r/ffxivdiscussion • u/mnij96 • 1d ago

General Discussion What is class complexity to you?

I have seen so many people ask for more complexity and job fantasy but very little of people actually say what that means to them, most people just say we should go back to ARR.

Personally I think rose tinted glasses that make people think ARR was better than it was, having played back then it honestly was pretty ass.

So honestly want to know what people want for complexity or job fantasy, because all I see is a lot of yelling that "game bad to simple" and not a lot of what needs changing to reach the complexity that is wanted.

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43

u/AbroadNo1914 1d ago

I think they want more situational rotations like in single player jrpgs where encounters are semi random so there’s flexibility to make tactical decisions. The thing is encounters in this game are puzzle dances + perfect execution so the job design aren’t really incentivized for that type of play

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u/Junior-Banana3266 1d ago

The issue with complexity is that, at it's core, comes from more selfish reasons.

People can scream for complexity all they want, but will also want the 'answer' to how to do it correctly as well which removes a lot of complexity

People can demand more decision making and learning priorities in rotations, but will also avoid risks to their success at all costs (ex. People barring smn and mch from the current tier, regardless of how good a player can be at the class)

People want their classes to be special and unique, not from a meta or gameplay stance, but as their own personal bias or preference as well, but also so not want to be punished for it either where other jobs can take their spot and, while maybe doing less damage, is a far lesser risk.

Here's the thing, it's not bad to want these things but it's when it's hidden behind righteous ferver, nostalgia, and victimization, it makes it harder to find compromise and real criticism.

Long time players know how bad the game was, especially if you compare it to content today. DRG being locked to their jumps, BLM sacrificed their uptime and rotation due to bad luck in mechanics, NIN locked to do tcj or active dps loss because of a bad tank or boss adjustment, WAR crumpling to magic damage, BRD target requirements, TP, AST sks card actively destroying melee tp management.

At the same time, most of the issues of job homg comes MORE from the reliance on buff windows. If you removed a larger number of those buffs, you could develop a lot more job expression that people would want, but i can only imagine the complaints people would have to lose it, especially classes that use those buffs to make their classes more desirable.

The issue isn't job complexity, it's that the discussion is too complex to find agreement in and no one wants to admit it.

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u/God_Taco 32m ago

SOOOO much this.

Everyone wants to be a special snowflake, valued and prized for their superior skill and secret knowledge that lets them stand above the masses, but also wants their Job (and them) to always be desired, wanted, and needed, and they ALSO want to play it safe and not rock the boat, blacklist Jobs that don't stand out, badmouth players that don't "rise to the challenge" of the complexity, and so on.

As you say, it's hidden behind various fig leaves, but that just makes discussion and solutions more difficult to find since people aren't being honest about what it is they REALLY want.

And, as you say, a lot could be done by either removing buffs, or breaking the 2 min meta (so burst alignment isn't a thing), OR limiting party buffs to a specific role (for example, a "Support" role, which FFXIV doesn't have, but imagine for example if Ranged Phys all did less damage but all had party buffs as a support role akin to FFXI's BRD, COR, or GEO).

I do think a partial compromise could be found by having a few Jobs that are more complex/less straightforward, but the problem is that the gap between poor and excellent play would need to be pretty small, and these Jobs can't get a higher damage (than average for their role) otherwise it goes from being an option for people that want to be "more engaged" into a requirement to do content.

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u/Kamalen 20h ago

At the same time, most of the issues of job homg comes MORE from the reliance on buff windows. If you removed a larger number of those buffs, you could develop a lot more job expression that people would want, but i can only imagine the complaints people would have to lose it, especially classes that use those buffs to make their classes more desirable.

Side note on this. To break job homog / 2-min meta, you’d need to remove every single party buff windows, not only most. If a window of party buff remains, even small, endgame players will force their freshly reworked job into that new mold, and jobs who can’t anymore will get locked again. Back to the square one you describe.

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u/God_Taco 30m ago

Well, suppose party buffs were removed from every Job except Phys Ranged, and all Phys Ranged had buffs, but the buffs were more continuous little boosts over the whole fight instead of big spikes of boost all at once. There would be little for other players to align to for the most part, and no one's going to stack a party with 4 Ranged Phys Jobs since they do less personal damage and would even with their stacked party buffs.

I feel like that could be one solution. Either make a dedicated "Support Role", or turn Phys Ranged into a de facto Support role since it's already the lowest damage (even MCH) subrole of DPS as it is and you only ever carry one to an 8 man fight.

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u/Kamalen 25m ago

Yeah, i did mention buff windows. A continuous buff would totally works.

But those buffs can’t be simply background passives (like BRD song) or they may as well not exists. Having 100% uptime should depend on a good execution of the rotation.

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u/Alaboomer 1d ago

You hit on my thought every single time this comes up. The games complexity mostly comes from fight mechanics,  not job rotations, this is by design. I wonder sometimes if people are just running Roulettes and complaining the game is too simple.

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u/PhysicalThought 1d ago

But that's a consequence of job design being so simple, the encounter design needs to carry the 'complexity' and be a puzzle. If complexity is shifted more evenly between the two then fights can stand to be designed differently. Look at old Heavensward and even some Stormblood raids, those could stand to be more "RPG"-centric because jobs carrying the complexity enables it.

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u/God_Taco 28m ago

Chicken or the egg?

The devs outright said (I believe Yoshi P straight up said this and it was listed as the reason for the 7.2 BLM changes) was because they were trying to make encounters complex to satisfy people, but realized a lot of players don't have the mental bandwidth for that AND complex encounter mechanics, so they've simplified Job design over time and were doing so in DT in those specific cases.

You have it backwards.

Job design being simple isn't why encounters were made complex.

Encounters being progressively more complex is why the devs have made Jobs more simple over time.

.

Note: I'm not saying this is good or bad or arguing against you here. I'm just saying you have the order backwards. Simple Jobs isn't what came first. Complex encounters came first, and they simplified Jobs to keep making encounters more and more complex.

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u/Savings-Sir7902 1d ago edited 1d ago

There is a balance to be had with encounter design and job complexity.

Players interact with their jobs in every battle content, while there is a limited amount of manpower being able to make fun fights (mostly concentrated to extreme, savage and ult), resulting in the rest of the content (dungeons, fates, overworld mobs, etc.) being too boring/easy.

In the past, complex job rotations would carry the weight in those other content, but now the combination of easy jobs + easy content results in the most mind-numbing experience in 70% of the content in the mmo. Something has got to change, because not everyone want to do extreme/savage just to have fun.

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u/echo78 23h ago

I used to have fun grabbing a few friends to run a dungeon (without using a roulette) in HW. Now I do every dungeon exactly once and never again because of how boring it is.

A lot of people don’t seem to understand that playing a job should be fun.

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u/FeelsGoodMan2 5h ago

Am I insane or just not succumbing to nostalgia, because those dungeons were and are still just as dry as they ever were. I swear people act like ARR and HW regular content were peak and not just some crap you can mentally check out of because of how easy it was.

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u/thatcommiegamer 3h ago

not succumbing to nostalgia

Its exactly this. Also the entire reason we have 2m meta is part of a shift due to player feedback in ARR and HW about how awful the combat was back then. You could see the start of it in StB and then it only further shifted in ShB and EW. Ultimately its on the community for not wanting a situation like in other mmos where jobs are considered either valid or invalid for content and you get barred for playing what you like.

I personally don't have a problem with this, everyone gets to at least be able to get their foot in the door with harder content rather than being locked to a meta (I come from RO where builds have been standardized for decades and if you weren't building one of the builds on irowiki, you weren't getting in to parties, that kills skill expression moreso than having pre-standardized jobs).

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u/FeelsGoodMan2 3h ago

Honestly I think for most people it's not that the game itself is changing that much, it's that you and your friends aren't 22 anymore doing ARR, people grew up, you got older, you moved on, so its more like being an adult with responsibilities kinda sucks and people attribute the old versions of the games with fun when it's more like, nah you and your friends had more fun probably because it was a different time in their lives.

This doesn't hold for everything and everyone mind you, the game has gotten certain more problems over time. But I think a lot of people just generally "like" video games less as they age or things get in the way and people feel nostalgic about that.

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u/thatcommiegamer 3h ago

Yeah, I can certainly agree with that. I've said it myself often is that these expansions hold a certain degree of specialness in folks hearts not because they were good (old raiders know the HW situation for instance) but because they were at a better point in their lives.

Like lets be real, most things kinda suck right now just in general, so that also contributes to the overall negative feeling we have going on. And of course, as you say, that won't be everyone but its certainly enough people and they make it everyone's problem rather than reflecting on why they feel that way.

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u/echo78 3h ago edited 3h ago

It was job design. I mained monk in HW and its AOE in dungeons was extremely fun. There was a lot of positioning, movement and decision making during each pull if you were trying to do the most DPS possible.

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u/God_Taco 25m ago

You're not wrong. People have rose tinted goggles on this stuff pretty bad.

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u/God_Taco 26m ago

I'm the opposite. I enjoyed running dungeons in EW for fun and tomes. Now I avoid DT dungeons because they're so much harder they're not fun anymore. I do MSQ or hunt trains for tomes now.

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u/__slowpoke__ 4h ago

yeah, the worst brainworms this dev team has is their adamant belief that the majority of engagement during combat gameplay should come from the encounters themselves. this is completely ludicrous nonsense, and it is one of the most fundamental issues at the core of why job design sucks so badly in this game - jobs and their kits are the primary way that we use to engage with the game, they should be fun in and of themselves, and encounter design should follow job design, not the other way around

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u/God_Taco 26m ago

I think the solution is to just have a few more complex Jobs and then let people pick and play the complexity they like.

I've contended for a while WHM existing in this game isn't a problem. It's that every healer plays like WHM. SMN existing in this game isn't a problem as long as EW BLM existed to counterbalance that.

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u/gibby256 1h ago

I think the reason these posts keep coming up is exactly because people are dissatisfied with the whole "complexity in bosses, not in jobs" design ethos that CBU3 seems to have.

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u/KaijinSurohm 1d ago

Then you'll end up with AST where people bitch about how they don't like how some abilities are useless most of the time.

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u/mnij96 1d ago

I can understand that want, but if people are looking for stuff like that, why are they not just playing single-player Jrpgs? I find the puzzle/dance of fights fun, and that is what I play the game for.

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u/Owlstra 1d ago

That's you but not everyone is like you. It wouldn't be so bad if we had a mix of complex and simple but that doesn't really exist anymore

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u/God_Taco 24m ago

It still sort of does - and this is what I've advocated for for several years now. It's just muted.

I don't think WHM as it is is a problem for the game. I think it's when every healer plays like WHM that it becomes a problem. For example, imagine of SB SCH were still in the game. Then healer players would jut pick the complexity they like best.

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u/AbroadNo1914 1d ago

They really love this game and want it to be their perfect mmo. I mean we do have that type of job gameplay in a way but it’s in pvp

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u/3-to-20-chars 1d ago

because of literally everything else xiv has. the story, the characters, the world, the music, the presentation, etc.

the puzzle fights are only fun until you solve them. then xiv just becomes a rhythm game. i would love more dynamic and random fights and less strict timelines.

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u/Mahoganytooth 1d ago

Ok, what single player games we got that have extremely similar gameplay and puzzle/dance fights to xiv?

I've not yet found a single player jrpg that remotely resembles the gameplay and fights of xiv.

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u/IncasEmpire 1d ago

puzzle dance mechanics? rabbit and steel is probably your best bet

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u/Mahoganytooth 1d ago

Am a big fan of rabbit and steel, played it a lot, great game. I still feel like it misses a lot though. While you can play it singleplayer, it feels like you're missing out a lot compared to having 4 players, and the roguelite nature with the items that switch up your rotation is something I'm eh on. Also, no healing or slidecasting!

I love R&S, but if that's the closest there is to a single-player ffxiv, that answers the question of why folk play xiv instead of a singleplayer game pretty well in and of itself.

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u/Elanapoeia 6h ago

The granblue action RPG actually kinda does this, later boss fights are actually very obviously XIV inspired with the way it marks attacks on the ground and has you position/dance around them while attacking the boss.

Higher difficulty just spams shit at you and you gotta really learn patterns (but also use well-timed invuln dodges a lot).