Job Complexity and Difficulty

[ForsakenRoe]

It's not optional to be optimal right now even, because it's a good way to end up dead (and in more higher-end content, you kill everyone else too) unless you're a tank. If the DDR goes away as the source of difficulty, something WILL have to take its place, and they may saddle that onto the jobs themselves where nobody can effort to slack.

Yes, the point is that while 'interact with fight mechanics' is not optional, and you will die if you are not 'optimal' in executing them, Job rotations have leniency within them and you can afford to be suboptimal without causing problems for the party.

The question is 'what is 'enough' contribution from a player'. If it's a case of 'you cleared the fight, you did enough', then there's a massive amount of difference between the skill floor of a job, and its potential skill ceiling. A Healer, for example, their 'skill floor' is to simply keep the team alive. Dealing damage is unrequired of them in 95% of content. It is the playerbase, not the game, that is making the assertion that 'you have to be optimal', and the game should not be designed downwards around that mentality, because it only empowers that mentality and makes them feel like they're correct.

Here's a thing to consider. Stormblood Healers had more complexity than SHB-onwards, most would agree. Did you know that O1 Normal has an enrage timer? Most players don't, even within the subset of Healer players who don't use their DPS actions to maximum effect. Because even back then when there was a higher skill ceiling for the Jobs, the skill floor was still low, and you could get through regular content without sweating for every last DOT tick.

I think I'd rather just stay in my hole and stop pretending the game is an MMO, I don't really have it in me to keep trying anymore. Even this discussion has become tiresome because it's not like I'm saying Valence and others are wrong for wanting more complex jobs, I'm just saying I don't stand to benefit should it end up happening, and it may in fact be a detriment as I fumble around trying to find the jobs I can still play.

I think you've just fallen into a doom loop in your mind, and decided that 'I can escape the complexity of encounter design by avoiding going into encounters, but I won't be able to escape complexity in Job design because I am required to be on a Job', without any proof that you would have no 'escape' from the complexity beyond 'I think this is how SE would do it'. I get that there's plenty of reasons to believe that SE would not have the competence to pull off 'low skill floor, high skill ceiling', but the point is that a competent development team (SE or otherwise) could do 'low skill floor, high skill ceiling' correctly, providing a Job design for players wherein less skilled players have on-ramps to guide them out of detrimental gameplay situations and back into preferable ones, while also allowing the sweaty tryhard players to show their mastery of the Job.

Here, an example from what I wrote for SGE a few months back:

Imagine a Raidwide attack is coming, and you want to put up a barrier against it to protect the party.

Current SGE:
You press Eukrasian Prognosis. It costs 800MP to cast, and upon breaking, grants an Addersting. This can be spent on Toxikon for 370p damage.
The 2 GCDs you spent give a total damage of 370p, whereas spending those 2 GCDs on Dosis would result in 740p, for an overall damage loss of 370p per barrier you cast.

My design for SGE:
You press Eukrasian Prognosis. It costs 500mp to use Eukrasia, and 0mp for the GCD itself (meaning that if you're out of MP entirely, you can still spam Prognosis heals instead of just standing there).
Eukrasia's activation generates 5 Toxikosis, a gauge that replaces Addersting. 50 Toxikosis can be spent on a burst phase to deal big damage via faster attack speed (which results in Kardia being triggered more often).
Upon the barrier breaking, you (the SGE) gain 'Phlegmatic', a new buff, and everyone in the party (including you) has their barrier buff replaced with 'Second Opinion', a new buff.
'Second Opinion' can be consumed with Pepsis (5s CD, costs 500MP, generates 5 Toxikosis) to trigger a healing effect, just like when it consumes a barrier, allowing for a more 'reactive' kind of gameplay
'Phlegmatic' allows for the execution of Phlegma, without consuming a charge. Instead of Toxikon being the 'refund' attack, it'd be Phlegma which hits harder.
Due to potency rebalancing, Dosis would be 310p and Phlegma 500p, so the damage lost by using Barrier>Phlegma instead of Dosis>Dosis would be just 120p, not the current 370p.

My design for SGE (but the player is a tryhard):
You do not press Eukrasian Prognosis at all. You know the raidwide is coming, and prepare for it in advance.

Soteria increases the healing of Kardia by 50% of the damage of the attack that triggered it. This means that a Phlegma would cause more healing via Kardia than a Dosis, for example.
Zoe adds a barrier equal to 25% of the healing dealt by Kardia, stacking with itself to empower the barrier. This allows the player to protect the team without having to let up on the offense.
Krasis reduces the cast time of the next 4 spells with cast times, by 3 seconds. This opens up doubleweave spaces, and even allows for faster resurrection casts if required.
Pankardia (new) causes Kardia's healing (and barrier) to be applied in an AOE, but at 50% reduced effectiveness for all targets that are not the main Kardia target.
All of these effects have 4 stacks (as a reference to the four humours). Consuming a stack of any of these grants 4 Toxikosis, and triggering Kardia grants 1 Toxikosis. Thus, each use of these augments grants a total of 20 Toxikosis overall.

Philosophia instantly grants you 4 stacks of all 4 augments, and increases the potency of your next 4 heals (or next 4 Kardia triggers) by 20%. Its CD is also reduced from 180s to 120s

As such, because you are a tryhard and know the raidwide is coming, you use your Kardia augments to apply a Zoe barrier to the party in advance, fulfilling the 'protect team' part of your role without having to sacrifice any damage output.
Furthermore, after the Zoe barrier is consumed, it is replaced with the Second Opinion buff, so you can heal the party after the raidwide with Pepsis.


If you tried to learn the tryhard methods of this design, but felt overwhelmed, or you were to panic and think 'I don't have time to put a Zoe barrier out, the party's gonna die aaaaa', you would be able to simply fall back on a Eukrasian Prognosis barrier. The potency loss (compared to current game) is far lower, the MP cost is lower (so it's far more likely that you will have enough even if you're running on fumes), all of your basic GCDs would cost 0MP (so you are always able to cast 'something' instead of standing there waiting for MP ticks/Lucid). The majority of the 'optimizations' you could do with such a design would be entirely optional for 95% of the game's content.

That said, despite liking them more than disliking them on WoW, I don't want anything like WoW's talent trees in XIV. They're too much expense for too little punch, and there's no room to leverage that customization in our battle content anyways, so I'd rather some more essentialist/minimalist customization be produced hand-in-hand with some shifts in content design (without that simply devolving into build-flopping for different pieces of content). I despise when menuplay displaces actual gameplay.

Reminds me of when I posted this idea, ages ago. Despite specifically noting in the first post that the system would not have any effect on your damage output, there's a lot of comments making mention of how 'what is the point, we would just take the one that gives us the most damage'. I would imagine that it'd be real tough to come up with effect ideas for the DPS, as they've been pruned down so much in what utility/non damage actions they have. Like, what would Viper even be able to have as effects, when the only non-damage related action they have is Slither?

But for something like a WHM, where the choices are, say:
Liturgy of the Bell has only 3 stacks, but always heals for the full 400p per stack (even if detonated early) and its CD is reduced to 90s (so instead of 1000-2000p every 180s, it's a guaranteed 1200p, available every 90s)
Divine Benison leaves 9s of Regen on the target upon expiration or breaking (750p healing total)
Plenary Indulgence applies it's 'additional healing of 200p' as a Barrier instead of direct healing. Additionally, it grants 10% damage reduction to allies while active (to mirror AST's access to Collective Unconscious)

Now, if we imagine that we're doing content where every crumb of damage is precious. Say, week 1 prog of a 4th Savage, or an Ultimate. All three of these effects would be useful in different ways within that fight. Would someone be able to tell which of the effects is 'best' in a given fight? Possibly. Would they be able to, while also considering the effects available to other Jobs, or which Jobs are even present in the raid group? What if you have a SCH cohealer vs a SGE? Does Haima from the SGE mean that the Divine Benison effect is not as heavily incentivized, and something else would be worth taking instead? If there is truly a 'best option', would it even be 'the best option' due to its numerical balancing, or is it more because of the player's skill in being able to leverage the opportunity that was created by that effect? Is it even possible to measure something like that, and make determinations of which choice is 'the best option', when everyone's skill level is different? Perhaps there's a hypothetical 'best option', but how many players would be able to reach that bar and make use of that 'hypothetical best'?

And of course, in casual content, where things are meant to be more chill, a player could just take whichever effect and it would not matter, because I would assume that the content (eg an EX roulette) would be tuned low enough that you could go in without ANY of the effects and still breeze through it.

'We would take the thing that gives best damage' is all well and good, but it's easy to say that without considering how many factors go into the calculations of 'best damage' behind the scenes. But instead, we're seeing this mentality that 'oh we would just take the thing that someone on The Balance told us to, so we might as well just not have the system at all', and not only does the mentality pervade the game, it seems to even be a consideration the devs take into account when designing. Should we retroactively apply the logic to other things too? Should Materia be deleted, because there's a meld loadout that has the most damage and every other variation is just 'wrong because not best damage'? When you're trying to choose between a Crit Det piece and a Tenacity/SkillSpeed piece as a Tank, one is clearly better for your damage, so should we have Tomestone and Raid gear just have the exact same stats, and be nothing more than 'you got the raid gear, you get to use it as a Glamour and that's its whole purpose'?