Job Complexity and Difficulty

[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.

[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.

[Gwenkatsu]

Some Casuals in this game ruin the game for everyone.

You definitely nailed it there. I said it before and I'll say it again: When next I meet my good buddy Yoshi-P I will ask him to ruin the game even more for people like you. And since I'm a casual, he always does what I ask him for. Sucks to be you, but that's the way things are around here.

And back to the topic at hand. I'm playing the game for a couple of years now, and do a lot of roulettes. Not once have I been approached for not playing perfectly. Does this mean that I in fact play perfectly? Or is it just that nobody cares, as long as the job gets done?

[Asari5]

as easier and simpler something gets as more do otherd expect you to do it and wanna force it on you.

unpatient players in dungeons is another exemple. sure there were always unpatient people but nowhere as many as nowadays

[AmiableApkallu]

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.

What unfortunate server or data center do you play on where that actually happens with any sort of regularity?

Maybe I'm just unlucky and always ended up queuing during the times of day/days of the week where the most toxic people were online as well, or maybe its a more prevalent issue on NA data centers (or just Aether and Primal) compared to EU or Crystal.

Ah, the so-called "raid" data center and its backup companion — "raid" as in high-end duties. One might wonder whether that has anything to do with the culture and environment…

Crystal exists. We're still here. Nothing is stopping you from giving it a chance.

[Valence]

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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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.

I'm not asking you to "just pick another job", I'm asking the devs to widen the depth of jobs so that everybody can tackle them within their own skill range.
I don't know how to tell it clearer than that.

If you struggle in casual content as to become a "dead weight", "being carried" and "having people redo a fight" , it's not because of job complexity, as playing your job badly doesn't mean jackshit in dungeons and whatnot. The people that struggle as you describe struggle because they get slaughtered by the DDR, period. So let's not try and hunt job complexity when the true culprit hides behind a different face.

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.

Now wait a minute, I don't know which one you refer to, but it was also probably written from my perspective as to what I found engaging at a higher level with it. If you think what I wrote about it was required for the job to even function and deal damage (even if subpar), then I think you're mistaken. I'm sure I could also find ways to make current MCH that I find excruciatingly bland sound complex if I talk about uninterrupted 10 Blazing Shots segments, or even something simpler as desynced WF/hypercharge sequences.

Do you need to be able to do that to play current MCH?

[ForsakenRoe]

I was doing the first Variant Dungeon 6 times for the Mog Tome event. On one of the runs, iirc the 5th, I got matched with a player who was on Dancer, but used exactly ZERO Dances. No Standard Steps, no Technical Steps. Despite this 'very clearly not optimal' gameplay from the Dancer, nobody mentioned it in party chat, no vote kick was initiated, etc. Because either people didn't notice, didn't care, or in my case, did notice and found it more entertaining than the content itself.

Like, if the jobs are more simple nowadays to help players reach a higher baseline performance/output, what's the explanation for the existence of players who don't interact with such core parts of the Job's kit, that it's in the name of the Job?


If SE balances potencies sensibly, you can reduce the amount of damage a player 'loses' by playing 'suboptimally'. Looking again at the SCH example I gave on page 1:

Broil: 340p
Biolysis: 370p
Miasmalysis: 360p
Shadowflare: 350p

If someone were to ignore all of the DOTs entirely, and just spam Broil, yes, their damage would be lower than someone who does make perfect use of all three DOTs. What would the difference between the two players be?

560p per two minute loop. They would lose less than 2 Broils worth of damage, per 2 minutes. For comparison, Savage DPS checks are built with some leniency in mind to allow Healers to GCD heal in early progression. My Week 1 Clear of M8S, I had like 46 GCD heals over the 14min fight duration, which averages out as about 6.5 GCDs lost per 2min (and that doesn't factor in that part of that duration was cutscene, so the actual 'Lost-GCD' count would be even higher). We still cleared the fight, and that's when gear was at its tightest, due to being Week 1. For comparison, the difference between a NIN's Hyosho Ranryu (or any other 4-digit Potency action, and boy do we have a lot of those nowadays) getting a Direct Crit, and being a standard hit, is MORE than that entire 2 minutes of 'lost damage'.

But the point of these numbers is not the DPS checks. The point is, if the damage lost from playing suboptimally (in this case, ignoring DOTs entirely) is made to be so low via potency balancing, it reduces the chance that toxic elitists will try to be toxic about lost damage, because A: it makes it more likely that they will cause just as much lost damage by trying to type angrily in party chat and flubbing their own rotation, and B: it makes them look even more cringe when they bitch about how the SCH is costing the party a whole 20 potency by casting a Broil instead of refreshing Miasma. And with the damage 'loss' being so low, who on earth would decide to run the risk of a GM talk/warning/strike on their account, when the time lost due to the suboptimal play is such a small amount?

[Nero-Voidstails]

as long as DPS is king and people just think about themself nothing will change jobs are so easy it doesn't take skills to play them anymore. healer have suffer so much that playing with a healer is more damaging then helping. the devs need to fix many thing yet they will focus on making thing easier or change nothing. at this rate most healer main will leave the game for a other MMO maybe wow guilds war even 11

[MartinFreeman]

Just do it how WOW does it. More customization options, different specs, and get rid of that shitty 2.5 gcd meta. And get rid of each class only being able to do fun stuff every two minutes.

[Aravell]

If DDR goes away and job complexity becomes the norm, it means new failure points will get created to compensate, and I don't want to be the guy who got people killed because I'm doing gray parse or whatever the lowest rank on that thing is.

If you really only do battle content up to alliance raids in terms of difficulty, then you will never wipe parties due to lack of damage.

They will never make any difficult dps check in regular dungeons or trials and any dps check in an alliance raid can easily be covered by all the other red jobs.

Personal damage only starts to matter in extremes and up, if people call out someone's damage in a regular dungeon run, then they're being a tool.