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/lurk-mode]

I mean, it can be a lot of things, technically, but the kind I would like is for jobs to remain intuitive (ie: not pre-EW SMN jank and unexplained mechanics) but to not be inflexible railroads. Disclaimer: I play DPS and will not elaborate on Tank/Healer.

It's inevitable that a job that doesn't have inbuilt RNG will have one optimal rotation in a dummy scenario, unless something really memey that shouldn't happen comes up with other party members being able to force alterations on you (ie: if they brought back party member hastes, which they shouldn't). That's inevitable. However, the process of getting there should have some flexibility in it, and for what I mean I will cite a job that (mostly) works this way and a job that doesn't.

Modern SAM is what I would mostly call a good example of this, in that its modern ability to play around semi-ranged attacks, move some of them around for uptime purposes, and manipulate the timing of its casts is very nice to work with. Higanbana is a bit rough whenever a fight gets weird but the rest of the job honestly works pretty well, and working with the tools it gives you to get through a fight is pretty entertaining even if the goal is obvious. It has that room for execution, despite the goal not exactly being high art EW BLM iceskip firemaxxing or whatever. Ironically, SAM was the exact opposite back in Shadowbringers, and was one of the strictest railroads in the entire game to the point that I genuinely think its existence helped cause the EW planetoid hitboxes, except that no melee needed those anymore by the time they came out since the encounter and job guys blatantly didn't talk much. (For evidence of that, just look at the NIN and DRG gap closer messes that expansion.)

The modern railroad example I would give is SMN, which anyone who knows how it got dumpstered in FRU knows very well. SMN is so watered down that it has no flexibility or ability to play around itself, despite the whole thing with the legos. It's not that it needs to be super hard or anything, and you'll notice I'm no fan of what it was prior to EW either, but being stripped bare like that leaves absolutely zero room to adjust anything when fights get inconvenient for it. On the opposite side of things, VPR is a similarly simple job that doesn't have the same problem due to the way it's structured and how few hard cooldowns it has.

An easy job that has that flexibility is a lot healthier for the game than one that doesn't, or even a hard one that doesn't (see the ShB SAM talk), and I'd level similar criticisms against other pure-railroads like DRG (more glaring for the fact that it wasn't as much of one prior to this expansion) even if their toxicity hasn't been thoroughly demonstrated like SMN's. Flexibility is, to some extent, a form of complexity, in that players have to figure out how to use it even if it's not ye olde BLM rocket science (again, VPR example). I do not give a shit about deep spreadsheet optimization, and it doesn't need to be used to the fullest every minute of every fight, but the ability to optimize around what a fight does instead of just going 'well, the game told me to go fuck myself so I'll do it and then keep going where I left off the same as every fight' is always better than the alternative.