Purpose of Mana For Most Jobs?

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Originally Posted by Valence

The problem is not being attached to something, or a part of something, the problem is seeing things getting removed without anything added back in counterpart, making the game poorer and poorer as a result.

The last and only time we have had something actually added to the battle system was in Stormblood with job gauges...

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Pure removal isn't necessarily a bad thing, but even with Kaiten it was rolled into something else as part of the design. The rotations in FFXIV are extremely constrained and are designed to be played more like a piano piece than dynamically responding to the environment for most jobs -- something the community seems very split on. The devs clearly have an idea of exactly what buttons they want you to press in what order because they literally force you to or see severe damage drop-off. oGCDs are designed to be run at 1m or 2m intervals to line up with party burst windows. Rotations are designed. I hope we can all agree on at least these points.

I guess the last part for me is that designs live or die on the whole, rather than the part. Something that may seem bad in isolation can become beautiful when consumed with something else. I guess I see the overall design for a lot of these jobs, and I see vestigial parts that don't really enhance the whole. I've played both with Kaiten and without and don't really miss Kaiten. I don't miss DoT-based songs. And while I can get decent DPS on DRG and it used to be my favorite job, I don't enjoy how it plays right now.

This isn't my thread and there are volumes written discussing FFXIV's job design changes and this isn't that thread, so that's all I really wanted to say on this. I understand people have different likes and dislikes and you're welcome to hate certain job designs. Personally, as someone who deals with design all the time, I try to look at the whole and how the parts come together because sometimes something that is amazing in one design is just cruft/bloat/vestigial/etc. in another.

Kaiten hasn't been rolled into anything else as a result and that's just pure bad faith to claim otherwise. The damage of the main action it affected was just adjusted. That's not adding something else interactive or otherwise engaging as a result. But I'm not even sure what brought up Kaiten specifically in that regard, it's just a detail on the greater scheme, but a polarizing one for a lot of players considering how well it portrays the problem.

If party resource management or MP is a detail and not the whole picture to you, then I don't know what to say. It's a pretty significant part of the whole system and it's been made mostly irrelevant, which is absolutely not trivial as a change. It's not just the removal of one ability, no matter how attached players are to it. It goes way beyond than this and affects literally the whole battle system.

And please then, show me anything that has actually been added to the game system besides gauges, because I really can't see it.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Kaiten hasn't been rolled into anything else as a result and that's just pure bad faith to claim otherwise. The damage of the main action it affected was just adjusted. That's not adding something else interactive or otherwise engaging as a result. But I'm not even sure what brought up Kaiten specifically in that regard, it's just a detail on the greater scheme, but a polarizing one for a lot of players considering how well it portrays the problem.

If party resource management or MP is a detail and not the whole picture to you, then I don't know what to say. It's a pretty significant part of the whole system and it's been made mostly irrelevant, which is absolutely not trivial as a change. It's not just the removal of one ability, no matter how attached players are to it. It goes way beyond than this and affects literally the whole battle system.

And please then, show me anything that has actually been added to the game system besides gauges, because I really can't see it.

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There's a famous designer quote: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Admittedly I'm a design minimalist so we might be at cross-purposes here.

I didn't mean to imply that the individual elements of a design weren't important, but that their importance only exists in how they come together in the whole. Having an MP bar with nothing to spend it on, isn't good design in my opinion. Similarly, an "I win" button is bad design because it doesn't take into account the goal of creating a meaningful experience for the user.

My hope is that for each job, the experience of playing it feels good. If that requires adding or removing something or changing something, I don't care about the individual parts, but the experience of the whole. E.g., for me positions feel good in MNK and bad in DRG. I'm not saying positionals are bad or good, I'm saying they work for me in some designs and not others.

Then for the battle system, I would argue that you also have to not look at it in isolation, but also look at in terms of fight complexity. Better feeling rotations and UI design allow for you to focus on more complex mechanics and more unexpected mechanics.

And lastly, you have to deal with human ergonomics and how that figures into what people call button bloat. Can everyone reach all the various keyboard and/or controller commands effectively. Does the design of the job/fight restrict what kinds of setups you can use. There are also accessibility issues, though I find that your average gamer doesn't really take that into account. "Just use CTRL, SHIFT, etc. or an MMO mouse" is unusable advice for someone suffering from Ulnar RSI or Carpel Tunnel.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

And lastly, you have to deal with human ergonomics and how that figures into what people call button bloat. Can everyone reach all the various keyboard and/or controller commands effectively. Does the design of the job/fight restrict what kinds of setups you can use. There are also accessibility issues, though I find that your average gamer doesn't really take that into account. "Just use CTRL, SHIFT, etc. or an MMO mouse" is unusable advice for someone suffering from Ulnar RSI or Carpel Tunnel.

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yeah. from the get-go I had to rebind my keys to go with Q-E-1-2-3-4-R-F-V because I physically can't reach past 6 without taking my hand off the movement buttons. but despite that, I have a hard time performing the ctrl+input for the third hotbar I have set most of the time to the point where I click the buttons instead for that. most classes don't have huge issues with this from my experience - extremely situational buttons get put there - but there are some like AST and...every tank where I have no other place to put some rather important buttons.

I do have extra buttons on my mouse but the game seems rather finicky about seeing them and I don't have very many of them, so I just use one of those to toggle auto-run xD

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Originally Posted by Sjol

There's a famous designer quote: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Admittedly I'm a design minimalist so we might be at cross-purposes here.

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With all the respect possible, this quote is probably from someone tying to sound smarter than they are.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

I didn't mean to imply that the individual elements of a design weren't important, but that their importance only exists in how they come together in the whole.

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This is exactly why things like kaiten are just things on their own, but becomes representative of a way bigger problem when stacked together, especially if they keep piling on and on and on.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

Having an MP bar with nothing to spend it on, isn't good design in my opinion.

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It's the exact kind of justification that's been brought up every time something got axed without any replacement. I'd like them to fix MP instead of removing it. Nobody is saying that MP is in a good state right now.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

My hope is that for each job, the experience of playing it feels good. If that requires adding or removing something or changing something, I don't care about the individual parts, but the experience of the whole. E.g., for me positions feel good in MNK and bad in DRG. I'm not saying positionals are bad or good, I'm saying they work for me in some designs and not others.

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Likewise. However for instance, while I hate cast times or positionals, I wouldn't like casters or melee dps any better if they removed it from those roles, because it would leave them bland and boring for most of them.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

Then for the battle system, I would argue that you also have to not look at it in isolation, but also look at in terms of fight complexity. Better feeling rotations and UI design allow for you to focus on more complex mechanics and more unexpected mechanics.

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Hell no, thanks but no. We're already way past the threshold in the imbalance and how everything is focused on encounter difficulty already at the expanse of jobs. We had something nice going on. We're getting jobs those days but they're hollow, and only neatly camouflaged beneath flashy moves portrayed during job trailers.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

And lastly, you have to deal with human ergonomics and how that figures into what people call button bloat. Can everyone reach all the various keyboard and/or controller commands effectively. Does the design of the job/fight restrict what kinds of setups you can use. There are also accessibility issues, though I find that your average gamer doesn't really take that into account. "Just use CTRL, SHIFT, etc. or an MMO mouse" is unusable advice for someone suffering from Ulnar RSI or Carpel Tunnel.

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pvp kits have 4 times less buttons and manage to be 10 times more flavorful and interesting than the pve kits we have right now, because they actually provide intricacies and interplay with the battle system and don't try to constrain themselves into mirroring each other at the cost of creativity and uniqueness. If you constantly gnaw at the battle system and how it provides a bridge between job toolkits and the rest of the game, you end up with the current pve situation.

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Originally Posted by Valence

With all the respect possible, this quote is probably from someone tying to sound smarter than they are.

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It's a foundational idea for minimalist design, but it sounds like it's not your thing.

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Originally Posted by Valence

This is exactly why things like kaiten are just things on their own, but becomes representative of a way bigger problem when stacked together, especially if they keep piling on and on and on.

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I'm not following you here. I'm talking about Kaiten in regard to SAM's kit, but it sounds like you're talking about something else.

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Originally Posted by Valence

It's the exact kind of justification that's been brought up every time something got axed without any replacement. I'd like them to fix MP instead of removing it. Nobody is saying that MP is in a good state right now.

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This is what I'm trying to get at. Only the whole can be fixed, not the individual element. Does the whole do what it was meant to do. It's like saying a sliding glass door is broken because it doesn't use a hinge. It still functions as a door, it's implemented with different parts.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Hell no, thanks but no. We're already way past the threshold in the imbalance and how everything is focused on encounter difficulty already at the expanse of jobs. We had something nice going on. We're getting jobs those days but they're hollow, and only neatly camouflaged beneath flashy moves portrayed during job trailers.

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Admittedly, I do think our attacks/spells/abilities are a little over-flashy and I do think they missed on SMN because it doesn't feel good. It does feel like it's missing something. I'm just not placing limitations or judgements on the act of adding, removing, or changing. They're all tools in the toolkit.

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Originally Posted by Valence

pvp kits have 4 times less buttons and manage to be 10 times more flavorful and interesting than the pve kits we have right now, because they actually provide intricacies and interplay with the battle system and don't try to constrain themselves into mirroring each other at the cost of creativity and uniqueness. If you constantly gnaw at the battle system and how it provides a bridge between job toolkits and the rest of the game, you end up with the current pve situation.

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This is where you lost me because here it feels like you're arguing for thinking about things as a whole rather than caring if they removed something specific. This is exactly what I'm arguing for. Remove, change, or add to get to a whole that feels good. And in this case, decreasing the number of buttons is critical for the much higher human response rate required for PvP. It's partly why PvP folks talk about it being the ultimate encounter design... real people are unpredictable and force you to keep on your toes.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

Cover is a bloat useless ability that doesn't even deserve to be on PLD's hotbar even if was off gauge it would still be useless, it was only ever good when it had built in mitigation. It's a holy sheltron and intervention gauge in reality, which can be done by putting it on 2 shared stacks, PLD's the definition of having redundant abilities (cover, Shield bash ect.) and out dated designs such as a oath gauge holding down the job.

It's not really a contest between who has the worse gauge, but I don't want "gauges" slapped onto jobs, I want gauges to actually make the job feel interesting which a lot fail, adding a "mana gauge" is just more visual clutter that I'm not a fan of.

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Have to disagree, the amount of lives I saved by using it speak for itself.
pld can save a pull by covering the last resser and giving they time to cast res

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Originally Posted by Sjol

It's a foundational idea for minimalist design, but it sounds like it's not your thing.



I'm not following you here. I'm talking about Kaiten in regard to SAM's kit, but it sounds like you're talking about something else.



This is what I'm trying to get at. Only the whole can be fixed, not the individual element. Does the whole do what it was meant to do. It's like saying a sliding glass door is broken because it doesn't use a hinge. It still functions as a door, it's implemented with different parts.



Admittedly, I do think our attacks/spells/abilities are a little over-flashy and I do think they missed on SMN because it doesn't feel good. It does feel like it's missing something. I'm just not placing limitations or judgements on the act of adding, removing, or changing. They're all tools in the toolkit.



This is where you lost me because here it feels like you're arguing for thinking about things as a whole rather than caring if they removed something specific. This is exactly what I'm arguing for. Remove, change, or add to get to a whole that feels good. And in this case, decreasing the number of buttons is critical for the much higher human response rate required for PvP. It's partly why PvP folks talk about it being the ultimate encounter design... real people are unpredictable and force you to keep on your toes.

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I can't follow you either...

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Originally Posted by Eldhelion

Have to disagree, the amount of lives I saved by using it speak for itself.
pld can save a pull by covering the last resser and giving they time to cast res

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I've never seen cover be useful or a skill worthy of hotbar space, I'm not a fan of it being there for the sake of very niche situations, I'd want the skill to actually be useful.

In any hardcore content if you have one rezzer (lets say no healers and like a RDM left) usually in that situation PLD's cover isn't going to save that run, In normal content theirs a possibility, but you also have a niche spammable skill called clemency to keep rezzers topped up in that exact situation, infact because covers got such a short range and in general if you want to "save" teammates you got intervention the skill is generally hard to ever actually use as a "run saver".

It's not like I'm against cover but for one PLD's a class that needs space, it's new rotation is very boring I would rather have more DPS skills added to the job then skills like "cover" and "shield bash" take up space while still being rarely useful. If they want to make PLD's skills like Cover actually more strong and impactful then I'm fine with it but in it's current state on a job plagued with hotbar space issues It's in need of that space. It's been two expansions now that cover has just remained a skill you will rarely use/see.

circling back to my original point what's even the justification that it's on the oath gauge? It feels like the only reason it's there is because they can't think of putting anything intresting on PLD's gauge.

MP represents your aetheric reserves, and at this point in the story it's clear that there's basically no job that doesn't rely on aether to function. In a perfect world, this would mean that every job would be designed to use MP as a core gauge in it's gameplay - each interacting with it in some manner thematic for that job.

In practice, it's easier to just design jobs from scratch with their own bespoke mechanics and resources, instead of trying to balance them around a single resource shared by everyone. This means MP has become vestigial over time, much like TP, with only the healers and small number of other jobs using it.

There's no doubt that it's a flavour fail, what we have is just a compromise needed to presumably streamline design development for the game. The answer is as simple as that.