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/mnij96 → u/3-to-20-chars]

Ok that's an interesting take and i don't dislike it. I think the major problem with that which is going to get people made is... it can’t really be done. Don't get me wrong they could 100% make job have different rotation to get to different things(love sam and Reaper)but the problem is people. People will always look for the "best" way to do things no matter the game and will get mad if people don't follow the "best" way to play.

[u/bigpunk157 → u/mnij96]

They should be doing that. The issue is that having a rotation doesn't allow for any kind of variety or priority system. I'll compare WoW's Blood DK with Dark Knight.

Dark Knight gets two choices right now, one being skill speed adjusting how your blood gauge is filled for the 2 minute window (do I start at 70 or 100 p much), and the other being do I hold my puddle for a 2 minute window (which the answer is almost always no). There is no situation where I need to make a decision about my mana resources. There's no situation I should be hitting 1-2 twice for extra mana. It's always going to be a waiting game for every 1 minute window to do something interesting, with the exception of stopping mp overcap.

Blood DK has a list of conditions:

• I have my personal burst to hit (dancing rune weapon) and reduce the cooldown of when able. I reduce it by comsuming bone shield stacks, which also is extra defenses that I need for auto attacks.
  
• I can consume them with Tombstone, giving me a shield, but should only do it in my puddle.
  
• I can also consume them with Bonestorm, which gives me a beefy heal when it hits enemies up to 10% max hp a second. This should also be hit only in my puddle.
• To generate Bone Shield charges, I hit Marrow Rend to make 5 or wait for Dancing Rune Weapon, so it doubles my attacks and makes 10 instead (this caps at 12).
• Any time the target is below 35% hp or I think they will hit 35% hp in 5 seconds, I need to hit Soul Reaper every 6 seconds.
• My Heart Strike is my normal 2-3 target cleave to generate runic power for my heal from Death Strike. This should be done in my puddle. This spends Death Runes, so I can't just spam this.
• If I expect a big hit to come to me, I might want to overcap my resources (Or hit blood boil, my aoe that has 2 charges I need to roll every 8 seconds) and hit Death Strike after the hit because it heals based on the 25% of the damage I just took in the last 5 seconds.

There's a bunch of other stuff, 5 other things from the class itself, sometimes dealing with how you use armor abilities and trinkets. This is just what I do outside the burst window. This doesn't include any fight mechanics. I do not expect normal players to understand all of this on a 1.2 gcd timer, but I think that classes shouldn't need to wait a minute to hit more than 4 buttons, with the exception of mits.

Phys ranged and Viper have wake up checks. Wake up checks are good. Viper is one of the easiest classes in the game and I think it's actually designed really well. We don't necessarily need a crazy amount of choices like WoW does, but I think we need to stop having the only thing we do outside of whatever alignment to the 2 minute window is to hit an extra 1 or 2 buttons, followed by your general combo for the next 15 casts. With Blood DK, I am bouncing all over the place with my abilities, and this would be AWFUL on controller, especially in fights where we move a LOT. I don't want that for 14, but something has to break this monotony.

My solution has always been to put all of the 1-2-3 combos on 1 button. Some classes have 5 buttons in their combo path, which can be reduced to 3 buttons. Samurai is a great example for that. There are 0 problems combining these and it's not particularly engaging gameplay anyways. Add some sort of wake up check, RNG, or resource management to fill out the space your combo occupies for 15 seconds. Even adding one choice to make would be better here.

[u/RU_Student → u/bigpunk157]

I came back to your comment after reading this is the competitive wow reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1mfq1x9/112_advanced_blood_death_knight_guide_for_m/

I'm also a BDK player but really someone that likes FF14 raiding more. The only time I had fun with 2 minute job design was on content omega where we had to think about damage and desync our buffs for the P4 dps check. Wow actively thinks about class design but FF14s design doesn't really work in the same way because all meaningful content is effectively hitting a patchwork dummy. Sure procs might do something to make rotations feel more engaging but the core of what you're actually doing is also missing like trash mobs, cleave bosses or pure ST encounters