Job Complexity and Difficulty

[Valence]

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?

Sure I guess, but as a veteran that got robbed of the job I loved above everything else, I claim precedence. Sorry.

Not like we can't design accessible jobs with an optional higher depth and intricacies, but if you're unable to accept playing a job not to its fullest, then yes, it's gonna suck either way, because at some point I'm starting to suspect that a lot of players asking for "chiller" or "simpler" jobs to play are actually unable to accept the idea of not playing one at 100% in reality.

To go back to an example I find pretty striking in what we had in HW/SB tanking in particular: tank stances were mostly a defensive tool that helped just a little with aggro (you gained 20% mitigation which is what modern tank mastery does automatically, lost 20% damage output, and gained +70% aggro generation, which probably went down to 40-50% after the loss in damage), but most players in casual modes tanked in tank stance, in dungeons, everywhere, like they do today, and yet, good players and tryhards would go stanceless. Most people used tank stance because it was safe, and because it was easier, and yet they played sub-optimally.

HW DRK also added another layer of optional complexity over it: Darkside was a stance that made MP being drained constantly and disabled external MP support to gain +20% on damage. It was optimal to play the job with it, and yet half of the casual playerbase if not more didn't turn Darkside on because it was a layer of complexity they didn't want to deal with. Those DRKs were everywhere in casual content, and just on Grit they could do their tank job perfectly fine.

I think the main difference is that the objective set out by the developers in PvE content is for you to (eventually) win, while that's not the case in PvP.

Because of that, PvE encounters are set to follow a strict script that the players can solve and get their win after, contrasting with that, you cannot "solve" PvP because it involves multiple unpredictable people in the field at once. So PvE encounters are only an interaction between your job kit and the script that the boss follows, whether your buttons are useful or not depends on the script, that's why PvE feels like you can clear it just fine with just movement keys and one attack button. On the other side, PvP can actually give you just 5 buttons and be very engaging because your content is not scripted.

So why can't PvE be more like PvP? Because that would require encounters to be unscripted, and if you take unscripted encounters with the mechanics vomit that the dev team enjoys right now together, you get encounters that can occasionally spit out unsolvable mechanics, which runs counter to the end objective of letting the player win. If you then restrict the randomness so it doesn't cause unsolvable mechanics to happen, you run the risk of creating a solvable script once again.

What some of us have been asking for though, is a return of player interaction in PvE. This makes PvE encounters more random because of the players you match with, without messing too much with the scripts they enjoy writing.

Remove mechanic vomit, bring back the Renauds. With more rng.