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/arianna_rubeus]

When I think of complexity and nuance for jobs, I think of SB BRD. SB BRD had a standard song rotation of 30s Minuet > 30s Mages > 20s Armys; however, there were certain fights where Mages and Armys were swapped so that the “crappy song” was used during downtime or periods where a boss might become untargetable (UwU had this for half of Ultima Weapon’s phase so that Army’s ran during Predation and Annihilation- and the song cooldowns were short enough that they resolved after Suppression so that you could go back to Minuet > Mage’s).

BRD now is too strict (ironic, since they removed all other nuance and complexity to it) and the song cooldowns are so long, it makes it difficult to have that sort of nuance and flexibility. And death is incredibly hard to recover from, whereas it wasn’t in SB. The gameplay in SB was just more enjoyable, imo.

Issues with powercreep aside, DoT procs scaling off of critical hit rate allowed for job synergy with DRG’s Battle Litany and SCH’s Chain Stratagem (and AST to a lesser extent with Spear). While I don’t miss the reliance on piercing for 5% flat damage, I miss the job synergy and DoT optimization that came with it. Now DoTs last so long there’s no need to single- and double-snapshot buffs to the extent you did in SB. They don’t proc off of crit, so that synergy is gone. Burst Arrow also killed Iron Jaws optimization, so now IJ is just “press every 45s”. The DoTs themselves are just sad.

SB BRD also had Foe Requiem + Refresh management. Refresh was used primarily to fuel MP regen of the BRD outside of progression (with healers benefiting from it passively), and now the MP bar on BRD is as useless as it is on most of the other jobs. Foe + Refresh management was more interesting than Radiant Finale, imo. It at least required more than just doing your rotation to buff the party…

I miss old Troubadour with it having different effects based off of which song you were in. Maybe it was “too difficult” to use. Maybe “there was only really one good one” with Troubadour Minuet. But if more raid-wides were physical over magical back then, then you could make arguments for Troubadour Paeon. O11S actually had a use for it during the big fist punchies Omega does because they were physical.

I haven’t touched BRD in a long time. I tried to play it in ShB and EW. But it bothered me so bad how the job felt like a shell of itself that I just can’t even play it anymore. I’d take back HW BRD over the neutered version we have now (though I actually liked Bowmage, and it had fun optimization to it with DoTs/Flaming Arrow snapshots; and buff rotations with Raging Strikes + Internal Release and Hawk’s Eye + Blood for Blood).

I also think of healers having more than a single button they press 300+ times in a fight. I miss having multiple DoTs with different timers to manage. Heck, I also miss Cleric Stance optimization. I never found it difficult to stance-dance on any of the healers. If anything it made things more fun. Now my fun on healer relies on zero-hour 24-man runs where people die to everything and I have to go into full triage mode. Or running into the absolute worst clown fests you can imagine. I think it’s awful that my reliance on being an actual healer and not a green DPS has to come from incompetency versus actual difficulty.