Job Complexity and Difficulty

[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.

[Aravell]

Isn't there a middle ground where there is a baseline "script," but the ability of players to interact with the boss beyond chip damage impacts how the fight plays out?

We had that in older fights where CC played a role, but I assume the dev team viewed that as causing conflict in the party (for whatever reason) and removed it. Although we did get a taste of the old encounter design again in M6S adds phase, which is probably why a lot of people say it's too hard.

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.

If not for the party % buff, why take a physical ranged job at all when VPR can stack up to over 8 seconds of disengage time and SMN only has 3 casts a minute while also bringing a res?