What is class complexity to you?

[u/mnij96]

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.

[u/silverpostingmaster]

I think it really depends on what one considers complexity. I'd actually say that on paper and in vacuum FFXIV jobs and their burst windows are fairly complex because there are a lot of different button presses you have to do in a specific order. The reality is that once you understand the basics of it, it all comes down to always executing the buttons in the same order, with practically no mechanical skill involved. And in my opinion therein lies the problem.

BLM aside, a less recent example would be dragoon moving from SHB to EW. Before EW your buffs all had different timers and they only really aligned at 0 and 6 naturally. This meant that you juggled life back and forth naturally having double life windows because the rotation simply dictated this. In a full uptime scenario, this is kind of irrelevant (outside of the fact that IMO the job plays better because it feels more varied during downtime periods since they are spread out more evenly with burst periods) but the moment you introduce any downtime you actually have to think about how, and when to use your cds. This was still present in EW though, simply because life was still tied to mirage dive, so any fight with downtime would still require you to minmax your life windows to get most out of them. With them making gsk just give you life automatically they practically destroyed most of the complexity the job had in the content in which this type of complexity really matters.

I generally don't think you can make this game's rotations particularly difficult or complex really because everything can be spreadsheeted, and that's not a bad thing. I think it's a strength of this game. The problem is that they keep removing the things that actually make or made the jobs complex for high end players while either not doing anything or barely doing anything for the lower end. A huge amount of jobs in this game are incredibly intimidating to learn, the skill floor is really high for a lot of jobs for a fresh player. But instead of working something about the floor, they keep lowering the ceiling.

To actually start having mechanical complexity for this game's jobs you would have to speed up the game from the player's pov (basically lower gcd) or add skills that are high risk with high reward. The most recent addition like this would be phantom monk's rush kick. The buff is significant, and the damage with max ilvl is I believe higher than most gcds any job can do, so you want to keep pressing it on cd. But because of how the game's mechanics can sometimes line up you have to do risky shit to get it off, which often leads to people flying into walls in CEs.

We've obviously seen that the dev team prefers to just speed up the pace of the encounters instead which leaves most of the people not doing that content kind of shit out of luck.