Ask Questions for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXXVII! (Exploring Patch 4.0)

Can we get rid of the undersized party option that is hidden in the duty finder and let pre-made groups to meet up at the dungeon location and enter like an instance?

From a first time player experience, I find it extremely non intuitive that I cannot enter a dungeon from the entrance without going through a duty finder que along with the "undersized party" option being hidden and hard to access in the setting/cog button.

At the state of the game, you can enter a dungeon halfway across the world in a city. Also the aesthetics of the entrance of the dungeon and the area surrounding it becomes "barren and lifeless in population" as there is no reason to visit it (besides main story quest line) compared to the convenience of an instant teleport duty finder.

Also for custom pvp matches, can we lower the required members from 4 to at least 2+?

As of right now there is no mode to support 2v2 / 3v3 matches, and finding 4 people (2v2) is easier than finding full 8 (4v4) participants.

Can we have alts be tenants of the personal house, and refresh 45 days please?

Do the heavensward primals still drop their crafting mats when the fight is done unsynced or is that something that needs to be patched in like with the arr primals?

Will there be more Far Eastern themed furnishings added with Shirogane housing? Namely, Oriental partitions and half-partitions to match the existing Oriental Partition door, or the Oriental theme in general?

Are there any plans to do something to Triple Triad where it makes sense to use 4 star cards? In other words any plans to let us expand our decks to use all 4 stars and 1 5 star? Right now the only purpose 4 star cards have is to fill up your collection.

1) Will we be seeing more gunblade and garlean weapons in the future? Cause after seeing Nero using the gunblade in Omega instance got me really excited!

Is it possible that you could talk about the issue regarding the current roles of Tanks? It's really starting to nag on me that WAR has more damage in Defiance more than Deliverance, and the fact that PLD seems to be overpowered when using Holy Spirit in both OT and MT stances. DRK in general also could use a fix regarding The Blackest Night, since currently its entire rotation usually revolves around that one ability every 15s and pressing a lot of buttons that are on timers compared to PLD/WAR(despite wanting to reduce button bloat and make rotations easier).

As an alternative to having a "glamour slot," could we maybe at least be given a little more leeway on how many copies we can carry of currency-purchased gear, such as Omega armor pieces or Tomestone gear? Being able to have multiple copies of current tier gear would go a long ways towards helping us at least tailor each job's appearance to how we want them to look.

Can we have a pool furnishing for our houses?

Can the Savage Mode of Deltascape recieve some sort of remixed music / or a different theme altogether from the normal mode?

x

Any chance to increase range of Tethers such as Fey Union and Dragon Sight?

Thanks in advance.

Any chance we'll see drastic changes to yet more established systems in upcoming patches? I'm thinking along the lines of gear durability, spiritbonding, companions, guildleves and guildhests, and so forth.

What kind of new mounts, and companions will be added?

Can we have more challenge logs for duty roulettes, dungeons, player commendations, and add one for trial roulettes? While they're great to gain experience points, feels like it's not enough.

Is there any chance designers from the development team actually designs other guns than muskets and stuff like this, for Machinist's weapons ?

I'd personnally like a bit more of repeaters, sniper rifles, tech-ish rifles and not always these same old ugly muskets or ridiculous short guns. Several guns already doesn't match Flamethrower or some other Machinist's skills, anyways.

What are you planning to do for machinist's lack of raid utility (compared to Bard) and for its overall damages (again, compared to Bard) ?

Machinist was overpowered in Heavensward and it took a nerf hammer in the face, like it was supposed to get. But now, several skills are useless from now on (Turret Overload, Flamethrower being a "second" Barrel Stabilizer in case of mess-up). Overheating on 3rd, 5th and 7th (and so on) Wildfires isn't worth it considering the damage given and the received punishment. It is underperforming compared to its Ranged Physical friend, the Bard.

Any chance we'd get Cooldown at level 54 and Gauss Round at level 62 for better fight dynamics in leveling content ? Or any cooldown time reduction on Barrel Stabilizer ?
If this is read by development team, though, i insist : Great job on Machinist's skills animations ! I litterally cried of happiness when i've seen how even more awesome it is at level 64 !

With two new roles and a lot more to explore, is there a chance to have two more hotbars? While playing literally everything, I running out of slots.

Currently I'm trying to obtain Anima and Relic weapon for glamor purposes, currently it's very difficult and tedious to queue for Heavensward and ARR content and to grind those instances hundreds of times in order to complete the associated quests (ie: "Born Again Anima")

Can the quest be altered so that the weapon will grow as long as the weapon are at least in the user's inventory/armoury and can connect light/aether and perhaps be given a huge boost to how much aether/light is obtained from an instance?
Another request: can light/aether be allowed to be gained from Stormblood instances -- it doesn't have to be all Stormblood instances, but at least some of them would help make it easier to queue at least.

Thanks,
- Biri Dreisan

The new Job specific UI elements are a very helpful visual reference, however while playing it's easy to think of some things that would be helpful to add, for example the duration of Blood Weapon/Blood Price on DRK or it would be helpful to have Dualcast light up the outline of the RDM UI.

In short, are there any plans on adding onto the UI elements, perhaps with customization?

Given that the current tier of 8-man raids are just the boss fights with nothing before, what's the difference in design and planning between a trial and a raid? We had the Warring Triad in 3.0 with three boss fights and one story chain linking them all together, but that wasn't classified as a raid. Why is the Deltascape considered to be a raid? What about it makes it a raid and not a trial? Can you make the raids more raid-like?

So I know Yoshi said to not give up hope about having playable Viera, and the main issue noted was that they are a digitigrade race (meaning they walk on their toes). So while I think it would be cool if they could keep that feature and speaking only for myself, I would be perfectly happy if they had to make them walk like the other playable races (plantigrade). Or I suppose they could just make the boots invisible when equipped? Just please don't do like Warcrack and simply cut off the feet of the boots...

*(im)patiently waits for playable Viera*

Are there any plans to add more Disembowel-like Piercing Debuff effects into the game, or change the way it works entirely? At the moment the market is monopolised by Dragoon, and with Dragoon being in the gutters, it's severely hurting both Ranged DPS trying to push their limits.

I personally feel like spreading out the debuff onto more classes would be the desirable thing to do here; with the effect being more accessible, not only would we have more meaningful synergy options, but Disembowel would not have to be contributed heavily as a DPS gain to the Dragoon, and you would have space to buff its potencies elsewhere.

Do you see yourself doing a "suggest a job" or "Design a Job" Contest for supporting fans to come up with new classes/jobs?

In many dungeons, there are humanoid enemies of normal size, alongside other humanoid enemies of a much greater scale. Why are certain human-like enemies gigantic compared to other human-like enemies and ourselves?

Tank main now. I stopped playing a healer because of how scholar now feels underwhelming and weak, some of it's abilities do not work together at all (dissapation and Fey Union).

Are there any plans to make fey union easier to use like increasing it's range?

Scholar does not feel compensated for losing it's ability to dps like in 3.0, including the sch/smn aetherflow nerf, it loses out against both whm and ast in their ability to heal and migitate(plus utility)-.

Are there any plans to re-balance scholar?

So, let's talk Ixion.

I can understand him being a rare spawn. Trying to catch him within his window can be a little rough, but with a little luck you can sometimes find yourself on and in the zone when he spawns. The real problem seems to show up after he spawns. Because everyone piles into one zone, the lag that hits during this time can be crippling. People spawn and despawn on screen, actions can take up to several seconds to go off, finding and rezzing your party members becomes an impossible task, and more often than not I find myself getting a bronze participation reward, getting absolutely nothing for my troubles even though I was there and doing everything in my power to try to participate.

Is there anything you are doing to try to alleviate this problem?

Is there any plans to Add a DOT to Onslaught? I feel like it is much needed for warrior as they currently no longer have a DOT making Skill-speed worth less then it has been in the past

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Priya

Will you ever add primal totems, raid parts, and raid manifestos to the currency tab in order to clear all the bag/retainer space these items occupy?

---

And beast tribe currency?

With the release of 4.0 and the job rebalancing that came with it, some some jobs, like Astrologian and Paladin, got a good deal of much needed improvement while their role counterparts got overly reined in resulting in a single job being noticeably better than the others in the healer and tank roles.

What is the plan to bring the jobs that are currently behind in these roles, WHM/SCH and WAR/DRK, up to par and can we expect only numerical tweaks to things like potencies or will we see more drastic changes to abilities and job mechanics?

I would really like to be able to place minions within my house or apartment and have them just idle, wander around and play different animations.

Is there any plan to do something like this?

Can you please refund everyone the housing and change to personal housing as instance so they can purchase place in a zone they want instead? Can you make the wards into instance Free Company wards so players in FC can purchase plots in there?

If you are keeping the wards, then is there a way that you can make it purchaseable between friends alts only by making it instance?

Why must people fight over a ward and have people forcefully stay in a housing zone that they don't want to be in?

If you have no intention in fixing current housing system instead of making it instance, will you be selling a ticket in MOGstation so players can purchase a private ward in their preferred housing zone so they can bring alts, friends, linkshell or free company members?

Regarding the current state of Monk, many players are generally dissatisfied with with some of the changes such as the class now being RNG relate and how Riddle of Earth and Riddle of Fire work. There's also the matter of Purification and Tornado Kick's usefulness (the former being a waste of charka when we have the role action, Invigorate and the latter being a waste of our grease lighting stacks). People have also complained that the tackle mastery traits are underwhelming. What are your thoughts on making the class more rewarding to play?

The very first thing I did when I arrived at the Ruby Sea was jump into the water while riding my Elbst (from the Sahagin Beast Tribe). Needless to say, I was stunned when I found out that not only can you not be mounted on the surface of the water, but even more importantly the Elbst cannot swim at all.

I understand that swimming uses the same coding as flying for simplicity's sake, but expecting us to believe that chocobos can swim while a mount that was given to us for the sole purpose of its ability to swim cannot, is absolutely ridiculous.

Can we look forward to flying and swimming becoming 2 separate categories in the future?

Between removed skills, buffs/debuffs, job guages, combo procs, and ability timers the combat is more complex than it has ever been (in a bad way).

At this point I feel like the combat rework did more harm than good. Are there plans to continue refining the new system and/or allow players to turn the new system off?

Many jobs had skills completely removed from the game and a ton of players are unhappy about it.
A lot jobs lost AoEs and DOTs, was there a specific reason such skills were specifically targeted for removal, and is there any chance that those skills could be added back into the game?

Also, on a more personal level, DRG lost Ring of Thorns as one of those skills removed, but then got Sonic Thrust as its lv62 skill. What was the point of taking away the AoE that we had loved since 2.0 only to replace it with a less versatile AoE instead of giving us an entirely new skill? DRGs essentially only got 4 new skills instead of 5 like every other job (though I shouldn't be surprised since you did that to us in HW with Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrust too).

You have introduced a new class to us through the Astrologian 60-70 story. Is this a tease for the next class and if so, what patch is it planned for? It fits in perfectly with the expansion since it comes from the "far west" that was released with the expansion. The teaser, while not part of the main story, feels similar to when we were introduced to the Thief class.

Hello,

I am a very active member of several Hunt-oriented Linkshells. Yet, I have been able to participate in only a handful of S-Rank ARR and HW Marks since the release of Stormblood. They are more often than not already dead as I'm traveling to the Mark, sometimes even when I'm loading in.

Has there been consideration on raising the stats on ARR and HW S-ranked Elite Marks to SB levels?

On a related note: The current design of linkshells only allows for 128 members. This means that in order to have a bustling an active linkshell, you have to remove inactive members to make room for new active members. Currently there is no way to see how long member have been inactive in a Linkshell.

Are there considerations or technical ability to 1. Raise the cap of linkshells and 2. View offline duration of linkshell members?

Lastly, I want to thank you, and your team, for all the hard work you have poured over into making this such a wonderful game.

Also,

3. Are there considerations on streamlining the process of inviting people who are not on
your friendslist to linkshells?

Currently the only method is to do a character search, which may fail under certain circumstances such as if in a dungeon.

Will we be getting the glamour sets from the Kugane NPCs at one point during the xpac?

P.S.: Please take another look at SMN, I feel its the most punished job during hard duties for minor mistakes and dodging atm.

Any plans to further lower the cost/light grind for 3.0 Relic weapons?