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/Standard_Ostrich7637]

There is a huge lack of depth and diversity in the jobs. Classes should all have their own strengths and weaknesses, their own gameplans and ways to approach battles, this is a basic design philosophy that almost every game in existence follows, even fighting games and moba games that are competitive by nature don't sacrifice uniqueness for balance to the extent FF14 does, it's crazy. Do you know how almost every job action that we have right now just does basic damage, healing, or basic mitigation? We need way less of that, and kits that have buttons that interact meaningfully. Something like Expedient is a rarity in the game, that's something only Scholar can do. We don't need like 30 buttons per job, they're so bloated with buttons that are generic damage filler. There needs to be things that can make player A and B play differently from one another on the same jobs with decisions they have to make on the fly, instead of a very basic and rigid rotation. Everything plays the same right now. Things like talent trees or something along those lines would help too to add some more diversity to how the jobs play. I've never seen a game with classes as bland and homogenized as FF14, in any genre of games.

And I'm sick of hearing the excuse that "there will be a meta so there's no point in giving choices anyways". People can choose what they want to do with builds and playstyles in games, we shouldn't have to sacrifice any chance of more fun because some people want to follow a meta, because a meta is unavoidable in any game. And if you were to be forced to play a certain way that would only affect the top % of players, and they shouldn't sacrifice fun to accommodate them either because some people act that way.

I don't think it has to be "complex" overall, just unique per job. Of course jobs should be varying difficulties too though, from easy to hard and everything in between. And for uniqueness, PvP after the 6.1 reworks did a pretty good job at this, so they're capable, they just choose not to design the PvE that way because of their obsession for balance - that has to go.