In all the games I've ever played Orbus, I've never seen a dev team so disinterested in what players think than what we have on display here in FF14. They literally couldn't care less who riots, who's upset, or who leaves the job.
Printable View
Actually, despite their occasional flops, they're still far more responsive at the class design level and in regards to overall issues of engagement in the content itself.
Its primarily just matters of overarching systems and content-loops that drive their heads of development deeper and deeper into the proverbial bucket.
Fair enough. I can only go by my experience from Vanilla to Cata, a bit of Mists, and WoD to, well, last month as someone highly involved with those class forums. There's plenty of contention and, increasingly, radio silence, but there's rarely ever such a sense of any suggestion made, if taken up, having a more than half chance of a Monkey's Paw outcome or the overall class pool being pervasively dumbed down.
In late-Stormblood, there were a handful of DPS as complex as what I could, even limiting myself to what would be contextually competitive, build in WoW. By 5.0, there were two... maybe three. Now, none, unless I ignore any and all impacts of borrowed powers and constrain myself to content for which the simplest builds might be the highest performing (though such is exceedingly rare). WoW's design at least keeps the options distinct enough that if one doesn't like a chosen direction, there are plenty of alternatives, and fresh options arise at roughly the same rate, or better, as others would lose their appeal. Here, it's just a matter of how long until the same bat hits what few jobs retain a particular appeal, usually in the favor of the prospective player over those who already actually enjoyed this or that. That's... not a great a feeling.
I don't say that to imply that complex is necessarily good. But, complex is necessarily more: a greater number of potential attractors and means of engagement. Used poorly, they can shade each other out. Used well, they synergize. But in the absence of complexity, such opportunities are lost by default—the outcome already assured. Only a history of very poor implementations could ever make paring a given design down to its skeleton and an arbitrary set of clothes seem a good idea.
I welcome SCH changes. I like having another, presumably long CD with damage reduction and speed up effects.
But none of them seem to adress my main problem with SCH and healers in general: (Maybe not AST and SGE)
The prevalent healing downtime that forces SCH/WHM to Glarebroil spam or sit idly for long stretches of time.
In SE's bid to make the game all inclusive they've removed something pivotal to the trinity system. Constant damage.
If you play any game with something similar to the trinity system one thing you'll notice is the your team is under constant damage from things largely considered outside the scope of main mechanics.
These damage sources usually come in the form of bleeds, damage that breaks through tank block mechanics, puddles that bleed(fire), random aggro mechanics that are either sinlge hit or AoE.
Most of the above are things that will happen intermittently between individual mechanics, often changing the further along the fight you get or simply getting more of them.
These also usually rely on players knowing the monster/boss's tell and not a cast bar. These sources of damage are what allow healers to be healing 90% of the time and using the other 10% for whatever is needed at any given time.
Consequently this means that death for these games is usually cheap.
What ffxiv does is make all damage scripted and deadly. Therefore death is extremely expensive. The upside to this is that combat is "easy" does not rely on reaction time as much and is more inclusive.
The downside is if you're playing a healer you're not going to be healing, worst of all they remove your dps abilities to close the skill gap on healers. So you're left with these classes that spam 1-2 buttons and heal every 30 seconds.
So really what you see as a problem to SE is a feature. Healers could be made to heal all the time by tomorrow if SE wanted it but that's counter intuitive to their Goal specifically Yoshida's.
Basically.
Is this the lvl 90 capstone or is it not. Because if it is, I'd be livid.
SCH has some pretty bad capstones as it is.
Dissipation goes against everything the Job lore stands for and the +healing doesn't affect 90% of the job actions.
Fey Union is just a Buffed Regen and has to be channeled locking you out of everything else.
Seraph is clunky as hell.
Thinking about it, is the reason they didn't show Seraph during the trailer because they didn't fix any of its problems? I know they said they're tweaking the pet's AI but they never stated how. >3>