer damage. Filler-only doing some 85% of optimal striking dummy dps is plenty.

Hell, the more potential is wrapped into non-filler damage, the less healer output needs to scale linearly with uptime and therefore the less GCD healing costs the party its total damage (via healer), which is by far the larger complicating factor in healer DPS and probably the least enjoyed ("As a healer, you should [GCD] as little as possible [mostly by scheduling everything party wide and relying on tank AoE heals and DPS debuffs as much as possible]") aspect of it.

[Heavensward] Rotations were hard for new players to understand and rarely executed correctly, leading to a fraction of the damage they should be dealing on certain jobs. The jobs just weren't intuitive at all and had no tutorial, and the game is often played by partners of gamers who aren't that great at gaming.

They were neither hard nor unintuitive outside of simply and solely BotD and Enochian. Maintained, though, very little has changed rotationally for most jobs outside of certain enjoyable flukes that came up well after HW (4.3 TK Monk, non-standard lines EW BLM). Since HW, DRG for instance has been "apply buffs, do direct damage; repeat". The only rotational change has been that we went from 122223333 to 1111122222. Yes, we can now preposition for our first dragon skill per combo (and, as of DT, no longer have to position at all for the second), but the core is identical.

Make every ability useful and have purpose. And don't add damage to utility, otherwise we won't use it as utility ie. gap closers.

Food for thought:

I get what you're saying here, but it's mostly a matter of how one approaches value-norming (essentially, equality vs. equity).

Unless you make every fight cost melee the same amount of uptime if not for their gap-closers, those gapclosers will vary immensely in value. This matters, especially if you're looking at casters, rangers, and melee each having a different base and having to adapt to their circumstance (wherein anything that helps them do so is additive) rather than looking to have every job necessarily arrive at the same damage and then allowing each job a way to bypass what would otherwise cause any variance.

When looking at the gap-closer as a helpful tool offered to a job as comparable to what others get (so, from an "equality" mindset) rather than merely a way to remove any possible variance from melee relative to, say, physical ranged without restriction by proximity or cast-times (per "equity"), all XIV utility then exists ultimately for damage, because all XIV fights end from damage. If it does not make the fight end sooner, it has no utility, because it literally makes no difference / has no value. And allowing the tool to have some damage, then, gives it fall-back value so that it doesn't vary so immensely (say, some 8 GCDs of damage saved for ~3500 potency in value between uptime and reduced drift... to some pitiful 400 potency in value... if gap-closing is all it can accomplish).

If looking at utility as just a way to ensure equity no matter the circumstances of the fight, then either (A) the needs of the most mobility-intensive fights will glut your means of uptime for all others, devaluing any other tricks you may have in all but those fights, or (B) you're going to have to design fights around the frequency and charge counts of those tools, constraining variance in fight design.

(Yes, I realize that if people throw a fit over some 2% variance in a given tier, you're only ever going to be able to design per equity anyways; it's just food for thought.)

Make MP more likely to run out again, such as by having ability heals consume MP. Speaking of which, make healers actually have to heal in the first place which has eroded in higher level dungeons. All this will lend itself to bringing MP share abilities like Mana Shift and Bard's MP regen back.

Why, though? Like... why do we necessarily want our ability to even press our buttons to the extent we normally could before (still locked by CDs or at cost of offensive uptime anyways) to depend on both a composition check (is there a Ranger in our party) and competence check (is that Ranger aware/alive/not_griefing)?

I could see the logic behind this if it weren't purely a starvation mechanic, but the more we standardize MP usage, the more it goes from a shared CD system that allows for varied recharge times to "put in another quarter to continue playing", so I'm not sure I want much more to be placed on MP until such time as low MP can at least turn into something softer than "you literally can't use spells/skills" (e.g., both costs and potencies are scaled with %MP, so you lose up to 50% potency on one end but MP costs then fall so low that you're still MP-positive).

Having Skill Trees will help story-only players, non-gamer partners and journalists to play by having the default Skill Tree build be really easy and hard to get wrong, while others can be more sophisticated with greater control of party utility, buffs, debuffs or a bit higher damage potential.

Not sure what your vision of this is here. Like, would this cut down the number of actions in some way, or offer simplified versions? Otherwise, this sounds additive, and therefore only a way to, well, add further complexity, which wouldn't help anyone who's already struggling...

On that note, though, one thing I kind of wish the game had would just be like... easy hotbar setups/layouts to try out based on a given button arrangement. Something algorithmic such that if I like using 1, 2, 3, 4, R, F, C, V, B, T, G, Y; Alt-1, -2, -3, -4, -Q, -E, -R, -T; Shift-1, -2, -3, -4, -R, -F, -T, -G, -Y; Ctrl-Z, -X, -C, -V, -B... the game might suggest sets of skills to be arranged into those sets of keys (by contiguity).

To start with a simple example, let's say I'm a fresh player with the default keybinds of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, -, =.

I'm a Gladiator, so I start with Playguide on 9, Teleport on 0, Return on -, and Sprint on =. Fast Blade goes on 1, and as I level, Fight or Flight goes on 2, Riot Blade on 3, Total Eclipse on 4, Rampart on 5, Shield Bash on 6, Iron Will on 7, Low Blow on 8, and Lob on... Ctrl-1. To say the least, that's... kind of awful. All the more so when I end up with Provoke on Ctrl-2, Interject on Ctrl-3, Rage of Halone on Ctrl-4, etc., for a default combo of 1-3-c4.

What if, instead, upon acquiring Riot Blade, the game would make better and job-specific use of Active Help (as you suggested) to show that Riot Blade and Fast Blade are linked, and so one might want to place them together, across 1-2 or 2-3 or 1-s1? When acquiring Iron Will, it'd note that the action rarely ever needs to be used and might therefore suggest placing it further towards the edge, leaving room for other actions. And when acquiring Rage of Halone, again, it would note that it, Fast Blade, and Riot Blade are connected, suggesting a position for that.

Heck, let players sort choose among different recommended keybind layouts and import a recommended job hotbar layout for it, with mouseover on the not-yet-acquired skills making providing a simplified usage-centric explanation of the skill and making very obvious when you'll acquire it.

[ForsakenRoe]

I have also made posts saying similar for the past who-knows-how-long. The idea of moving complexity out of the Jobs, and into Encounter Design, is self-defeating in its supposed purposes. If it were a decision made 'to make it less burdensome on less skilled players to perform', then SE has accidentally made the situation for said players infinitely worse.

Take the first 24man of the supposed behemoth of complexity, Heavensward: Void Ark. And the recent 24man of DT, Jeuno. In Void Ark, the last boss is Echidna, whose most threatening mechanics are 'don't look at the boss' and 'take the adds far apart'. Contrast this with Jeuno's final boss, Shadowlord, where he does 3 Cleaves (which you have to remember the directions of), 2 Cleaves from an add (which start telegraphing while the main boss is still doing HIS cleaves), a halfroom cleave, and then another halfroom cleave from an add, all of which execute over the course of about 10 seconds. If a player was struggling in Void Ark, they could drop aspects of their Job kit until they felt like they were not 'drowning' any longer. I main Healer, so my immediate example would be that they would think 'don't use Cleric Stance, don't use DOTs, just focus on healing people'. Now, in Jeuno, a player is not able to drop aspects of their Job kit to focus on Mechanics as effectively, because A: there's less Job Kit to drop in the first place (previously we had 2 DOTs, now we have 1, for example) and B: The Encounter's Mechanics are so much more oppressive to a less skilled player, and you cannot opt out of the Mechanics.

Furthermore, if a struggling player DOES die to the mechanics that they cannot opt out of, they're branded with the Mark Of Shame (and 25% less stats). As a Healer main, I've seen for months, this idea that 'oh if Jobs are more complex, people will get called out for not being optimal'. That if we gave SCH Miasma back as a second DOT, toxic elitists would pipe up in party chat about 'where is your DOT, I don't see it on the boss, ur so bad'. It's a nonsense and it needs to be put to rest

Besides that, we've now seen what I would consider to be the logical conclusion of following 'move Job Complexity into Encounters, and make Encounter design more interesting': The Omega Protocol. Every possible position, can be assigned to any of the 8 players in the fight, and so the player (individual) has to remember 8 distinct positions/movements, based on the situation (for example, how many Dynamis stacks they have, how many their party members have, who's got Near/Distant World and will be increasing by 1, etc). By comparison, let's look at something from Stormblood, that had 8 distinct 'positions': Heavensfall Trio. I can go into that mechanic and know 'I am H2, so my tower is 'second clockwise from Nael'', and it's that one every time. Imagine if Heavensfall Towers were all colour coded, and you had to match a debuff to the tower you're taking, such that 'your tower' might be any of the 8.

Instead, we can look at Stormblood raiding, and see that even when the fights were kinda mid (cough O6S), we didn't have complaining about the game to the extent we're seeing now. And I would posit that the reason for this, is that the Jobs themselves felt like they had meat on the bone. Sure, Chardarnook was a nothingburger of a fight, even in Savage. Alte Roite was cleared in Savage on the first pull by at least one group. But the WHMs had Aero3, and the SCHs had Miasma, Miasma2, Shadowflare, and the ASTs had unpredictability in their cards (seriously, whoever heard of a Tarot reading where the fortuneteller knew which cards are going to be drawn ahead of time?). PLDs, WARs and DRKs all felt like they had something different in their kit that set them apart from the others, with DRK being about extending their Blood Weapon Haste buff, PLD having a 100% uptime DOT in Goring Blade, and WAR being 'the 2min Meta before it was cool' back in 4.1 (ironically, despite my dislike of the 2min meta now, 4.1 was my favourite version of WAR). Now, all four Tanks have the 'press button A, which lets you press big burst 3 times in a row' design so they feel more samey than ever

The solution, in my mind, is pretty obvious/simple. We have this system in the game, called 'Potencies'. Each action deals a set amount of effectiveness, and 'Potencies' are a way of conveying that to the player. All that needs to be done, to have a high skill ceiling and simultaneously, a low skill floor, is to tune the Potencies of actions, such that the optimal output of a Job and the 'baseline' are relatively close. Here's an example for SCH that I use:

Broil: 340p
Biolysis: 20p instant damage, 35p per tick, 30s (total of 370p)
Miasmalysis: 280p instant damage, 10p per tick, 24s (total of 360p) (replaces Ruin2, Ruin2 moved into the Ruin/Broil progression line)
Shadowflare: AOE, 100p instant damage, 50p per tick, 15s (total of 350p) (drops a puddle centered on target)

If we consider 'Optimal Gameplay' with these Potency values as '100%', 'Optimal Dawntrail SCH' would be about 99%, and 'These Potency values, but you only press Broil and ignore the DOTs entirely' would be about 98% effectiveness. Every DPS check would be clearable with these hypothetical values, without touching a single DOT. Optimizers would still want to use the DOTs, because their goal is to deal as much damage as possible.

As an example I know better than others (due to my familiarity with the role), we could have the following damage profiles for Healers:

WHM: Bursty, mostly direct damage, quite simple/intuitive DPS kit, 'refund' systems allow it to stockpile damage to unleash in the burst window
SCH: DOT management, snapshotting Crit buff to amplify the DOTs, spread them in AOE situations with Bane (upgrade to Energy Drain)
AST: Very 'raid DPS' focused, stronger buffs to give to allies compared to current DT AST. Bring back Royal Road, and rework the AOE effect into something that doesn't break the game. Also, bring back Nocturnal Sect
SGE: Fast paced, lots of OGCD weaving, make it the 'GNB' of the Healers. Howling Blade is fast, let me be as fast as him, if not faster. Rework Kardia into a more prominent method to deliver your healing

As a Healer main with too much time on my hands, I've previously written design sheets of what I'd do to each the Healers. If I were a <other role> main, I'd have done the same for them too (because I'm like that). I wrote these, not because I expect SE to do exactly as I ask (though it would be nice NGL), but to show that what we have, is not the only way to implement the Jobs. We CAN have more depth than a puddle for our Jobs, and still have them functional within the current Raid design. In fact, despite writing these ideas a couple months before DT came out, I would argue that these designs would fit better with 7.2's raids, than the 7.2 Jobs themselves do

So please, SE, change course and focus less on Encounter Design being the whole ballgame of 'what is fun about FFXIV', and move some focus back into how our Jobs interact with that Encounter Design. Stormblood was where some of the biggest pain points were addressed (cough Cleric Stance), but still before the great Shadowbringers prune. I would suggest starting there, at Stormblood's Job design, and building upon that. It's what I did for the designs I linked above


TLDR, +1

[Jeeqbit]

I agree that jobs should be interesting and be able to interact with eachother, because if your job can uniquely influence the party and you can only choose one of multiple abilities to use, then it makes the overall battle different each time.

What used to be a lot of fun, for example, was how Bards could increase MP of the party, and this allowed Paladins to spam Holy Spirit (which they quickly nerfed). Mana Shift was used frequently to help rezzers, because MP actually mattered more due to having less off-global heals.

However, I don't think just replicating Heavensward is the way to go. There were genuine problems then that they were trying to improve with the changes they made:

• A lot of abilities were bloat or such rarely used attacks that it was pointless.
• A lot of abilities were flat out unused, pointless or sub-optimal.
• A lot of stats were pointless or annoying, such as Parry (RNG physical mit that didn't consistently help with the primary tank threat of tank busters), Accuracy (effectively gatekeeping raids too much because you'd miss attacks if you did it wrong), Elemental defenses (since each enemy uses different elements for each attack, it would be pointless and not realistic to switch for each boss).
• Rotations were hard for new players to understand and rarely executed correctly, leading to a fraction of the damage they should be dealing on certain jobs. The jobs just weren't intuitive at all and had no tutorial, and the game is often played by partners of gamers who aren't that great at gaming.
• Status effects are something MMO players are used to, but many join FFXIV as their first MMORPG, so changing that to Job Gauges made sense but it also trivialized things a bit by making them feel more similar (get gauge to 100, spend) and usually having no time limit.

So rather than just copying Heavensward, things like this would need to actually be implemented better overall, such as:

• Make every ability useful and have purpose. And don't add damage to utility, otherwise we won't use it as utility ie. gap closers. They currently have purpose, but that purpose is mostly damage now, or not very unique.
• Keep Tenacity as a sub-optimal damage stat but make tanks want to consider it more by having very hard-hitting auto-attacks.
• Add elemental stats again and make them useful by having players cast an elemental buff on the party. For example, if a dragon is going to cast fire attacks, a Black Mage could cast fire resistance on the party. White Mages could cast earth offense on the party if an enemy is weak to earth, or wind defense on the party to protect from Wind Sprites. And if the party doesn't do these things, incoming damage should be extremely high and outgoing damage should be extremely low. A lazier way that they've already done could just be an elemental wheel, but it means no party interaction which is what we need more of.
• Make MP more likely to run out again, such as by having ability heals consume MP. Speaking of which, make healers actually have to heal in the first place which has eroded in higher level dungeons. All this will lend itself to bringing MP share abilities like Mana Shift and Bard's MP regen back.
• Having Skill Trees will help story-only players, non-gamer partners and journalists to play by having the default Skill Tree build be really easy and hard to get wrong, while others can be more sophisticated with greater control of party utility, buffs, debuffs or a bit higher damage potential.
• Tutorials on the first use of each action or scenario. FF16 does this so they know how to do it. FF14 actually does it with Active Help, but it's not job-specific.

[MetaBoi]

As a Healer main with too much time on my hands, I've previously written design sheets of what I'd do to each the Healers.

Even though I don't agree with everything there (mostly nitpicks and liking a different design philosophy) I love how you did it and I wholeheartedly agree on your approach to optimizing a job. For anyone reading this, read that forum post.

Make MP more likely to run out again, such as by having ability heals consume MP. Speaking of which, make healers actually have to heal in the first place which has eroded in higher level dungeons. All this will lend itself to bringing MP share abilities like Mana Shift and Bard's MP regen back.

I agree with this as well. Having MP as a resource which all jobs can interact with allows for MP Restoration to be added as a utility. Which can be a way that certain jobs "buff" others and might even create soft synergies between jobs. Maybe a job consumes their MP continuously so they might synergize well with a job that recovers MP continuously etc.

I can only give my +1 here however I didn't play in StB (Started late ShB) so I can't really comment about past versions of the jobs.

[Aidorouge]

Unfortunately, until encounter design changes from being "tee hee everything is Savage now" jobs will continue to be homogenized.

Double unfortunately, hardcore players will throw an ABSOLUTE FIT if you dare suggest that encounters become easier in any way so the scale can shift back to jobs being complex instead. They want jobs AND fights to be ball-busters, and will never accept one or the other being "brain dead" because how dare casuals be allowed anything. It's why you don't see many of them actually complaining about the current state of things, because it's "filtering as intended" for those they deem lesser, while they get to engorge themselves on content only they can beat.

And yet when job changes happen again right before the promised Ultimate drops, it'll be casual players being blamed for the changes despite how few of them are even still playing, go figure.

[Valence]

I'll continue to fight for this until I'm in the grave.

We also need more rng jobs for rng enjoyers.

We could also envision a post expansion job progression, where job's progress and learning isn't just stunted for 2+ years because of a stale cap that is reached when finishing the vanilla story. Even if it was barely scratching the surface, for example pre SHB Bard continued progressing in endgame due to the crit stat constantly ramping up as itemization went up, generating more and more procs comparatively.

[Kohashi]

How do we fix the problem? Reintroduce greater job complexity, and finding the middle ground becomes much easier. Casual or 'easy' content will become much more tolerable for advanced players if they have a lot of spinning plates or job mechanics to engage with to distract them from simple mechanics, and raids can also shift away from the "DDR" approach that many seem to dislike because more focus can be placed on managing job mechanics instead of fast-paced 'dance' movements. If you like Eureka's Logograms or Bozja's Lost Actions over OC's Phantom Job system, then you can extrapolate that thinking to how FFXIV's jobs function and hopefully appreciate how greater depth makes for a much more entertaining and dynamic gameplay experience. 'Hard' jobs is not the end goal. Engaging jobs, though, open up the design space a lot.

If this resonates with you at all, please consider making your voice heard for the promised 8.0 job revamp by asking for greater depth in our gameplay while you have the chance.

How about people complaining they get bored in dungeons, actually are trying their hand at doing Ex, Savage, and Ults?

Most here are full of excuses and 0 valid reasons not to try those pieces of content. If they have time to sit in the forums and spam 4k comments, then they have time to clear an Ultimate as well. Imagine playing the game for 11 years and only touching normal dungeons and alliance raids.. like HOW the F???? Especially when there are a LOT of ways to find people that have the same vibe as you + share the same interests + goals.

As for the revamp people are looking for, let me say this: it's not coming. It makes 0 financial sense, + it would mean they need to rework not just jobs, but also how it interacts with every piece of battle content.
Looking at how much they are actually investing back into the game and how much effort they are dedicating, the answer is very obvious.

[Valence]

Just play ultimate if you think healing is boring bro. Where have I heard this again