The End of Hard Job Content in 7.0: MNK and BLM

How is BLM getting easier? Its core rotation has always been easy. What makes BLM challenging is how stationary it often is and trying to plan movement tools around mechanics. Unless all BLM spells are becoming instant cast, I don't see how its difficulty will change much.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

You should do as yoshi-p says and play ultimate content if you're feeling the game is too easy. I feel a lot of these posts are just made by people who are too anxious to engage in ultimates.

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People aren't complaining about encounter difficulty, but rather the level of engagement they're getting from the jobs themselves, which has progressively been going down over time due to ability pruning and simplification of rotations. MNK and BLM just happens to be the latest victims.

Doing ultimate content does not change the fact that the jobs are boring; not least of which the tanks and healers where everything can still healed/mitigated on a predictable timeline.

Standard BLM is certainly not getting easier. If anything, it's getting a LOT more rigid with flare star (losing stacks when swapping to ice), still has the same-ish rotation, same timers, etc. Non standard BLM, which was way harder since it required a deeper understanding of the job and a good reactivity on execution, is being removed, what's being lowered is the skill ceiling, but the skill floor at lvl100 isn't necessarily being lowered, perhaps the opposite.

For MNK the main rotation remains relatively similar, it's getting somewhat easier to track gauge stacks than nebulous timers maybe, at best. New tools to get into the burst which can raise difficulty a bit though. The DK spamm rotation that was performing barely less than standard has been axed? I think? If so, then the job is actually getting harder. But on the other hand optimal drift like non standard seems to keel over so, again, I think the skill floor remains very similar (if you don't count current DK spamm), but the skill ceiling is being lowered.

It seems they are planning a complete job overhaul for 8.0, with unique ways to play for every job and bringing back "complexity" in gameplay. They know that the game has been too simplified and made to focused on casual players, but the truth is, the main core playerbase are not "casuals", so they need to listen to them. Players want each job to be truly unique in the way you play them. Instead of just streamlining all jobs into categories, they need to make every job stand out from the rest because of truly unique, useful features that are needed in certain game situations. For example: DRG and MCH are just DPSs. The only variation are the skills, but in the end they're just that. What makes NIN unique? nothing. Just another melee DPS to add to the list. So give each job something truly unique that no other job can do. Something that transcends the typical dungeon instance.

NIN could get a "stealth" gameplay to use in certain missions and situations, or "steal" could be used on certain NPCs, and so on.

The main issue here is that they discovered this when Dawntrail was too advance in its development, so they had to postpone a full job overhaul for 8.0.

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Originally Posted by Ryskim

It seems they are planning a complete job overhaul for 8.0, with unique ways to play for every job and bringing back "complexity" in gameplay.

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I'll believe it when I see it. Cynically, talking up how 8.0 will revive class identities is a way to deflect any questions or complaints during 7.0. Kind of like how "go play ultimates LOL" was meant to shut down healer criticism for 6.0.

If we look at what the team is doing, they're expressing a pretty consistent design philosophy with each rework: simpler, homogenized, easy. It's more likely that an underserved segment of the community it latching onto one translated phrase, completely changing its meaning from what was intended.

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Originally Posted by Ryskim

It seems they are planning a complete job overhaul for 8.0, with unique ways to play for every job and bringing back "complexity" in gameplay.. Players want each job to be truly unique in the way you play them. Instead of just streamlining all jobs into categories, they need to make every job stand out from the rest because of truly unique, useful features that are needed in certain game situations. For example: DRG and MCH are just DPSs. The only variation are the skills, but in the end they're just that. What makes NIN unique? nothing. Just another melee DPS to add to the list. So give each job something truly unique that no other job can do. Something that transcends the typical dungeon instance

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It was stated, that they will think/talk about that as focus or 8.0.

That doesnt mean, that whe will have that for everyone in around 3 years.
Esspecialy, when they first need to decide, who need a "identity" re-work/actualisation.

Blm identity is, beeing the wizard of the game. Who use elemental attacks for dmg. That was allways the case. Except, that esspecialy now is the blm focusing to much on fire. And to little on ice and thunder. They could search for ways to increase the use of this 2 elements (change ice phase, that ice spells recover mp differently strong, with B1 as the strongest recovery spell and B4 for ice shards, maybe create a very strong ice spell, that is only usable, when all ice stacks are there).

Monk was allways the fist fighter who attack very fast and many times. I think that is fullfilled now. Many of there skills have now nice special effects.

Summoner is summoning beeings. That is even given now. What they could improve is the duration, each beeing is staying there. And give them maybe more actions (and give Kabunkel something to do).
Red Mage is a mix between BLM and WhiteMage. What he is missing would be healing power.

So, the first thing that has to decide is, what "identity" is meaning.

If you mean, gameplay mechanic, could you say, that this is allready given.
There are no 2 classes, who plays exactly the same (only similary by the tank and healer).

Nin, Red mage and Reaper are "magic knights", who combining magic with meele. Where Red mage is more on the magic side, reaper on the meele side and Ninja is balanced within the middle (has around the same numbers of physicaly and elemental magic attacks).
Monks are the "weaponless" fastes attacker. Samurai the slow but powerfull attacker, with little movement and Lancer is the mobile physicaly attacker in between this 2.

If you mean, that the classes should have skills, that allows them to solve certain problems much easier as the other classes, could it create problems in fight designing. Or, that some classes are excluded from content. Because there are some who are more usefull (like, taking summoner and RM over BLM for ressurection option).

I suspect making ice spells actively casted to regain MP is them trying to restore some more prevalence to the ice part of black mage.

For monk, I'm not sure if there were further changes. But changing the core combo from two buffs to keep an eye on and one debuff to consolidating all the info I need to track in one place will, for me at least, be a welcome change.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

I suspect making ice spells actively casted to regain MP is them trying to restore some more prevalence to the ice part of black mage.

For monk, I'm not sure if there were further changes. But changing the core combo from two buffs to keep an eye on and one debuff to consolidating all the info I need to track in one place will, for me at least, be a welcome change.

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Another thing that would have restored prevalence to ice phase would have been an ice finisher instead of yet another fire spell.
The devs don't want us to skip ice phase but they themself do everything they can to make us spend the less amount of time in it as possible.

The more I think and the more interviews I read I get the impression they wanted to go down the road of simplification in the future but were surprised by the amount of negative feedback that was piling up. Not saying it was the majority but it was getting louder and louder (Yoshida himself said that he watched Zeplas video on EW).
A loud negative minority if I'm allowed to call it that is still bad PR for the game that already has its fair share of cliches in the mmo community.

Yeah, I'm not saying it's the best solution but that's just my guess as to why they made the ice change.

Ultimately I'm not too sure what to do about it though. When they were first making the job, it seemed like a decent way to work black mage into an MMO rotation. FFXIV doesnt' have specs/talents like WoW does, so they couldn't just make 'fire mage, ice mage, lightning mage' as separate things. But in classic FF games, having fire/ice/lightning spells was their iconic thing. But in those games they were all basically the same spell but with a different elemental tag. Fitting well into the turn baed jrpg genre but not so much in a hotbar rotation WoW style MMO.

So the idea of 'fire phase is burn mp for big damage, ice phase to cool down and regain mp, and lightning as a dot' was a clever way to in a sense to work all three into a rotation and cycle. But the unfortunate end is it makes the ice phase lame. You don't want to be in ice phase any longer than neccesary, want to use as few ice spells as possible, and if you like the flavor of an ice mage, too bad. Fire eclipses lightning and ice both. And because it's more fun and exciting to be in fire phase over time, expansion by expansion they add onto that.

I wonder if perhaps BLM could benefit from something similar to summoner and the way it cycles through ifrit/garuda/titan. If they had fire/ice/blizzard stages and the emphasis wasn't all put on FIRE FIRE FIRE with lightning relegated to a dot and ice to mp recovery. Or to the way paladin used to cycle between its physical and magical rotations before things were shaken up mid EW. A way to put all three elements on equal footing and make all three of them just as exciting and interesting. But then copying summoner would likely just make the jobs more homogenous and alienate players who like how the job has played up until now. So I'm not really sure what the best way to go about things would be.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

Snipped because of post limit stuff.

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Agreed.
I also don't have a solution neither do I think anyone has.
I love blm and its nice rotation flow that still gives room for optimization but tbh even I grew tired of only fire phase getting interesting things. That's why I adored paradox so much. It seemed to be the starting point of something bigger.

If job identity are going to be more of a thing in the future, in my opinion that's what blm should go to.
Maybe fire phase stationary and ice phase allowing instant casting while still having some kind of mana refreshing system in ice phase or somewhere else.
Or give both phases the same potency and make it a thing to switch between the elements not in a phase like system but fire >ice > fire to hold enochian and so on.
If its done well that would give entirely new optimization chances like filling with thunder or xeno to keep enochian up and so on.

On the other hand I wouldn't mind if it stays in its EW state with more interesting stuff outside fire phase. That would probably be the easiest workaround to make most people happy.

They designed themself into a corner with the simplification in my opinion. Stormblood was a nice middle ground for the jobs. Was it perfect? No it had lots of grumbling back then too but its ok for an mmo to have some friction between players.