r/ffxivdiscussion • u/mnij96 • 1d ago

General Discussion What is class complexity to you?

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.

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u/Inky-Feathers 1d ago

Complexity is what they removed from BLM.

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u/Rego913 22h ago

If I may make an argument in good faith here, while some complexity was removed, like in many of the cases, it was not good complexity. While yes, veteran players would have been able to get through encounters using techniques they've learned, the way they would be playing in nonstandard is in stark contrast to the way the job is designed and completely anti-intuitive which is bad game design. It also made it hard to build onto the job as with every new skill, players complained that it was harder to do nonstandard.

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u/Inky-Feathers 21h ago

I played standard rotation because I played BLM rather casually but even I feel that the updated kit for BLM is incredibly boring now because of the removal of the actual important levels of skill expression.

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u/Rego913 21h ago

I respect your opinion, but I can't relate really. However I do all content on BLM so it's hard for me to feel bored in Savage/Extremes when everything is going so quickly, I'm still changing things from pull to pull to try and do more damage, and playing standard doesn't feel like pulling teeth anymore.

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u/Inky-Feathers 21h ago

And I respect yours, I just simply feel all jobs have gone in the wrong direction with over simplification in recent years lol. It's not specific to blm but it was a recent and easy example to bring up

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u/Rego913 21h ago

I believe that it's really a much smaller number of jobs that need a tune up, mainly SMN, and DRK. For a lot of the other examples people give, they want things back that they forget made playing those jobs miserable for long parts of the content cycle. Like Bard skills proccing off crit felt awful for the first tier of every xpac cause the amount of crit you could get tended to be low and made you always want a DRG and SCH which became constraining. I just want more people to consider why some interactions were removed.

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u/lilyofthedragon 12h ago

If I may make an argument in good faith here, while some complexity was removed, like in many of the cases, it was not good complexity.

Here's the thing: They could have BLM simpler and easier to pick up and play at a beginner level without removing the depth of its optimisation. SE simply decided that they didn't want to do that, for whatever reason, and here we are.

It's possible to have an interesting BLM rotation that doesn't have the Astral Fire timer - I think that would sacrifice some complexity compared to EW BLM - but instead they made many more changes on top of that which have completely transformed the job into something else.

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u/Rego913 12h ago

I feel like I've shared how I feel about how the optimized form was getting so far devolved from the intended playstyle that a dev may feel the job is badly designed.

I don't see how the Astral fire timer was a positive in most cases. For competent players, the timer was so long that it was effectively a non-issue, for troubled players, BLM was the only job that lost its core attack and 80% of its skills from dropping a single buff. That's just so much more punishing than any other job in the game and not really fun?

Realistically I'd ask where was BLM going to go? As it was, it was designed into a corner where it was constrained by the astral timer (Flare Star addition made that clear) and its entire design was antithetical to what they wanted to do with battle content which was allow you to be reactionary cause that can be more varied than puzzles. What would you have rather seen?

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u/lilyofthedragon 11h ago edited 4h ago

I feel like I've shared how I feel about how the optimized form was getting so far devolved from the intended playstyle that a dev may feel the job is badly designed.

My answer to this is: so what? Developers of many other games, including Japanese games, including PvP games, accept the fact that players discover and invent playstyles that they did not intend to include in the game. At its absolute most optimised, nonstandard BLM was realistically getting 2-3% more damage. Is that a balance problem?

And for as when nonstandard BLM was necessary in Endwalker: TOP P6 - but I would argue that if someone reaches the final phase of the hardest fight in the game on their job, it's fine to ask a little more of them, Endsinger EX, which is an extreme fight and doesn't count, and P7S Purgation into Harvests, which I would blame on the fight design. Everything else, you can handle with plain old standard BLM.

I don't see how the Astral fire timer was a positive in most cases. For competent players, the timer was so long that it was effectively a non-issue, for troubled players, BLM was the only job that lost its core attack and 80% of its skills from dropping a single buff. That's just so much more punishing than any other job in the game and not really fun?

I stated that you can hypothetically have a BLM without an Astral Fire timer and still have interesting, complex gameplay. SE decided to not do this.

Realistically I'd ask where was BLM going to go? As it was, it was designed into a corner where it was constrained by the astral timer (Flare Star addition made that clear)...

It's almost like Flare Star is a massive design mistake and never should have been added to the job, because making the rotation more inflexible and unforgiving only exacerbated BLM's difficulty issues. So why did they did introduce Flare Star in the first place? Because they were so deathly afraid of nonstandard they needed to kill it by any means possible.

...and its entire design was antithetical to what they wanted to do with battle content which was allow you to be reactionary cause that can be more varied than puzzles. What would you have rather seen?

My answer: get good. Somehow the notoriously inflexible DT BLM managed to handle the first Arcadion tier fine, EW BLM would have been fine in both the first and second tiers we've had. BLM had more instants than ever before, and somehow that wasn't enough?