FFXIV Job Design Feedback

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Just don't take such a long break that your house gets demolished yes? ;)

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*demolishes their house while they're subbed anyway*

There, problem solved!

Looking at the results really makes me wish that SE would do surveys like this. In-game surveys which represent entire player base, not just specific community, which give you hard, factual, non-deniable data. Then they could actually start listening to player base, instead of listening to loud minority and/or listening only to the feedback they want to hear.

Just from this simple survey (which obviously represents only tiny part of the community), you can for example see that Dragoons are one of the most satisfied players at the moment (below BLM obviously), yet they're on the chopping block - I mean with planned rework. Meanwhile, all healers are around 5/10, with minimal deviation, which is unsurprising since they barely deviate gameplay wise. 66% of surveyed SAMs want "mini-rework". I wonder why.

They keep saying to provide feedback, that they listen to us and the usual sweet nothings. But even if they actually did, from where would they get that feedback? EN forums are half shitpost since nobody believes that devs actually read this. JP forums seems to use those dogshit chaotic mega threads with 100+ pages which make it impossible to pinpoint any specific issue. And I hope that they don't listen to reddits, since r/ffxiv is hyper casual and r/ffxivdiscussion too hardcore. Maybe r/shitpostxiv, that's probably most sensible community. Without in-game surveys, they're left to listen to only small parts of communities. Not like that's a problem since they only choose to listen only to what they want to hear anyways, but hey, would be nice if they would at least put more effort into pretending they're listening.

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Originally Posted by Deo14

Looking at the results really makes me wish that SE would do surveys like this. In-game surveys which represent entire player base, not just specific community, which give you hard, factual, non-deniable data. Then they could actually start listening to player base, instead of listening to loud minority and/or listening only to the feedback they want to hear.

Just from this simple survey (which obviously represents only tiny part of the community), you can for example see that Dragoons are one of the most satisfied players at the moment (below BLM obviously), yet they're on the chopping block - I mean with planned rework. Meanwhile, all healers are around 5/10, with minimal deviation, which is unsurprising since they barely deviate gameplay wise. 66% of surveyed SAMs want "mini-rework". I wonder why.

They keep saying to provide feedback, that they listen to us and the usual sweet nothings. But even if they actually did, from where would they get that feedback? EN forums are half shitpost since nobody believes that devs actually read this. JP forums seems to use those dogshit chaotic mega threads with 100+ pages which make it impossible to pinpoint any specific issue. And I hope that they don't listen to reddits, since r/ffxiv is hyper casual and r/ffxivdiscussion too hardcore. Maybe r/shitpostxiv, that's probably most sensible community. Without in-game surveys, they're left to listen to only small parts of communities. Not like that's a problem since they only choose to listen only to what they want to hear anyways, but hey, would be nice if they would at least put more effort into pretending they're listening.

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To my knowledge, Dragoon is receiving a rework not because it's flawed or unliked, but because it's perfect and there isn't room to expand on it without messing up that current flow, which I think is a difficult position to be in. As an MMO, there is an expectation to add onto it more in the future, and if they don't, a lot of people will be upset even though Dragoon is in such a good, enjoyable state. That said, Dragoon is one of the few jobs where the design team seems to respect its more complex nuances rather than see them as imperfections to be cleansed. While I'm not 100% confident that it will be a success, I have more confidence in Dragoon's rework turning out as a positive more than I have confidence in the Astrologian rework for example, or most other jobs that need adjustment getting the proper changes.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

To my knowledge, Dragoon is receiving a rework not because it's flawed or unliked, but because it's perfect and there isn't room to expand on it without messing up that current flow, which I think is a difficult position to be in. As an MMO, there is an expectation to add onto it more in the future, and if they don't, a lot of people will be upset even though Dragoon is in such a good, enjoyable state. That said, Dragoon is one of the few jobs where the design team seems to respect its more complex nuances rather than see them as imperfections to be cleansed. While I'm not 100% confident that it will be a success, I have more confidence in Dragoon's rework turning out as a positive more than I have confidence in the Astrologian rework for example, or most other jobs that need adjustment getting the proper changes.

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It's nice to see some positivity for a change, but devs have a terrible history with reworks, which is why everyone is so afraid. They postponed AST and DRG reworks after insane backlash from Kaiten, which tells me that they themselves don't believe that their past plans on 6.3 reworks were good enough in a first place and same thing as with 6.1 SAM would happen again. So in good scenario, they'll actually put in some effort and DRG will get actually good rework in 7.0. In a bad scenario, they just delayed the release of the original 6.3 rework, just to wait for people to cooldown after SAM rework. Considering that SAM is still hollow shell of its past self a year later, I fear that radio silence and hoping that players will forget became their tactic.

I feel like I rather have a unbalanced game where jobs feel unique and interesting then a balanced game where jobs feel safe and the same.

I'm not gonna say everything has changed for the worse but a lot of making things similar really hurts the Job design and diversity, I think I'll give a example, SHB white mage I remember having long cast times but having lillies instead of OCGD's this gave the Job a sort of "BLM" feeling where you're less mobile then other healers, Which I personally found actually really fun for the Job, Obviously WMH had a lot of other places where it wasn't great but making their casts shorter for the sake of it, was a small change, but one that completely made the job feel like this safe easy job.

Another example I'll give is warrior/dark knight, Both having the same core GCD rotation with very small differences one being "busy in the 120 windows", doesn't really feel interesting, I personally rather Dark Knight feel separate enough in it's GCD's while having less weaving, Gunbreaker already fits the "weave/busy" tank and does it in a much more fun way that's tied more to the job.

120, window is something a lot of people point out, Obviously the issue is raid buffs, but removing raid buffs isn't a "great solution" I think the issue is having only rigid 120 raid buffs that you press every 120 seconds and forget about, I don't think it really adds to the job, if anything Samurai, Blm and machinist are unique for not having raid buffs nowadays.

Personally I rather Fun and uniqueness be embraced over Balance, both are important don't get me wrong but I feel like Jobs shouldn't become cool reskins of each other, What makes Jobs interesting is having unique and interesting quirks from one another, having weaknesses but also having strengths, the issue with that is obviously the more unique you make something the more hard it is to balance. But being hyper safe at this point is so uninteresting.

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Originally Posted by Deo14

It\\'s nice to see some positivity for a change, but devs have a terrible history with reworks, which is why everyone is so afraid. They postponed AST and DRG reworks after insane backlash from Kaiten, which tells me that they themselves don\\'t believe that their past plans on 6.3 reworks were good enough in a first place and same thing as with 6.1 SAM would happen again. So in good scenario, they\\'ll actually put in some effort and DRG will get actually good rework in 7.0. In a bad scenario, they just delayed the release of the original 6.3 rework, just to wait for people to cooldown after SAM rework. Considering that SAM is still hollow shell of its past self a year later, I fear that radio silence and hoping that players will forget became their tactic.

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I’d say it’s more cautiously optimistic. I don’t think their methods of handling jobs has been sound, but certain jobs are played by some of the design team and Yoshida himself. I don’t think if Black Mage were in that situation, that its rework would turn out poorly because Yoshida plays it. That’s more what I’m thinking. Since Dragoon is a job played by one of the designers, but the postponing is worrisome, that’s true.

It's up in the air really I think. Some reworks were good and well received (ie, NIN after people stopped doomposting, the change to TCJ alone (going from 1-4-2-4-3-4 to 1-2-3) did wonders for the flow of the class, and while the GCD change to Mudras lowered the speed admittedly, making it less reliant on ping, making it so we didn't have to clip our GCD horrendously for Suiton, etc, means that it was a good rework. MCH too, if we ignore the exact damage numbers, it feels like a machinist now, rather than 'guy who got given a gun'.

Then on the flip side we have 5.0 AST when they made all the cards do the same flat damage boost. Or SMN in 6.0, which, while definitely adhering more to the traditional 'summoner' archetype, is very barebones, and is a kit designed more for Stormblood era than EW. As such, we could either get a DRG rework that just touches up the pain points, or we could get a complete SMN job. And if it IS a SMN job, it could work out to be really cool, or it could be as barebones as SMN currently is. As for AST, there's very little faith to be had there. The same developers who put AST in the state it's in, are the ones who will 'fix' it, how could there be any optimism in that situation? Not to mention, they don't have a healer main on the dev team, and they have a very old and outdated way of looking at 'the role of a healer in the party', hence the whole 'good heal work' thing. So chances are it'll still have ridiculously overtuned levels of HPS and not much on the damage side of things. The only hope really is that they put more emphasis on buffing allies, as a way to get us to use less Malefics, but even that's a long shot

I don't think I've ever been this anxious to see how the design team will respond to an expansions overall feedback than I am for EW going into 7.0. I feel like job design feedback is something that's historically been more of an underbelly issue--something that exists but is easy to ignore, but it's something that's been brought up a lot more this expansion outside of just the forum circle, so I have to believe there's going to be some sort of acknowledgement of these things. No doubt several media tour attendees are going to ask questions regarding some of these issues. I don't foresee the media tour going on an no one bringing up Kaiten, for example, or the aggressively simple Summoner.

I honestly have no idea what to expect with the AST rework and what that will look like. There's no way to know how they actually are taking in criticism since nothing will ever be said about it until those changes are revealed and finalized. The delaying of the DRG and AST reworks, feels both concerning on one hand, but also has the chance of perhaps being relieving on another. What does that mean?

Honestly, all this just makes me wish Yoshida was willing to be more transparent about their design process and how he thinks/feels. I don't understand this PR secrecy mentality and how that's supposed to benefit them or their audience. If you want to foster the positive growth of a game, you should let it breathe rather than sheltering it away from the sun. Something that's come to mind lately, though, as far as questions I'd like to see in future Q&As is asking about their process of collecting feedback in the first place. How do they go about collecting feedback from each region, and what is their process of parsing through that feedback? Has feedback changed their minds on certain design ideas in the past, and what triggered those changes of heart?

I’d really like any indication that they’ve heard the complaints and/or have ideas for where to take the whole combat side of things come 7.0. This silence is just maddening.

About future rework planned for 7.0, we will have some info on fan fest and on live letter dedicaced to 7.0, which would likely be lunched in about a year (or a bit less).

I've seen some post telling thet want many possibilities to play a job or prefer job with high variety but not balanced, but by my experience, both theses situations are horrible for player and dev :
- If jobs are many way to plays, one will be meta and others forgetted. Moreother, people would likely mess player who didn't play like the Meta because players, and it's already something i've seen in WoW.
- Having job forgotten for high-content will lock out many of them from all content. As the dev intend is to allow players to play their jobs in all content... And it's not fun when the job you like the most performed poorly in raid content, and I can just take the MCH in example here.


On the Dragoon, i always though it's kit to be disjoined : there is the combo paths and jumps paths, and they never interact each other. Moreother, i think Life of dragoon feels weak next to Enshroud, and it's probably because one appears more than 4 years before the other, when hotkey replacement wasn't a thing.

The total silence in regard to job changes started some time back in Stormblood (maybe early Shadowbringers). I think it was because the devs were annoyed by people giving feedback/complaints immediately after seeing the patch notes, so they opted for total silence from then on.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

The total silence in regard to job changes started some time back in Stormblood (maybe early Shadowbringers). I think it was because the devs were annoyed by people giving feedback/complaints immediately after seeing the patch notes, so they opted for total silence from then on.

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I started playing just in late ShB, but I keep hearing that job design was at its peak in StB and then it got worse and worse. What a coincidence.

Funnily enough, their changes lately have been so questionable, that patch notes are often enough to tell how bad they are. You really don't need to give 6.1+ SAM a try to realize that Kenki has no other use than just a Shinten spam. Their explanation for job changes didn't help them either, since they revealed that they unironically thought that PLD should have lower damage because he has range in magic phase.

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Originally Posted by Deo14

I started playing just in late ShB, but I keep hearing that job design was at its peak in StB and then it got worse and worse. What a coincidence.

Funnily enough, their changes lately have been so questionable, that patch notes are often enough to tell how bad they are. You really don't need to give 6.1+ SAM a try to realize that Kenki has no other use than just a Shinten spam. Their explanation for job changes didn't help them either, since they revealed that they unironically thought that PLD should have lower damage because he has range in magic phase.

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So, the "try it out and give us feedback" act that the dev team has been using for Kaiten has been done before during early Shadowbringers, SAM wasn't the first victim. The dev team changed GNB sound effects in patch 5.01, this spawned a large forum thread asking why they changed the sound effects, the dev team, of course, asked us to try it out and give feedback, then they never mentioned it ever again. Exactly what's happening to SAM and Kaiten right now. It's a method they've used before, and they'll keep on using it because complaints always eventually die down.

Over on the first page, I added some additional questions to my initial post, but I want to reiterate those questions here for anyone skipping ahead to this more recent page.

In the future, I plan on doing more feedback threads later when we get new job change information during the next media tour and again after 7.0 launches to see how people feel about the listed changes before release and compare that to after we get to try those changes out. Even though that's still a ways away, I'd like to gather some more info on what I can do better with my formatting next time around. With that in mind, I have a few extra questions I'd like to get some feedback on:

Do you think the 1 to 10 scale I used for the content satisfaction questions was good, or would it be better to run with a 1 to 5 scale? Do you think I asked the right amount of questions, or the right questions in general? Are there other questions I should think about next time around? For the "What do you want to see more/less of" sections, I already feel like I can do a much better job adding more specific options to gain more clear information, as the "other" option ended up making the responses fairly unhelpful and hard to turn those questions into graph questions. Do you agree with this? What are other "more of/less of" answers do you think I should add for each job or specific jobs?

In regards to the 1 to 10 questions and overall satisfaction question, I want to follow up with a bit more detail. Now, I do realize that the answers we've gotten on these feedback submissions is limited in some respects, so the scores we have currently on these spreadsheets should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I'd like to know, what do you think is a "good" score out of 10? And what exactly does that mean to you? At what point do you think a score indicates some amount of investigation into changes? Is a 7 out of 10 acceptable? Is a 5 out of 10 acceptable? If you feel a 1 to 5 scale is better, how would you translate those responses to a 1 to 5 scale?

1. I think job homogenization is at its absolute worst right now and makes me completely uninterested in every single class in the game. When every class feels so similar to play within a role, what decision do I have to make beyond "what do I think looks the coolest?" I think it is at the worst point in the game's history but nothing leads me to believe it will change for the better. World of Warcraft doesn't have this problem. Every class and specialization feels unique to itself. They all offer something different in gameplay loop and theming so that you have a reason to play them all, or skip one or two in particular that don't feel good to you. In FFXIV, they all feel bland and cruddy.

2. I'll echo what so many other have and say Stormblood. They made Bard fun to play and every healer felt great. The tanks were doing alright too, but I think the simplification of Tanking had already begun to take place by then. I miss the days of actually having to work at tanking to be good at it. Now, anyone can do it by simple breathing and it makes me completely uninterested in doing the job.

3. They could I suppose, though I don't see much point in it. It's the forums and the subreddits that the developers need to be looking at. Threads like this one encourage people to provide productive feedback and conversations can be had on the points raised. Surveys in the game or whatever will not only be skipped by a lot of people, but some people will just fill them out without reading them(if there is a reward for doing it). You're also getting no conversation at all, so how the questions are worded will HEAVILY impact the responses and can lead the development team getting the completely wrong idea about what people want.

I think the main concern with job updates really is the duality of the situation. Let's take AST's 7.0 'rework' that is scheduled. If they're not going to ask the playerbase for feedback on what they plan for the future of the job, we're basically left in the situation that 'the people who put the job in such a state that 'it needs a rework so big, that it has to be done at expansion time', are the people who are the sole voices of how the design should go'. How's anyone meant to have any optimism in that situation? It's like having faith that the person who set fire to your house accidentally is going to be the one who can handle putting the fire out. Chances are they're gonna throw water on a cooking oil fire and flare it up even more, because they don't know what they're doing.

https://i.gyazo.com/403667d4300aca0d...938d35f318.png

Pretty relevant lines, I'd say

The job design of XIV is poor.

You can say that, and still be a fan of the game.....

Skyrim is the greatest open world game ever made....but people sink into floors & walk through walls like Kitty Pride.

XIV job design is a cluster f***.

Some jobs start at lvl1, some at lvl 50...others at lvl 70....

Some have hunting logs, others do not....

Some can do the STORY!!!!!!! One cannot.......

XIV's job design is like someone in the board room was throwing darts for ideas....and used all the ones that did not stick.

"What does not make sense...Okay, lets go with that"

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Originally Posted by MonsutaMan

Skyrim is the greatest open world game ever made...

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That's the biggest lie anybody could tell. That title goes to Dragon's Dogma.

Who can sincerely say that skyrim's great? Even in the same series morrowind is far superior as an open world game.

Blue mage stands as the only good job, presumably its inability to turn in msq is to avoid saddling the player with up to an 80 level grind when BLU hits the level cap.

Seeing how for Dark Knight most people ( 90%!!! ) ask for either a mini rework or a full rework, here are some ideas for the tank problem child:

->Dark Mind grants 10% damage. At level 82, upgrades to Oblation, granting an additional 20% magic damage mitigation.

->Dark Missionary should be obtained at level 66.

->Carve and Spit / Abyssal Drain moved to be GCDs with 20 sec CDs.

->Bloodspiller combos into 2 more actions, part of a combo, each action costing 15 blood.

->Living Shadow increases Darkside's damage bonus to 25% for 20 seconds. Fray merges with you giving you an enshroud like effect but suited to DRK fantasy.

->Delirium grants the Delirium buff for 10 seconds. During this time Darkside cannot be obtained from Edge/Flood of Shadow, they instead increase the bloodgauge by 20!

->Quietus removed. Bloodspiller combo can have AoE fall-off.

->To replace Quietus and Dark Mind merged into Oblation you can gain Blood price and Sole Survivor.

->Blood price: When around more than 2 enemies, getting hit increases the Bloodgauge. Should be obtained in Stormblood.

->Sole Survivor: Marks target for execution. If target is killed, gain HP and MP. If target survives, gain only HP. Should be obtained in Endwalker for sustain purposes.

->Salted earth gives a regeneration effect while standing inside it. Salt and Darkness heals the DRK instantly.

Idea of mini rework:
Minimize the use of EoS/FoS outside Delirium, but make sure you keep Darkside up.
Maximize the use of EoS/FoS inside Delirium to increase the bloodgauge.
Use the bloodgauge specifically to use the Bloodspiller combo as many times as possible under Living Shadow.
Play around with TBN's Dark Arts!
More GCDs.
Merge similar defensive CDs for easier weaving of defenses, add identity in the defensive / utility kit, solidify dungeon sustain.
Add more intensity to downtime periods: C&S being 20 seconds and managing Darkside more carefully.
Distance DRK's gameplay from WAR.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

Who can sincerely say that skyrim's great? Even in the same series morrowind is far superior as an open world game.

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Hell, even Oblivion is superior as an open world game in that same franchise. Skyrim's a pretty bad Elder Scrolls game.

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Originally Posted by ItsUrBoi

snippy

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I've already made my response over in the DRK Megathread, which you can find by following this (or just going to the thread itself):

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Originally Posted by Zairava

Alakablam

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I would be open to discussing it here, but we should probably keep the lengthy DRK discussions in the Megathread

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Originally Posted by fulminating

Who can sincerely say that skyrim's great? Even in the same series morrowind is far superior as an open world game.

Blue mage stands as the only good job, presumably its inability to turn in msq is to avoid saddling the player with up to an 80 level grind when BLU hits the level cap.

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Skyrim is great... After I install around 500 user made mods into it... >.>

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

Hell, even Oblivion is superior as an open world game in that same franchise. Skyrim's a pretty bad Elder Scrolls game.

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It's actually kind of interesting to compare XIV and Skyrim side by side, because criticisms for both games have a lot more similarities than you'd think considering they're both RPGs that wanted to get a wider audience by becoming more *accessible (read: simple).

As an example, like how the egregious simplification of Elder Scroll's combat turned all encounters into "stealth archer or bust" specifically so you could avoid how bad melee and magic combat is in Skyrim. Also the removal of a lot of mechanics which felt defining for the franchise like spellcrafting from Morrowind/Oblivion or the consolidation of a lot of unique builds/classes leaving only mage, melee and archery. I think I don't need to explain how this one aligns with XIV lol.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

That's the biggest lie anybody could tell. That title goes to Dragon's Dogma.

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Just popping in to commend a fellow Dragon's Dogma enjoyer. ฅ(^◕ᴥ◕^)ฅ

I thought this is a FFXIV Job Design feedback thread, not off topic gaming thread...

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

I thought this is a FFXIV Job Design feedback thread, not off topic gaming thread...

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Since when do we every stay on topic on this forum?

I still get new answers little by little from new eyes checking out the thread, so doesn't really bother me if it runs off topic.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

further feedback questions

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Sorry I'm a bit late to this, but I'll put in my thoughts here.

1) 1-10 scale is better because it provides more input to work with, there's much less of a middle ground in 1-5 as it's a small frame. I think you did ask the right questions in general, as anything outside what you already asked will tend to fall onto a job-by-job basis based on its current kit. My only comment is that (and this could also be a job-by-job basis) in the "what would you like to see in the future for X" (at least in the Dark Knight pane), there probably should be "More GCD actions" and "More OGCD actions" like how it is in the "What could X use less of in its current kit".

2) I believe good is roughly around a 7, while anything below that is under par. I don't think investigation into changes should be limited to how the score is, because even if a job currently works, that doesn't mean the people who play it are happy with how it plays. (*cough* Dark Knight). However, if any jobs' average starts teetering on rounding down to 6 and below that, that's cause for concern in a general sense.

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Originally Posted by Zairava

Sorry I'm a bit late to this, but I'll put in my thoughts here.

1) 1-10 scale is better because it provides more input to work with, there's much less of a middle ground in 1-5 as it's a small frame. I think you did ask the right questions in general, as anything outside what you already asked will tend to fall onto a job-by-job basis based on its current kit. My only comment is that (and this could also be a job-by-job basis) in the "what would you like to see in the future for X" (at least in the Dark Knight pane), there probably should be "More GCD actions" and "More OGCD actions" like how it is in the "What could X use less of in its current kit".

2) I believe good is roughly around a 7, while anything below that is under par. I don't think investigation into changes should be limited to how the score is, because even if a job currently works, that doesn't mean the people who play it are happy with how it plays. (*cough* Dark Knight). However, if any jobs' average starts teetering on rounding down to 6 and below that, that's cause for concern in a general sense.

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I plan on really expanding on the "more/less of" questions and removing the option for a fill-in-the-blank space. There's already the bottom write-in response area for that type of info, and all that having the "other" option gave me was results like this:

https://i.imgur.com/mqKvPiJ.jpg

As you can see, it's just a big wall of 1 individual responses that are hard to actually read, and I've outlined that like half of these are different ways of saying basically the same thing: different faeries. It's not super helpful, and there was no easy way to add that to the spreadsheets. Could you imagine a pie chart with that breakdown?

Instead, I'd like to just be more thorough with options on each job, perhaps being more curated to individual jobs as well. I mocked up this list below of options I might offer for the healers over on that forum since I'm more colloquial there to see if anyone had suggestions on what to add.

What to Add:

• Animation Updates
• Higher rDPS
• Stronger MP Economy
• Burst Healing Actions
• Regen Actions
• Barrier Actions
• Attack Actions
• Party Mitigation
• Party Utility (Expedient/Warden's Paean/etc.)
• Personal DPS Buffs
• Party DPS Buffs
• Crowd Control (Stun/Silence/etc.)
• Mobility Tools (Swiftcast/Icarus/etc.)
• Unsure/Nothing Specific

What to Remove:

• Total rDPS (This job is too strong)
• Total MP Economy (This job's MP management is too strong)
• Burst Healing Actions
• Regen Actions
• Barrier Actions
• Attack Actions
• Party Mitigation
• Party Utility (Expedient/Warden's Paean/etc.)
• Personal DPS Buffs
• Party DPS Buffs
• Crowd Control (Stun/Silence/etc.)
• Mobility Tools (Swiftcast/Icarus/etc.)
• N/A (Nothing needs removing)

There's still plenty of time before we get any news on 7.0 of course, so it's not something I need to worry about right now. But it's still on my mind, and I want to do a better job collecting information leading up to 7.0 and after to see if how people feel about whatever media tour news we get changes, or if it largely doesn't change. Something like those lists though would allow me to turn that into graphs on the spreadsheets which would make them a lot easier to absorb information from.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I mocked up this list below of options I might offer for the healers over on that forum since I'm more colloquial there to see if anyone had suggestions on what to add.

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What's the difference you're trying to get at between, say, "add higher rDPS" and "add party DPS buffs"? (Similarly for "remove" options.) I mean, the latter accomplishes the former, does it not?

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

What's the difference you're trying to get at between, say, "add higher rDPS" and "add party DPS buffs"? (Similarly for "remove" options.) I mean, the latter accomplishes the former, does it not?

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My goal there is thus...

Add higher rDPS = This job does not do enough total damage and needs a higher total damage, whether that comes from selfish damage or buffs.
Add more attack actions = This job needs more DPS skills in their rotation regardless of overall damage output.
Add more selfish DPS buffs = This job should have more buffs that increase their own damage dealt (such as Presence of Mind) regardless of overall damage output.
Add more Party DPS buffs = This job should have more party-wide buffs in their gameplay that increase everyone's DPS regardless of the job's overall damage output.

In other words, the rDPS question is meant to be about how much damage you're actually doing while the other responses are about wanting more actions that get you to that number.

If you were to say that this job should have more attack actions and party DPS buffs, but also said they should have lower rDPS, what you're saying is that this job should reduce the potencies of their existing attacks and spread that to new actions as well as possibly lower their total damage output because, presumably, you believe that job's current damage output is too high in relation to other jobs of the same role.

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

I thought this is a FFXIV Job Design feedback thread, not off topic gaming thread...

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Comparing XIV's Job Design to other games provides different perspectives other then just XIV that could help discussions.

XIV's Job Design to me is summarized as becoming " Lazier/Emptier/Scripted ". Making Jobs easier to manage sounds like a big win for Square regarding the work-load for the Dev's while pursuing unobtainable perfect balance, regardless at the cost of gameplay.

Is Job Design still good? It's Good Enough to get players to Subscribe.

Shoving another Job choice into a Players face ( often suggested... ) is a terrible solution. Players like x Job and should be granted optional depth/complexity/nuances to allow players to express mastery of the Jobs they love in any content they wish to do it in, " Not just Ultimate ". Taking that away? is akin to stomping the passion out of players who grew fond of the Jobs... This can be done without raising the skill-floor. And raising the skill-ceiling would not deter away hardcore Raiders, they'll more likely welcome the challenge to master it.

Job Design can be tweaked slightly to be 2x as Fun, with having the exact same skill requirement of the now. Square shown they can do this, but the focus obviously isn't about quality Job Design or Job gameplay here, it's about Balance and Content. Hence their stance on " Just go play Ultimate ". Square obviously seems to think it's all about the content they think you will enjoy, disregarding what Jobs you enjoy playing content with.

• Make the Jobs more Fun? and Combat content becomes more Fun to do
• Make the Jobs more Boring? at some point Combat Content becomes unappealing to do

Wishful thinking with the supposedly x amount of years of XIV to come that Square will give us something that improves Job design, gameplay and providing Job depth. Wouldn't hold my breath though. DRG and AST players are up next right? and if they weren't hoping for a SMN rework... here's to hoping

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Originally Posted by CelestiCer

Shoving another Job choice into a Players face ( often suggested... ) is a terrible solution. Players like x Job and should be granted optional depth/complexity/nuances to allow players to express mastery of the Jobs they love in any content they wish to do it in, " Not just Ultimate ". Taking that away? is akin to stomping the passion out of players who grew fond of the Jobs... This can be done without raising the skill-floor. And raising the skill-ceiling would not deter away hardcore Raiders, they'll more likely welcome the challenge to master it.

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Said it many times, with comparisons to hot wings, curry, FPS games, all sorts. If I like Chicken, but can't handle spicy food so well, I don't get told 'sorry we only do chicken vindaloo', there is chicken korma, chicken tikka masala, chicken madras too, a spectrum of spice levels. Similarly, if I like the Sci-Fi aesthetic of Halo, but I find Easy to be, well, too easy, then I can ramp up to Normal, Hard, Legendary, whatever they call the hardest difficulty. The suggestion that 'oh you don't like Chicken Vindaloo? Too spicy? Well you can have Lamb Kofta instead, maybe that's your speed'. Yeh and maybe I don't like Lamb (I personally do, it's example). Or for the FPS example, someone getting told 'oh Halo's too easy for you? Go try COD or Battlefield then', well maybe said person doesn't like how everything in COD is so aggressively brown-filtered colorwise, or how it's too realistic and they like the futuristic stuff like energy swords and flying motorbikes.

I play SGE because I like the aesthetic. I shouldn't be told 'oh you find SGE easy? Well go and play SCH and fight the fairy clunk then, that'll give you some challenge' because I don't like the SCH aesthetic as much. Both classes should have a skill ceiling to strive for, and a skill floor that keeps them accessible to newcomers. And the worst offender is when people suggest something of a different role entirely. 'Oh you don't like X healer, well go and play DPS if you want to do damage' is the equivalent of saying 'Oh you don't like the mobility people have in Apex Legends? Well go and play turn based RPGs then' instead of suggesting a more grounded BR like PUBG

I've said this before, and I'll echo it again.

95% of FFXIV's content is extremely forgiving. You do not need to perform your jobs rotation perfectly, or even competently in order to clear the MSQ, FATEs, dungeons, variant dungeons, alliance raids, normal/hard trials, normal raids, Eureka/Bozja, deep dungeons, treasure maps, or even extreme trials. Savage raids can be cleared with at least mild competence particularly after the first several weeks as well. This alone is what makes the game incredibly accessible. Any player that is at the novice or intermediate skill level will have little difficulty getting through all of these examples regardless of whether they are playing an easy job like the new Summoner or a hard job like Ninja. If you don't believe me, look at any video of Nyxipuff playing FFXIV. Absolutely no hate to her in any way, shape, or form, but she spends a fair amount of time in any fight not even attacking and just admiring the boss, the music, and the environment. In her case, it has absolutely no tangible influence on her experience that she doesn't have to manage Greased Lightning as a Monk. Whether she was playing ARR Monk, HW Monk, SB Monk, ShB Monk, or EW Monk, her experience would probably be the same. I don't think if asked the question of which version of Monk was the best, that she would really care at all, because that's not why she plays the game. And you know what? I think that's a beautiful aspect of FFXIV.

But it's also because of that level of accessibility built into the content itself that I cannot understand why there is this crusade against all things that even sound like complexity across so many jobs--as if somehow the conal AoEs on Warrior or Samurai were somehow gatekeeping players like her from getting to experience the story, or melee positionals, or healers having DPS actions, or Dark Knight having Darkside, or Astrologian having different utility card effects instead of all flat 6% DPS increases on each card. And you know what else? Those aspects of complexity and nuance are what allow this game's incredibly accessible content to stay engaging for players who have gone beyond the novice and intermediate skill thresholds. Expert and master level players can find a lot of fun in simply trying to perfect their job even when that perfection is not necessary at all. Doing things like ensuring your Fleche and Contre-Sixte are always used as they come off cooldown, managing your DoT timers on old Scholar so that every DoT was always refreshed as the previous one fell off while still being on top of healing requirements, or being able keep your GCD always moving as a Black Mage are what the most experienced players get excited about during their expert roulette, their extreme trial farming, and their savage reclears.

Now, there are things that can be too complex as well, such as the old HW Cleric Stance. As a tool, it took away a player's ability to heal almost entirely anytime they wanted to perform any amount of DPS. Another thing that could be a far too punishing change if we were to implement it would be drastically increasing caster MP costs and building MP management into a more complex rotation, something like Machinist's Hyper Charge pre-charge system where each use of Heat Blast gave you MP back and you were required to hit all 5 Heat Blasts every time to have enough MP to keep your rotation going, and those Heat Blasts all had cast times, or you'd just run out of MP entirely and be forced to idle. Something like that would have a very negative impact on the novice and intermediate Summoner and Red Mage players, and possibly higher skilled players as well depending on how punishing that system turned out.

But my point, ultimately, is that there is a balance that should be maintained. The content being as forgiving and accessible as it is allows the jobs to have more challenging components to their optimization that more skilled players can enjoy, because it doesn't matter if the less skilled players fail to optimize properly, or don't even try to optimize certain aspects. Forcing jobs to essentially be playable on auto-pilot, and/or shaving their DPS gameplay down to a skeleton of a rotation only serves to hurt the skilled playerbase without necessarily providing something for the less skilled player base.

But also, whenever we talk about these issues, there are some of those more novice or intermediate level players (not all, just a few outliers), that lash out at these ideas because they immediately jump to the conclusion that that aspect of perfect play will now be required of them, and that's scary. But I don't know why that's the conclusion people continue to jump to. "Add or return this to job XYZ" is not synonymous with "play at a savage level or not be able to progress through the rest of the game" which I have never seen anyone actually propose.

As you said, XIV is already incredibly accessible on the basis of letting a player get into a dungeon and beat it by pressing any order of buttons regardless of if it's optimal or not. Back in 2018 when I was a sprout I liberally used Tornado Kick as soon as I unlocked it on MNK despite the Double/Triple TK rotation not existing at the time and yet no one told me once about playing poorly or about how TK was a damage loss. I just used it because I thought it looked cool.

Removing aspects from jobs like Greased Lightning, positionals, old AST card effects, Dark Arts/MP management or DoT management is not accessibility, they don't prevent you from playing those jobs. They can prevent someone from enjoying them, and that's a matter of taste, not accessibility, which shouldn't necessarily be seen as a bad thing.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

But also, whenever we talk about these issues, there are some of those more novice or intermediate level players (not all, just a few outliers), that lash out at these ideas because they immediately jump to the conclusion that that aspect of perfect play will now be required of them, and that's scary. But I don't know why that's the conclusion people continue to jump to. "Add or return this to job XYZ" is not synonymous with "play at a savage level or not be able to progress through the rest of the game" which I have never seen anyone actually propose.

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As for this, it's just an incredibly exhausting and time wasting effort for users to disparage any form of discussion they don't like, so they deliberately act obtuse or misinterpret us thinking that whatever change we want couldn't possibly have any middle ground. You will see it in any discussion surrounding the game on any site, whether it be the forums, twitter or reddit.

"Hey guys I think the job design of XIV is too boring and focuses too much on balance" -> "Clearly you want to go back to Heavensward jank with accuracy stats and Cleric Stance"
"Content at level 90 is a little too easy" -> "You just want every form of content to have savage/ultimate tier difficulty"
"Endwalker has been lacklustre in delivering any form of long-lasting combat content" -> "Go squeeze every ounce of content from this game if you're so bored"
"The relics this time around feel uninspired and are just glorified tomestone weapons" -> "You just want to grind (x content) 20 times again"

So on and so forth.

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

As for this, it's just an incredibly exhausting and time wasting effort for users to disparage any form of discussion they don't like, so they deliberately act obtuse or misinterpret us thinking that whatever change we want couldn't possibly have any middle ground. You will see it in any discussion surrounding the game on any site, whether it be the forums, twitter or reddit.

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It's doubly annoying for those of us who made theorycrafting or suggestions or whatever, because we put a lot of thought into 'how do we strike a balance between keeping the design accessible for casuals and new players, while also having a deep optimization for veterans and hardcores to master'. For example, my SGE idea (and I think Ty's more recently posted one too) has Diagnosis and Prognosis, the basic GCD heals, as costing zero MP. Casuals will find this useful, as if they are overwhelmed and panicking, the idea of 'oh balls I overspent MP and now I can't heal' is not a factor, they can always fall back on that tool. It's a damage loss to do so, sure, but it's accessible without restriction. When we made these suggestions, the only people who would be 'forced' to use the new stuff is the people who clear Savages super early, people who have to be good at adapting to unknown things, because they're speed-learning the new mechanics for fights (even before guides are out for stuff, so blind). If they can learn how the hell High Concept works before any guides exist, just with their static looking at debuffs and thinking things out, I think it's fair to assume they can learn where to put Banish in their rotation as WHM.

Also, anyone who's got an opinion like the ones on the right of those arrows, the 'think of the casuals' crowd, needs to remember that I was a casual once upon a time too. I didn't join the game with an instant knowledge of how to perfectly optimally heal a raid (I still don't), I learned how to heal less wastefully and pump more damage by practicing, and I did it during 'clunky Cleric Stance' Heavensward, as AST. Cleric Stance, Accuracy caps, 6 different card effects, 3 Royal Road effects, Cross Class actions, and people still managed to graduate from 'casual' to 'not-quite-so-casual' in that supposedly horrid janky time

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

But also, whenever we talk about these issues, there are some of those more novice or intermediate level players (not all, just a few outliers), that lash out at these ideas because they immediately jump to the conclusion that that aspect of perfect play will now be required of them, and that's scary. But I don't know why that's the conclusion people continue to jump to. "Add or return this to job XYZ" is not synonymous with "play at a savage level or not be able to progress through the rest of the game" which I have never seen anyone actually propose.

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It's not only that, there are also people that cut into discussions with the "I got mine" mentality, you can see it happening a lot in regards to healers and SMN. People coming into discussions and saying they enjoy the job so it's fine and everyone should stop whining. I'm not knocking them for enjoying the jobs as they currently are, I'm happy for them if they do, but it's quite annoying when they come and stifle discussion and call everyone whiners who should quit the game if they're so unhappy.

Overall, I think the results that the feedback forms have gotten thus far aren't too surprising for the most part, but one that that is kinda weird is the Paladin Rework score is rated very low over and over, but the reworked 6.3+ paladin is actually being selected as the best iteration of Paladin. Not saying there's a "right" answer or anything, but the results seem opposite to one another. I'm wondering if maybe a lot of people rating are just selecting the bottom Endwalker quickly without reading into the specifics of if its 6.3+ or 6.0-6.2? Not sure if there's another reason why that might be the case.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

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If I had to guess, I would say that's best explained by PLD enjoying a pretty consistent design continuity from 4.0 all the way through to 6.2. PLD spent two and a half expansions as basically the same class, with a consistent rather than burst-focused damage profile, 100% DoT upkeep, the dual FoF/Physical and Req/Magic damage windows, etc. It's easy to imagine people who might prefer the Stormblood version (PLD was hard meta, game was overall more complex, Cover was good, etc), other people who might prefer the Shadowbringers version (game was less complex, PLD was still a solid performer), and still other people who might prefer the original Endwalker version (even if performance was bad, it was the poster boy job, people enjoyed Holy Sheltron and the Blade combo, etc). Taken together, the 4.x, 5.x, and 6.0-6.2 versions are nearly twice as popular in total as the 6.3+ version, while all being fairly similar in gameplay.

In contrast, I would expect that when WAR or DRK players say their favourite version is from Stormblood, they probably don't have much in common with players who say their favourite version is from Shadowbringers.