FFXIV Job Design Feedback

What people forget is: they made everything same-y and fit into the 2min meta, yet content comes out with the bottom dps classes not able to clear week 1. If they cant get balance right with homogenization, what good does it do except boring the shit out of people? If MCH fails to clear savage week 1 anyway, at least make the classes interesting.

Noticed there was an issue with the warrior form. The link should work now.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

1. How do you feel about the general state of job design in Endwalker in contrast to past expansions? Do you think this direction is good or bad for the game long term?

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I've spoken at varying length about this in the Healer subforum, but here's a good place for general direction. The writing has been on the wall for several years now when it comes to overall job design: the direction is clearly pruning, simplification, and removal of skill expression. Job design changes are, almost without exception, made to reduce player interactivity as much as possible. I don't mean this puts players on autopilot- what I mean is, the effect of player choice on their success is more muted. With each change, the correct decision at any fork in the road becomes more in-your-face, and the punishment for failing to take that path gets less severe.

RDM's mana gain per cast was reduced, but the gap between black and white mana before your gauge becomes unbalanced remained the same (reduced punishment).
Enchanted Reprise went from being a situational potency gain to a potency loss (Only the main rotation is the correct choice)
Boss hitboxes were blown up so melee don't have to disengage.
Tanks get ever more defense, ever more sustain, ever more immortality.
Casters get more and more mobility tools
Healers get ever more redundant free, instant healing abilities with gigantic potencies while their downtime gets as childproof as I've ever seen a healer in any MMO.


Will this design direction lead to more subs and money for Square? Probably. Lots of people with money are easily entertained by shallow class design.
Will this design direction piss off veterans? A chunk of us, yes. Square very clearly doesn't give a crap about that though unless the backlash is loud, embarrassing, and public.
Will a portion of this playerbase keep insisting "but pressing 111111111 over and over again Is sO FuN" instead of finding a visual novel? Oh god yes. They've never stopped and I don't expect them to.

IMO I'd say Job design in FFXIV is another in a long list of victims caused by the removal of staple RPG mechanics and oversimplification of gameplay that was labeled as "accessibility". This lead to jobs losing their individuality over time to homogenization by role as every job within a role needed to perform the same all the time due to there being no variance on enemies or combat situations.

Stormblood IMO was the golden age for Healers, SCH and AST were the peak design while WHM still ehh... better than HW.

1.) In general, I like the current state of job design where it's at right now for this particular point in time. Would I have liked it 10 in this format 10 years ago? Probably not. Would I have liked the format from 10 years ago today? Also probably not. With limited playtime and a few different games I go between, the current generally homogeneous nature of the classes within each role coupled with a select few abilities that distinguish them works very well for me to try out a variety of different classes. The only part of the current design I wish they would get away from is the infamous "2-minute meta".

2.) This is also a complicated question. I think it's important to consider the time period for each expansion alongside the job design. Similar to #1, I think they've done a good job of adjusting job design to match the reality of their playerbase. For example, back in the early days of WoW, I was in college and had plenty of time (along with most of the playerbase, which was mainly teenagers, college kids, and recent grads). I had no problem with sitting around in a town spamming the chat to find a dungeon group, then traveling to the dungeon, and it being an hour-long affair. Today? Not a chance. It's the same human beings who are the main playerbase, but we're now approaching middle age, with families and full-time careers. What was "awesome" back then wouldn't be today. My take on class design is similar. Job design in each expansion has kept up with the reality of the times and the primary playerbase.

3.) No interest or opinion on this one.

You don't need to incentivize feedback. If you're investing time into playing this game on a regular basis, it's always to your advantage to provide feedback. There's reams of it on this forum. The difficulty is in separating player feedback that is genuinely beneficial to the state of the game out from requests designed to selectively grant a competitive edge to one subset of players over the rest. Who isn't going to ask for more damage for less effort?

There's too much focus both within the community and by the developers around how target dummy rotations are designed and not enough focus on the intersection between rotation design and fight mechanics. You spend countless hours in raid content across any expansion hammering out your base rotation. That's just muscle memory. What makes it interesting is the little tricks you use to maintain uptime. Can you negate the damage from a mechanic or take advantage of a movement ability to squeeze extra GCDs in?

You need a toolkit that allows players to come up with creative solutions, but you also need fights that give them opportunities to actually showcase them. Actions like Ingress/Egress and Shukuchi have a lot of interesting possibilities in a movement heavy fight. But if the boss hitbox fills the arena, they become a lot less interesting.

As far as tanks and healers go, the primary issue is that these roles are progressively deemphasized and devalued, but that's a design decision that dates back to Stormblood. If you don't want players to be reliant on their tanks and healers, then the players who are drawn to those roles aren't going to want to play them. But that's likely a consequence of the game itself trying to evolve away from a trinity model.

While Stormblood wasn't perfect, it's the point in the game that I feel had the most interesting combat.

It mainly boils down to the fact that right now we only really got direct damage buffs to play around with, taking out a lot of the old support abilities (we still have a few like Mantra, but not a lot).

Take SB Ninja as a true melee support job. While Goad was moved from a cross-class skill to a role action, the job still had Shadewalker and Smokebomb for enmity manipulation. But after SHB tank stance changes, you need to be really bad not to hold enmity as a tank so these were just removed. The same with Diversion.
It also removed all interaction with other party members' MP, Refresh was gone from Phy-ranged and Mana Shift from casters. I've had several healers thank me for giving them MP after a big dungeon pull when I played BLM.
A lot of the defensive actions were also removed such as Apocatastasis and Pallisade, now mostly replaced by the same three-but-different-named Phy-ranged buffs.

It's interesting that while jobs are getting dumbed down and actions pruned (I liked RDM Tehter in Eureka), other jobs either keep useless skills like Flamethrower, and then some jobs like BLM gets to keep most of its complex actions (I wonder why...).

1. I feel EndWalker is at somekind of a rupture point : some people enjoy having all jobs aligned on same so no job out of meta by having strange base rotation (ShB bard for instance) while other hated it. I still think it was a good idea and better for the future, but i fear the need to add flashy and powerfull skill will break some balance of the game (like some extreme case now on short fight duration like P8S last phase of part 2 or TOP phases).

2. I think overall its EW

3. I find players survey wouldn't work on a "static" game like FFXIV. Games like Genshin got new characters to create, same as LoL. FFXIV with new job every two years and balance patch every 4/5 months, i don't think it would be really usefull


On a side note, I find funny how many people said they love SB state of the game while at SB it was mostly hated.

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Originally Posted by Sparkthor

On a side note, I find funny how many people said they love SB state of the game while at SB it was mostly hated.

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I was under the impression they hated Stormblood based on the story and setting, not based on job design (mostly).

Then again, people often react badly at something but end uo regretting it because the most likely thing to happen is them making it worse.

Thank you Shadowbringers for ultra simplifying tanks and healers, really cool. /sarcasm off