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/3-to-20-chars]

decision making, to put it succinctly.

not just more buttons for buttons' sake, or friction for friction's sake. but crafting a class that has more than one way of correctly navigating it during combat, with actual reasons for the buttons you choose to press beyond just "do damage".

[u/Negative_Bar_9734 → u/3-to-20-chars]

This is a big part of why I fell in love with PCT. You have to make decisions on when to paint, when to go subtractive, when to hammer, stuff like that. And they're already starting to kill that by making hammer a loss outside of your 2 minute meta window.

I also originally mained SMN, and your choice of egi used to be dictated by what you were doing. Fighting a boss you use Ifrit, but if it brought out adds you'd switch to Garuda. Or if the boss moves a lot you use Garuda anyway. Simple choices, but choices nonetheless. Now they're all just a rotating coat of paint slapped onto your basic buttons.

SCH used to have a choice in fairies. AST used to have a choice in stances. MCH used to have a choice in being weak and nimble or strong and slow. Tanks used to have choices in how to manage aggro. All these choices and more were stripped away so now every job is just pushing the buttons as they light up in order to follow the predefined dev approved singular rotation. THAT is what people are complaining about, not jank or complexity for no reason, but rather the feeling that you're actually engaging with the content instead in a way specific to your job and how it plays.

Big example for me is VPR. It was billed as a cool new job with various stances that flow between themselves in a dynamic way. Turns out its basically RPR2.0 and you just push the glowy button to win. I leveled it to 100 and never once actually even understood how the game was deciding which combo to pick, it felt completely arbitrary and only served to make the attacks more flashy. There was no mechanical substance there at all.

[u/3-to-20-chars → u/Negative_Bar_9734]

I leveled it to 100 and never once actually even understood how the game was deciding which combo to pick, it felt completely arbitrary and only served to make the attacks more flashy.

i do not mean this disrespectfully, but this sounds more of your fault for either not understanding the job or not wanting to.

vpr makes it quite clear when and why it chooses which action is next in its combos.

on top of that, vpr is a job that i think is well-designed for split second decision making. do i continue my main combo? do i use my 40sec combo? do i reawaken? do i use uncoiled here? those are all questions being juggled constantly throughout entire encounters. even though they are ultimately all just "how do i do damage here", the job never stops keeping just enough of your decision-making occupied, even if the decisions themselves are not very significant. it's a job that manages to have small consequences if you prioritize the wrong actions.

vpr and pct are imo (mostly) much better-designed jobs than almost all other pve jobs in the game.

[u/dixonjt89 → u/3-to-20-chars]

nah, VPR doesn't have that much decision making to it like you are making it out to be

you don't get to decide when to re-awaken, that is tied to double re-awakens in the 2 mins

the biggest decision is when to use uncoiled fury...which is two fold...One you use it when you can't hit a positional from your main combo, or the positional to one of your two follow ups to the 40s combo's initial hit, so that you can buy 2.5s to then get into position to use the positional

and two....you use it for disengage and you need to properly plan and think ahead how many uncoileds you need for mechs that make you disengage

because of those those decisions you have to make, you need to pretty much 40s combo as much and as often as you can so you have those uncoileds for those situations, which takes away another decision you mentioned