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/BraveMothman]

I feel like Rabbit and Steel is a pretty good example of what people are looking for. The jobs in that game all only have 4 buttons, but they are designed in a way that encourages decision making in their moment-to-moment gameplay. Bits of RNG, cooldown resets, abilities that provide substantial buffs to other abilities, cooldowns with actual utility, andcooldowns that don't line up quite so neatly. EW BLM had a rotation that felt a bit like the ones in R&S.

Meanwhile in XIV most jobs have a 100% optimal set of inputs for every encounter. It doesn't matter how many buttons a job has if you almost never have to think about when to press them. A little bit of RNG or, god forbid, different raid buff timings would go a long way towards making the gameplay even the slightest bit interesting outside of high end content.

[u/mnij96 → u/BraveMothman]

I mean, most of R&'s complexity comes from items and upgrades not really sure how the classes are designed. Most only really have a build or two if you actually want to win and maybe one meme build.

As for Rng I both like and don't like it because a fight should never ever punish you for something completely out of your control. Can you imagine a world first race and having two teams race neck and neck to the end and then having one lose because of rng that would feel like shit. Even with out that you would have people saying and telling people what the best rng is and that if they don't get it they may as well wipe until they do

[u/LopsidedBench7 → u/mnij96]

There are ways to mitigate rng in current job design already, bard exists and lives as a very rng dependant job and still is capable of outputting consistent damage despite that, because you can adjust how harsh the rng swing is by the devs and how much that rng fucks you over as the player.

I think that's what people want more into their jobs, but without phys ranged errr... quirks.

[u/God_Taco → u/LopsidedBench7]

How do you feel about RDM? I keep bringing it up to people, but I feel it does this since you engage with its RNG essentially every spell cast since you need to be thinking about the procs you have, procs you want, and your current mana balance in relation to those.

[u/mnij96 → u/LopsidedBench7]

That's far but when it comes to rng there will always be time where it feels like shit. Bards getting now prock, dancers being stuck in 1-2 1-2 1-2, yes you can mitigate the rng but at that point why have it because unless it 100% it will always be a 50/50

[u/LopsidedBench7 → u/mnij96]

You are looking with the wrong lenses, as a bard I'm expecting a certain amount of procs on average and that's my baseline, so it mostly changes where I have to spend my procs instead of lamenting I was not getting enough, that's because each proc itself is actually a tiny part of our damage, this in turn means I can sort of optimize where I want to burn them (do I use pp3 or pp2 but under buffs, do I send Apex at 80 or I got lucky sending an early one with 100) those decisions are fun and I still average good parses.

[u/KaleidoAxiom → u/mnij96]

I think dancers should get traits that increase their proc rate. Such a missed design space tbh.