Your Hopes and Ideas for the Battle System Changes in FFXIV 8.0

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Originally Posted by Daralii

I'm fully expecting them to announce that there won't be new jobs because all the time that would go toward designing them went towards the amazing, sweeping redesigns instead, and for the reworks to actually be very simple and lobotomize combat even further.

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Given the trajectory this game has gone, this wouldn't surprise me at all.

I'm never sure what to say in these kinds of threads, because as someone who started in ShB, I have only experienced the battle system after it had "gone to shit" if you ask most of the veteran players around here. I don't know what the game played like before then, and I can't experience it now. But from the changes that I have experienced...

- Positional melee attacks should do something. I know they do slightly more damage, but...do you see or hear any difference when you land a positional vs when you don't? No. But why not? Why no reward good melee playing with a little extra visual sparkle and sound? Yes, it sounds silly, but often what makes a video game fun to play are in these tiny details. When you hit an attack button and it does a cool animation with a satisfying sound effect, that feels good! It's a little dopamine hit that says "yeah, you did it!" Dragoon used to only have certain combos work if you hit the positional correctly, but because boss fight design changed more to bosses zooming around doing their own thing rather than being directed into positions by players, they removed it. And maybe with the current design, that was a fair choice as to not punish players. But I'm always a proponet of reward >>> punishment for getting people to do something, anyway. Reward players for playing right and hitting those positionals with a fun little satisfying effect.

- Speaking of boss designs...I kind of miss feeling like I need to be in charge of coordinating stuff when I tank. I like the thrill of having to time swaps just right, or run to position the enemy strategically for the next attack. I think I got to do that...once? maybe twice? these last few raid tiers...

- Hey, does anyone remember how Samurai used to have this shield button, and if you timed your shield right as you took damage, you then got a free small heal or counter attack ability to light up and press? Wow, that sure was fun and made me get really good at using that ability because it felt super cool!
But now all it does is...fill more gauge. :| No sound effect. No fanfare. Just more kenki, which doesn't feel like much of a reward for using a shield ability. Maybe they added a small heal back in DT, I don't remember, I think they changed something but it's still not the same.
Oh, what about a button that has a really cool animation and sound effect and when you hit it, your next attack does 50% more damage? Ooooh, yeah, doesn't that feel so satisfying to hit?
Nope, it's gone, now the attack just auto crits without the player doing anything. And some people celebrated this as it made the class "more efficient with less bloat." If that's true, then why are my hotbars just as full of buttons as ever on a job that is now far less satisfying to play?

I WANT and CRAVE those little "feedback" mechanics in job design. I want little indicators to show me "yes, you did it right, good job!" I am just a small silly mammal that wants to hit buttons that make my little guy on my screen do something cool in reaction to the buttons I'm hitting, and I feel like Square-Enix just keeps taking my satisfying happy buttons away. I want more of that back in 8.0. Not this participation trophy-ass "everybody wins!" job design for doing nothing. My abilities should feel good and satisfying to use, visually and mechanically.

Dark Knight should be the next job with a crazy transformation skill

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Originally Posted by CuteBucket

I'm never sure what to say in these kinds of threads, because as someone who started in ShB, I have only experienced the battle system after it had "gone to shit" if you ask most of the veteran players around here. I don't know what the game played like before then, and I can't experience it now. But from the changes that I have experienced...

- Positional melee attacks should do something. I know they do slightly more damage, but...do you see or hear any difference when you land a positional vs when you don't? No. But why not? Why no reward good melee playing with a little extra visual sparkle and sound? Yes, it sounds silly, but often what makes a video game fun to play are in these tiny details. When you hit an attack button and it does a cool animation with a satisfying sound effect, that feels good! It's a little dopamine hit that says "yeah, you did it!" Dragoon used to only have certain combos work if you hit the positional correctly, but because boss fight design changed more to bosses zooming around doing their own thing rather than being directed into positions by players, they removed it. And maybe with the current design, that was a fair choice as to not punish players. But I'm always a proponet of reward >>> punishment for getting people to do something, anyway. Reward players for playing right and hitting those positionals with a fun little satisfying effect.

- Speaking of boss designs...I kind of miss feeling like I need to be in charge of coordinating stuff when I tank. I like the thrill of having to time swaps just right, or run to position the enemy strategically for the next attack. I think I got to do that...once? maybe twice? these last few raid tiers...

- Hey, does anyone remember how Samurai used to have this shield button, and if you timed your shield right as you took damage, you then got a free small heal or counter attack ability to light up and press? Wow, that sure was fun and made me get really good at using that ability because it felt super cool!
But now all it does is...fill more gauge. :| No sound effect. No fanfare. Just more kenki, which doesn't feel like much of a reward for using a shield ability. Maybe they added a small heal back in DT, I don't remember, I think they changed something but it's still not the same.
Oh, what about a button that has a really cool animation and sound effect and when you hit it, your next attack does 50% more damage? Ooooh, yeah, doesn't that feel so satisfying to hit?
Nope, it's gone, now the attack just auto crits without the player doing anything. And some people celebrated this as it made the class "more efficient with less bloat." If that's true, then why are my hotbars just as full of buttons as ever on a job that is now far less satisfying to play?

I WANT and CRAVE those little "feedback" mechanics in job design. I want little indicators to show me "yes, you did it right, good job!" I am just a small silly mammal that wants to hit buttons that make my little guy on my screen do something cool in reaction to the buttons I'm hitting, and I feel like Square-Enix just keeps taking my satisfying happy buttons away. I want more of that back in 8.0. Not this participation trophy-ass "everybody wins!" job design for doing nothing. My abilities should feel good and satisfying to use, visually and mechanically.

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... Back in my day we could create mage tanks and leveled weapons not jobs!!! I imagine most forgot though. There was a hero level and a weapon level, and then you did a sort of create a job thing from that. Game wasn't ready to be released, hence Dalamud came and created 2.0 :P (by not ready I mean like super not ready). Then for a short while we could equip cross job stuff, so you could see a Paladin with stoneskin and a raise (didn't work in combat if I recall though), that turned into role skills which imo was a mistake. At that point the whole thing should have died and just made skills for each job. Kept leeches to SCH, Esuna to WHM. If someone is so full of bricks that they make a bag, keeping the name the same isn't going to save them. It only reduced thematic value to the jobs.


You had stuff like using Hallowed Ground and Cover in conjunction, or Scholar fairies that provided Scholars the ability to be war healers (in a dungeon they knew well and wasn't end game you'd see them playing the keyboard on damage spells), Summoners where the pets had HP bars (Titan could tank, could save a fight by tanking while a downed player revived, and got blown into the nerf hole instead of nuanced because of players trying to replace tanks on Ramuh with Titan-egi), Dark Knight didn't feel like a remixed warrior (it was hectic.. like weirdly hectic, but some liked that).


There was bad, and some of the changes have been fixing that bad. So its not all rainbows and daises. Like Warrior for a time would cry for healers to esuna them because they would self pacify as part of their enrage mechanic (pacify prevents you from using abilities).


Agreed that reactivity can be fun, and with so many jobs they can try different things. So hell if you don't like a reactive job, there should be others of different styles. There is a challenge that is unfortunate since we have so many jobs having proper talent trees that allow you to express a job differently is not really possible, unlike say WoW. So you might REALLY want to play SMN but not "x" style, and that is hard to do here since if each job had multiple styles and roles it would take 21 jobs and make it 42 or something. So I do feel bad about that, but I really think they should try to develop (and maintain*) unique play styles. *Changing these is a new different type of pain, like did you love how SCH played in HW? Probably sucks now then. Did you like carpel tunnel SMN? Guess what, no. lol.


In some ways I really care about the fantasy and expression over the SPECIFIC change, but I can usually line up with people since they tend to overlap. Like for you I have seen a lot of little pay attention / skill play removed to make numbers more 'same'. Blackmage turret for example.


I am already having a hard time sticking to the game now because I feel like they've corporatized (de-flavored / exceled / MBA'd, fill in whatever word you want for vanilla) the game, I do like the pvp sometimes and I don't really care for the gearing side of PvP in WoW (I find that annoying), but I can say a lot of my copium is resting with 8.0 delivering something tactile.