Job Complexity and Difficulty

[Aidorouge]

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

Well, it wouldn't be the first time I've had a higher-skill player tell me I deserve nothing, and the end result would be that I just don't get to play any ranged DPS at all I guess. Though if other vets of other jobs got their way as well, I'm not sure there would be usable DPS jobs left for me period as they slide backwards into... whatever they were before my time. (And since I don't play healer or tank, welp.)

You shouldn't be left with nothing but easy and boring jobs of course, but I shouldn't be left with nothing but hard and complicated ones either, especially when the content its self is already doing its damnedest to skill-check me out of doing most of it that I don't really want my jobs being difficult too.
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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.

Like I said before, playing optimally won't remain "optional" and players WILL try and force others into spinning the same number of plates they are on those same jobs, and with the the power to kick/mute/blacklist, there's already tools in place to filter out the sub-optimal at every level. It happens right now even, over smaller inadequacies in job performance, and most of those were noob traps made by Square-Enix themselves (like Freecure) where people literally don't know any better. But once the ceiling gets raised this community will simultaneously raise the floor of what they deem acceptable when the complexities cease to be 1% of the job's expectation that can be safely ignored, and instead are 40-50% or more that determines if the run is efficient or a slog (or even a wipe). PVP already has "community enforced scripts" as it were, we would just be bringing that to PVE as well, and anyone who doesn't follow is going to be labeled "lethargic" and be hit with every consequence that comes with it.

Maybe you have a static/premade/friend group/free company that you roll with that would never give you any sort of grief over performance, but I don't really have that benefit, and I'll never buy into the lie again that "nobody cares in normal content" after what happened to me in Ivalice.
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I find it strange why some people keep repeating "You haven't done savage" as if it was some miraculous cure-all solution to the job design being boring.

It's not.

I feel like that's where the discussion on job complexity versus simplicity is going to go with someone telling me "how do you know you'll hate it until you play it" as if somehow I'll just magically enjoy spinning several plates if I would just give it a shot the same way people assume others will have an epiphany and love current job design if they would "just do Ultimates bro". Except I already know I'll hate it, because I can point at BRD right there. I don't like having to upkeep DoTs that feel like they're doing nothing, I don't like using buffs that feel negligible to my overall performance, I don't like having a percentage of a chance to use the next button in a rotation. There is pretty much nothing about BRD I enjoy doing.

Ironically, MCH is still screwed if it ends up homogenized/simplified as well because Square-Enix will absolutely make it play exactly like BRD and DNC (DNC is more tolerable to me, but not enough to main it) because right now MCH is the nail sticking up and Square-Enix is lazy enough that they'll just turn it into another buffbot and say mission accomplished. Likewise I find VPR the most "braindead" job in the entire game to the point it bores me, and it would be awful to me personally if NIN/DRG/RPR started playing copycat with it because again, Square-Enix is lazy and likes to homogenize.

And BLM... hahaha... that was my least favorite job in the entire game before the recent changes, and its STILL my least favorite job AFTERWARDS because nothing they did actually changed why I didn't like playing it, hence my sympathy for BLM mains and agreement it should be restored.

Contrary to popular belief, "filthy casuals" didn't ask for homogenization and a lot of it doesn't make sense to me either (BLM) or I would actively hate to see it happen (MCH & NIN). But I'm also not onboard with making every job complex either because I know how much Square-Enix likes to overdo it when people ask for something harder (see Dawntrail), or how most of this community isn't as forgiving and understanding about lower skill players at all. There's good apples in this topic, yes, but they're no way the majority.

[Valence]

Well, it wouldn't be the first time I've had a higher-skill player tell me I deserve nothing, and the end result would be that I just don't get to play any ranged DPS at all I guess. Though if other vets of other jobs got their way as well, I'm not sure there would be usable DPS jobs left for me period as they slide backwards into... whatever they were before my time. (And since I don't play healer or tank, welp.)

You shouldn't be left with nothing but easy and boring jobs of course, but I shouldn't be left with nothing but hard and complicated ones either, especially when the content its self is already doing its damnedest to skill-check me out of doing most of it that I don't really want my jobs being difficult too.

I'm a little amazed that what you took out of this was that you should have nothing, and I should have everything. And I'm actually sad that you continue to introduce unbridgeable gaps between jobs that have to be easy and jobs that can only be hard. I do not subscribe to that mindset and that's not what my values about good job design align with.

I just want my MCH and my ammo back. Where did I say it had to have an unreachable skill floor?

Edit: like honestly, if Yoshida was actually serious about changing their philosophy to make content for everyone at every piece of content instead of doing some content for a small portion and another piece of content later for another small portion of people, then perhaps they could also apply this to job design as well.

Like I said before, playing optimally won't remain "optional" and players WILL try and force others into spinning the same number of plates they are on those same jobs, and with the the power to kick/mute/blacklist, there's already tools in place to filter out the sub-optimal at every level. It happens right now even, over smaller inadequacies in job performance, and most of those were noob traps made by Square-Enix themselves (like Freecure) where people literally don't know any better. But once the ceiling gets raised this community will simultaneously raise the floor of what they deem acceptable when the complexities cease to be 1% of the job's expectation that can be safely ignored, and instead are 40-50% or more that determines if the run is efficient or a slog (or even a wipe). PVP already has "community enforced scripts" as it were, we would just be bringing that to PVE as well, and anyone who doesn't follow is going to be labeled "lethargic" and be hit with every consequence that comes with it.

Maybe you have a static/premade/friend group/free company that you roll with that would never give you any sort of grief over performance, but I don't really have that benefit, and I'll never buy into the lie again that "nobody cares in normal content" after what happened to me in Ivalice.

You're assuming a lot of things about me. I only had statics for savage/ultimate raiding (and extremes on the way). For the rest I tend to play solo 99% of the time and queue with randoms. If anything it's in a couple of HC statics that I've been given grief over performance (learning speed performance, imaginary or real), not in casual content. But I do understand that I cannot speak for players that struggle in casual content because I don't, and perhaps the only thing I struggle with in casual is luigi's mansions first two bosses (as an ex hardcore raider, I genuinely do).

Now that's out of the way, I want to point out that 1) people generally don't shit on party members because that's a surefire way to GM talks and 2) in all my 10 years of XIV history the overwhelming majority of the casuals that Ive ended up running casual content with were passable to mediocre with their job performance, and some died all the time, and nobody gave a crap about it.

If you however refer to how players constantly shit on "Oh I had another cure bot in my roulette today" then yes, it happens all the time. The community is as shitty and insecure as any other online community even with the current jobs: if anything, when the jobs were more complex, we didn't have more of this, in fact, perhaps less because today people just use the convenient excuse that "jobs are too brainless to fail" or some nonsense like that. I also do acknowledge that I'm actually very worried where the log rot mentality is moving the community to, especially with the appearance of tools like tomestone, but overall that's something you will encounter in challenging content, something that you don't run. Not in casual content.

I'm also talking from a perspective of someone that have played through a time where things were more complicated, and the skill floor wasn't always very accessible depending on the job and guess what, it was the same in casual content, nobody gave a crap, and everybody shit talked everybody behind the scenes on their FC chat or whatever. Nothing has changed one bit in my experience. It's not a difficulty or complexity problem, it's a community/human/species problem.

[Hallarem]

I'll give a simplified take. The fight and job design is flawed and not engaging

The game is so much against traditional MMO mechanics, and forces everyone to dps and play dodge dodge revolution. That I have not done anything above an extreme on release.

I want a game where healers' duty is to heal, and dps when they have time, not because they have to
I want a game where tanks are tanks, they guide the flow of battle, kite the bosses, position them right and swap etc
I want a game where dps have variety, unique mechanics that also help the battle in various ways
I want jobs to have varied unique flavored mechanics / talents / abilities that can be used for flavor and usefully in the open world as well

But I don't think it's possible with the current designers in the team, they don't want you to have a game like that. They want a streamlined soup of same, I am a 100% sure that the new people in the team have never played an MMO and are designing the game from a basis of "What is the most approachable for the general audience" which drives away the MMO crowd which this game is supposed to be catering to. Even ultracasuals are bored, I can guarantee you.

[Hallarem]

I'll give a simplified take. The fight and job design is flawed and not engaging

The game is so much against traditional MMO mechanics, and forces everyone to dps and play dodge dodge revolution. That I have not done anything above an extreme on release.

I want a game where healers' duty is to heal, and dps when they have time, not because they have to
I want a game where tanks are tanks, they guide the flow of battle, kite the bosses, position them right and swap etc
I want a game where dps have variety, unique mechanics that also help the battle in various ways
I want jobs to have varied unique flavored mechanics / talents / abilities that can be used for flavor and usefully in the open world as well

But I don't think it's possible with the current designers in the team, they don't want you to have a game like that. They want a streamlined soup of same, I am a 100% sure that the new people in the team have never played an MMO and are designing the game from a basis of "What is the most approachable for the general audience" which drives away the MMO crowd which this game is supposed to be catering to. Even ultracasuals are bored, I can guarantee you.

[YukioKobayashi]

Well, it wouldn't be the first time I've had a higher-skill player tell me I deserve nothing, and the end result would be that I just don't get to play any ranged DPS at all I guess. Though if other vets of other jobs got their way as well, I'm not sure there would be usable DPS jobs left for me period as they slide backwards into... whatever they were before my time. (And since I don't play healer or tank, welp.)

You shouldn't be left with nothing but easy and boring jobs of course, but I shouldn't be left with nothing but hard and complicated ones either, especially when the content its self is already doing its damnedest to skill-check me out of doing most of it that I don't really want my jobs being difficult too.

So one job that caters towards lesser skilled players in each role isnt enough? WAR for Tanks, WHM for Regenheale, SGE for Barrierhealer, DRG for Melees, DNC for Physranged and RDM for Casters isnt enough?
Every big MMORPG has Classes that are not meant to be played by every 2 Finger Johnny on earth except XIV and im seriously getting tired of it. Some Casuals in this game ruin the game for everyone.

While MCH in HW and SB was quite challenging to pull of and not meant to be played by people that dont put the time into it, there were at least 10 other jobs casuals could play.

[Aidorouge]

I'm a little amazed that what you took out of this was that you should have nothing, and I should have everything. And I'm actually sad that you continue to introduce unbridgeable gaps between jobs that have to be easy and jobs that can only be hard. I do not subscribe to that mindset and that's not what my values about good job design align with.

I just want my MCH and my ammo back. Where did I say it had to have an unreachable skill floor?

Edit: like honestly, if Yoshida was actually serious about changing their philosophy to make content for everyone at every piece of content instead of doing some content for a small portion and another piece of content later for another small portion of people, then perhaps they could also apply this to job design as well.

You said as much that you were a veteran that claimed precedence, which sort of implies I'm expected to step aside and let MCH be tailored to your wants even if it made the job unplayable for me, and I would need to move onto another job if it doesn't suit me.

The problem with this whole "just pick another job" thing that people keep trying to push with regards to why some jobs should be more complex though, is when the remaining jobs aren't appealing for one reason or another. Just a couple of posts down you have someone acting like I should be "grateful" for WAR/WHM/SGE/DRG/DNC/RDM even though of those the only ones I actively play are DRG and RDM (and I actually don't like WAR and WHM ironically enough, they're my least favorite tank and 2nd least favorite healer), or how they didn't stop to consider that there are WAR/WHM/SGE/DRG/DNC/RDM mains that DON'T want them to be the "easy" jobs and demand they be made complex too.

And as an added bonus, they once again blame casuals for current job design instead of it being based on hardcore encounter design, because we just can't have a topic about job discussion without someone blaming the casual boogeyman for everything that's wrong. When the next job change comes sweeping in, it's not going to be due to MSQ Ann & Andy, it's because the new Ultimate or the upcoming Quantum necessitated the change in Square-Enix's eyes, same as how BLM got changed right before a new Savage and Forked Tower, not because someone was struggling to "talk to Wuk Lamat" without tripping over their staff.
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You're assuming a lot of things about me. I only had statics for savage/ultimate raiding (and extremes on the way). For the rest I tend to play solo 99% of the time and queue with randoms. If anything it's in a couple of HC statics that I've been given grief over performance (learning speed performance, imaginary or real), not in casual content. But I do understand that I cannot speak for players that struggle in casual content because I don't, and perhaps the only thing I struggle with in casual is luigi's mansions first two bosses (as an ex hardcore raider, I genuinely do).

Now that's out of the way, I want to point out that 1) people generally don't shit on party members because that's a surefire way to GM talks and 2) in all my 10 years of XIV history the overwhelming majority of the casuals that Ive ended up running casual content with were passable to mediocre with their job performance, and some died all the time, and nobody gave a crap about it.

If you however refer to how players constantly shit on "Oh I had another cure bot in my roulette today" then yes, it happens all the time. The community is as shitty and insecure as any other online community even with the current jobs: if anything, when the jobs were more complex, we didn't have more of this, in fact, perhaps less because today people just use the convenient excuse that "jobs are too brainless to fail" or some nonsense like that. I also do acknowledge that I'm actually very worried where the log rot mentality is moving the community to, especially with the appearance of tools like tomestone, but overall that's something you will encounter in challenging content, something that you don't run. Not in casual content.

I'm also talking from a perspective of someone that have played through a time where things were more complicated, and the skill floor wasn't always very accessible depending on the job and guess what, it was the same in casual content, nobody gave a crap, and everybody shit talked everybody behind the scenes on their FC chat or whatever. Nothing has changed one bit in my experience. It's not a difficulty or complexity problem, it's a community/human/species problem.

Everything being deemed "too brainless to fail" only makes failure feel a lot worse because then one is left wondering how stupid or useless they are if they screw up and die on "sooo easy" content. It's a large part of why I stopped doing roulettes once ARF, Mhach, and anything Stormblood could pop up because I knew I'd be dead weight and I wasn't going to subject other people to carrying me, or put myself in the crosshairs of others who don't tolerate having to redo a fight. Admittedly, there's also solo content that I can't do easily (Deep Dungeons/Field Operations/Masked Carnivale), and where making jobs harder (because that's what complexity ultimately amounts to knowing Square-Enix's overcompensation) would just further narrow what I can and can't do in the game anymore.

With the way things are, only one of us is allowed to be happy with jobs, and understandably you feel like its your turn given the length of time you've been made to tolerate changes that you never asked for, but it's going to come with consequences for those who started with jobs in their current form, and some of us already feel like the game is hostile and unforgiving enough when it comes to skill floors via the content. Complexity is the salt you want so things stop tasting bland, but for others that salt is getting rubbed right into wounds that Dawntrail keeps on making.

And it's not as though your perspective isn't valid, given you can recall a time where "Square-Enix wasn't always like this" and believe they can do better if given the chance, while I don't have that frame of reference, I only have the last nearly 3 years of blunders and contradictions from them (and the community at large) and thus meet all these ideas with skepticism and pessimism, and assume harder jobs will happen while content also remains hard, leaving no room for my casual ass at all.

[Shurrikhan]

And it's not as though your perspective isn't valid, given you can recall a time where "Square-Enix wasn't always like this" and believe they can do better if given the chance, while I don't have that frame of reference, I only have the last nearly 3 years of blunders and contradictions from them (and the community at large) and thus meet all these ideas with skepticism and pessimism, and assume harder jobs will happen while content also remains hard, leaving no room for my casual ass at all.

If you've already been limiting yourself to normal content where even half of optimal damage will easily get you through everything and half the effort of optimal play will already get you to 80+% of said optimal damage... why so much concern that the maximum damage (albeit with proportionately or more-than-proportionately increased effort) would increase on jobs currently considered and tuned by the devs as "easy" jobs?

Although there might for example be a couple more buttons to press, not pressing them would only leave you about the same as you were before, which would remain plentiful.

If you were at a tipping point, then those preferences could easily come into conflict, but we're talking about raising skill ceilings here, not floors, by stepping away from the "this job should only be allowed up to X degree of effort and therefore X degree of performance" concept that Yoshida himself says the game is tuned around. You'd still have increasingly diminished returns for increased effort / disproportionately high rewards for merely basic skill.

(That's not a critique, btw; imo, the game should be that way, giving just enough reward to meaningfully incentivize deeper engagement for those who feel comfortable taking that extra step with nonetheless minimal loss to accessibility.)

[Shurrikhan]

So one job that caters towards lesser skilled players in each role isnt enough? WAR for Tanks, WHM for Regenheale, SGE for Barrierhealer, DRG for Melees, DNC for Physranged and RDM for Casters isnt enough?

Why have any do so? They all, in effect, cater to less-skilled players so long as optimizations become increasingly less rewarding (which almost always happens regardless). As long as one can still put in just a small part of the maximum effort for the vast majority of the result, it's already catering plenty.

The only ways to "cater" further towards less-skilled players would require making one job deal every bit as much damage as the hardest, for the average player, to optimize (in which case design --and soon, inadvertently, the community-- will push players away from anything else unless especially skilled, which is inherently not the average player)... or to effectively just say that those "easy" jobs (and by extension the players only comfortable on those jobs) aren't allowed to be competitive for high-end content, period, because they're stuck at only being able to put in 75% of the effort that the other jobs can reward and therefore only some 95% the output, which is apparently enough to bar jobs over. I.e., RIP anyone who enjoys that job's aesthetic but either (A) wants to take its gameplay into further engagement or (B) doesn't want to face discriminatory PF listings.

[Aidorouge]

If you've already been limiting yourself to normal content where even half of optimal damage will easily get you through everything and half the effort of optimal play will already get you to 80+% of said optimal damage... why so much concern that the maximum damage (albeit with proportionately or more-than-proportionately increased effort) would increase on jobs currently considered and tuned by the devs as "easy" jobs?

Although there might for example be a couple more buttons to press, not pressing them would only leave you about the same as you were before, which would remain plentiful.

If you were at a tipping point, then those preferences could easily come into conflict, but we're talking about raising skill ceilings here, not floors, by stepping away from the "this job should only be allowed up to X degree of effort and therefore X degree of performance" concept that Yoshida himself says the game is tuned around. You'd still have increasingly diminished returns for increased effort / disproportionately high rewards for merely basic skill.

(That's not a critique, btw; imo, the game should be that way, giving just enough reward to meaningfully incentivize deeper engagement for those who feel comfortable taking that extra step with nonetheless minimal loss to accessibility.)

I have no way of knowing if I'm playing optimally to begin with actually (I don't parse or bother with training dummies), I didn't even know NIN and RDM were considered "hard" compared to other melee and casters until this topic, and for all I know I'm the crappiest NIN and RDM there ever was and should be hanging them up. Other jobs entering into that sort of difficulty bracket, or demanding more in general (as complexity would be want to do), only further decreases the options I have any "right" to be playing lest I bring down the rest of the people I'm playing with.

Even if your personal intent isn't to raise the floor, other people will still demand everyone jumps to reach the ceiling anyway, and if I was barely scrapping by before (and not actually being plentiful, flattering as your assumption was) then the difference becomes even more apparent if I'm not playing by the "new baseline" because again, being optimal will not remain optional with the way this community goes about these things, or if Square-Enix themselves creates encounters to now account for the "expected" output and anything less results in a wipe, just as much as failing the expected floor dance does now. (This game isn't a stranger to DPS checks/enrages for example.)

It's a large part of why I don't do hardcore content to begin with, because I'll never be good enough for it while being subjected to the scrutiny that comes with repeated failures, and job complexity would only end up creating new failure points even within normal content, with a playerbase that very much does not accept failure despite some claims to the contrary.

I do get people wanting more forms of skill expression and showcasing it that comes with more robust and complex skills systems, but I'm not as interested in embarrassing myself when I inevitably under-perform because I can't meet and manage the same complexity. I wouldn't even dare attempt the hypothetically-complex MCH that Valence suggests, because the description alone they've posted about elsewhere sounds out of my depth, and I would just move straight to retiring as a MCH main.

[Aravell]

Even if your personal intent isn't to raise the floor, other people will still demand everyone jumps to reach the ceiling anyway

In my personal experience back when jobs still had complexities, it was actually the opposite. People back then were far more hesitant to call others out on not playing perfectly because they themselves were not playing perfectly as well.

Even the high-end players found it hard to play perfectly, and that was the fun of it for me personally, the striving to reach higher, not like what we have now where you can pick up a job and figure out 90% of the job's potential after 30 minutes on a training dummy.