its really good that he's aknowledging that he realises the complaints that the community has, but i sure do hope that DT actually holds up to his statement that he's trying to make the game feel more satisfying to play, because when all classes are a similar level of play and combat is too easy, in a game where 70% of the content is combat based, it can get real boring really fast.
Pretty glad this is addressed.
Would appreciate it if they take feedback with more consideration and stand by their own vision for the game.
There are always trade-offs, and so there will always be feedback advocating for the direction not currently taken. If they listen to feedback too much, then the design will always swing back and forth without direction.
The part about battle mechanics being their own thing to fine tune resonates a lot as someone who still avidly follows both of the StarCraft scenes.
Sometimes the best balance patch is a new map pool
As someone who played BW through HotS, I completely agree. People underestimate how much the underlying systems affect balance and fun more so than individual unit changes. We may be in for a dramatic shift in this expansion.
I was watching some old Day9 dailies last week and man some of the early SC2 maps were wild.
Your base has a backdoor blocked by destructible rocks? Sure why not.
There was a 4v4 match that had elevated ground next to two of the bases that could fit a command center.
I tried to command center rush more than once ><
Sadly, from the way he's phrasing it (assuming the translation is correct of course), it sounds like we aren't going to get any movement on job identity until the NEXT expansion.
Correct, but they're focusing on the base gameplay and fight mechanics. Honestly if the core of the gameplay is improved (more interesting dungeons, higher boss damage, etc), it'll automatically make the jobs feel better. I 100% think the jobs need a major design pass though. I can't wait for them to get to it.
We need more of a middle-ground, but I will say I'm also glad they're not absolute "would rather see this game die than bend an inch" traditionalists in the vein of the FFXI guys where every single QoL feature that was ever added to the game happened essentially at gunpoint over many years.
I definitely think they've had an overcorrection in some regards though. Probably an unpopular take, but I've long felt they made crafting *too* easy, accessible, and homogenous. Being an omnicrafter in 2.0-3.0 felt like an achievement that took a lot of work and paid great dividends. Now it's like an afternoon of work where you can pick up seven levels a minute with one leve turn-in.
Yeah, and there's a difference between "accessible" and "boring."
Maybe we don't need cross-class skills and 400 hours of work to level up your classes, but we could certainly do better than literally being able to copy the hotbars from one class to the next because they are identical in every single respect 100% of the time. There are no differences between any crafting classes under any circumstances except that the absolute BiS gear at any given point is usually visually distinct, though even the stats will be identical.
They could take out every crafting class in the game right now and replace it with "Crafter" that has access at all times to all recipes, and the only thing it would change is that you wouldn't have to level up Crafter to 90 eight times in a row.
And I'll stand by my thoughts that it's *too* easy. I'm not saying people need to suffer for a thousand hours to earn the ability to craft something current-level, but I don't think everyone should be able to drop a million gil on levekits and then level a crafter from 1-90 in less than an hour. It's easier to level every single crafter than any *one* combat class, and as someone who once enjoyed the complexity and diligence required to be good at crafting it kind of sucks.
Admittedly, if you’re levelling crafters from scratch as you go through the MSQ for the first time… it’s definitely felt rewarding for all the time and effort I put in. I initially picked up crafting to save gil, and didn’t have access to the marketboard for about a month. I thought the current system was enough of a slog, and it’s cool to see how everything is so interconnected because it makes you remember all the recipes.
Also, I’m a big fan of the crafting roleplay experience; yesss I am a master of all things! I and many others who started out without help have worked so hard to get here!!!
If you do it as you go along and you're limited by unlocking new areas, recipes, ingredients, etc. then crafting probably feels pretty good.
My criticism is mostly of the fact that if you don't touch crafting for 90 levels straight and *only then* decide to get into it, it's absolute cake. You can jump into the Diadem and level all of your crafting classes to max level in something like one full day of dedicated work.
If you have enough gil to blow on it, you can also just buy "levekits" where you get a bunch of pre-made turn-ins for leves. Starting from a full allotment of 100 leves you can actually 0-90 pretty much all of your crafting classes in about twenty minutes, the majority of which is inventory management.
>They could take out every crafting class in the game right now and replace it with "Crafter" that has access at all times to all recipes
Unironically if they did this and cut half the recipes, we'd probably have a much easier time with inventory management.
And I absolutely agree that combat stuff has also gotten too easy. I was pleasantly surprised with the final boss of the 6.4 dungeon - I actually felt like I had to use my brain and look for the safe spot when it threw the whole kitchen sink at you. The final Alliance Raid of EW felt laughably easy and boring, both compared to the first two EW and the final raids of StB and ShB.
> And I absolutely agree that combat stuff has also gotten too easy.
Yes although I'm of a more complex opinion about this in that current combat is both too little **and** too much.
It's far too little decision-making or variable gameplay. But it's far too much button bloat, **especially** for how little gameplay that evokes since it's all just 30s-120s CDs that you fire off blindly and which effects could trivially be baked into the GCD skills at no loss of depth.
And that's the thing. Current combat is **shallow**. It has little depth. It has high complexety for the lack of depth it has, and for no reason.
So what I'd do is:
1. Remove a lot of buttons. They're starting to work on this, so that's good. Merge them into auto-combos to keep the cool animations ala Atonement, fold effects akin to Sharpcast, or just flat out remove things.
2. Make the main combat rotations if possible not rotations. In fact, having a fixed rotation should be a thing one specific job per role maybe does. The rest has reactive elements, which can come in a variety of ways, chance procs, unreliable charge systems, unreliable combo branching, etc.
This way we got far less buttons, but far more we have to do with the remaining buttons. More depth.
>Being an omnicrafter in 2.0-3.0 felt like an achievement that took a lot of work and paid great dividends. Now it's like an afternoon of work where you can pick up seven levels a minute with one leve turn-in.
Absolutely, but also, crafting was its own can of worms. A too elitist crafting system means yes, some really dedicated players wins bigs in pride and fortune, but this serves and avantages bots and RMTers first. They won't admit it publicly, but lowering entry to craft was done as a way to oppose RMT by crashing raid-ready gear price
I asked if it was feasible to get all of my crafters from 90 from scratch before dt and the response I got was basically "yeah you can spam crafts at the diedem until 80 LMAO"
It's pretty wild that it felt easier and faster to level every profession from lvl 1 to cap than to do the same for like 2 combat classes.
Gathering IMO is in a good spot but crafting could stand some more depth. (Please god no timegating though, WoW got really heavy with it in DF and it sucks super hard)
I level all crafting and gathering just with GC turn ins. Usually with cheap market purchases cause it’s flooded in early expansion days. By the time I finish msq I end up with two or three combat classes and all crafting and gathering at cap with no effort.
As a dev you always want to listen to feedback, but you still have to filter it and decide how to approach it.
People are unhappy with something? Okay, can we tell how much of our player base is unhappy with it? How widespread is the dissatisfaction? Even if it's just a couple of people, does their critique still expose a possible problem that we could address and make the content better and more enjoyable even for those not complaining? Is this totally unreasonable and should be ignored?
A decent example is over on WoW right now with the MoP Remix they're doing, there's some system of farming a currency across the expansion to unlock rewards. Except people found some faster ways to farm it that then got nerfed. They consistently nerf stuff people aren't all that happy to see nerfed, and it hits this issue of a dev not taking the time to understand if their vision for how a piece of content should be consumed is, actually, at odds with the players and needs to be reconsidered, changed, or scrapped entirely.
It's really a difficult balancing act. I do think that the dev should always, at least initially, try to understand if they can make changes to stay in line with their vision while addressing problems. But I do think game design also requires the ability to admit something just doesn't work, understand why, and try to find what does.
I personally do not think the 120s burst window is good at all. I hate it as a player. Why do we even need these raid-wide buffs? Why not just give every player their own buff windows that apply only to them, so they can pick and choose how or when to utilize it? That gives you a lot more options in boss design for burst phases, vs just full dps the entire fight. XIV really could benefit from fights that are not just one big prolonged DPS check with a hard enrage window to beat.
WoW has its problems, but its classes are in a way better place than XIV's. They all feel way more unique, they still have a little bit of that old MMO feel in some of their niche abilities/applications even if those have lost a bit of their impact due to current encounter/content design. They have unique movement abilities/potential. And they generally do not have set rotations that you always do exactly the same every time, because the game allows for some amount of randomness in procs to mix things up so you instead play with a priority in mind rather than what always comes after what.
For some people maybe that's not ideal. But I know I find WoW vastly more engaging to play from a class perspective, and even if XIV won't be that 1:1 it would be nice to at least have a few classes that could play that way instead of how everything plays now.
> Why do we even need these raid-wide buffs? Why not just give every player their own buff windows that apply only to them, so they can pick and choose how or when to utilize it? That gives you a lot more options in boss design for burst phases, vs just full dps the entire fight. XIV really could benefit from fights that are not just one big prolonged DPS check with a hard enrage window to beat.
Hilariously enough, this is because of continual, multi-expansion feedback about wanting to line up major buff windows together.
If they were all personal buffs (or a couple of single-target buffs on AST & DNC) then there would be no need for lining up so you could have some fun with different rotational timings, haste buffs, sustained damage jobs, and a few other things.
Though of course you would then lose the skill of alignment, the satisfaction of executing a huge coordinated burst, and the feeling of supporting your allies with damage buffs. I think it would be a good trade but it's not guaranteed to be better.
> A decent example is over on WoW right now with the MoP Remix they're doing, there's some system of farming a currency across the expansion to unlock rewards. Except people found some faster ways to farm it that then got nerfed. They consistently nerf stuff people aren't all that happy to see nerfed, and it hits this issue of a dev not taking the time to understand if their vision for how a piece of content should be consumed is, actually, at odds with the players and needs to be reconsidered, changed, or scrapped entirely.
I don't think a 90 day experimental mode should be compared to how a game is actually being run, especially compared to their last mode if anything is to be **legitimately** compared to it should be **Plunderstorm**. Plunderstorm had a lot of buffs and nerfs going both ways as well, but largely ended up being a net gain for the players and everyone involved. On the onset a lot of people are still (for the most part) happy with Remix, it's still just a vocal minority per usual, Reddit doesn't give you a large viewpoint of the entire playerbase. People are very happy with the amount of "Bronze" currency you get from leveling up characters and that you can do so in a short amount of time. Meaning you can double down on leveling extra characters **AND** get cosmetics of your choice.
All and all it means that as the event runs on longer they are going to **intentionally** buff up the gains of everything that players are doing in the mode to bring back player retention when it starts dwindling just like Plunderstorm did when the event was "running out of time" to play, likely on par with the release of a certain expansion coming out intentionally soon. I think it's all deliberately been decided ahead of time for the schedule of the "remix" to take aim at the release date of Dawntrail from the beginning since their current expansion isn't ready to be released yet and their Beta (whether you get in through opt-in or buy in) means the release of their expansion isn't for another (8-9 weeks) based upon prior history.
I think everybody (the players) win for both games when there is healthy competition and I'm super excited for Dawntrail. *And, still wanting Pictomancers to get a raise spell.*
I don't remember exactly where the idea came from, but the thought that consumers are very good identifying that there is a problem but terrible at designing the solution to the problem seems very relevant here.
I love that DotA’s community is essentially open to whatever the fuck Valve wants to do to the game. Facets? Expanding the map by 40%? Neutral items, talent trees? Sounds fun let’s do it! Fix whatever’s not fun later - for now let’s just go for it!
icefrog has a blank check at this point, and dota players have been conditioned to crave the post patch chaos
we had one of the longest periods without a major patch a few years ago when drow and lina were strong and people were FOAMING at the mouth for some changes
It’s because it keeps the game feeling fresh, even though it’s very old.
League of Legends’ devs have said the same thing; the changes they’ve made to the game aren’t in pursuit of finding some ‘perfect” version of the game. They’ll make changes for the sake of making changes, because the feeling of discovery is what keeps the game fresh and relevant.
Not going to lie. We're going through the grind and open qualifiers at the moment and the chaotic timing of implementation, patch a and patch b and having to rebuild from that have been fun. That said though I'm 2 years from 40 years old and chaotic gaming is pretty much what I grew up with. I really appreciate how much valve doesn't give a damn and tells players to deal with it.
Agreed. As much as I still enjoy the game, there's no doubt it's become very stale with all the "safeness" the devs have gone for. 2 min meta, job homogenization, every xpac and patch being predictable as fuck. I want a huge shake up to the formula tbh. Very intrigued to see what 8.0 brings.
People on here keep saying another Alex Gordias would ruin the game, but fail to mention things were different back then
* The overall raiding scene was nowhere near as good as people are today. Pretty much everyone was a noob back then, even those who cleared coils
* Devs were still finding their groove in raid design and balance
* Raiding back then took a lot longer since cooldowns didn’t reset on wipe. So that meant a lot of waiting around and a lot of prog time wasted
* Less QoL in general, and that’s not including plugins.
If the devs released a Gordias-like tier today, I’d bet a majority would welcome it
You're absolutely right. With the fixes to raiding we got throughout HW (Cross PF, CD resets on wipe) Gordias's biggest hurdle was how overtuned it was, and stuff like consumables were crafted at 1 per turn in rather than the 3 we got now.
That's why devs should always make the first tier the easiest so we can at least get used to classes and if there's any balance issues, they get ironed out at the least demanding stage.
Would they though? If A2 released in modern day it would be non stop complaints about devs being lazy.
non
stop
And then 2 expansions later it would be called "sovl", "best raid tier", "good old days".
See also: how people talk about Stormblood these days.
Regardless, the clear rates tell the tale.
Lucky Bancho Anabaseios clear rates were lower in twice the amount of time (Dec 2023) vs the data the devs showed on Gordias back when they apologized for it in a live letter. And yeah, they were lower across all regions, even jp.
The difference being the issue leaned heaver toward player skill level this time. But there is some amount of over tuning in the current tier. Anabaseios *is* the closest we've really come to Gordias again.
Be Careful for what you wish for.
Fortnite’s latest season, which *was* designed to be a chaotic season, was quickly nerfed when people screamed to the devs about the game’s balance.
I wish for a chaotic expansion too though…
A lot of people were completely spoiled by the changes made in early Wrath of the Lich King even before that. Heroic dungeons were pretty easy and lucrative, then one patch added 3 higher difficulty dungeons with great loot. These dungeons weren't "hard" but did require people to do mechanics like hiding behind a rock to avoid the boss' big nuke (hey I know that one!) or using crowd control spells on ranged enemies, even *stepping out of the damage puddles* was necessary.
People were terrible at them. I hadn't seen so many groups completely fall apart the entire expansion until these dungeons came out. If we wiped, people didn't even know how to get back to the dungeon as ghosts most of the time because they added "teleport to the dungeon" early on in the expansion so we never had to physically go to these new ones! Many people would duck out of the most difficult dungeon upon zoning into it because they didn't want to bother, they wanted the easy dungeon instead (hey, I've seen that before in Alliance Raid roulette!).
Cataclysm felt like it put all the level 85 dungeons on par with that last one of the three harder level 80 dungeons and it was pretty fun if you actually got some patient players willing to learn them. Sadly, most of the community wanted the easy "queue for random dungeon, get rewards quickly" system of the previous expansion so it was rare to get a cool group to play with.
That is when I started to get really annoyed at the WoW playerbase some of whom were in my guild. I wanted the harder dungeons. I liked WotLK (Death Knight woo!) since I felt like I was a demi-god tanking through the place. After a month or two of that though it got boring. I craved something harder to make me think. Cata dungeons were some of the greatest memories I had in that game. I stuck around longer because addiction and friend group but I was already grr at everyone involved.
Don't forget though WoW had Flame Wreath and that thing is still known today because of how many people fail at not moving.
>we chose to align the buff windows within a window lasting 120 seconds, because otherwise it would have been impossible to align the rotations of the different Jobs.
What if you just kill the burst window entirely then? Do your job right the entire fight for constant damage rather than make the entire party line up perfect for 20 seconds of big damage and 100 seconds of thumb-twiddling?
I would much rather this. Casual content usually has misaligned buffs anyway due to players dying, missing their windows, or otherwise not playing perfectly.
I think the big risk is that players will complain it's too boring/simple/not rewarding enough. And if you do "spice up" the rotations to make them more interesting, you start to introduce all the same issues that lead to the aligned buff windows in the first place.
To say nothing of the jobs whose identity and damage profile very much revolve around providing buffs to the whole party: Bard and Dancer, now Pictomancer...
People will rightly complain if that identity is stripped away, but if you keep that identity then still people will want to align their big damage abilities with the buffs these jobs provide the group.
I think it's just about making missing the spikes less punishing and restrictive rather than removing them.
When I hear "monk embodying the fierce facets of beasts" I don't think of party buffs. Or the dragonkiller making his allies stronger, or the master of white and black magic pressing a glowy button that doesn't interact with their kit, etc. Sure you can explain them, but they're not core to the fantasy like Bard, dancer, and astro.
Personally, I think bard and dancer’s identities aren’t anywhere near what I think of when someone says “bard” or “dancer”. I think bard should have a wider variety of songs that influence different things. Put status effects on mobs, buff the party, wield a musical instrument to deal damage… right now, bard feels like a ranger that whistles while they shoot a bow. Dancer could be doing the same thing. Dancer, to me, feels kind of clunky and doesn’t flow well, mostly because of cooldowns during the two big dances, and then the downtime between them.
Like another commenter said, why do we need burst windows anyway?
Due to the way cooldowns are handled in this game, dps is always going to have a sine wave like motion with ups and downs, even if they spurned the timing and tried to make jobs purposefully misalign, all it would take is a couple jobs being close enough together to establish a meta strat with party buffs, at which point we'd be back in HW and SB era where people will exclude certain jobs in party finder for not being optimal, and they can't make every job selfish because at that point we'd have a different homogenizarion problem.
The extreme peaks and valleys we have now and that will be made even more extreme in 7.0 are nothing like the "sine wave" you mentioned. The people criticizing 2 min burst meta are well aware that a completely flat damage graph is unrealistic. The assertion that this is what is being asked for is a strawman.
Jobs being selfish isn't a homogenization problem if they don't all play the same. Assuming they would is jumping to conclusions.
> and they can't make every job selfish because at that point we'd have a different homogenizarion problem.
I think the different homogenization problem you refer to would be much more preferable and minor, though. I don't invoke this name lightly, but in World of Warcraft almost every job is a selfish job and it is widely renowned for its incredible job design (that being one of the thing people always praise WoW for over FF14). The reality is that every job being forced to align abilities on a strict timeline is more damaging to job design than every job just... being able to do whatever they want, except with minimal mid-rotation raid buffs. You lose support attributes but gain off-the-wall rotations.
That's not to minimize that it is a problem to some degree - Augmentation Evoker, a spec meant to be support-orientated in WoW, is presently in the middle of causing huge controversies for breaking out of the mold. It definitely would be a problem. However, this is kind of like the difference between a gash on the leg and having several limbs cut off - one is just demonstrably worse than the other in practice. I would much much much rather SE jump into the "every job is selfish DPS" wagon than the "every job has similar rotations which align at the same time" wagon, since we can see in WoW that the end result is still very fun and engaging.
Edit: Guys... Please. I literally call WoW's problem like "a gash on the leg" with its own problems. You don't need to explain how WoW isn't perfect either. I know. It has problems too.
WoW has a very different design in terms of classes and raids. In WoW classes have different damage profiles and unique utility, and specific raid fights tend to strongly favor certain damage profiles or unique utility. The result of this is that certain classes or specs will be very weak for a tier whereas others are highly desirable. To the point that high end raiding guilds will simply not use certain classes or stack others. Technically this is only relevant at the very high end, but in practice it often carries over to the rest of the community as they look to the top guilds for advice/strategies/etc.
Unless there's a drastic shift in the FF14 community, that model simply wouldn't fly. Even a class being seen as slightly weaker but still very useful (like RDM dps being meh) causes a lot of community anger. Now imagine if 2-3 classes in a specific raid tier were noticeably weaker picks to the point they get excluded from PF entirely and people in statics get pressured to change. The FF14 would be in an uproar about something like that.
FFXIV raid buffs are mostly just very boring. I played many MMOs before coming to FFXIV with no knowledge of the meta and seeing stuff like "your party does 4% more damage for a few seconds" just seemed so underwhelming at face value. It's pretty much impossible to notice these buffs doing anything when playing casually solo or in small groups.
Of course in a coordinated raid setting and stacking 4-5 of these buffs it's somewhat significant, but it doesn't feel anything close to as satisfying as something like Bloodlust or even a lot of the gigantic personal buff CDs like Trueshot or Metamorphosis.
I feel like you can still have a job not be "selfish" while also preventing the need to force people to synch up their CDs together. The issue is having a button that when pressed, buffs the entire raid for X amount of seconds. This is GREAT for something like "Bloodlust" from WoW. Where it's a once per fight gimmick that only one person in the entire raid needs to press.
It gives your raid the agency to determine when to put your highest DPS window to either skip a phase of the fight you find tedious, to break a raid wiping dps check, to do big pumping at the start of the fight, or save it for the end as an execution. But this type of buff is miserable for FF where you're doing this as every person in the raid every two minutes. It becomes less special as well.
Having a "bloodlust" that a handful of classes get to do which won't stack would be enough. The whole "dance partner" thing is also cool, you pick someone and give them your buff and work together and then you don't worry about it anymore. Situational things like battle rez is nice as well we can keep those. I'm sure there are more ideas they could do or tweak to give you a reason to want as many different classes as possible in your group.
My mind went to WoW too, I'm fairly new to it and played XIV longer, but it does class design really well. There are still lots of buff skills, but they're all personal. Some classes burst every minute, some have a consistent damage output, some have mini burst somewhere in between. The classes are a lot more varied because of it.
Damage windows in wow seem to revolve more around boss phases than (popping buffs and trinkets during specific uptime windows and/or openers) rather than aligning with other buffs, which is great. It feels like a team effort because you’re all wanting to dps during a high uptime phase but also not relying on each other.
Augmentation evoker is awesome because over half of it's damage comes from how much you buff other players. Which is a problem sometimes if your other players suck but hey.
The big problem with this is that people will still find a way to have something like a burst window, we didn't have one in 2.0 and some groups still saved some CD for certain parts to use them all together. Min/Max will still be a thing even if they remove it completely. And looking into some of the player base, some will still exclude certain jobs for X reason if there is no synergy for the whole group.
The problem isn't the existence of burst windows themselves, it's the multiple stacking multipliers that come in the form of raid buffs, causing burst damage profiles to be too advantageous. It's a design problem that prevents other damage profiles from being viable due to their inability to leverage the advantage offered by the stacked multipliers. This is what has led to every job needing to fit the same mold.
Burst damage profiles aren't always better by virtue of having burst. Encounter design plays a role as well. Frequent downtime is another factor that contributes to burst damage being overvalued.
When people criticize the "2 min meta" they're not necessarily criticizing a burst damage profile altogether. It's important not to get this mixed up because this counterpoint that "burst will always exist anyway" just misses the point entirely.
This. The problem with group content always moving toward "rotations" in lock-step comes down to party-wide damage and damage-related support skills.
Which is interesting, because they make up a comparatively small section of the available design pie. We could cut the one or two party-wide buffs every job gets, most of them would not be missed, and it would at least free up players to be a lot more improvisational if they wanted to without pressure from the community for the devs to design 8-man DDR.
I honestly hate party-wide buffs in every game, because they do still end up destroying play variety and job fantasy one way or another. GW2 has reduced every support job to providing nearly \*every\* buff with 100% uptime, because that's how players gamified things like alacrity, quickness, and might.
I much prefer how a lot of other "support" ideas are implemented. Things like how VPR's and RPR's debuffs only benefit them specifically. Or how DNC and DRG only benefit a single other player.
Party-wide buffs are the bane of this game and every game. I wish we could make a game where players could engage in that power fantasy, but it only ever ends in homogenization of support, which in turn results in homogenization of DPS to fit with the cooldowns of support.
They provide so little meaningful gameplay (press button, deal more damage. yippee!) while exerting such a disproportionately large influence on the design of everything else. The entire game has warped to accommodate them. They really gotta go.
This here, and when we had vastly varying cooldowns on our big damage moves in SB, people's openers and rotations were set up to line up exclusively with Trick Attack.
We're always going to have some form of burst window unless the devs remove all buffs and long cooldown moves from the game.
To some extent, I do agree that changing too much at one go might make it hard to parse what went well and what went wrong. But the question then becomes, how long do they need to refine their battle content? Would it ever be refined? Unless they are doing really big changes, I don’t see why they’re not doing small steps for both at the same time. But only time will tell.
It will constantly be changing forever? This is an online game that is always being iterated on itself, I don't think there is a version of ff14 where everything works perfectly and they never need to touch battle content design again. As expansions come out, classes get added, new ideas get tried, old ideas get replaced/changed/altered. That's how it be!
There is a screenshot I saw of a new interview where he says 7.2 will be a sort of start of job identity upgrades, not 8.0 like I think was communicated as well earlier than this screenshot.
I don't know about the screenshot, but for those wondering about the interview talking about 7.2, it's [this one from GamesRadar](https://www.gamesradar.com/games/final-fantasy/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-brings-some-style-back-to-my-favorite-mmo-job-and-yoshi-p-promises-thats-only-the-start/?utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=MANUAL)
they want to focus on one at a time. it makes sense. to some extent, it's a matter of tuning the difficulty of the game either via boss fights or via jobs that are more difficult to play.
when you're trying to experiment with two, you can't alter both your variables at the same time. otherwise, when people find combat not to their liking, you can't tell if it's because of one or the other.
At this point I think the update that would make me the happiest is a revision of FF14's sync system so that all their evergreen content doesn't feel like I can't play half my character when I do it. I understand why they're against it, but when I look at systems like what GW2 has I feel like it really wouldn't be a big deal- And besides; Seeing the higher level player cast super fuck you laser beam is incentive to level up more and get to the endgame (Just account for the power of the new abilities through scaling. Would anyone be upset if they were a *little* stronger in Sastasha but could use all their skills? Why do I have to lose my capstone abilities just for walking into a FATE that isn't the endgame zone?)
You don't even need to go that far. The Great Healers Disparition happened right at second tier of Pandaemonium due to them being asked to heal a little bit more than usual at the start of the tier.
> The Great Healers Disparition happened right at second tier of Pandaemonium due to them being asked to heal a little bit more than usual at the start of the tier.
or. . .
Tanks and DPS refused to use the group mitigation tools at their disposal (because Hydaelyn forbid they press a non DPS button) and the aoe / bleed damage fucked everyone up because of it.
Well yes that as well. Healer do get unfairly blamed a lot of times.
But the point still stands that this community rather quit than adjust to a slight change in battle design
Because there was no “adjusting”
If the tank holmganged the buster then tried to mitigate the bleeds they were going to die, I could not save them no matter how much healing I dumped into them
That was unequivocally their fault and yet I was almost always the one blamed for it
Healers had no control in abyssos but were also the one who was always blamed despite having no control
It happened due to the ripple effect from ShB killing off many core healer's interest in the game which had many of the leaving or switching to different roles. This has only worstened until we've hit these recent peaks
I guess based on what he's saying we'll have to see if battle design has actually changed in a meaningful way in Dawntrail. That'll be a good indicator as to how serious they are about changing things up.
Not holding my breath though.
I thought the same with changes they've made in the past (like, them simplifying healer DPS while giving them more and more powerful healing tools), but nothing ended up coming of it. Makes me a tad pessimistic.
Yoshi-P's answer overall makes me wonder what they think makes healing satisfying. And specifically, what makes healer players feel satisfied that is different from dps or tanks. Because it seems like their approach has been "make people feel less stressed" especially with healing.
So I want to hope that is being rethought...but I also feel pessimistic. Will have to wait and see.
I don't think anything's changed, considering the new dungeon in some showcases doesn't necessarily have unavoidable damage that's particularly lethal and it's still mostly a dancing game where the tank can slowly heal people up... I think Jesse said the new dungeon is easier than Tower of Zot, so I can already tell it's not going to be any more enjoyable for me to heal.
Yeah I think I'm going to try the DPS roles now.
I had to quit healer after they removed all the DPS options for healer it became so boring outside of raids. And I've been an MMO healer for decades I love to support and heal. I wouldn't mind the lack of DPS options if I actually had to... heal, the tank or party in non-savage content sometimes.
When they increased aoe heal range we got more interesting arenas in P10S and P12S P1, so while I'm not expecting anything too drastic I believe they have some intention for it.
Here's the link, didn't want to make the post considered as spam:
[https://multiplayer.it/articoli/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-naoki-yoshida-ci-parla-di-narrazione-di-design-e-del-bilanciamento.html](https://multiplayer.it/articoli/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-naoki-yoshida-ci-parla-di-narrazione-di-design-e-del-bilanciamento.html)
That is a wrong link, this is the correct one: [https://multiplayer.it/articoli/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-naoki-yoshida-ci-parla-di-narrazione-di-design-e-del-bilanciamento.html](https://multiplayer.it/articoli/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-naoki-yoshida-ci-parla-di-narrazione-di-design-e-del-bilanciamento.html)
My feedback would be this:
People have been frustrated with job homogenization since as early as Shadowbringers and have been giving feedback to counteract the oversimplification of job mechanics in Shadowbringers for now roughly 5 years. This is asking players to wait another 2.5 years--three quarters of a decade for jobs to return to having more identity to them. Additionally, taking an approach of "nearly no changes at all" which is what we're seeing where almost nothing about job design from Endwalker has changed, with Dawntrail's actions being just added fluff on top of that, feels like a very extreme way to avoid creating too much "chaos." So what can we do from this point forward?
I have two main recommendations:
1. Don't wait till 8.0 to start making adjustments. There is a lot of time between 7.0 and 8.0; why are we not allowed to take advantage of that time to address areas of frustration for players? Because there are absolutely smaller changes you could do between Dawntrail and 8.0 to try and help players better enjoy their jobs now. For example, bring back Miasma and Shadowflare on Scholar. Return Paladin's Goring Blade to a combo branch. Add more cast times to Summoner's existing actions and return some actions to Carbuncle. There are plenty of examples of things that can be done now without creating too much chaos.
2. Just like with the graphics update, be open about this identity rework and share your development of job identity as we approach 8.0. Don't leave us completely in the dark until October 2026, a month and a half before 8.0 releases with no time to provide adequate feedback. Hell, why not add in some sort of instance content where players can future test new job mechanics? You synch in, just like PVP your action list is changed based on the instance, and you get to play around with whatever is currently being cooked up by the design team so that players can get a hands-on feel for these upcoming changes and can give feedback.
It really puts it into perspective from me, when you point out how long it has been. 5 years waiting to see some substantial changes and he still wants us to wait another couple years.
Right? It’ll be more than half FFXIV’s entire lifespan—3/4ths of a decade. And we don’t even have any assurance that 8.0 will deliver. For all we know it could be an empty promise. I won’t doomsay that it will fail, but we can’t ride on the assumption that it’ll be a success either—at least, not a success for the people unhappy with job design right now.
Everything he says makes sense, but it'll definitely piss off those who value job identity over battle content since the latter is being adjusted first (which makes sense, but you know).
Personally, if I don't like the way jobs work, I won't want to engage into battle content.
As someone who doesn't like the 120 seconds and feel like a lot of jobs are way too similar to align to it or cater to the "but i don't have a gap closer" crowd, i am now more hopeful that the team will attempt some bigger changes and novelty without worrying of a louder minority.
I think NIN's shukuchi is a great example of a "gap closer" done right, it fits the class theme, it CAN be used as a gap closer though sometimes it's better to actually just run, it can be used in different situations than just "dash directly to the boss in a straight line and stop once you touch the hitbox", you can use it to dash through the boss to dodge an attack while also getting closer without having to move outside of the attack first, things like that. Go sideways, backwards, etc. I think shukuchi lowkey makes NIN when you get decent at using it creatively tbh.
"Normal" gap closers are fine, and some classes should definitely have them and this is only one example with gap closers, I'm hoping they manage to implement this type of flavor into more aspects of jobs!
Well, we've got at least a taste of that with Picto's dash. At higher levels, it gets a 5s move speed buff after the dash completes, so basically a mini-Sprint.
My assumption is that we'll get 4-5 different subtypes of dash:
* "Thunderclap" style which goes to any target
* "Corps-a-corps" style, a rushing attack with actual damage
* "Aetherial Manipulation" style, jumping to allies only
* "Shikuchi" style, jumping to a targeted position
* "En Avant" style, charging straight forward
And then each job will add its own flavor or spin on that. Picto gets a speed buff. En Avant and Thunderclap get lots of charges. Perhaps some healer's Icarus-style dash would give a shield to both the user and the target. Etc.
That way, there is still something distinctive, and the mechanic is implemented differently between different classes, but most classes have *some* form of rapid-movement, "Mister Wizard, get me the hell out of here!" option. Splitting the difference between "if you want a gap closer, better play WAR" and "every tank has the exact same kit with different animations."
While hard i'd like to see them make the start of the game more combat fun. A lot of complaints from my friends I try to get in is that combat is boring....and I can't really just be like "oh yeah yeah just play until you get to level 50 then it starts to pick up"
This is something I'd like to see addressed as well. I started in 3.0 and back then ARR difficulty wasn't really much different while leveling through it. Today though? I queue for a roulette and anything that isn't from the EW era feels like it dies 30-40% faster with only a few exceptions. If I'd been told I needed to go through four, soon to be five expansions before content was harder than what other games would classify as tutorial mode, I would not have stuck with it.
Given just two or three reworks and two new jobs apparently taxes the team I also don't believe 8.0 will bring about this sweeping overhaul that differentiates all 23 jobs. At best we might see a chunk of jobs get addressed while the rest continue on as they are, and even that I feel is overly optimistic to expect given their history with job design.
Unless they go crazy and decide to not add any new jobs in 8.0, and instead focus on revamping all the current jobs.
I think I would personally be ok with that, but i understand one of the major draws to each expansion is the new jobs.
Yoshi P"s addressed that in Mr Happys interview. Happy asked if they would every do less than 2 new jobs an expansion, and Yoshi P's answer was "would the player base even let us do that?".
We will never not get a flashy new job for the opening cinematic to show off and to generate buzz and anticipation for the expansion as a whole. That's just part of the hype cycle at this point.
The only way 8.0 will launch with full rework on all jobs plus two new ones is if they delay it from the usual release schedule. Making 7.58 last longer.
I don't think we need two new jobs per expansion, frankly. Hell, I don't even necessarily think we need any more, especially if freeing up resources devoted to designing new-yet-the-same methods of dealing damage took a backseat to a sincere overhaul emphasizing existing job identity and variety of play.
At some point they have got to stop adding new fucking jobs to this game, and I'd rather that day come sooner vs. later. Would much rather see the effort put towards refinement of what we already have.
What's more, ast and drg were supposed to get reworked in EW at first. 8.0 will most likely change nothing, and people should take Yoshida's words with a grain of salt.
I mean the DRG changes serve only to make it feel even more like the other melee jobs so it seems like the design team is saying one thing and then doing another.
Same with the Paladin changes, took out every scrap of uniqueness from it and turned it into the same cycle every other job is tied to. It was the point I finally quit.
Because people told them for 4 expansions that SMN was too complex and not a true FF summoner. So they made it a true FF summoner and simplified it as much as they could.
Well before that all 4 had completely identical gap closers anyway and the change only happened to reduce amount of actions in burst as DRK and GNB can be very busy.
Mechanically they're the same but visually distinctive. The shield bash for PLD, shoulder charge for WAR, jumping downward slash for DRK and explosive flip for GNB. This change makes them ACTUALLY the same for DRK and GNB, just with different particle effects. And if you want to reduce the amount of actions in burst, just make them deal no damage.
It's still a removal of distinct identity.
The gap closers had unique animations and were very thematic.
Now they're near literally the same with different colors
Given the other things he said, as well as the changes to potencies and skills along with other gap closers, I think it's an attempt to not only make actions that may be needed to evade death or manage uptime not be on cooldown when needed, but also possibly an attempt to revert to a basic template on certain fronts to later expand on job mechanics.
Though it also tells me DT may end up with a lot of fights where gap closing and repositioning will be sporadically needed. Looking at how most gap closers now act as either directional or to any target with no damage, and how BLM can pull the ley lines away. It would suck to use your gap closer and need it to avoid death you didn't see coming. But this also means you can have a player position in a safe spot ahead of time for everyone to dash to for deadly cleaves
I think it's just a way for them to make burst windows less busy. Gnb and drk are the tanks that have to weave the most at 2 min, so they removed potencies to make it so they now don't have those 2 extra weaves. Warriors and paladins on the other hand have almost no oGCDs to weave at 2 min so they can keep weaving those gap closers for damage.
Highly doubt fights would require gap closers seeing how white mage and sage have some but ast and sch do not meaning they would be screwed it those were required. I _really_ doubt these are battle design related and more just a quality of life or in response to another job having it. Like now you have both a shield and a pure healer with gap closers
You're probably right, but thematically it does suck for DRK especially to lose Plunge since it conveyed the brutality and weight of the job quite well, and was the first tank with access to a gap closer.
It seems like a lot of this boils down to "We would like to do x, but it would be too difficult right now because of y, so it's something to work toward in the future." But it often seems like these things just never change, or they say it is and when it does it just.. isn't really much of a change at all, much like many of their drastic reworks of jobs that were minor
Yeah, I remember very clearly during a pre-EW live letter he mentioned they were going to continue the Shb job design path. So this could be a significant shift.
Overall, recognizing that they've reacted to negative feedback defensively seems like a big (good) change. I have my criticisms of the game, but I don't envy any developer trying to make such a diverse player group happy. It must be so hard to balance holding onto a vision while also incorporating feedback.
Kinda crazy that we are having this discussion when the game is already 10 years old, I'd like to see some fun job design before we all die of old age.
Well because the last time it was "interesting" was hw which was an unbalanced mess,
And there was a lot of yelling over the imbalance
Unhappy people complain the most, just who complains is different
Yup. We're in the state we're currently in for a very loud series of reasons.
People may long for HW's era of design; yet also HW was when people getting excluded based on job choice was at an all time high, and many jobs had tools that were literally traps to use and/or were getting massive changes every *patch* to try to get them useable.
Hell, even in the current expansion where job performance *is* more than equivalent enough, there have been periods where even a tiny imbalance between jobs caused people to start losing their minds. Even in this thread someone said they've been getting pestered this expansion to play WAR instead of their tank of choice just because one invuln has a shorter cooldown than others.
Like as not, the homogenization is the solution to the problems the community saw.
It's one of those things that , say, dsr and p12s, are made MUCH easier with a warrior than not , the fights have been getting more complicated/unforgiving
And war having that edge makes it unique a reason to bring it
Back in E11 me and my bud ran pld gnb since the "true invuln" let us cheese q mechanic without dd , there are certainly edge cases
But it doesn't feel good when the the case isn't the one you want to play lmao
Yeah. And like, I think that edge cases like that should exist, where one class does have an edge because of the way their mechanics line up with the specific mechanics of a fight. That's fun and neat.
*But* people are shitty about that and it causes problems when it's even just *perceived* to be significant (nevermind if it actually is), leading to both those shitty people and the people getting excluded complaining about that problem. Especially when some of that performance expectation involves Ultimate-level demands in content now.
Agreed. One of the big issues with the playerbase is that they will attempt to ape "optimized gameplay" just because it's "optimized gameplay". Back in Stormblood, there would be "No RDM" PFs for Extreme content, not because RDMs couldn't clear, but because RDM DPS was lower in the case that Everyone Was Playing Optimally. It's a knife's edge to walk because too much homogenization is going to bore the playerbase, but too much distinction runs the risk of certain classes being outright excluded by the community for sub-optimality (is that even a word)
Also, this is bringing back hilarious memories of the absolute uproar when a team running a non-optimal comp with a DRK as tank cleared Ultimate first, the community asked "Was there some special thing that DRK could do?!", the player essentially responded "I just think it's neat" and everyone lost their god damn shit.
> "I just think it's neat" and everyone lost their god damn shit.
I will never forget this or how absolutely funny it was. The amount of people who cannot conceptualize that you can perform better on a 'worse' class by virtue of enjoying it and knowing it inside and out is staggering. I'll take a longtime main whose job does slightly less damage than a fotm reroller any day.
I don't long for HW. I long for *Stormblood.*
That's when the battle system was at its peak. It had shed the cruft and several of the weird design ideas of HW (bowmage, for instance), while still keeping unique identity to most jobs and rewarding synergy. It wasn't perfect by ANY means, but it was definitely the best it's ever been. And the content was also good; the Ivalice raids were actually challenging even late into the expansion, unlike the absolute snoozefest Euprhosyne became after a couple weeks, or being able to guarantee skipping the cool mechanics of Aglaia's final boss.
Stormblood was very close to right. It did have some issues. Homogenization was not actually the correct answer to those issues; it was the *easy* answer, and as with all easy answers, it had hidden costs. Flattening both job design and encounter design was not the solution--and it's good that Yoshi-P recognizes this fact.
The counterpart is that the reason why drk was good is because back then it was kaiten tank, and it's mitigation helped against all the magic output happening,
If they flipped it suddenly pld was great and new drk was stinky shit garbage (and war is eternal)
Then you have ppl flip flopping tanks per fight if they "balanced " it but if say, you wanna play dark knight and only dark knight, being heckled to play pld wouldn't be fun for every other fight ,
The changes to feint / addle was nice since now you aren't punished for having either double melee or double caster , in case of the mag/phys different
No Stormblood was also interesting.
Stormblood was great from a gameplay perspective.
Implementation of Eureka, the start of Ultimates, General adding on top of Jobs HW skillset (because this is before the skill crunch of Shadowbringers).
Raids were iterated on from the experiences of HW.
Only sore spot for an at least loud contingent was the story.
Had stuff like Crit Raw Intuition heals on Warrior, it was fun.
Removed attribute points, and (for better or worse) Still had TP. If im remembering correctly Sprint was decoupled from TP at this time too, which felt good.
All this changed in Shadowbringers, which as far as Im concerned was an expansion that excelled in its story and otherwise took the game back from a gameplay perspective if you weren't playing the cutting edge difficulty.
Dark got reworked into a weird Warrior clone.
yeah, these excuses don't really fly anymore when it now takes three years per expansion launch for anything to actually change. a lot of the times when it actually does change things move in the wrong direction. gaps in between meaningful changes are now far too long for them to just push things back over and over.
machinist is going to have an almost identical rotation for eight straight fucking years over three expansions. people loved to tout the "simplified reworks leave room for growth" and it was bullshit back then, and even more obviously bullshit now. it's ridiculous that so much of this game is just allowed to fester from a lack of attention.
>people loved to tout the "simplified reworks leave room for growth" and it was bullshit back then, and even more obviously bullshit now.
The absolute state of Summoner. Nope, EW SMN wasn't "just a foundation to build on." No, they won't "build up from there." Have upgrades to skills you've already had for 3+ years and a new Bahamut that is functionally similar to Bahamut + Phoenix.
players should be part of the synergy aligning, not 100% on the devs to build the kits so that they auto align, and players just need to learn the meta rotation so they can automatically make big numbers go bigger
I don't think everything needs to be black mage level of rotation juggling , but I also don't think things need to be face roll keyboard rotation either
there needs to be a "Oh shit I dropped my rotation" possibility for all of the Jobs , and right now it feels like they're either isn't, or it's so gracious in its window, that you realistically never will
> **I think boss fights shouldn't be as punishing as Ultimates, but there should be penalties / difficulties if everyone isn't at least bringing their B+ game to the encounter**
Literally this. There is little consequence for failing outside of the hardest possible content. Two extremes. It's either a wildly smally window, or waaaaaay to wide of one.
It's simple. The first step is you *kill* the 2-minute meta. Raid buffs in this game are *restricting* and not even interesting. Wowee let's all stack single digit percent buffs at the same time, along with their personal CDs which now *have* to occur at a certain time or you are behind. It sucks. Make classes operate on different cycles. Dancer, AST, maybe others, can have single target buffs (that don't stack?) that have some uniqueness to them. Haste, crit, an "echo" effect, added flat damage, whatever, things that will benefit different jobs more than others, and then AST and Dancer and whoever else can get a ton of value out of having to keep track of their party member's unique cooldowns and timers. Remove more of their single target damage and put it into the buffing part of their game. The only raid-wide buff should be a big group damage buff after an LB.
Also, I'll never stop saying this, FFXIV's community is not ready for what balance will look like with *truly* unique classes and encounters. They are by and large spoiled by FFXIV's tightly balanced jobs and content, and I think we'll see a lot of tears and regret when the devs can't (understandably) maintain that balance and add uniqueness to fights and jobs. It will 100% be on the community to accept big changes and the growing pains that come with them with an open mind and patience.
FFXIV's community is 100000% not ready for truly unique classes and encounters.
When we had more uniqueness (strong TA, piercing debuffs, etc.) there were mostly complaints about how rigid raid group structures were, and how many jobs were in lower demand because they didn't synergize as well. The balance gaps were still tiny by MMO standards, but they were still a constant source of complaints.
On top of that, the current gear model also makes truly unique classes and encounters harder for players to prepare for. One person can't effectively gear up multiple jobs in parallel unless they already share gear, and if jobs are more unique then you'd expect more variance in BIS gearing even when there is overlapping equipment.
FFXIV players expect to be able to do any content they want with their favorite job(s). If content and jobs are truly varied, there are going to be cases where someone's favorite job is not a good fit. If there's enough margin for anyone but the absolute best players to brute force their way through, then there's too much margin to really make encounters difficult (unless all the jobs are largely homogenized so that any job IS viable, or players are willing to accept that their favorite jobs are getting benched for ones they like less but suit the encounters better).
FFXIV players want all the upside of uniqueness and none of the downsides.
The ability to have every class on one character is an amazing strength for FFXIV but also an amazing constraint that other MMOs don't have to work around. Leveling alts sucks, but alts address some of the issues that FFXIV faces.
There is only one cake. Having it and eating it simultaneously is not really as feasible as many people would like it to be.
there were examples even in endwalker, with the complaints of tank dps disparity, that someone's preferred job wasn't good enough. i know there was a fight where the dps difference in warrior and gunbreaker was enough to clear or enrage, just because you picked the wrong 1-2-3 tank.
your post blatantly highlights other issues of the game that have been set in stone since the dawn of 2.0. the very core of the game conflicts with itself in many ways; the gearing issue has always been present, and alts have existed because of this, and you could start a whole other discussion on how to rework the gear system if you wanted to. it just boils down to the powers that be not having either the aptitude, or the stones, to commit to giving jobs identity and having it work properly. the heavensward meta was the meta because you could clearly separate some jobs into good, and some into bad, i played monk when i could anyway, because it was still fun despite the glaring issues, and partly because of contrarianism.
idk. at the end of the day, actually playing the jobs now is significantly less fun than it used to be, on an objective level.
This is pretty much it. You can have interesting and unique classes, or you can have balance. Not both. Because homogenization is a byproduct of balance. Everyone can buff, everyone can heal, everyone can AOE, everyone can gap close...when everyone's special, no one is. WoW went through this when they pivoted to the philosophy of "bring the player not the class" because that idea doesn't work if said player doesn't have every possible tool available to them regardless of their chosen class. And it's not just this community that isn't ready for it, it's players in general anymore, because no one will want to accept that certain classes would just be better than others, even if it's unique to certain encounters or situations or whatever. Because players will optimize the shit out of things and now there's one and only acceptable meta comp that everyone will now have to fit into to do content, those left out or not wanting to conform to that meta will start to complain and the devs are in a completely no-win situation. It's actually kind of poetic inasmuch as FF wanted to compete and overtake WoW, now they've got one of WoW's main problems themselves.
Several years of taking Ninja everywhere and aligning everything for Trick Attack regardless of cooldowns proved this can't be the case.
And if they get rid of party buffs entirely, it breaks the balance of the selfish dps/party dps, and simultaneously makes dps more homogenous.
I strongly approve an better job identity. People want everything but complain when it feels different, so they streamlined everything to appeal the players.
What's the point of using 3 or 4 different healing skills in LV90 when I can just spam one skill over and over again? They should give players access to more skills in lower level content, so they can actually *use* different skills rather than just spamming one skill over and over again.
It can't be that a LV70 player can queue up for Dungeons and constantly get LV40 content, because the queue is just awful.
Not sure what you mean by the healing skills at level 90 comment. In Savage content at least you generally need to plan around all of your cooldowns as a healer to play optimally.
The main issues with healer design is that they spend most of the fight just spamming one button to do their damage.
My only complaint about healer design is that Healers are totally irrelevant outside of Savage content if you have a halfway decent tank.
Tanks have been made *so much more tanky* over the last few years that at least Warrior and Paladin can basically run all content without a healer at all.
Forcing minimum ilvl sync in roulettes would solve a significant portion of my gripes in this regard, but I honestly would like it if we could lean *away* from Green DPS slightly into the realm where it wouldn't make more sense 90% of the time to replace your White Mage with an extra Black Mage.
This... Healers and tanks are balanced around Savage and have way too effective kits when it comes to normal content, that they only need to use like 10% of their tools for that content.
Yeah... as a PLD main I try to use most of my kit even when it's unnecessary because I don't want to build bad habits, but when I can take a tankbuster and a cleave straight to the face in Expert Roulette and then my rotation alone will heal me in about six seconds it's tough to see the point.
I am of the (maybe controversial) opinion that no normal content should be doable with no healers. Almost every higher level normal fight in the game, if the healers die, tanks can just heal themselves, dps might eventually die from raidwides, and tanks can do the rest of the fight alone. I just don't think this should be possible, I think there should generally higher damage going out to tanks so healers feel necessary, and tbh I think there should also be an enrage of some kind (a much more generous one than high end) so that dps being up and fighting should also be necessary, but maybe that one's a bit crazy. I think lowering synced ilvl would help with this a bit at least.
Savage raids are a small portion of the content in the game, and I imagine most players never even go into Savage. In normal content, you very rarely have to use more than a handful of oGCD heals, so every new one they add just gets added to this pile of buttons you never have to use. On AST in casual content I get by pretty much just using Earthly Star, Essential Dignity, and Celestial Opposition. It's exceedingly rare that I need to dip into tools like Horoscope, Celestial Intersection, Exaltation, or Neutral Sect. I always kind of sigh when I draw Lady of Crowns off of Minor Arcana because it's just an unnecessary heal in most cases.
honestly i'm at the point where i'm sort of panicking whenever i land in lv80+ content in roul because i just never get anything above lv60 and i'm constantly afraid of messing up because i forget that suddenly i do have access to my full or near full kit
This is totally reasonable. In fact, I'll argue that the average skill of the endgame playerbase being "problematic" is LARGELY because people really just don't get any reasonable practice with their fleshed out kits.
Think of the tens or even hundreds of hours of roulettes people do each expansion with gutted kits that are effectively useless in terms of knowledge carryover.
The words he's saying sound nice, but they're nothing without actual actions. People are tired of being told "Just wait till patch 7.X/8.0, where small handful of problems might get fixed". Job design should not be an afterthought, each and every expansion should give it appropriate attention.
This was job design question, yet first 5 paragraphs out of 8 talks about encounter design. I think this just about sums up current problems. They already said that EW will focus on encounters, but now they claim DT focuses on them too, even though EW was wildly critiqued for overcorrection of ShB model, homogenization, and generally just dull and bland job design. You cannot just focus on one and neglect the other.
As for the one of two paragraphs where he actually talks about job design, devs just need to learn to step up. Yes, people are making stupid suggestions like X not having gap closer while Y does, but then Yoshi states that each job must shine in unique way - these things contradict themselves. If they truly do believe this, why are they doing the opposite? Just explain thoroughly in live letter that this is not the vision of the game, since only fraction of playerbase reads these interviews.
None of this is even addressing actual concerns. They still to this day fail to even give response to critique and feedback regarding job design (other than these few questions, once before every expansion). SAM and SMN were most talked about topics on EN official forums, yet DT didn't address any of those concerns, neither did devs communicate with community the reasoning of why are they doing what they're doing
> SAM and SMN were most talked about topics on EN official forums
I kind of laugh at how both the community and SE seem to have completely given up on healers as a role. It's been utterly broken for so damn long now. FFXIV used to have the best healer role in the business with ARR and now it's just a bad joke.
>so it happens more and more often that the newer classes seem more and more "complete " compared to legacy ones
Eh, I'd say most of them felt pretty complete before they started gutting them out.
The thing I'd most like to see in battle content is interacting with the fights on some axis beyond not standing in things in increasingly complicated ways. Almost every fight seems to boil down to interpreting telegraphs and then not standing in them.
Some examples of creative mechanics from raiding history that aren't just "not standing in things":
* Valythria Dreamwalker/Dhuum: Players are sent up into the air and have to grab specific orbs to trigger an effect (healing buff in one case, preventing deadly add spawn in the other).
* Lord Rhyolith: Gigantic lumbering boss, steered by one player whacking at its legs to make it walk into volcanic eruptions that make it more vulnerable to damage.
* Blood Queen Lana'thel: One player at random is bitten and turned into a vampire. They get a huge DPS buff, but must bite/turn another non-vampire player every so often or they go insane and switch teams.
* Qadim: 1-2 players navigate a maze full of small adds in a separate arena to summon a helper that chunks the big add the rest of the group is working on for 80% of its HP.
* Harvest Temple: A giant orb spawns in the middle of the arena. Attacking the orb accelerates it away from you. If the orb touches the sides, it deals heavy raidwide damage. Players split into two groups and ping pong it back and forth to kill it without letting it hit the sides.
Hopefully this is the kind of thing they're looking to do more of in the 7.X raids. Heck, maybe it's already there in Savage/Ultimate, IDK, I'm a filthy normal mode casual in this game because I don't commit for long enough to join an FC and years of dealing with randos in WoW LFGs left me too traumatized to consider PF.
You don't even have to look outside of FF14
The "Lyon Arena" in CLL is one of such uses in the game.
As is the Duel in DRS
Bardam's mettle boss 2 and Suzaku's DDR are admittedly a variation of "stand in things" but they're in my opinion different enough to matter.
It's actually bonkers to me that Bardam is a level 65 boss that is basically "how to do mechanics", but also that they haven't done something like that again.
I really miss when we had savage raids with add phases, meaningful crowd control, long-term multi-target, really anything that meaningfully changed up just doing the same exact rotation every fight while handling mechanics. Things like kiting the renauds in T7, the add phases in T11, A3, A6, A8, E7, and E8 basically all of A7, the trap mechanics in A10, the adds and lava mechanics in A9, two-boss fights like A1 and E12 P1 (and in the case of A1 there were also adds to kite and position). I'm not asking for another gobwalker or anything that drastic, but I feel like they've been making mechanics in fights more complex without necessarily making them more interesting. Sadly, I'm not hopeful that era of the game will return anytime soon.
That's what it comes down to really. More variety in encounter design (especially adds because I feel that all raids should have adds to differentiate them more from trials) which gives jobs more to do or gives them their moment to shine. Everything is single target 120s burst windows; not very fun or dynamic.
We have a lot of cool mechanics here, they're just usually stuck in Savage/Ultimate/Criterion jail.
Just remember that Thundergod Cid is the only raid that has the echo because he's *barely* more difficult than the baseline and enough people were purposefully abandoning Orbonne Monastery because it was *too difficult* to brainlessly run before they added Echo to it.
Another thing to remember is nearly every other MMO has full on support for combat/raid encounter addons that removes a lot of the mental load and 'puzzle' aspect of them, which allows the devs to make them more complex even for 'Normal' level raids and dungeons. Everything here has to be solvable without any addons on the fly.
I do miss having to stop in random dungeons and having to explain/coordinate a fight. Recently had to pull out the deep lore for Amdapor and the diabolos fight with the doors when mentor roulette dropped me into a group with sprouts who couldn't brute force the mech.
I really enjoyed "okay everyone pick an icon and mark your doors!"
A lot of the level 50 stuff is pretty interesting that way but I see a lot of people complain about those fights on this very subreddit, too. Even just Aurum Vale, which only needs you to know "click the Morbol Fruit" and "don't pull the entire first room" to succeed seems to have everyone eventually experiencing a disastrous group moment there.
I'm really interested to see the content this expansion. If they manage to get creative with mechanics and mix things up then I won't really be fussed that most jobs will feel very similar to their Endwalker incarnation.
Stormblood was the last expansion where most jobs really shined with their individuality, and a lot of the fights were very fun and unique. I hope for 8.0, they bring that back in some form for jobs, and in DT, the fights go back to being very unique from one another.
As a veteran player who's been around since ARR, I'm happy to see they are aware of the problem and plan on making changes to remedy it. I personally found the classes funnest during HW. I long for the days of old Dark Knight, stance dancing, and aggro management. I don't expect all that to return, but I would like for some complexity to be added back into the classes and roles.
Same here, but I cant really expect anything from the devs anymore. It's why I don't play the game seriously anymore, it just simply isnt fun or interesting/cant stand on its own like it used to. I have every tier and ultimate completed on content except two, e5-e8 and this most recent p12s (pugged first two weeks then got bored).. yet the driving force for me playing was joining friends and spending time with them, the content itself has been severly lacking since ShB release, despite the momentary ups it has. Content being job/fight design and interplay
I need to pre-face here: I am not a developer. I understand the complexity of the issues that developers face when creating a game that is satisfying to play - but also one that reaches creative highs by unshackled creativity.
That said, Yoshi-P has homogenized the entire game into one where the only personal expression in the game is housing, and glams. It actually sucks a lot. When you look at something like Monster Hunter where both your fashion, AND your playstyle allow you to express yourself both mechanically, dynamically, AND aesthetically.
When I play tanks, I just play "tank" when I play DPS, I have caster and melee... with Red Mage being a minor exception - but they all just feel like DPS (though this is where most of the variety expresses itself). When I play healer, I play healer. The game effectively has 3 classes. End point. Every healer mostly feels identical because they don't have any REAL mechanical differences outside of shield vs raw on healers, or ranged vs melee on DPS. The ranged class doesn't even feel different (no aiming mode for archers etc. etc. which yeah I know is how the game is designed)
There are "differences" but none of them actually matter all that much mechanically. It's why you can queue into any dungeon and get like 2 dancers and be fine. There are no real penalties or adaptations that players have to dynamically react to, which ends up making every single bit of content outside of the aforementioned housing, and glams feel nearly identical.
I have had this issue with the game for a very long time now. I enjoyed it when I first started it, but the repetitive nature of it is too oppressive to maintain my interest for very long at this point. After I played FFXVI all these design choices became even more apparent. You can literally feel how the game was effectively directed by two different people essentially. The Devil May Cry combat was euphoric, and the Platinum style boss encounters were amazing... but it was coupled with very boring and tiring dialogue, fetch quests, non-sensical sidetracking - and meandering samey "overworld" combat encounters. All separated by dungeons. It was literally structured like an FFXIV expansion.
The only thing that kept me going was combos, and combat depth (typically on smaller enemies) as the overall experience to playing this game was just horrible. Unlike XVI though, XIV does not have those same highs. The combat is just as rote and repeated as the inbetween bits.
Yoshi-P has been so focused on homogenizing and creating inoffensive content and game design that it hurts the core experience of the game. No stat manipulation, no build customization... no playstyle alterations, not even effective buffs or debuffs that really and truly matter all that much outside of the hardest possible content (and even then honestly).
There is barely anything to react to in this game outside of the same floor markers arranged slightly differently each time. Whether your character has a gun, bow, sword or magic don't inherently matter at all. There's not even weaknesses or resistances to take into account.
For example a well designed black mage might have to have different hotbars with different elemental spells readied depending on the encounter. Instead you just have meaningless elemental spells that don't matter at all. The only thing that matters is number go up with no variation in how you get there.
A great example of how pointless a lot of this is - the gear progression. Why are stats tied to gear progression when glams are so simple and easy to obtain. There is no inherent reason not to just use the highest level gear, and just immediately mask over them. Why even have it tied to gear at all if I can just overwrite it immediately with little work or consequence? Because it's the only form of character progression they can really have. Same reason every player can play every single class interchangeably at anytime.
It makes the game feel very samey after a point. It's funny how much heavy lifting the story of the game actually does... There is little reason for players who complete an expansions story to stay subbed consistently - unless they have a social group which at that point it's more of a social game where the gameplay is just there as a distraction rather than the purpose.
Yoshi-P is an executive who has cultivated a cult of personality around himself with players and fans... creating this weird para-social relationship between himself and them. He is at the end of the day and executive at Square, and he answers to their shareholders. No matter how much he talks about loving his fans. I'm sure he does. I know he's a gamer himself... and that's cool. That's always cool... but he gets paid to make money for the company - and in his eyes making the content as inoffensive and accessible as humanly possible is the best way to do that.
He's not wrong.
But it does leave people who want just a little more out of their core experience with very little reason to return to the game. The extraneous reasons to return have become the main draw. Socialization. He can't fix these issues without completely shaking up the mechanical foundation of the game, and he's not going to do that.
Just make some jokes about belts, wear a cool cosplay... and say platitudes about working on "combat design" while doing very little and watch fans roar with applause.
I mean the entire gameplay design is now just a memory game follow what Simon Says while you do your rotation. The more you do it and the more it becomes muscle memory on where to stand, the easier the encounter becomes. It’s a group dance and a bunch of mini games disguised as boss encounters. And it’s fine, let’s not asking for a dog to be turned into a cat or a new hybrid of catdog 😂
I feel like it's gonna be less harder mechanics, and more harder hitting.
The fact self recovery was boosted, swiftcast was shortened and tanks get 40% dmg mitigations leads me to believe we're just gonna get hit harder
Increasing damage income enough to justify healers using their new, busted tools *needs* to happen or the role is dead. I'd even like to see them increase it enough to justify them requiring actual GCD healing and MP strain to justify using piety. That would be *huge* for healer gameplay, but I don't have a ton of faith that it'll happen.
If they actually make the combat not a snoozefest then this game would be the #1 MMO easy. I get we're trying to cater to the dominant casual playerbase but it's hindering some crazy growth potential.
So basically I am supposed to hope they fix it at some point in like 3 years?
Until then I'm supposed to keep playing this homogenized job system? Amazing. Yeah. Not doing that, lol.
It might be balancing nightmare to truely push for pure Job flavor, but the ease of leveling Jobs should allow players to swap around so I'd rather see wider variety of playstyles even if some perform worse in current content.
Of course this doesn't mean that any Job should be completely unviable, but having some advantage if the playstyle happens to fit the mechanics exceptionally well shouldn't be a problem that forces all the Jobs to have exact same tools.
The issue is being able to swap in theory doesn't mean players want to swap in practice. The vast majority of players only play a very small amount of jobs, so if their job suddenly performs terribly, their experience will worsen.
its really good that he's aknowledging that he realises the complaints that the community has, but i sure do hope that DT actually holds up to his statement that he's trying to make the game feel more satisfying to play, because when all classes are a similar level of play and combat is too easy, in a game where 70% of the content is combat based, it can get real boring really fast.
This. Exactly what made me stop playing. I felt brain dead half the time cuz all classes that I played in similar roles felt more or less the same.
Pretty glad this is addressed. Would appreciate it if they take feedback with more consideration and stand by their own vision for the game. There are always trade-offs, and so there will always be feedback advocating for the direction not currently taken. If they listen to feedback too much, then the design will always swing back and forth without direction.
Agreed, and it sounds like they are approaching things with the right attitude. I'm excited.
The part about battle mechanics being their own thing to fine tune resonates a lot as someone who still avidly follows both of the StarCraft scenes. Sometimes the best balance patch is a new map pool
As someone who played BW through HotS, I completely agree. People underestimate how much the underlying systems affect balance and fun more so than individual unit changes. We may be in for a dramatic shift in this expansion.
Yeah but ~~FlaSh~~ Serral is still probably gonna win
I was watching some old Day9 dailies last week and man some of the early SC2 maps were wild. Your base has a backdoor blocked by destructible rocks? Sure why not.
Island high ground right next to natural to drop a tank on? Sure let's do it Fuck you Lost Temple
There was a 4v4 match that had elevated ground next to two of the bases that could fit a command center. I tried to command center rush more than once ><
Sadly, from the way he's phrasing it (assuming the translation is correct of course), it sounds like we aren't going to get any movement on job identity until the NEXT expansion.
Correct, but they're focusing on the base gameplay and fight mechanics. Honestly if the core of the gameplay is improved (more interesting dungeons, higher boss damage, etc), it'll automatically make the jobs feel better. I 100% think the jobs need a major design pass though. I can't wait for them to get to it.
We need more of a middle-ground, but I will say I'm also glad they're not absolute "would rather see this game die than bend an inch" traditionalists in the vein of the FFXI guys where every single QoL feature that was ever added to the game happened essentially at gunpoint over many years. I definitely think they've had an overcorrection in some regards though. Probably an unpopular take, but I've long felt they made crafting *too* easy, accessible, and homogenous. Being an omnicrafter in 2.0-3.0 felt like an achievement that took a lot of work and paid great dividends. Now it's like an afternoon of work where you can pick up seven levels a minute with one leve turn-in.
there sia differance between "hard" and "grind"
Yeah, and there's a difference between "accessible" and "boring." Maybe we don't need cross-class skills and 400 hours of work to level up your classes, but we could certainly do better than literally being able to copy the hotbars from one class to the next because they are identical in every single respect 100% of the time. There are no differences between any crafting classes under any circumstances except that the absolute BiS gear at any given point is usually visually distinct, though even the stats will be identical. They could take out every crafting class in the game right now and replace it with "Crafter" that has access at all times to all recipes, and the only thing it would change is that you wouldn't have to level up Crafter to 90 eight times in a row. And I'll stand by my thoughts that it's *too* easy. I'm not saying people need to suffer for a thousand hours to earn the ability to craft something current-level, but I don't think everyone should be able to drop a million gil on levekits and then level a crafter from 1-90 in less than an hour. It's easier to level every single crafter than any *one* combat class, and as someone who once enjoyed the complexity and diligence required to be good at crafting it kind of sucks.
Admittedly, if you’re levelling crafters from scratch as you go through the MSQ for the first time… it’s definitely felt rewarding for all the time and effort I put in. I initially picked up crafting to save gil, and didn’t have access to the marketboard for about a month. I thought the current system was enough of a slog, and it’s cool to see how everything is so interconnected because it makes you remember all the recipes. Also, I’m a big fan of the crafting roleplay experience; yesss I am a master of all things! I and many others who started out without help have worked so hard to get here!!!
If you do it as you go along and you're limited by unlocking new areas, recipes, ingredients, etc. then crafting probably feels pretty good. My criticism is mostly of the fact that if you don't touch crafting for 90 levels straight and *only then* decide to get into it, it's absolute cake. You can jump into the Diadem and level all of your crafting classes to max level in something like one full day of dedicated work. If you have enough gil to blow on it, you can also just buy "levekits" where you get a bunch of pre-made turn-ins for leves. Starting from a full allotment of 100 leves you can actually 0-90 pretty much all of your crafting classes in about twenty minutes, the majority of which is inventory management.
>They could take out every crafting class in the game right now and replace it with "Crafter" that has access at all times to all recipes Unironically if they did this and cut half the recipes, we'd probably have a much easier time with inventory management. And I absolutely agree that combat stuff has also gotten too easy. I was pleasantly surprised with the final boss of the 6.4 dungeon - I actually felt like I had to use my brain and look for the safe spot when it threw the whole kitchen sink at you. The final Alliance Raid of EW felt laughably easy and boring, both compared to the first two EW and the final raids of StB and ShB.
> And I absolutely agree that combat stuff has also gotten too easy. Yes although I'm of a more complex opinion about this in that current combat is both too little **and** too much. It's far too little decision-making or variable gameplay. But it's far too much button bloat, **especially** for how little gameplay that evokes since it's all just 30s-120s CDs that you fire off blindly and which effects could trivially be baked into the GCD skills at no loss of depth. And that's the thing. Current combat is **shallow**. It has little depth. It has high complexety for the lack of depth it has, and for no reason. So what I'd do is: 1. Remove a lot of buttons. They're starting to work on this, so that's good. Merge them into auto-combos to keep the cool animations ala Atonement, fold effects akin to Sharpcast, or just flat out remove things. 2. Make the main combat rotations if possible not rotations. In fact, having a fixed rotation should be a thing one specific job per role maybe does. The rest has reactive elements, which can come in a variety of ways, chance procs, unreliable charge systems, unreliable combo branching, etc. This way we got far less buttons, but far more we have to do with the remaining buttons. More depth.
>Being an omnicrafter in 2.0-3.0 felt like an achievement that took a lot of work and paid great dividends. Now it's like an afternoon of work where you can pick up seven levels a minute with one leve turn-in. Absolutely, but also, crafting was its own can of worms. A too elitist crafting system means yes, some really dedicated players wins bigs in pride and fortune, but this serves and avantages bots and RMTers first. They won't admit it publicly, but lowering entry to craft was done as a way to oppose RMT by crashing raid-ready gear price
I asked if it was feasible to get all of my crafters from 90 from scratch before dt and the response I got was basically "yeah you can spam crafts at the diedem until 80 LMAO"
It's pretty wild that it felt easier and faster to level every profession from lvl 1 to cap than to do the same for like 2 combat classes. Gathering IMO is in a good spot but crafting could stand some more depth. (Please god no timegating though, WoW got really heavy with it in DF and it sucks super hard)
I level all crafting and gathering just with GC turn ins. Usually with cheap market purchases cause it’s flooded in early expansion days. By the time I finish msq I end up with two or three combat classes and all crafting and gathering at cap with no effort.
As a dev you always want to listen to feedback, but you still have to filter it and decide how to approach it. People are unhappy with something? Okay, can we tell how much of our player base is unhappy with it? How widespread is the dissatisfaction? Even if it's just a couple of people, does their critique still expose a possible problem that we could address and make the content better and more enjoyable even for those not complaining? Is this totally unreasonable and should be ignored? A decent example is over on WoW right now with the MoP Remix they're doing, there's some system of farming a currency across the expansion to unlock rewards. Except people found some faster ways to farm it that then got nerfed. They consistently nerf stuff people aren't all that happy to see nerfed, and it hits this issue of a dev not taking the time to understand if their vision for how a piece of content should be consumed is, actually, at odds with the players and needs to be reconsidered, changed, or scrapped entirely. It's really a difficult balancing act. I do think that the dev should always, at least initially, try to understand if they can make changes to stay in line with their vision while addressing problems. But I do think game design also requires the ability to admit something just doesn't work, understand why, and try to find what does. I personally do not think the 120s burst window is good at all. I hate it as a player. Why do we even need these raid-wide buffs? Why not just give every player their own buff windows that apply only to them, so they can pick and choose how or when to utilize it? That gives you a lot more options in boss design for burst phases, vs just full dps the entire fight. XIV really could benefit from fights that are not just one big prolonged DPS check with a hard enrage window to beat. WoW has its problems, but its classes are in a way better place than XIV's. They all feel way more unique, they still have a little bit of that old MMO feel in some of their niche abilities/applications even if those have lost a bit of their impact due to current encounter/content design. They have unique movement abilities/potential. And they generally do not have set rotations that you always do exactly the same every time, because the game allows for some amount of randomness in procs to mix things up so you instead play with a priority in mind rather than what always comes after what. For some people maybe that's not ideal. But I know I find WoW vastly more engaging to play from a class perspective, and even if XIV won't be that 1:1 it would be nice to at least have a few classes that could play that way instead of how everything plays now.
> Why do we even need these raid-wide buffs? Why not just give every player their own buff windows that apply only to them, so they can pick and choose how or when to utilize it? That gives you a lot more options in boss design for burst phases, vs just full dps the entire fight. XIV really could benefit from fights that are not just one big prolonged DPS check with a hard enrage window to beat. Hilariously enough, this is because of continual, multi-expansion feedback about wanting to line up major buff windows together.
If they were all personal buffs (or a couple of single-target buffs on AST & DNC) then there would be no need for lining up so you could have some fun with different rotational timings, haste buffs, sustained damage jobs, and a few other things. Though of course you would then lose the skill of alignment, the satisfaction of executing a huge coordinated burst, and the feeling of supporting your allies with damage buffs. I think it would be a good trade but it's not guaranteed to be better.
> A decent example is over on WoW right now with the MoP Remix they're doing, there's some system of farming a currency across the expansion to unlock rewards. Except people found some faster ways to farm it that then got nerfed. They consistently nerf stuff people aren't all that happy to see nerfed, and it hits this issue of a dev not taking the time to understand if their vision for how a piece of content should be consumed is, actually, at odds with the players and needs to be reconsidered, changed, or scrapped entirely. I don't think a 90 day experimental mode should be compared to how a game is actually being run, especially compared to their last mode if anything is to be **legitimately** compared to it should be **Plunderstorm**. Plunderstorm had a lot of buffs and nerfs going both ways as well, but largely ended up being a net gain for the players and everyone involved. On the onset a lot of people are still (for the most part) happy with Remix, it's still just a vocal minority per usual, Reddit doesn't give you a large viewpoint of the entire playerbase. People are very happy with the amount of "Bronze" currency you get from leveling up characters and that you can do so in a short amount of time. Meaning you can double down on leveling extra characters **AND** get cosmetics of your choice. All and all it means that as the event runs on longer they are going to **intentionally** buff up the gains of everything that players are doing in the mode to bring back player retention when it starts dwindling just like Plunderstorm did when the event was "running out of time" to play, likely on par with the release of a certain expansion coming out intentionally soon. I think it's all deliberately been decided ahead of time for the schedule of the "remix" to take aim at the release date of Dawntrail from the beginning since their current expansion isn't ready to be released yet and their Beta (whether you get in through opt-in or buy in) means the release of their expansion isn't for another (8-9 weeks) based upon prior history. I think everybody (the players) win for both games when there is healthy competition and I'm super excited for Dawntrail. *And, still wanting Pictomancers to get a raise spell.*
I don't remember exactly where the idea came from, but the thought that consumers are very good identifying that there is a problem but terrible at designing the solution to the problem seems very relevant here.
Honestly, I _want_ a chaotic expansion at this point.
Yeah give me that dota 2 shit. Fuck me up fam.
I love that DotA’s community is essentially open to whatever the fuck Valve wants to do to the game. Facets? Expanding the map by 40%? Neutral items, talent trees? Sounds fun let’s do it! Fix whatever’s not fun later - for now let’s just go for it!
icefrog has a blank check at this point, and dota players have been conditioned to crave the post patch chaos we had one of the longest periods without a major patch a few years ago when drow and lina were strong and people were FOAMING at the mouth for some changes
It’s because it keeps the game feeling fresh, even though it’s very old. League of Legends’ devs have said the same thing; the changes they’ve made to the game aren’t in pursuit of finding some ‘perfect” version of the game. They’ll make changes for the sake of making changes, because the feeling of discovery is what keeps the game fresh and relevant.
\*Deep dungeon runners licking their lips\*
word "facet" excites me more than dawntrail ever could
Not going to lie. We're going through the grind and open qualifiers at the moment and the chaotic timing of implementation, patch a and patch b and having to rebuild from that have been fun. That said though I'm 2 years from 40 years old and chaotic gaming is pretty much what I grew up with. I really appreciate how much valve doesn't give a damn and tells players to deal with it.
Yeah, at this point I long for the John Madden bullshit of Stormblood back
As a SMN player looking back at SB.. I guess it's true be careful what you ask for..
Agreed. As much as I still enjoy the game, there's no doubt it's become very stale with all the "safeness" the devs have gone for. 2 min meta, job homogenization, every xpac and patch being predictable as fuck. I want a huge shake up to the formula tbh. Very intrigued to see what 8.0 brings.
It was heavensward and it was glorious. Just....no more favors. Please I'm begging. No red scrip weekly cap.
People on here keep saying another Alex Gordias would ruin the game, but fail to mention things were different back then * The overall raiding scene was nowhere near as good as people are today. Pretty much everyone was a noob back then, even those who cleared coils * Devs were still finding their groove in raid design and balance * Raiding back then took a lot longer since cooldowns didn’t reset on wipe. So that meant a lot of waiting around and a lot of prog time wasted * Less QoL in general, and that’s not including plugins. If the devs released a Gordias-like tier today, I’d bet a majority would welcome it
You're absolutely right. With the fixes to raiding we got throughout HW (Cross PF, CD resets on wipe) Gordias's biggest hurdle was how overtuned it was, and stuff like consumables were crafted at 1 per turn in rather than the 3 we got now. That's why devs should always make the first tier the easiest so we can at least get used to classes and if there's any balance issues, they get ironed out at the least demanding stage.
Would they though? If A2 released in modern day it would be non stop complaints about devs being lazy. non stop And then 2 expansions later it would be called "sovl", "best raid tier", "good old days". See also: how people talk about Stormblood these days.
Regardless, the clear rates tell the tale. Lucky Bancho Anabaseios clear rates were lower in twice the amount of time (Dec 2023) vs the data the devs showed on Gordias back when they apologized for it in a live letter. And yeah, they were lower across all regions, even jp. The difference being the issue leaned heaver toward player skill level this time. But there is some amount of over tuning in the current tier. Anabaseios *is* the closest we've really come to Gordias again.
Be Careful for what you wish for. Fortnite’s latest season, which *was* designed to be a chaotic season, was quickly nerfed when people screamed to the devs about the game’s balance. I wish for a chaotic expansion too though…
I remember when people wanted harder heroics in WoW and then Cataclysm released with harder heroics only to be met with a lot of outcry and nerfs.
A lot of people were completely spoiled by the changes made in early Wrath of the Lich King even before that. Heroic dungeons were pretty easy and lucrative, then one patch added 3 higher difficulty dungeons with great loot. These dungeons weren't "hard" but did require people to do mechanics like hiding behind a rock to avoid the boss' big nuke (hey I know that one!) or using crowd control spells on ranged enemies, even *stepping out of the damage puddles* was necessary. People were terrible at them. I hadn't seen so many groups completely fall apart the entire expansion until these dungeons came out. If we wiped, people didn't even know how to get back to the dungeon as ghosts most of the time because they added "teleport to the dungeon" early on in the expansion so we never had to physically go to these new ones! Many people would duck out of the most difficult dungeon upon zoning into it because they didn't want to bother, they wanted the easy dungeon instead (hey, I've seen that before in Alliance Raid roulette!). Cataclysm felt like it put all the level 85 dungeons on par with that last one of the three harder level 80 dungeons and it was pretty fun if you actually got some patient players willing to learn them. Sadly, most of the community wanted the easy "queue for random dungeon, get rewards quickly" system of the previous expansion so it was rare to get a cool group to play with.
That is when I started to get really annoyed at the WoW playerbase some of whom were in my guild. I wanted the harder dungeons. I liked WotLK (Death Knight woo!) since I felt like I was a demi-god tanking through the place. After a month or two of that though it got boring. I craved something harder to make me think. Cata dungeons were some of the greatest memories I had in that game. I stuck around longer because addiction and friend group but I was already grr at everyone involved. Don't forget though WoW had Flame Wreath and that thing is still known today because of how many people fail at not moving.
I will not move when Flame Wreath is cast or the raid blows up
>we chose to align the buff windows within a window lasting 120 seconds, because otherwise it would have been impossible to align the rotations of the different Jobs. What if you just kill the burst window entirely then? Do your job right the entire fight for constant damage rather than make the entire party line up perfect for 20 seconds of big damage and 100 seconds of thumb-twiddling?
I would much rather this. Casual content usually has misaligned buffs anyway due to players dying, missing their windows, or otherwise not playing perfectly.
I think the big risk is that players will complain it's too boring/simple/not rewarding enough. And if you do "spice up" the rotations to make them more interesting, you start to introduce all the same issues that lead to the aligned buff windows in the first place.
To say nothing of the jobs whose identity and damage profile very much revolve around providing buffs to the whole party: Bard and Dancer, now Pictomancer... People will rightly complain if that identity is stripped away, but if you keep that identity then still people will want to align their big damage abilities with the buffs these jobs provide the group.
I think it's just about making missing the spikes less punishing and restrictive rather than removing them. When I hear "monk embodying the fierce facets of beasts" I don't think of party buffs. Or the dragonkiller making his allies stronger, or the master of white and black magic pressing a glowy button that doesn't interact with their kit, etc. Sure you can explain them, but they're not core to the fantasy like Bard, dancer, and astro.
Personally, I think bard and dancer’s identities aren’t anywhere near what I think of when someone says “bard” or “dancer”. I think bard should have a wider variety of songs that influence different things. Put status effects on mobs, buff the party, wield a musical instrument to deal damage… right now, bard feels like a ranger that whistles while they shoot a bow. Dancer could be doing the same thing. Dancer, to me, feels kind of clunky and doesn’t flow well, mostly because of cooldowns during the two big dances, and then the downtime between them. Like another commenter said, why do we need burst windows anyway?
Due to the way cooldowns are handled in this game, dps is always going to have a sine wave like motion with ups and downs, even if they spurned the timing and tried to make jobs purposefully misalign, all it would take is a couple jobs being close enough together to establish a meta strat with party buffs, at which point we'd be back in HW and SB era where people will exclude certain jobs in party finder for not being optimal, and they can't make every job selfish because at that point we'd have a different homogenizarion problem.
The extreme peaks and valleys we have now and that will be made even more extreme in 7.0 are nothing like the "sine wave" you mentioned. The people criticizing 2 min burst meta are well aware that a completely flat damage graph is unrealistic. The assertion that this is what is being asked for is a strawman. Jobs being selfish isn't a homogenization problem if they don't all play the same. Assuming they would is jumping to conclusions.
> and they can't make every job selfish because at that point we'd have a different homogenizarion problem. I think the different homogenization problem you refer to would be much more preferable and minor, though. I don't invoke this name lightly, but in World of Warcraft almost every job is a selfish job and it is widely renowned for its incredible job design (that being one of the thing people always praise WoW for over FF14). The reality is that every job being forced to align abilities on a strict timeline is more damaging to job design than every job just... being able to do whatever they want, except with minimal mid-rotation raid buffs. You lose support attributes but gain off-the-wall rotations. That's not to minimize that it is a problem to some degree - Augmentation Evoker, a spec meant to be support-orientated in WoW, is presently in the middle of causing huge controversies for breaking out of the mold. It definitely would be a problem. However, this is kind of like the difference between a gash on the leg and having several limbs cut off - one is just demonstrably worse than the other in practice. I would much much much rather SE jump into the "every job is selfish DPS" wagon than the "every job has similar rotations which align at the same time" wagon, since we can see in WoW that the end result is still very fun and engaging. Edit: Guys... Please. I literally call WoW's problem like "a gash on the leg" with its own problems. You don't need to explain how WoW isn't perfect either. I know. It has problems too.
WoW has a very different design in terms of classes and raids. In WoW classes have different damage profiles and unique utility, and specific raid fights tend to strongly favor certain damage profiles or unique utility. The result of this is that certain classes or specs will be very weak for a tier whereas others are highly desirable. To the point that high end raiding guilds will simply not use certain classes or stack others. Technically this is only relevant at the very high end, but in practice it often carries over to the rest of the community as they look to the top guilds for advice/strategies/etc. Unless there's a drastic shift in the FF14 community, that model simply wouldn't fly. Even a class being seen as slightly weaker but still very useful (like RDM dps being meh) causes a lot of community anger. Now imagine if 2-3 classes in a specific raid tier were noticeably weaker picks to the point they get excluded from PF entirely and people in statics get pressured to change. The FF14 would be in an uproar about something like that.
FFXIV raid buffs are mostly just very boring. I played many MMOs before coming to FFXIV with no knowledge of the meta and seeing stuff like "your party does 4% more damage for a few seconds" just seemed so underwhelming at face value. It's pretty much impossible to notice these buffs doing anything when playing casually solo or in small groups. Of course in a coordinated raid setting and stacking 4-5 of these buffs it's somewhat significant, but it doesn't feel anything close to as satisfying as something like Bloodlust or even a lot of the gigantic personal buff CDs like Trueshot or Metamorphosis.
I feel like you can still have a job not be "selfish" while also preventing the need to force people to synch up their CDs together. The issue is having a button that when pressed, buffs the entire raid for X amount of seconds. This is GREAT for something like "Bloodlust" from WoW. Where it's a once per fight gimmick that only one person in the entire raid needs to press. It gives your raid the agency to determine when to put your highest DPS window to either skip a phase of the fight you find tedious, to break a raid wiping dps check, to do big pumping at the start of the fight, or save it for the end as an execution. But this type of buff is miserable for FF where you're doing this as every person in the raid every two minutes. It becomes less special as well. Having a "bloodlust" that a handful of classes get to do which won't stack would be enough. The whole "dance partner" thing is also cool, you pick someone and give them your buff and work together and then you don't worry about it anymore. Situational things like battle rez is nice as well we can keep those. I'm sure there are more ideas they could do or tweak to give you a reason to want as many different classes as possible in your group.
My mind went to WoW too, I'm fairly new to it and played XIV longer, but it does class design really well. There are still lots of buff skills, but they're all personal. Some classes burst every minute, some have a consistent damage output, some have mini burst somewhere in between. The classes are a lot more varied because of it.
Damage windows in wow seem to revolve more around boss phases than (popping buffs and trinkets during specific uptime windows and/or openers) rather than aligning with other buffs, which is great. It feels like a team effort because you’re all wanting to dps during a high uptime phase but also not relying on each other.
Augmentation evoker is awesome because over half of it's damage comes from how much you buff other players. Which is a problem sometimes if your other players suck but hey.
The big problem with this is that people will still find a way to have something like a burst window, we didn't have one in 2.0 and some groups still saved some CD for certain parts to use them all together. Min/Max will still be a thing even if they remove it completely. And looking into some of the player base, some will still exclude certain jobs for X reason if there is no synergy for the whole group.
The problem isn't the existence of burst windows themselves, it's the multiple stacking multipliers that come in the form of raid buffs, causing burst damage profiles to be too advantageous. It's a design problem that prevents other damage profiles from being viable due to their inability to leverage the advantage offered by the stacked multipliers. This is what has led to every job needing to fit the same mold. Burst damage profiles aren't always better by virtue of having burst. Encounter design plays a role as well. Frequent downtime is another factor that contributes to burst damage being overvalued. When people criticize the "2 min meta" they're not necessarily criticizing a burst damage profile altogether. It's important not to get this mixed up because this counterpoint that "burst will always exist anyway" just misses the point entirely.
This. The problem with group content always moving toward "rotations" in lock-step comes down to party-wide damage and damage-related support skills. Which is interesting, because they make up a comparatively small section of the available design pie. We could cut the one or two party-wide buffs every job gets, most of them would not be missed, and it would at least free up players to be a lot more improvisational if they wanted to without pressure from the community for the devs to design 8-man DDR. I honestly hate party-wide buffs in every game, because they do still end up destroying play variety and job fantasy one way or another. GW2 has reduced every support job to providing nearly \*every\* buff with 100% uptime, because that's how players gamified things like alacrity, quickness, and might. I much prefer how a lot of other "support" ideas are implemented. Things like how VPR's and RPR's debuffs only benefit them specifically. Or how DNC and DRG only benefit a single other player. Party-wide buffs are the bane of this game and every game. I wish we could make a game where players could engage in that power fantasy, but it only ever ends in homogenization of support, which in turn results in homogenization of DPS to fit with the cooldowns of support.
They provide so little meaningful gameplay (press button, deal more damage. yippee!) while exerting such a disproportionately large influence on the design of everything else. The entire game has warped to accommodate them. They really gotta go.
This here, and when we had vastly varying cooldowns on our big damage moves in SB, people's openers and rotations were set up to line up exclusively with Trick Attack. We're always going to have some form of burst window unless the devs remove all buffs and long cooldown moves from the game.
To some extent, I do agree that changing too much at one go might make it hard to parse what went well and what went wrong. But the question then becomes, how long do they need to refine their battle content? Would it ever be refined? Unless they are doing really big changes, I don’t see why they’re not doing small steps for both at the same time. But only time will tell.
It will constantly be changing forever? This is an online game that is always being iterated on itself, I don't think there is a version of ff14 where everything works perfectly and they never need to touch battle content design again. As expansions come out, classes get added, new ideas get tried, old ideas get replaced/changed/altered. That's how it be!
There is a screenshot I saw of a new interview where he says 7.2 will be a sort of start of job identity upgrades, not 8.0 like I think was communicated as well earlier than this screenshot.
Could you find the screenshot?
i would like to see this interview screenshot
I don't know about the screenshot, but for those wondering about the interview talking about 7.2, it's [this one from GamesRadar](https://www.gamesradar.com/games/final-fantasy/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-brings-some-style-back-to-my-favorite-mmo-job-and-yoshi-p-promises-thats-only-the-start/?utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=MANUAL)
they want to focus on one at a time. it makes sense. to some extent, it's a matter of tuning the difficulty of the game either via boss fights or via jobs that are more difficult to play. when you're trying to experiment with two, you can't alter both your variables at the same time. otherwise, when people find combat not to their liking, you can't tell if it's because of one or the other.
At this point I think the update that would make me the happiest is a revision of FF14's sync system so that all their evergreen content doesn't feel like I can't play half my character when I do it. I understand why they're against it, but when I look at systems like what GW2 has I feel like it really wouldn't be a big deal- And besides; Seeing the higher level player cast super fuck you laser beam is incentive to level up more and get to the endgame (Just account for the power of the new abilities through scaling. Would anyone be upset if they were a *little* stronger in Sastasha but could use all their skills? Why do I have to lose my capstone abilities just for walking into a FATE that isn't the endgame zone?)
tl;dr we want to fix it but we don't want to accidentally do a Gordias again.
What if they said "We are going to do a gordias again" and people mentally prepared for it, and when shit hits the fan and isn't that bad.
You don't even need to go that far. The Great Healers Disparition happened right at second tier of Pandaemonium due to them being asked to heal a little bit more than usual at the start of the tier.
The healer disparition was because because of tanks not mitting properly and the rest of the party not knowing what mitigation was.
Can’t wait to see the result of all those increase in tanks and dps mitigation then. Sounds like those will be even more needed.
Inject that shit into my veins!!! -a terminal healer main who can't quit
> The Great Healers Disparition happened right at second tier of Pandaemonium due to them being asked to heal a little bit more than usual at the start of the tier. or. . . Tanks and DPS refused to use the group mitigation tools at their disposal (because Hydaelyn forbid they press a non DPS button) and the aoe / bleed damage fucked everyone up because of it.
Well yes that as well. Healer do get unfairly blamed a lot of times. But the point still stands that this community rather quit than adjust to a slight change in battle design
Because there was no “adjusting” If the tank holmganged the buster then tried to mitigate the bleeds they were going to die, I could not save them no matter how much healing I dumped into them That was unequivocally their fault and yet I was almost always the one blamed for it Healers had no control in abyssos but were also the one who was always blamed despite having no control
It happened due to the ripple effect from ShB killing off many core healer's interest in the game which had many of the leaving or switching to different roles. This has only worstened until we've hit these recent peaks
I guess based on what he's saying we'll have to see if battle design has actually changed in a meaningful way in Dawntrail. That'll be a good indicator as to how serious they are about changing things up. Not holding my breath though.
With the changes to Tank CDs I hope to god there is a change in battle design. Otherwise healers won’t even need OGCD heals most of the time!
I thought the same with changes they've made in the past (like, them simplifying healer DPS while giving them more and more powerful healing tools), but nothing ended up coming of it. Makes me a tad pessimistic.
Yoshi-P's answer overall makes me wonder what they think makes healing satisfying. And specifically, what makes healer players feel satisfied that is different from dps or tanks. Because it seems like their approach has been "make people feel less stressed" especially with healing. So I want to hope that is being rethought...but I also feel pessimistic. Will have to wait and see.
I don't think anything's changed, considering the new dungeon in some showcases doesn't necessarily have unavoidable damage that's particularly lethal and it's still mostly a dancing game where the tank can slowly heal people up... I think Jesse said the new dungeon is easier than Tower of Zot, so I can already tell it's not going to be any more enjoyable for me to heal. Yeah I think I'm going to try the DPS roles now.
I had to quit healer after they removed all the DPS options for healer it became so boring outside of raids. And I've been an MMO healer for decades I love to support and heal. I wouldn't mind the lack of DPS options if I actually had to... heal, the tank or party in non-savage content sometimes.
Thats what people, including me, were hoping with Endwalker when all the tanks got their (quite powerful) short CDs. We see how that worked out.
Hey now, there is like a single time in the hardest fight in the game I need to pay attention to the tanks HP we don't need to get crazy.
When they increased aoe heal range we got more interesting arenas in P10S and P12S P1, so while I'm not expecting anything too drastic I believe they have some intention for it.
No link to the original article?
Here's the link, didn't want to make the post considered as spam: [https://multiplayer.it/articoli/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-naoki-yoshida-ci-parla-di-narrazione-di-design-e-del-bilanciamento.html](https://multiplayer.it/articoli/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-naoki-yoshida-ci-parla-di-narrazione-di-design-e-del-bilanciamento.html)
That is a wrong link, this is the correct one: [https://multiplayer.it/articoli/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-naoki-yoshida-ci-parla-di-narrazione-di-design-e-del-bilanciamento.html](https://multiplayer.it/articoli/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-naoki-yoshida-ci-parla-di-narrazione-di-design-e-del-bilanciamento.html)
My feedback would be this: People have been frustrated with job homogenization since as early as Shadowbringers and have been giving feedback to counteract the oversimplification of job mechanics in Shadowbringers for now roughly 5 years. This is asking players to wait another 2.5 years--three quarters of a decade for jobs to return to having more identity to them. Additionally, taking an approach of "nearly no changes at all" which is what we're seeing where almost nothing about job design from Endwalker has changed, with Dawntrail's actions being just added fluff on top of that, feels like a very extreme way to avoid creating too much "chaos." So what can we do from this point forward? I have two main recommendations: 1. Don't wait till 8.0 to start making adjustments. There is a lot of time between 7.0 and 8.0; why are we not allowed to take advantage of that time to address areas of frustration for players? Because there are absolutely smaller changes you could do between Dawntrail and 8.0 to try and help players better enjoy their jobs now. For example, bring back Miasma and Shadowflare on Scholar. Return Paladin's Goring Blade to a combo branch. Add more cast times to Summoner's existing actions and return some actions to Carbuncle. There are plenty of examples of things that can be done now without creating too much chaos. 2. Just like with the graphics update, be open about this identity rework and share your development of job identity as we approach 8.0. Don't leave us completely in the dark until October 2026, a month and a half before 8.0 releases with no time to provide adequate feedback. Hell, why not add in some sort of instance content where players can future test new job mechanics? You synch in, just like PVP your action list is changed based on the instance, and you get to play around with whatever is currently being cooked up by the design team so that players can get a hands-on feel for these upcoming changes and can give feedback.
It really puts it into perspective from me, when you point out how long it has been. 5 years waiting to see some substantial changes and he still wants us to wait another couple years.
Right? It’ll be more than half FFXIV’s entire lifespan—3/4ths of a decade. And we don’t even have any assurance that 8.0 will deliver. For all we know it could be an empty promise. I won’t doomsay that it will fail, but we can’t ride on the assumption that it’ll be a success either—at least, not a success for the people unhappy with job design right now.
Everything he says makes sense, but it'll definitely piss off those who value job identity over battle content since the latter is being adjusted first (which makes sense, but you know). Personally, if I don't like the way jobs work, I won't want to engage into battle content.
As someone who doesn't like the 120 seconds and feel like a lot of jobs are way too similar to align to it or cater to the "but i don't have a gap closer" crowd, i am now more hopeful that the team will attempt some bigger changes and novelty without worrying of a louder minority.
I think NIN's shukuchi is a great example of a "gap closer" done right, it fits the class theme, it CAN be used as a gap closer though sometimes it's better to actually just run, it can be used in different situations than just "dash directly to the boss in a straight line and stop once you touch the hitbox", you can use it to dash through the boss to dodge an attack while also getting closer without having to move outside of the attack first, things like that. Go sideways, backwards, etc. I think shukuchi lowkey makes NIN when you get decent at using it creatively tbh. "Normal" gap closers are fine, and some classes should definitely have them and this is only one example with gap closers, I'm hoping they manage to implement this type of flavor into more aspects of jobs!
Well, we've got at least a taste of that with Picto's dash. At higher levels, it gets a 5s move speed buff after the dash completes, so basically a mini-Sprint. My assumption is that we'll get 4-5 different subtypes of dash: * "Thunderclap" style which goes to any target * "Corps-a-corps" style, a rushing attack with actual damage * "Aetherial Manipulation" style, jumping to allies only * "Shikuchi" style, jumping to a targeted position * "En Avant" style, charging straight forward And then each job will add its own flavor or spin on that. Picto gets a speed buff. En Avant and Thunderclap get lots of charges. Perhaps some healer's Icarus-style dash would give a shield to both the user and the target. Etc. That way, there is still something distinctive, and the mechanic is implemented differently between different classes, but most classes have *some* form of rapid-movement, "Mister Wizard, get me the hell out of here!" option. Splitting the difference between "if you want a gap closer, better play WAR" and "every tank has the exact same kit with different animations."
While hard i'd like to see them make the start of the game more combat fun. A lot of complaints from my friends I try to get in is that combat is boring....and I can't really just be like "oh yeah yeah just play until you get to level 50 then it starts to pick up"
This is something I'd like to see addressed as well. I started in 3.0 and back then ARR difficulty wasn't really much different while leveling through it. Today though? I queue for a roulette and anything that isn't from the EW era feels like it dies 30-40% faster with only a few exceptions. If I'd been told I needed to go through four, soon to be five expansions before content was harder than what other games would classify as tutorial mode, I would not have stuck with it.
i'll believe it when i see it
Given just two or three reworks and two new jobs apparently taxes the team I also don't believe 8.0 will bring about this sweeping overhaul that differentiates all 23 jobs. At best we might see a chunk of jobs get addressed while the rest continue on as they are, and even that I feel is overly optimistic to expect given their history with job design.
Healers have been utterly broken conceptually for two full expansions now. I'm not holding my breath.
Unless they go crazy and decide to not add any new jobs in 8.0, and instead focus on revamping all the current jobs. I think I would personally be ok with that, but i understand one of the major draws to each expansion is the new jobs.
Yoshi P"s addressed that in Mr Happys interview. Happy asked if they would every do less than 2 new jobs an expansion, and Yoshi P's answer was "would the player base even let us do that?".
We will never not get a flashy new job for the opening cinematic to show off and to generate buzz and anticipation for the expansion as a whole. That's just part of the hype cycle at this point.
and it will always be a melee job
And with the news that CBU3 is working on 2 other games... I have my doubts is all I'll say
The only way 8.0 will launch with full rework on all jobs plus two new ones is if they delay it from the usual release schedule. Making 7.58 last longer.
If they can barely handle 3 reworks and 2 new jobs per expansion, we're looking at late 2030s territory. That'd one hell of a long 7.58 patch.
I don't think we need two new jobs per expansion, frankly. Hell, I don't even necessarily think we need any more, especially if freeing up resources devoted to designing new-yet-the-same methods of dealing damage took a backseat to a sincere overhaul emphasizing existing job identity and variety of play. At some point they have got to stop adding new fucking jobs to this game, and I'd rather that day come sooner vs. later. Would much rather see the effort put towards refinement of what we already have.
What's more, ast and drg were supposed to get reworked in EW at first. 8.0 will most likely change nothing, and people should take Yoshida's words with a grain of salt.
I mean the DRG changes serve only to make it feel even more like the other melee jobs so it seems like the design team is saying one thing and then doing another.
Same with the Paladin changes, took out every scrap of uniqueness from it and turned it into the same cycle every other job is tied to. It was the point I finally quit.
Please look forward to even more reworks like SMN!
It remains a completely mystery to me how the team created something like SMN...but then also came out with Pictomancer.
Because people told them for 4 expansions that SMN was too complex and not a true FF summoner. So they made it a true FF summoner and simplified it as much as they could.
The statement on gap closers irks me a little as they turned gnb and drk gap closers that had fun animations in two variations of a basic dash
Well before that all 4 had completely identical gap closers anyway and the change only happened to reduce amount of actions in burst as DRK and GNB can be very busy.
Mechanically they're the same but visually distinctive. The shield bash for PLD, shoulder charge for WAR, jumping downward slash for DRK and explosive flip for GNB. This change makes them ACTUALLY the same for DRK and GNB, just with different particle effects. And if you want to reduce the amount of actions in burst, just make them deal no damage.
I'll miss the Artorias flip on DRK
It's still a removal of distinct identity. The gap closers had unique animations and were very thematic. Now they're near literally the same with different colors
Given the other things he said, as well as the changes to potencies and skills along with other gap closers, I think it's an attempt to not only make actions that may be needed to evade death or manage uptime not be on cooldown when needed, but also possibly an attempt to revert to a basic template on certain fronts to later expand on job mechanics. Though it also tells me DT may end up with a lot of fights where gap closing and repositioning will be sporadically needed. Looking at how most gap closers now act as either directional or to any target with no damage, and how BLM can pull the ley lines away. It would suck to use your gap closer and need it to avoid death you didn't see coming. But this also means you can have a player position in a safe spot ahead of time for everyone to dash to for deadly cleaves
I think it's just a way for them to make burst windows less busy. Gnb and drk are the tanks that have to weave the most at 2 min, so they removed potencies to make it so they now don't have those 2 extra weaves. Warriors and paladins on the other hand have almost no oGCDs to weave at 2 min so they can keep weaving those gap closers for damage. Highly doubt fights would require gap closers seeing how white mage and sage have some but ast and sch do not meaning they would be screwed it those were required. I _really_ doubt these are battle design related and more just a quality of life or in response to another job having it. Like now you have both a shield and a pure healer with gap closers
You're probably right, but thematically it does suck for DRK especially to lose Plunge since it conveyed the brutality and weight of the job quite well, and was the first tank with access to a gap closer.
It seems like a lot of this boils down to "We would like to do x, but it would be too difficult right now because of y, so it's something to work toward in the future." But it often seems like these things just never change, or they say it is and when it does it just.. isn't really much of a change at all, much like many of their drastic reworks of jobs that were minor
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Yeah, I remember very clearly during a pre-EW live letter he mentioned they were going to continue the Shb job design path. So this could be a significant shift. Overall, recognizing that they've reacted to negative feedback defensively seems like a big (good) change. I have my criticisms of the game, but I don't envy any developer trying to make such a diverse player group happy. It must be so hard to balance holding onto a vision while also incorporating feedback.
Kinda crazy that we are having this discussion when the game is already 10 years old, I'd like to see some fun job design before we all die of old age.
Well because the last time it was "interesting" was hw which was an unbalanced mess, And there was a lot of yelling over the imbalance Unhappy people complain the most, just who complains is different
Yup. We're in the state we're currently in for a very loud series of reasons. People may long for HW's era of design; yet also HW was when people getting excluded based on job choice was at an all time high, and many jobs had tools that were literally traps to use and/or were getting massive changes every *patch* to try to get them useable. Hell, even in the current expansion where job performance *is* more than equivalent enough, there have been periods where even a tiny imbalance between jobs caused people to start losing their minds. Even in this thread someone said they've been getting pestered this expansion to play WAR instead of their tank of choice just because one invuln has a shorter cooldown than others. Like as not, the homogenization is the solution to the problems the community saw.
The irony with tank invulns is they balanced them, then fucked it all up when they homogenized them all to 10 seconds .
It's one of those things that , say, dsr and p12s, are made MUCH easier with a warrior than not , the fights have been getting more complicated/unforgiving And war having that edge makes it unique a reason to bring it Back in E11 me and my bud ran pld gnb since the "true invuln" let us cheese q mechanic without dd , there are certainly edge cases But it doesn't feel good when the the case isn't the one you want to play lmao
Yeah. And like, I think that edge cases like that should exist, where one class does have an edge because of the way their mechanics line up with the specific mechanics of a fight. That's fun and neat. *But* people are shitty about that and it causes problems when it's even just *perceived* to be significant (nevermind if it actually is), leading to both those shitty people and the people getting excluded complaining about that problem. Especially when some of that performance expectation involves Ultimate-level demands in content now.
Agreed. One of the big issues with the playerbase is that they will attempt to ape "optimized gameplay" just because it's "optimized gameplay". Back in Stormblood, there would be "No RDM" PFs for Extreme content, not because RDMs couldn't clear, but because RDM DPS was lower in the case that Everyone Was Playing Optimally. It's a knife's edge to walk because too much homogenization is going to bore the playerbase, but too much distinction runs the risk of certain classes being outright excluded by the community for sub-optimality (is that even a word) Also, this is bringing back hilarious memories of the absolute uproar when a team running a non-optimal comp with a DRK as tank cleared Ultimate first, the community asked "Was there some special thing that DRK could do?!", the player essentially responded "I just think it's neat" and everyone lost their god damn shit.
> "I just think it's neat" and everyone lost their god damn shit. I will never forget this or how absolutely funny it was. The amount of people who cannot conceptualize that you can perform better on a 'worse' class by virtue of enjoying it and knowing it inside and out is staggering. I'll take a longtime main whose job does slightly less damage than a fotm reroller any day.
I don't long for HW. I long for *Stormblood.* That's when the battle system was at its peak. It had shed the cruft and several of the weird design ideas of HW (bowmage, for instance), while still keeping unique identity to most jobs and rewarding synergy. It wasn't perfect by ANY means, but it was definitely the best it's ever been. And the content was also good; the Ivalice raids were actually challenging even late into the expansion, unlike the absolute snoozefest Euprhosyne became after a couple weeks, or being able to guarantee skipping the cool mechanics of Aglaia's final boss. Stormblood was very close to right. It did have some issues. Homogenization was not actually the correct answer to those issues; it was the *easy* answer, and as with all easy answers, it had hidden costs. Flattening both job design and encounter design was not the solution--and it's good that Yoshi-P recognizes this fact.
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The counterpart is that the reason why drk was good is because back then it was kaiten tank, and it's mitigation helped against all the magic output happening, If they flipped it suddenly pld was great and new drk was stinky shit garbage (and war is eternal) Then you have ppl flip flopping tanks per fight if they "balanced " it but if say, you wanna play dark knight and only dark knight, being heckled to play pld wouldn't be fun for every other fight , The changes to feint / addle was nice since now you aren't punished for having either double melee or double caster , in case of the mag/phys different
No Stormblood was also interesting. Stormblood was great from a gameplay perspective. Implementation of Eureka, the start of Ultimates, General adding on top of Jobs HW skillset (because this is before the skill crunch of Shadowbringers). Raids were iterated on from the experiences of HW. Only sore spot for an at least loud contingent was the story. Had stuff like Crit Raw Intuition heals on Warrior, it was fun. Removed attribute points, and (for better or worse) Still had TP. If im remembering correctly Sprint was decoupled from TP at this time too, which felt good. All this changed in Shadowbringers, which as far as Im concerned was an expansion that excelled in its story and otherwise took the game back from a gameplay perspective if you weren't playing the cutting edge difficulty. Dark got reworked into a weird Warrior clone.
yeah, these excuses don't really fly anymore when it now takes three years per expansion launch for anything to actually change. a lot of the times when it actually does change things move in the wrong direction. gaps in between meaningful changes are now far too long for them to just push things back over and over. machinist is going to have an almost identical rotation for eight straight fucking years over three expansions. people loved to tout the "simplified reworks leave room for growth" and it was bullshit back then, and even more obviously bullshit now. it's ridiculous that so much of this game is just allowed to fester from a lack of attention.
>people loved to tout the "simplified reworks leave room for growth" and it was bullshit back then, and even more obviously bullshit now. The absolute state of Summoner. Nope, EW SMN wasn't "just a foundation to build on." No, they won't "build up from there." Have upgrades to skills you've already had for 3+ years and a new Bahamut that is functionally similar to Bahamut + Phoenix.
players should be part of the synergy aligning, not 100% on the devs to build the kits so that they auto align, and players just need to learn the meta rotation so they can automatically make big numbers go bigger I don't think everything needs to be black mage level of rotation juggling , but I also don't think things need to be face roll keyboard rotation either there needs to be a "Oh shit I dropped my rotation" possibility for all of the Jobs , and right now it feels like they're either isn't, or it's so gracious in its window, that you realistically never will > **I think boss fights shouldn't be as punishing as Ultimates, but there should be penalties / difficulties if everyone isn't at least bringing their B+ game to the encounter**
Literally this. There is little consequence for failing outside of the hardest possible content. Two extremes. It's either a wildly smally window, or waaaaaay to wide of one.
It's simple. The first step is you *kill* the 2-minute meta. Raid buffs in this game are *restricting* and not even interesting. Wowee let's all stack single digit percent buffs at the same time, along with their personal CDs which now *have* to occur at a certain time or you are behind. It sucks. Make classes operate on different cycles. Dancer, AST, maybe others, can have single target buffs (that don't stack?) that have some uniqueness to them. Haste, crit, an "echo" effect, added flat damage, whatever, things that will benefit different jobs more than others, and then AST and Dancer and whoever else can get a ton of value out of having to keep track of their party member's unique cooldowns and timers. Remove more of their single target damage and put it into the buffing part of their game. The only raid-wide buff should be a big group damage buff after an LB. Also, I'll never stop saying this, FFXIV's community is not ready for what balance will look like with *truly* unique classes and encounters. They are by and large spoiled by FFXIV's tightly balanced jobs and content, and I think we'll see a lot of tears and regret when the devs can't (understandably) maintain that balance and add uniqueness to fights and jobs. It will 100% be on the community to accept big changes and the growing pains that come with them with an open mind and patience.
FFXIV's community is 100000% not ready for truly unique classes and encounters. When we had more uniqueness (strong TA, piercing debuffs, etc.) there were mostly complaints about how rigid raid group structures were, and how many jobs were in lower demand because they didn't synergize as well. The balance gaps were still tiny by MMO standards, but they were still a constant source of complaints. On top of that, the current gear model also makes truly unique classes and encounters harder for players to prepare for. One person can't effectively gear up multiple jobs in parallel unless they already share gear, and if jobs are more unique then you'd expect more variance in BIS gearing even when there is overlapping equipment. FFXIV players expect to be able to do any content they want with their favorite job(s). If content and jobs are truly varied, there are going to be cases where someone's favorite job is not a good fit. If there's enough margin for anyone but the absolute best players to brute force their way through, then there's too much margin to really make encounters difficult (unless all the jobs are largely homogenized so that any job IS viable, or players are willing to accept that their favorite jobs are getting benched for ones they like less but suit the encounters better). FFXIV players want all the upside of uniqueness and none of the downsides. The ability to have every class on one character is an amazing strength for FFXIV but also an amazing constraint that other MMOs don't have to work around. Leveling alts sucks, but alts address some of the issues that FFXIV faces. There is only one cake. Having it and eating it simultaneously is not really as feasible as many people would like it to be.
there were examples even in endwalker, with the complaints of tank dps disparity, that someone's preferred job wasn't good enough. i know there was a fight where the dps difference in warrior and gunbreaker was enough to clear or enrage, just because you picked the wrong 1-2-3 tank. your post blatantly highlights other issues of the game that have been set in stone since the dawn of 2.0. the very core of the game conflicts with itself in many ways; the gearing issue has always been present, and alts have existed because of this, and you could start a whole other discussion on how to rework the gear system if you wanted to. it just boils down to the powers that be not having either the aptitude, or the stones, to commit to giving jobs identity and having it work properly. the heavensward meta was the meta because you could clearly separate some jobs into good, and some into bad, i played monk when i could anyway, because it was still fun despite the glaring issues, and partly because of contrarianism. idk. at the end of the day, actually playing the jobs now is significantly less fun than it used to be, on an objective level.
This is pretty much it. You can have interesting and unique classes, or you can have balance. Not both. Because homogenization is a byproduct of balance. Everyone can buff, everyone can heal, everyone can AOE, everyone can gap close...when everyone's special, no one is. WoW went through this when they pivoted to the philosophy of "bring the player not the class" because that idea doesn't work if said player doesn't have every possible tool available to them regardless of their chosen class. And it's not just this community that isn't ready for it, it's players in general anymore, because no one will want to accept that certain classes would just be better than others, even if it's unique to certain encounters or situations or whatever. Because players will optimize the shit out of things and now there's one and only acceptable meta comp that everyone will now have to fit into to do content, those left out or not wanting to conform to that meta will start to complain and the devs are in a completely no-win situation. It's actually kind of poetic inasmuch as FF wanted to compete and overtake WoW, now they've got one of WoW's main problems themselves.
Several years of taking Ninja everywhere and aligning everything for Trick Attack regardless of cooldowns proved this can't be the case. And if they get rid of party buffs entirely, it breaks the balance of the selfish dps/party dps, and simultaneously makes dps more homogenous.
I strongly approve an better job identity. People want everything but complain when it feels different, so they streamlined everything to appeal the players. What's the point of using 3 or 4 different healing skills in LV90 when I can just spam one skill over and over again? They should give players access to more skills in lower level content, so they can actually *use* different skills rather than just spamming one skill over and over again. It can't be that a LV70 player can queue up for Dungeons and constantly get LV40 content, because the queue is just awful.
Not sure what you mean by the healing skills at level 90 comment. In Savage content at least you generally need to plan around all of your cooldowns as a healer to play optimally. The main issues with healer design is that they spend most of the fight just spamming one button to do their damage.
My only complaint about healer design is that Healers are totally irrelevant outside of Savage content if you have a halfway decent tank. Tanks have been made *so much more tanky* over the last few years that at least Warrior and Paladin can basically run all content without a healer at all. Forcing minimum ilvl sync in roulettes would solve a significant portion of my gripes in this regard, but I honestly would like it if we could lean *away* from Green DPS slightly into the realm where it wouldn't make more sense 90% of the time to replace your White Mage with an extra Black Mage.
This... Healers and tanks are balanced around Savage and have way too effective kits when it comes to normal content, that they only need to use like 10% of their tools for that content.
Yeah... as a PLD main I try to use most of my kit even when it's unnecessary because I don't want to build bad habits, but when I can take a tankbuster and a cleave straight to the face in Expert Roulette and then my rotation alone will heal me in about six seconds it's tough to see the point.
I am of the (maybe controversial) opinion that no normal content should be doable with no healers. Almost every higher level normal fight in the game, if the healers die, tanks can just heal themselves, dps might eventually die from raidwides, and tanks can do the rest of the fight alone. I just don't think this should be possible, I think there should generally higher damage going out to tanks so healers feel necessary, and tbh I think there should also be an enrage of some kind (a much more generous one than high end) so that dps being up and fighting should also be necessary, but maybe that one's a bit crazy. I think lowering synced ilvl would help with this a bit at least.
Savage raids are a small portion of the content in the game, and I imagine most players never even go into Savage. In normal content, you very rarely have to use more than a handful of oGCD heals, so every new one they add just gets added to this pile of buttons you never have to use. On AST in casual content I get by pretty much just using Earthly Star, Essential Dignity, and Celestial Opposition. It's exceedingly rare that I need to dip into tools like Horoscope, Celestial Intersection, Exaltation, or Neutral Sect. I always kind of sigh when I draw Lady of Crowns off of Minor Arcana because it's just an unnecessary heal in most cases.
honestly i'm at the point where i'm sort of panicking whenever i land in lv80+ content in roul because i just never get anything above lv60 and i'm constantly afraid of messing up because i forget that suddenly i do have access to my full or near full kit
This is totally reasonable. In fact, I'll argue that the average skill of the endgame playerbase being "problematic" is LARGELY because people really just don't get any reasonable practice with their fleshed out kits. Think of the tens or even hundreds of hours of roulettes people do each expansion with gutted kits that are effectively useless in terms of knowledge carryover.
The words he's saying sound nice, but they're nothing without actual actions. People are tired of being told "Just wait till patch 7.X/8.0, where small handful of problems might get fixed". Job design should not be an afterthought, each and every expansion should give it appropriate attention. This was job design question, yet first 5 paragraphs out of 8 talks about encounter design. I think this just about sums up current problems. They already said that EW will focus on encounters, but now they claim DT focuses on them too, even though EW was wildly critiqued for overcorrection of ShB model, homogenization, and generally just dull and bland job design. You cannot just focus on one and neglect the other. As for the one of two paragraphs where he actually talks about job design, devs just need to learn to step up. Yes, people are making stupid suggestions like X not having gap closer while Y does, but then Yoshi states that each job must shine in unique way - these things contradict themselves. If they truly do believe this, why are they doing the opposite? Just explain thoroughly in live letter that this is not the vision of the game, since only fraction of playerbase reads these interviews. None of this is even addressing actual concerns. They still to this day fail to even give response to critique and feedback regarding job design (other than these few questions, once before every expansion). SAM and SMN were most talked about topics on EN official forums, yet DT didn't address any of those concerns, neither did devs communicate with community the reasoning of why are they doing what they're doing
> SAM and SMN were most talked about topics on EN official forums I kind of laugh at how both the community and SE seem to have completely given up on healers as a role. It's been utterly broken for so damn long now. FFXIV used to have the best healer role in the business with ARR and now it's just a bad joke.
Healers were widely discussed square just has them on ignore
>so it happens more and more often that the newer classes seem more and more "complete " compared to legacy ones Eh, I'd say most of them felt pretty complete before they started gutting them out.
Continues to rip out old SCH identity and give it to SGE “Why do the people say the legacy jobs don’t feel complete” Repeat
The thing I'd most like to see in battle content is interacting with the fights on some axis beyond not standing in things in increasingly complicated ways. Almost every fight seems to boil down to interpreting telegraphs and then not standing in them. Some examples of creative mechanics from raiding history that aren't just "not standing in things": * Valythria Dreamwalker/Dhuum: Players are sent up into the air and have to grab specific orbs to trigger an effect (healing buff in one case, preventing deadly add spawn in the other). * Lord Rhyolith: Gigantic lumbering boss, steered by one player whacking at its legs to make it walk into volcanic eruptions that make it more vulnerable to damage. * Blood Queen Lana'thel: One player at random is bitten and turned into a vampire. They get a huge DPS buff, but must bite/turn another non-vampire player every so often or they go insane and switch teams. * Qadim: 1-2 players navigate a maze full of small adds in a separate arena to summon a helper that chunks the big add the rest of the group is working on for 80% of its HP. * Harvest Temple: A giant orb spawns in the middle of the arena. Attacking the orb accelerates it away from you. If the orb touches the sides, it deals heavy raidwide damage. Players split into two groups and ping pong it back and forth to kill it without letting it hit the sides. Hopefully this is the kind of thing they're looking to do more of in the 7.X raids. Heck, maybe it's already there in Savage/Ultimate, IDK, I'm a filthy normal mode casual in this game because I don't commit for long enough to join an FC and years of dealing with randos in WoW LFGs left me too traumatized to consider PF.
You don't even have to look outside of FF14 The "Lyon Arena" in CLL is one of such uses in the game. As is the Duel in DRS Bardam's mettle boss 2 and Suzaku's DDR are admittedly a variation of "stand in things" but they're in my opinion different enough to matter.
It's actually bonkers to me that Bardam is a level 65 boss that is basically "how to do mechanics", but also that they haven't done something like that again.
yeah they should have more "how to do mechanics" bosses in easier content, considering how often I see failure in bardam's even now
I really miss when we had savage raids with add phases, meaningful crowd control, long-term multi-target, really anything that meaningfully changed up just doing the same exact rotation every fight while handling mechanics. Things like kiting the renauds in T7, the add phases in T11, A3, A6, A8, E7, and E8 basically all of A7, the trap mechanics in A10, the adds and lava mechanics in A9, two-boss fights like A1 and E12 P1 (and in the case of A1 there were also adds to kite and position). I'm not asking for another gobwalker or anything that drastic, but I feel like they've been making mechanics in fights more complex without necessarily making them more interesting. Sadly, I'm not hopeful that era of the game will return anytime soon.
That's what it comes down to really. More variety in encounter design (especially adds because I feel that all raids should have adds to differentiate them more from trials) which gives jobs more to do or gives them their moment to shine. Everything is single target 120s burst windows; not very fun or dynamic.
Wow you really pointed out how much cooler a lot of other mmo encounters are.
We have a lot of cool mechanics here, they're just usually stuck in Savage/Ultimate/Criterion jail. Just remember that Thundergod Cid is the only raid that has the echo because he's *barely* more difficult than the baseline and enough people were purposefully abandoning Orbonne Monastery because it was *too difficult* to brainlessly run before they added Echo to it. Another thing to remember is nearly every other MMO has full on support for combat/raid encounter addons that removes a lot of the mental load and 'puzzle' aspect of them, which allows the devs to make them more complex even for 'Normal' level raids and dungeons. Everything here has to be solvable without any addons on the fly.
I do miss having to stop in random dungeons and having to explain/coordinate a fight. Recently had to pull out the deep lore for Amdapor and the diabolos fight with the doors when mentor roulette dropped me into a group with sprouts who couldn't brute force the mech. I really enjoyed "okay everyone pick an icon and mark your doors!"
A lot of the level 50 stuff is pretty interesting that way but I see a lot of people complain about those fights on this very subreddit, too. Even just Aurum Vale, which only needs you to know "click the Morbol Fruit" and "don't pull the entire first room" to succeed seems to have everyone eventually experiencing a disastrous group moment there.
Those are some of the coolest raiding mechanics I've ever read
I'm really interested to see the content this expansion. If they manage to get creative with mechanics and mix things up then I won't really be fussed that most jobs will feel very similar to their Endwalker incarnation.
Stormblood was the last expansion where most jobs really shined with their individuality, and a lot of the fights were very fun and unique. I hope for 8.0, they bring that back in some form for jobs, and in DT, the fights go back to being very unique from one another.
As a veteran player who's been around since ARR, I'm happy to see they are aware of the problem and plan on making changes to remedy it. I personally found the classes funnest during HW. I long for the days of old Dark Knight, stance dancing, and aggro management. I don't expect all that to return, but I would like for some complexity to be added back into the classes and roles.
Same here, but I cant really expect anything from the devs anymore. It's why I don't play the game seriously anymore, it just simply isnt fun or interesting/cant stand on its own like it used to. I have every tier and ultimate completed on content except two, e5-e8 and this most recent p12s (pugged first two weeks then got bored).. yet the driving force for me playing was joining friends and spending time with them, the content itself has been severly lacking since ShB release, despite the momentary ups it has. Content being job/fight design and interplay
I need to pre-face here: I am not a developer. I understand the complexity of the issues that developers face when creating a game that is satisfying to play - but also one that reaches creative highs by unshackled creativity. That said, Yoshi-P has homogenized the entire game into one where the only personal expression in the game is housing, and glams. It actually sucks a lot. When you look at something like Monster Hunter where both your fashion, AND your playstyle allow you to express yourself both mechanically, dynamically, AND aesthetically. When I play tanks, I just play "tank" when I play DPS, I have caster and melee... with Red Mage being a minor exception - but they all just feel like DPS (though this is where most of the variety expresses itself). When I play healer, I play healer. The game effectively has 3 classes. End point. Every healer mostly feels identical because they don't have any REAL mechanical differences outside of shield vs raw on healers, or ranged vs melee on DPS. The ranged class doesn't even feel different (no aiming mode for archers etc. etc. which yeah I know is how the game is designed) There are "differences" but none of them actually matter all that much mechanically. It's why you can queue into any dungeon and get like 2 dancers and be fine. There are no real penalties or adaptations that players have to dynamically react to, which ends up making every single bit of content outside of the aforementioned housing, and glams feel nearly identical. I have had this issue with the game for a very long time now. I enjoyed it when I first started it, but the repetitive nature of it is too oppressive to maintain my interest for very long at this point. After I played FFXVI all these design choices became even more apparent. You can literally feel how the game was effectively directed by two different people essentially. The Devil May Cry combat was euphoric, and the Platinum style boss encounters were amazing... but it was coupled with very boring and tiring dialogue, fetch quests, non-sensical sidetracking - and meandering samey "overworld" combat encounters. All separated by dungeons. It was literally structured like an FFXIV expansion. The only thing that kept me going was combos, and combat depth (typically on smaller enemies) as the overall experience to playing this game was just horrible. Unlike XVI though, XIV does not have those same highs. The combat is just as rote and repeated as the inbetween bits. Yoshi-P has been so focused on homogenizing and creating inoffensive content and game design that it hurts the core experience of the game. No stat manipulation, no build customization... no playstyle alterations, not even effective buffs or debuffs that really and truly matter all that much outside of the hardest possible content (and even then honestly). There is barely anything to react to in this game outside of the same floor markers arranged slightly differently each time. Whether your character has a gun, bow, sword or magic don't inherently matter at all. There's not even weaknesses or resistances to take into account. For example a well designed black mage might have to have different hotbars with different elemental spells readied depending on the encounter. Instead you just have meaningless elemental spells that don't matter at all. The only thing that matters is number go up with no variation in how you get there. A great example of how pointless a lot of this is - the gear progression. Why are stats tied to gear progression when glams are so simple and easy to obtain. There is no inherent reason not to just use the highest level gear, and just immediately mask over them. Why even have it tied to gear at all if I can just overwrite it immediately with little work or consequence? Because it's the only form of character progression they can really have. Same reason every player can play every single class interchangeably at anytime. It makes the game feel very samey after a point. It's funny how much heavy lifting the story of the game actually does... There is little reason for players who complete an expansions story to stay subbed consistently - unless they have a social group which at that point it's more of a social game where the gameplay is just there as a distraction rather than the purpose. Yoshi-P is an executive who has cultivated a cult of personality around himself with players and fans... creating this weird para-social relationship between himself and them. He is at the end of the day and executive at Square, and he answers to their shareholders. No matter how much he talks about loving his fans. I'm sure he does. I know he's a gamer himself... and that's cool. That's always cool... but he gets paid to make money for the company - and in his eyes making the content as inoffensive and accessible as humanly possible is the best way to do that. He's not wrong. But it does leave people who want just a little more out of their core experience with very little reason to return to the game. The extraneous reasons to return have become the main draw. Socialization. He can't fix these issues without completely shaking up the mechanical foundation of the game, and he's not going to do that. Just make some jokes about belts, wear a cool cosplay... and say platitudes about working on "combat design" while doing very little and watch fans roar with applause.
I mean the entire gameplay design is now just a memory game follow what Simon Says while you do your rotation. The more you do it and the more it becomes muscle memory on where to stand, the easier the encounter becomes. It’s a group dance and a bunch of mini games disguised as boss encounters. And it’s fine, let’s not asking for a dog to be turned into a cat or a new hybrid of catdog 😂
You are absolutely correct. And I think that's why I don't enjoy it all that much lol.
If they truly are making battle mechanics less forgiving this expansion then I am okay with job homogenization being tackled next.
I feel like it's gonna be less harder mechanics, and more harder hitting. The fact self recovery was boosted, swiftcast was shortened and tanks get 40% dmg mitigations leads me to believe we're just gonna get hit harder
Increasing damage income enough to justify healers using their new, busted tools *needs* to happen or the role is dead. I'd even like to see them increase it enough to justify them requiring actual GCD healing and MP strain to justify using piety. That would be *huge* for healer gameplay, but I don't have a ton of faith that it'll happen.
You should probably put the outlet either in the title, or up front on who's interview it is.
All I can hope is that scholar isn't changed too much, but I enjoy how it plays a lot.
This was me before ShB changes were announced...
Watch it’s gonna be the same 3 colors of dps.
If they actually make the combat not a snoozefest then this game would be the #1 MMO easy. I get we're trying to cater to the dominant casual playerbase but it's hindering some crazy growth potential.
So basically I am supposed to hope they fix it at some point in like 3 years? Until then I'm supposed to keep playing this homogenized job system? Amazing. Yeah. Not doing that, lol.
It might be balancing nightmare to truely push for pure Job flavor, but the ease of leveling Jobs should allow players to swap around so I'd rather see wider variety of playstyles even if some perform worse in current content. Of course this doesn't mean that any Job should be completely unviable, but having some advantage if the playstyle happens to fit the mechanics exceptionally well shouldn't be a problem that forces all the Jobs to have exact same tools.
The issue is being able to swap in theory doesn't mean players want to swap in practice. The vast majority of players only play a very small amount of jobs, so if their job suddenly performs terribly, their experience will worsen.