Job Complexity and Difficulty

[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.