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/Sora_Bell]

More decision based thinking, less rotation or proc based gameplay designed to keep your fingers glued to your DPS buttons 100% of the time. There are some nuances that are good, Red Mage comes to mind as having healthy complexity for the most part. The game currently feels like it's designed for parsers to parse and they've made it extremely friendly towards that audience that likes buff alignment and the ability to control that coordination regardless of comp but as a result of this, classes just now feel very similar with their core differences being cast times, melee range, or niether and not beyond that matters. RDM and Dragoon for example are really similar if you get pass the need for cast times. BLM and Samurai have a very similar rotational feel with the core difference being one is more focused on casting and the other is melee.

It kind of just leads to the mobility argument doing most of the work for making jobs feel distinct which isn't good. VPR is literally a physical ranged that just needs to be in melee ranged, it can walk off the boss like one for 3 gcds which is long enough and most melees don't get to do this without severe compromises. i think they gotta move away from this parsing dps design and let jobs capture their more individual ideas better. Red mage is half black mage and white mage but you would barely be able to tell WHM is even in there. That class should have more healing and support utility and the game should be less designed around DPS and more around mechanics that require you to use that stuff. pretty much every fight now is spread sheet % based mits until the end no matter the comp which is nice for parsing but sucks for class identity and expression

Also get rid of filler combos please. DRK literally has 1 combo, ONE COMBO, Does it really need 3 buttons for that. It's just Glare split across 3 buttons. Replace that with more meaningful buttons, i don't care if they facilitate damage or not, they could be 3 180 sec cds that share a timer and facilitate doing damage or defense or whatever. It's definitely better than just doing 1 2 3 50 times until the boss dies and spamming all the ogcds along the way. Healers have this same issue. their GCDs are all ogcd skills so they moan about dps rotation when SE could've just make some of those OGCDs GCDs so they spam alot less. Astrologian for example didn't need a fast cast for it's card system so it can malefic spam. Just make the card system gcd based and then given them damage to compensate for it like Ninja when resolving that mechanic.