"Players who already like the way things are can feel at ease..."

The way I read what he said, it sounds like they will possibly keep our levels at level 100 and then add bonus points per level that we can alter our characters to our desire. Example, a healer could spec into DPS, survivability or healing. That way you could boost your DPS, live longer in harsh encounters or become a healing powerhouse. I hope they will allow us to change the spec as needed so as raids progress, we could change our spec, similar to how we used to change our specs back in 2.0.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

The demand for buff alignment was not unanimous back in ShB, but it's definitely something that sounds good in theory until you realize how it influences the rest of gameplay.

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It didn't even sound good in theory if people thought about the implications at all.

The post-EW 2 minute alignment is actively hostile to newer players. Where it didn't matter as much before when you missed the timing on your buff button because alignment wasn't expected and buff window exploitation wasn't an easy thing for most jobs, it is now actively detrimental to group damage if buffs don't align on the big damage buttons that now everyone seems to have.

It's also easy to see that balance would become harder to fine tune with the changes to the 2 minute alignment. Back then, all buffs only aligned on minute 0, minute 6 and minute 12, they were a big boost to damage but not expected to happen because people can miss their timing and drift. Now, all buffs are expected to come out every 2 minutes on the dot and anyone who drifts will never align again unless they skip 1 usage.

There's just multiple downsides to the dev team forcing something that people already were doing on their own, just to make things easier for people who can't understand that 60s, 90s, 120s and 180s all align at 360s.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

It didn't even sound good in theory if people thought about the implications at all.

The post-EW 2 minute alignment is actively hostile to newer players. Where it didn't matter as much before when you missed the timing on your buff button because alignment wasn't expected and buff window exploitation wasn't an easy thing for most jobs, it is now actively detrimental to group damage if buffs don't align on the big damage buttons that now everyone seems to have.

It's also easy to see that balance would become harder to fine tune with the changes to the 2 minute alignment. Back then, all buffs only aligned on minute 0, minute 6 and minute 12, they were a big boost to damage but not expected to happen because people can miss their timing and drift. Now, all buffs are expected to come out every 2 minutes on the dot and anyone who drifts will never align again unless they skip 1 usage.

There's just multiple downsides to the dev team forcing something that people already were doing on their own, just to make things easier for people who can't understand that 60s, 90s, 120s and 180s all align at 360s.

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It also just feels SO bad if you happen to die right before buffs, or you just derp and miss the window for whatever reason. Either you sit there like an idiot for 2min waiting to re-join your team, or everyone gets to side-eye you as your buff is wildly out of sync with the rest. If they really want to push the 2min meta but shake it up, they could potentially try what Tera did back in the day and tie it to the boss? It may be worth discussing it over a new thread though.

EDIT: Behold my unhinged take here! https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-a-new-meaning

Honestly, I’m just gonna be patient and wait until he elaborates on this more before I make my final decision on whether I’m staying or not.

His statement can be taken quite a few ways and I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt to go into more detail about this expansion to the current job system.

I’m just indifferent right now so I’m gonna wait.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

The demand for buff alignment was not unanimous back in ShB, but it's definitely something that sounds good in theory until you realize how it influences the rest of gameplay. it was really on them to understand what buff alignment would lead to and if necessary, perhaps have an open discussion about it and why it isn't healthy for the game. The more a game naturally leads you to the answer, the less room for error you have when you don't reach that answer.

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Let's be honest for a minute, the demand for buff alignment mostly came from a subset of the raiding population that wasn't happy that their Inner Release window or similarly inclined job profiles wouldn't always land with trick attack and therefore make their job supposedly "less favored" in the meta on fflogs.


Edit: that will teach me to reply before reading the entirety of the replies. Your next reply literally says the same thing. I could delete my post but I find it pretty funny so I'll leave it up.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I think they consider having atrociously bad damage, despite having almost no utility or buffs a part of Machinists identity. Sort of like how a part of White Mage’s identity is not having utility, buffs, or anything more complicated than raw damage or raw healing.

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The problem with Machinist is the niche it was built for is specifically for solo-players. The devs don't want to change it because of that.

It looks bad on paper but it's *consistent* in a way no other job is. Not having any reliance on party utilities makes it perfect for PUGs, since a good Machinist will perform the same in any party comp and can just slide in. It's also quite easy to learn and play.

Furthermore, it's the go-to job for Deep Dungeon solo runs because it's a mobile Phys. Ranged and hits harder than the other two.


It sucks but just because it's REALLY good at something with how it's currently built, the devs don't want to change it.

They can barely even balance the existing jobs. I could never see them implementing things like talent trees or specializations in XIV. Yoshida always goes on about how giving people build diversity creates "player tension" when people complain about what builds their fellow party members are using.

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

It sucks but just because it's REALLY good at something with how it's currently built, the devs don't want to change it.

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I like the way it is. Especially like that it's useful for Deep Dungeon.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

The reality of MMOs is that the game is bound to change over time, and not everyone will like every change. I get that. But I would hope that after years... years of many players expressing their dissatisfaction with the ongoing direction of their role, or their job, that maybe instead of continuing to bulldoze every semblance of depth or nuance in your path, that we could instead shoot for a more happy medium where jobs aren't too hard that they feel overwhelming to the casual player, but still offer more unique elements of mastery that feel rewarding to the players who want to engage with their job's design more.

But its statements like the title of this thread that kind of hurt me, as a player. I've seen and spoken to many players like me who get much of their enjoyment out of MMOs from fun, exciting, and dynamic class design, and yet it feels like we could not matter less to you. You say you want FFXIV to be a "game for everyone" but I guess we don't qualify as a part of "everyone" to you. But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong and we're just misinterpreting your statement from the PCGamesN article and we'll all be blown away come 8.0. I would genuinely love nothing more than to be wrong, so please, Yoshi P... Make me eat my words.

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I could go line by line on the rest of your post, but I want to focus on this first.

The players aren't complaining about the right thing. The problem isn't job design. It's fight design and server design.

For example, DoT summoner is a direct victim of SMN not being a good FF summoner (modern iteration kind of is,) but a true DoT class is a victim of the server architecture being bad. Both from overcapping on boss debuffs and from snapshotting. SMN broke the game twice over.

But fight homogenization is why all healers have nearly identical toolkits, why tanks have 1 hair off of literally identical toolkits, and why casters are being turned into rphys. The devs forgot how to design good fights, and if 7.2 was their attempt to fix this problem, they broke the game more by making 7.2 lag intolerant to such a degree that I'm likely going to quit once I'm well and truly done with this tier.

Even things like AST cards are tied to fight homogenization. When every fight is a DPS check and resources are meaningless, DPS is king and only damage matters. Having one AST theoretically get nothing but damage while another gets literally nothing during an entire fight is enough to never bring an AST. Want utility cards to come back, we need a triage meta where it's not a strict DPS check to also be a thing. In a 'fights lead job design' game like FFXIV, the buster meta forces modern healer design, tank design, and even caster design. If you can't make fun mechanics like Stormblood fight design, then you break things that existed in Stormblood like Black Mage in the process.

I can go over other things, but it would take an essay unto itself just to explain why nonstandard was very much caused by bad design and not because it was intended, and that it only existed for 1-1.5 expansions compared to the overwhelming majority of the game where it just didn't really exist.

Yoshi forgot he was making a game based on WoW and instead made the game based off how much he's struggling to beat the raids he's not even designing.