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So, I need actual help in picking a new job, because I'm not even certain what I'm looking for is actually in the game. I mained Scholar for most of my playtime. Not necessarily because I wanted to heal (although the short queue times didn't hurt), but because I enjoyed that Scholar wasn't really a job with a rote skill chain. The real strength of Scholar was all of its weird situational cooldown skills, making them a lot less about execution of a set sequence (although it sort of had a bread-and-butter combo) and more about reading the fight and deploying the weird esoteric skill that was useful at right this moment. It got really fun and frantic for some of the harder bosses, where it ends up feeling like you're spinning five plates at once. Scholar's moving away from that, and I really don't like the direction it's moving to since it seems to be emphasizing the part of the job I found the most boring. I don't want to just quit the game, because I enjoy the game itself, but everything I've tried so far has been the sort of difficulty I don't like--with a focus on executing this specific skill chain over and over unto infinity, to the exclusion of all else. I'm willing to admit it might be a fault of what I've been choosing, and that maybe there is something more suitable for me in the game, but I don't know yet. So far, the jobs I've tried, along with generally how I feel about them: -Scholar, as mentioned -Black Mage (way too staid and focused on executing a really involved skill chain; basically the opposite of what I want) -Summoner (I'd call it 'fun enough'; it's acceptably playable as a side-job to Scholar, but felt too empty and simple to focus on as a primary) -Ninja (theoretically had potential, but it just ends up doing a really specific skill chain, with unnecessary complexity because it requires dipping into the largely-wasted mudras system) -Bard (has some neat-seeming toys but I'm pretty sure Bard is 60% 'trap skills you shouldn't be using' by weight, I ended up just using the same two or three skills constantly and occasionally refreshing a song) -Blue Mage (not a real job, but I'd like it if it was) Is there anything hiding in this game that might work for me, given all that? The only suggestion I've had so far is Dancer, which I haven't looked into at all because... well, it doesn't exist in-game yet.
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Jun 23, 2019 04:43
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:The only classes that don’t just do a rotation are healers, and it looks like scholar is the only one you’ve played. Honestly, the rub is that the boring part of Scholar for me is the healing. It's a little hard to describe, but Scholar's healing is a very easy execution, and my favorite part is actually the things you do when you aren't healing. I wouldn't call it an 'endless skill chain' but I admit it can look like that if you go REALLY hard on it (which is rarely needed), but yes, it is my favorite part of it. The worst fight of endgame Stormblood to me was Kefka. Not because he was hard, but specifically the fact that he wasn't. You didn't even theoretically need the Scholar's esoteric skills, which led to a fight that on several occasions I nearly fell asleep doing. And now I'm worried that every fight's going to be Kefka, because I play for those things I do on top of Scholar's healing, and they're going away in favor of more healing. homeless snail posted:Bard or RDM are the closest things to what you're looking for, but everyone in this game has a rotation of some form. Its just that Bard and RDM are pressing their buttons in relation to some kind of resource rather than explicitly following some kind of combo. Bard doesn't really have any trap buttons, you end up pressing most of them over a full rotation, but they're all situational and you don't want to want to press them if you aren't set up right. I can look into Red Mage and give Bard a second chance, I guess, but I'm not overly fond of jobs that focus too hard on their internal mechanics rather than what's going on around them, which sounds like what's up with them from your explanation. It's the thing that drove me away from Black Mage, that their gameplay was focused so inward, on managing MP, and the fire/ice stacks, and staying in Ley Lines, and Enochian (which I admit I didn't get to) that to play them well you're essentially ignoring as much of the fight around you as possible in favor of your own numbers. Samurai hasn't come up at all, so I might check that out. The section where you play as Hien is an AWFUL pitch for the job, which is a shame because those 'Role-Playing' missions are theoretically perfect for showcasing what a job's actually like to play.
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Jun 23, 2019 05:20
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:tbh I'm not really sure what you're asking for anymore, because scholar literally has an endless skill chain rotation. Once dots are up you either spam broil or miasma 2, and you heal between them. The healing is the part that takes anything else into account. From what I can glean, I don't think there's a single dps in this game that would satisfy you. Okay, I see the confusion! I'm not talking about the attacking skill chain. I'm talking about the situational cooldown abilities that Scholar has. Sacred Soil, Eye for an Eye/Deployment Tactics, Chain Strategem, arguably Bane or even Selene, etc. Basically the support things you do on top of vomiting green numbers all over the place. They're not always useful, but the real heart of Scholar to me is being able to recognize when everything lines up to make them the right thing to throw out. That's what I find fun, and overall I see that going away in favor of making Scholar less 'weird bucket of skills' and more 'easily-readable systemic skill chain with a bigger focus on actually healing'. I'm not even necessarily looking for a DPS role, it's just that they're most of the jobs and they feel a bit more mechanically diverse and solo-friendly, so I ended up trying a bunch of them for fun. And also I was, until recently, very content with Scholar as long as I wasn't doing solo content, so I had no reason to shift what my main would be until now. BisbyWorl posted:Eh, I'd say Role-Playing missions are screwed from the word go because they have to be made with the assumption that the player has never touched that class before. I think there's a midpoint between giving us barely anything and giving us everything, I'd prefer if they essentially gave an abridged version of the 'point' of the job. Y'shtola's Role-Playing mission is the one I keep coming back to in considering this, because I think that would be perfect for using a mission to basically pitch a job to the wider playerbase, and they totally fumbled it. Hers really should be more healing-focused and based around keeping a larger amount of friendly NPCs alive and fighting (a sort of mission that actually happens fairly often in the early-game) rather than being the main combatant herself. Basically, they messed up by making Y'shtola fight a single boss herself. Sarrisan posted:I don't think you are going to find a magically interesting class. What you might want to try doing is checking out more advanced raiding - not necessarily joining a static, but joining learning groups for savage fights and the like. Your rotational complexity is less important when you are concentrating on the fight itself - god knows I'd have quit this game forever ago if raiding didn't keep me coming back. I can see that in theory, but I live in Australia and have characters in the NA servers (because the alternative is playing with Australians), so most of my gameplay is in off-peak hours for most of the playerbase.
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Jun 23, 2019 06:09
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Failboattootoot posted:Cleretic have you considered dancer? I can't fully consider Dancer like I can with the rest of the jobs because we can't play it yet! But it looks potentially interesting, albeit really complicated. It definitely seems like it could be up my alley in terms of being way more about situational awareness and understanding everyone else's situation more than yours. I was really hoping that it'd be more of a debuff-centric support class like it is in a lot of other FF games, as sort of a counterpart to Bard, but what they've come up with is promising. The only downsides are that I can't actually work on Dancer before the expansion's released, and I don't generally like being one of the influx of people trying the new hotness straight away. Also while looking at it I can't help but feel like they've gone way too hard on it out the gate and it's destined for nerfs or retooling further down the track, which wouldn't be a dealbreaker but would be kinda disappointing.
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Jun 23, 2019 06:44
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Nessus posted:Level the job you loving hipster You know when the DPS queues for dungeons are at their worst? When there's new DPS jobs. You know when the healer queues are at their best? When there's new DPS jobs. Early Stormblood was great. Orcs and Ostriches posted:I don't think it's going to require much situational awareness, at least any more than any other dps class. You're probably just going to partner with the highest dps person in group, outside of the raid buff windows where you'll sabre dance/technical step. It looks a bit like Scholar's situational buffs (as well as some team buffs in other games I've played), where you can probably do just fine by slamming things when they're off cooldown but putting in the effort to figure out the right timings in relation to everyone else can go a long way. There's a lot of space between 'decent play' and 'high-level play' but you're still worth having around if you're closer to the 'decent' side of things, which is also something I enjoyed about Scholar.
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Jun 23, 2019 07:15
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Krabboss posted:The strict rotations of DPS classes might seem really boring, but in difficult content they can take a lot of focus to execute properly and I found it really satisfying to just stop dying in extreme trials and to put out a really good DPS parse. Like I said, I've tried Black Mage before (it was actually my first ever job, although I abandoned it sometime around mid-Heavensward in favor of the SMN/SCH duo), and I feel like it's a bit too much. The mechanics of it get really involved, and it's a strain to keep things up because when I got disrupted, it was a lot more about just resetting everything and building up rather than the more improvisational and reactive style that Scholar has when things get tough. I think Black Mage is overall the job that struggles most in 'poo poo's gone haywire' situations, since so much of it is reliant on setup and long-ish cast times. The DPS job I've tried that I really had high hopes for was Ninja, because it did look like it had that 'situational toolbox' style with the combo system, the basic skills doing extra positional damage, and the mudra skills. But the mudra skills sort of killed it for me, because that's not really the basket of situational skills it looks like at first, it's a basket of 'Huton, Raiton and sometimes Doton' with some extra obfuscation. It does look like Dancer has a lot of the feel that I was hoping Ninja has, and a similar energy to what I liked about Scholar, so that's good. And Samurai seems like it could play in that improvisational style now that I'm looking at it. Astrologian I might check out, since it does seem to have gotten a little crazy in a good way in its efforts to keep up, but I'm not sure. I do wish that Machinist were more up my alley mechancially, because it's absolutely my thing aesthetically.
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Jun 23, 2019 11:50
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I mean, I'm not exactly looking for 'reactive' from DPS specifically. I'm just looking for 'reactive' on Scholar's level, from jobs that aren't Scholar, and for other reasons I've personally tried a lot of DPS jobs. I'm very happy to swing at another healer or a tank, but most jobs are DPS and I'm leaving a healer job, so it makes sense that they're the ones that keep getting suggested. I'm disappointed that tanks generally haven't fit the bill (outside of 'Dark Knight I guess but not for much longer'), but that also makes sense since tanks are kinda by nature required to be prescriptive and setting the pace for everything else. Tanks in general in XIV have been sort of disappointingly hard for me to get into because they all look really similar, with that similar look being generally unappealing to me. I kept wanting some kind of 'magic tank' option that'd be more aligned with the magic jobs in both playstyle and aesthetic (because it never made sense to me for my Amano-looking willowy main to be clad in big chunky armor) but I know that's not gonna happen.
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Jun 23, 2019 13:33
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THE AWESOME GHOST posted:What did you level Bard to? Early on as Archer it does definitely feel like that, enough that they are straight up removing skills from the game next patch and just consolidating stuff. But later on it feels like a pretty adaptive class and you have all sorts of abilities that need you to pay attention to what's happening with procs and such. Level 50 at the very least, I think I scraped together another couple levels after that too. My Bard was my alt I was planning on doing Blue Mage stuff with, which then got shelved entirely when I found out that Blue Mage was an overall unsatisfying experience that kinda just wound up falling into its worst possible situation by trying to avoid it.
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Jun 23, 2019 15:10
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Zoig posted:Yeah i think i see your problem here, ya cant really be sure of a play-style until you max a class, and bard in particular gets a number of things that change it up from 50 to 60. Summoner is practically a different class at 70 than at 50 as well, if you didn't max that. Summoner, for the record, I obviously did get to 70 given the fact that I had Scholar at 70. I didn't play it in teams but it was my solo of choice because solo play as a healer is a special circle of hell. I kinda do want to elaborate on what I felt about Summoner, because I did see someone question it. At level 70 (and from 60-70, in fact) it felt a little weirdly empty, like it was missing a core component of some sort somewhere in its 'middle'. I can slam in the first Dreadwyrm Trance in like fifteen seconds, and then spam Ruin III/IV until it was time to cast Deathflare. And then when Aetherflow's back off cooldown I can slam together another Dreadwyrm Trance, then summon Bahamut and just go ham for a while. But the point between those Aetherflows was what felt empty. I didn't have much to do, just lay down some debuffs and do a 1-2 punch of Ruin spells while I waited. And I think that might be a consequence of playing Scholar in teams, which always plays like that 'between stage' but has a lot of healing and buffs it could and should be throwing around that Summoner doesn't. So rather than judging Summoner on its own merits, I could only see it as 'I'm playing a lazy, heal-less Scholar, except that sometimes I get to flip the gently caress out'. I have decided I'm definitely giving Astrologian a swing, though. I can get a head start on getting that together before Shadowbringers launches, and while I probably won't be at 70 by the time it does I'll at least be a fair way along.
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Jun 23, 2019 17:15
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I play on an RP server but don't really RP, and the worst I get on my female elezen main that I tried to make look like an SNES FF character is a couple of either genuine compliments about her look, or people trying to segue from a genuine-seeming compliment into being skeevy. That lulled me into a false sense of security. I made a female miqo'te alt and OH GOD.
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Jun 24, 2019 02:59
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Since we're sharing screenshots, my own character, who I'm still pretty proud of: I designed her to look like specifically an SNES-era design, both by trying to look Amano As gently caress and trying to get an appropriate color scheme. She's actually the closest I could get to one of the, like, four possible overworld/party character sprite palettes in FFVI. I'm still attached to one of the interim designs I ended up with before finding the right clothes, though. Looking like an evil wizard in a fantasy take on the seventies. 
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Jun 24, 2019 04:52
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Baby T. Love posted:Your character reminded me of Mokey Fraggle. Yeah, I'm into it, I can see it. She does have roughly the same color scheme.
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Jun 24, 2019 05:27
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My main takeaway from my first day of trying out AST: Oh god, I took SCH's fairy for granted.
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Jun 24, 2019 09:13
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Algid posted:At the lowest leveling dungeons essential dignity is pretty much as powerful as a fairy. Oh, I never actively controlled the fairy, especially not in early dungeons, I just let it do its thing. It turns out it was actually doing a lot of the patch-up healing that I now have to do.
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Jun 24, 2019 10:05
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SirSamVimes posted:On the other hand, the Far East content is just better than the Gyr Abania stuff. ...is it? I assume we're talking about non-MSQ stuff, because Stormblood's stuff in the Far East actually stuck worse with me than the leadup to Titan. At least Titan had a theoretical diversity of Things Going On even if it was a total runaround. The Far East part of the MSQ was 'go to downtrodden occupied territory, do random errands until they trust you enough to give Yotsuyu and/or Zenos some poo poo but not to the point where it actually hurts their standing, move on to next area' somewhere around four times in a row. Also, Gyr Abania's core NPCs were stronger than the Far East's, and I say that while knowing that Gyr Abania didn't even really have any. The Xaela tribal leaders were fun, but that's about it, and they were largely in service to Hien's story, who's kinda just a disparate pile of Generic Good Guy Traits and a few shallow references that don't add up to anything actually charismatic. And the less said about Yotsuyu's post-credits story the better, I still think that was the wrong choice in every goddamn way.
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Jun 24, 2019 18:40
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Bard (and soon Dancer) kind of demonstrate a big pitfall of simplifying everything down to a 'DPS/healer/tank' triangle, because a non-healing support doesn't cleanly fit into that. They're classed as DPS not because that's what they're definitely supposed to be, but because they don't really have anywhere else to be. At least they're useful and collectively understood to be in that weird position, though. It avoids Symmetra's problem in Overwatch, where 'support' was taken to mean 'healing' so she was seen as a bad support, and then she was retooled into being more of a supporting DPS but didn't fit into that niche either.
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Jun 25, 2019 03:46
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Dr Pepper posted:Yeah I think they would have saved themselves a lot of headaches if they had made a fourth "Support" category back in 2.0. But, alas. I would've liked that, I think it would've opened doors for jobs that I'd really enjoy (unsurprisingly, given my whole Scholar thing). On top of Bard and Dancer I could see it being a place for Time Mage, a combat-oriented take on Chemist, or possibly a version of Blue Mage that isn't vaguely insulting. The only problem is that I could see those sorts of jobs becoming essentially required takes for a serious team, which is something XIV's dev team both hates making and apparently can't resist if they get close (see: Bard, and probably Dancer). There's a reason that all of those jobs I mentioned are some level of indispensible in other Final Fantasies.
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Jun 25, 2019 04:08
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Poops Mcgoots posted:Why make a fourth role when ranged physical dps is basically already the support role. I mean, on one hand yes, because I want MCH to be my kind of job (and in most instances in the series it's in that mix, Edgar has a lot of that going on), but on the other hand like I said there's more types of job that fit that framework that'd be more magic-flavored, and they'd still be competing for DPS slots which was a problem in the first place. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jun 25, 2019 |
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Jun 25, 2019 04:18
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Intoluene posted:Honestly, I'm surprised Raubahn Ex was one of the only major problems in Stormblood. I'd say the biggest problem across XIV's expansions on the whole are that they go too hard on their respective themes. I don't even care if you like the themes of Heavensward and Stormblood, you're not going to after they get played forever!
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Jun 25, 2019 09:47
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Shabooty posted:i think it's time to decide Something about the viera faces still bug me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. I think their eyes are further apart than other XIV races'?
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Jun 25, 2019 18:47
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Yoko Taro doesn't make fun games, he makes games with weird and evocative stories that occasionally also happen to be fun as a result of someone else's work. So he's perfect for making some FFXIV raids, since they've already got people that know how to make rad boss fights for him.
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Jun 26, 2019 04:17
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Umbreon posted:What the gently caress are these crafter changes Honestly I kinda get the feeling that XIV's devs want to change crafting to make it better, but have literally no idea whatsoever how to do it. I've always figured that the switch from cross-class skills to the shared skill pool was applied to the wrong side of the game. Cross-class skills actually had an indirect benefit to the community knowledge base for combat jobs (you had incentive to learn other jobs and diversify your skillset and knowledge of what other jobs did) that just never existed for crafters, and actually doing the shared skill pool there would've reduced the Omnicrafter Problem they keep saying they want to do something about.
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Jun 26, 2019 09:34
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jalapeno_dude posted:Looks to me like they're trying to cut down on super long crafting recipes with the Maker's Mark and Heart of the Crafter changes. No idea why they deleted Byregot's Brow though. I think that's because Byregot's Blessing is now shared across all crafters along with Steady Hand II. I've forgotten which one of those I actually use, so I'm not sure how upset to be.
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Jun 26, 2019 10:46
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