Job Complexity and Difficulty

[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?