Job Complexity and Difficulty

[Mikey_R]

I'm really struggling to put into words my thoughts on this, but the starting point is, what do you mean by complexity? This is going to mean different things to different people and can muddy the water in getting across what you want. You then drop the word 'depth'. Is this the same as complexity? What makes a job deep? etc.

Just looking at the Bard post you made, from the bullet points, had making DoTs/songs 45 seconds really increased complexity/depth as you see it? The choice between Straight Shot/Refulgent was probably Refulgent 90% of the time with that last 10% being when you get close to the end of the Straight Shot buff then double Repertoire stacks is out of your control anyway, so you just deal with what you are dealt. You see, to me, none of that strikes me as 'complexity', it is just you wanting to move through the rotation quicker and press more buttons.

If I were to now say that EW Monk was more complex than HW Monk, how would you react? Whilst EW Monk doesn't have many positionals, Touch of Death or GL upkeep, it does have Masterful Blitz as a system now, which is something HW Monk doesn't have. Also, let's not pretend GL was any show of skill, you didn't need to think about it when you had full uptime and, when you did have to disengage for longer periods of time, it was luck as to whether GL lasted long enough for you to refresh it when you re-engaged, even when taking into account Form Shift. Why do you think they kept adding ways to try and upkeep it every expansion after all.

How about Dragoon? Blood of the Dragon was a punishing mechanic in HW, made easier coming into SB, did that add complexity? Or was it more of a hinderance to the gameplay? How about HW Enochian? Similar concept to Blood of the Dragon, but even more punishing. We know the community at large didn't like these 2 as they were much easier to manage in SB.

I'm hoping this is getting across what I am trying to articulate. Just saying 'complexity' doesn't help. What exactly are you after and what is it specifically about previous jobs that you do like, what about things you didn't like. Talk about what you enjoyed about your job from the past, what you didn't like, what you think could be improved but the important thing is say why you feel the way you do. Going back to your Bard example I am going to talk about the points again.


Straight Shot buff, you said, it is a 30 second crit rate buff, ok. How about coming from the angle of, it is a crit buff that synergises with the core idea behind Bard, that being getting benefits from your Songs via the crits from the DoTs. We have now talked about why you want to keep this buff up beyond just having a buff to upkeep.

30 second DoT duration, which you said required more maintenance. I mean, all you are doing is pressing Iron Jaws every 30 seconds, which aligns with your song windows. Saying more maintenance doesn't really say much either because, at the extreme, pressing it every other GCD is 'more maintenance' by what you have provided. It makes no sense.

30 second song durations, faster cycling. I know where you are coming from, Army's Paeon is an unexciting period and Mage's Ballard and Wanderer's Minuet also do not feel as good without the double repertoire procs I think the question here then does bring out that last bullet point. Would double repertoire procs help in alleviating this boredom from the 45 seconds songs? Would you want songs to be shorter as well? Would you want Army's Paeon to change to have another effect? These are all things that you can talk about when speaking of the feel of the job.

The choice with the Straighter Shot proc. Was it fine as it was, could there be something to make it better? I know many Bards who were annoyed when Straighter Shot didn't proc in the opener, meaning Barrage had to be used on Empyreal Arrow. Is this something you would want addressed? etc.

By properly stating why you liked or disliked certain aspects, it can influence the devs more in the direction you might want jobs to go in, especially if they see people agreeing with your ideas. I have said this several times in the past, but just posting some vague notion of what you want improved, without explaining exactly what the issues are, doesn't help.

[Daralii]

And then of course there's the old nugget of "if one job gets to be hard and another job stays easy, which one gets to be which"? Again I point to healers where a lot of WHM mains DON'T want to be the "derpy one" while SCH, AST, SGE get all the fun new stuff. Nor would I want NIN or RDM to become the "hard" melee DPS and caster thus forcing me to pick up different ones because I can't manage their hypothetical new complexity, but I also know full-well there's people who don't want them becoming any easier than they are because then THEY are out of a job.

NIN and RDM are already the "hard" jobs in their roles because of how low the bar has gotten. Even with changes like Ten Chi Jin having its movement restriction removed, simply needing to remember mudras automatically puts NIN over most of the other melees.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

...Huh, I can't say I ever considered NIN and RDM to be hard to play compared to say...

I guess part of the reason (at least for RDM) is because their difficulty & complexity has not changed by much since their inception whereas the rest of the roster (SMN & BLM) all got bonked by the simplification hammers over and over. Do that enough times, you may even reach to the point where two latter becomes easier than RDM.

It kinda makes me wonder if the reason they change those two were because of the “This is too complex pls make it easier”-complaints whereas jobs like RDM & WHM barely gets anything because then they get ”Well they’re the ‘easy’ jobs so they should not need much.”-perception.

[Supersnow845]

That's the other thing too, one person's complexity is another person's contempt.

I mean, I love ya Valence, but I've seen the things you want to do with MCH and most of it doesn't appeal to me as someone who just wants to pew-pew things, and would rather all that stuff got dumped on BRD instead because I don't play it anyway, lol.

And then of course there's the old nugget of "if one job gets to be hard and another job stays easy, which one gets to be which"? Again I point to healers where a lot of WHM mains DON'T want to be the "derpy one" while SCH, AST, SGE get all the fun new stuff. Nor would I want NIN or RDM to become the "hard" melee DPS and caster thus forcing me to pick up different ones because I can't manage their hypothetical new complexity, but I also know full-well there's people who don't want them becoming any easier than they are because then THEY are out of a job.

So who gets catered to and who gets sent to the unemployment line? And what happens if there's not enough jobs left for someone to enjoy despite there being "so many"? What did all the BLM mains change to when what they wanted doesn't exist in another job for example?

Because people aren’t advocating for pushing up the floors of jobs (which is ironically why old BLM is a BAD example) they are advocating for pushing up the ceilings so every job is accessible but has multiple layers of complexity that you can interact with if you want to but don’t have to (don’t hit me with the “if you can interact with someone you have to, 14 has never had that sort of community enforcement)

Jobs shouldn’t top out at “WHM tops out at dungeon difficulty, SCH tops out at ultimate difficulty”, they should all have avenues of being more complex if you want to engage with the complexity to do more for the party

You should be allowed to be challenged by your job in casual content; not be forced to do hardcore content (which I did and don’t do anymore because I don’t enjoy its modern design) just to not fall asleep at the wheel and if you are currently challenged by WHM in a dungeon then the floor shouldn’t be changed

[Absurdity]

I don't trust the developers to be creative with the ceiling installation, and I don't trust the community to let other people be if they decide to ignore said ceiling.
+++

Except we've already had this situation.
We wouldn't be comparing the current state of job design with the past if there wasn't a point in time where jobs were more engaging and arguably more complex.

And if we take Stormblood for example, while the player numbers weren't yet as huge as Shadowbringers (although we're on a trajectory back to those numbers), the game wasn't on fire.
We didn't have elitists flaming people in alliance raids for not playing optimally.
Because nobody actually cared how bad you played your job in casual content.

And it's not like those players have gone away just because they gradually simplified every single aspect of jobs since Shadowbringers.
They're still here and they still just press 1-2-3.
I'd even go ahead and say that it's more frustrating to see people like that now, exactly because jobs are so fool proof that seeing a Cure 1 mage or a filler-combo spammer means they're not even trying to follow what the game tells them with giant glowing buttons.
But just like back then, nobody actually cares in content where you can't really fail.

[Raikai]

Going back to MCH again even, there's a lot of people that want it to stop being a "selfish" DPS and be turned into a buffbot like BRD and DNC, but there's a reason I don't play those jobs (and downright hate BRD). Well shucks, which MCH mains does Square-Enix cater to then when it comes to changing the job? Because somebody is SOL no matter what they do.

People want that because there's no way to balance MCH in the Phys Ranged group without overhauling it as a whole.

If you leave MCH as a selfish dps trying to do some semblance of rDPS parity with BRD and DNC, both of them will still blow MCH out of the water because how better stats (and good players) scale with the buffing support.

If you buff MCH's selfish dps to be on par with the upper tier of rDPS rankings (above Ninja), then suddenly BRD and DNC are severely outclassed in the Phys Ranged slot.

For the latter option to work they need to actually overhaul the role/slots that the aiming jobs have in PVE, which honestly it would be for the better. I think it's the most problematic role atm (with healers), if it was not for that % party composition buff, I bet we wouldn't see a lot of BRD/DNC/MCHs on static groups.