Job Complexity and Difficulty

[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

[Aidorouge]

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?

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.

I just know that between my lacking personal skill (which would only be more obvious with a higher ceiling) and not knowing what kind of people I'm going to end up with, I don't really do roulettes anymore because its not worth the hassle. Ironically, it means I'm staying on Dynamis all the time now instead of traveling constantly, but it also reinforces the image of this being a single-player online game when I can go hours without seeing another person due to both Dynamis being a dead-ass data center and having to actively avoid the content where other people show up because contrary to what some folks believe, I'm not trying to ruin the game for other people.

I'm not even sure if I want to do the next PVP Series because all the changes brought with 7.1 (including Role Actions) did more to hobble my performance than improve it, and I don't want to be seen as dead weight in that mode either while being at risk of being reported for "lethargy" because I can't match everyone else in performance.

[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

[Aidorouge]

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

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.

I was playing on Primal (during a prior mogtome event) when I had my infamous encounter with trying to do the Ivalice raids for the first time where I ran into the full gamut of being kicked over watching cutscenes, failing mechanics, and dying too much. What should have taken 3 runs total (1 for each tier) took nearly 10 (4 on Orbonne Monastery alone) because I would be running from one fight to another and suddenly get hit with the fade out and back where I was standing/flying when I queued in.

The whole experience was just... incredibly difficult to believe and ended up taking over a week to finish because I had to hope the stars would align and I would get 23 people that would tolerate my first-timer self (where sure enough, I was virtually the only sprout in 8 of those runs), made even worse because I was looking forward to the Ivalice story/fights because I'm a huge Final Fantasy Tactics fan... now I just want to get the minions out of there via unsync and never look back. (I even gave up on farming all of the glam because I know it would take too long/I just want to be done already.)

As for Crystal, I don't RP, so I never had any specific reason to go there compared to doing raids on Aether and PVP on Primal, or just trying to get queues to pop in general. The only time I've visited Crystal is to shop (that's where I ended up buying a lot of the Ivalice orchestration rolls actually) and even then I always make sure I'm dressed modestly so I don't get any strange tells when the best deals are on Balmung, lol.

In general though, regardless of data center or content, I've just learned to stay quiet and keep my head down while keeping my duty/party finder use to a minimum, as the less attention I draw to myself and people I have to interact with the better, forums notwithstanding as I will likely never encounter anyone here in-game and they'll never see my subpar spectacle for themselves.

[Aidorouge]

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'm aware that the encounter design is some small part of why I suck (the rest is on me), I'm just saying that added job complexity isn't going to make me suck less, and might even highlight my incompetence further as I suck in a different way. I'm already dodging jobs the same way I dodge content because I can't play them effectively, and I don't know what I would be left to play with if I'm flubbing all of them instead of just most of them.

Hell, I won't even tank or heal, no matter how much people say both roles are "super easy" now because I still managed to mess them up and died for it, but unlike being a dead DPS, I took other people with me, and that was just mortifying.

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.
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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?

That's what I meant though, there's things you would find fun and engaging if added to the job, or added back rather as some of it was apparently how MCH played in the first place, while I would find it less fun and I wouldn't have stuck with old MCH at all.

I just don't think it's possible to make a MCH we could both enjoy at the same time.

[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.