/r/ffxivdiscussion: If you want WoW-style design, you're going to have to accept-

Full title: If you want WoW-style design, you're going to have to accept WoW-style concessions.

Another discussion on one of the FFXIV Subreddits about the potential future of the game, etc. I'm personally somewhat neutral towards this because if we just copy another game we sort of lose our own identity and uniqueness in doing so, not to mention its no guarantee that it will change FFXIV for the better. On the other hand, sometimes taking a giant leap, such as implementing an idea like this, yields favorable results.

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Original Post: Title. With so many people pointing to WoW, it's important to not just look at the green-side of the grass but to also see the results of what will occur, speaking as someone whose played almost two decades of WoW and a few years of 14.

#1: Your class will wildly vary in terms of effectiveness based on tier, fight and current balance.

On this, I'd argue 14's actually better than WoW: With the way 14's designed, it's easy enough to switch from say Ninja to Samurai or to switch from Gunbreaker to Astrologian, etc etc. But the key part is that eventually, you're going to get to fights that WILL NOT FAVOR YOUR CLASS. No matter how good of a ninja you are, if the boss has "whenever you do a Mudra, I throw a boulder at you", it's going to make ninja less wanted in that content.

This occurs in WoW with specs, mind you: There are sometimes where one spec completely stomps another, meaning that while you can go that warrior, you had BEST be picking fury. Because arms/prot are doodoo.

#2: At higher levels, a meta WILL evolve that the community will embrace.

Let's look back at WoW's Mythic+ Leaderboard. You'll note that 90% of the top players are all one class and spec. Out of the top 350, there was exactly ONE non-demon hunter. You'll also see several of the same class. This is the meta that will happen.

"Well that doesn't matter. I'm a -really- good Machinist, so—" The problem isn't that Machinist will be so bad you do no damage. The problem is that people in the community will end up avoiding certain classes because they're not meta, even if the group is mid/casual. This will lead to new community frustrations and it won't matter how good or bad a class is, community perception will warp it to being not welcome into content.

#3: The disparity within role will increase.

And I'm not talking "A 5% disparity". Certain tiers will outright favor certain classes. There may be situations where the group's melee has to pivot off melee because of how bad it can be. More ranged will be chosen due to highly mobile fights. Hell, DPS without defensives may also be no-gos due to tough healer checks, forcing players to have to further adapt and accommodate.

Couple this with not knowing 14's content before it's out there and day 1 prog and you're going to get people who poured all their time and effort into gearing Gunbreaker being told they need to hard-pivot to warrior due to the nature of how the tier is developing. And it may stay like that until you get enough gear to make Gunbreaker as good as warrior is naturally for this patch.

It kind of relates back to point one, but there may be a point where Summoner outperforms black mage so much you're going to fight to be able to bring Black Mage into content, as an example. People don't want to struggle too much in content and if BLM vs. SMN (in this hypothetical) is a straight 10-15% better? You're gonna get pressured to swap.

#4: WoW's raid and encounter design isn't built around 14's party size.

When people point out that "Wow look at all the good classes that you can bring into a raid and they're ALL UNIQUE AND VIABLE", the difference is WoW's highest end of content is 10+ players, at least 20% larger than your standard 14 raid. This naturally means you'll get more classes getting into content...and sometimes even then you're going to get repeats of classes.

Like it or not, 14's content isn't WoW's. You can't simply 1:1 port ideas easily without retextualizing them and reconsidering them due to the smaller size of 14's content. And 14 doesn't usually approve of double-class-dipping which will lead to new problems.

#5: WoW ALSO has identity problems, not just 14.

Anyone remember Bloodlust? Bloodlust was a unique mechanic only for Shamans that let them massively boost the haste of players. It was the defining reason to take Shamans into content. Then Hunters got it. Then mages got it. Evokers. Oh, and it's also a buff you can get from an item.

A lot of WoW's unique class identity, while it still exists, has slowly eroded over time just like 14. Partially due to the same complaints and partially due to simple pruning. It's not all golden sunshine there.

#6: WoW's turbo-addon support.

You can't compare the two. While it's an open secret people use addons, nothing in the 14 community is as prevalent as Deadly Boss Mods or Weakauras in terms of helping you play the game. This has further warped the scene and a lot of fights are designed around automatically having these tools. Yoshi P has committed that he wants content to be clearable without major addon support...which would likely be at odds if you borrow heavily of WoW designs to 14.

With all that said? There's plenty 14 can learn from WoW and vice versa. I think WoW's fights can be fun and the primary thing I think 14 could take away from WoW fights is the uniqueness of the arena. So many 14 trials and raids take place in a square box due to mechanics whereas WoW's arenas can vary immensely. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. (Spine of Deathwing, vomit).

But the important thing is to be aware WoW's design -isn't- perfect or totally better than 14. You'll simply be trading one problem for another. The community will shift to accommodate this new design and it's important to recognize the flaws that come with this. I'm not saying 14's state is perfect or that WoW is some terrible game you shouldn't look at, but it is very vital to recognize the problems that can (and will) arise by looking to WoW for guidance.

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Notable comments:

- "Why does everyone always seem to ignore that xiv literally just cannot become like WoW
like, why are we even debating if anything should become like in WoW? It's literally not gonna happen because every duty in this game would need to be significantly reworked, on top of massive class reworks like why are we even entertaining nonsense like this for discussion. edit: just for clarities sake, I am talking about fundamental gameplay design ideas here, not something like "Make Glamour like Transmog" or "Alts should share progress with your main" etc."

- "It's wild to see the gaps in performance between WoW's classes from patch to patch. XIV players have no idea how good they have it"

- "I don’t want wow style design. I want FFXIV 4.X design.
Now, in a vacuum, do I prefer 10.X wow over 6.X FFXIV? Uh yes. Tanks feel like tanks and healers feel like healers and gameplay is just less repetitive.
Does that mean I want WoW style specs, gearing, trinkets, leggos, talents, and balance? Oh hell no.
Would I like a return to tanks having to position bosses, mitigate random TB’s and maintain aggro (or similar)? Yes.
Would I like a return to boss cast times being much shorter with the party taking damage more often, having to focus heal the tanks fairly often, and needing to deal with actual mechanics during trash pulls and having more than two buttons to press when healing isn’t needed? Yes.
The reason people so often compare wow and 14’s current versions is that hardly anybody actually played 14 before all the changes ShB brought. So it’s a lot easier to point to wow, a game with a MUCH larger playerbase (compared to pre-5.0 14) and say we like these things. Especially because we can’t just go and play on a SB legacy server.
I’ve been playing wow for about three years now and though it’s tremendously fun, I don’t want the devs to copy wow’s design. I want them to revive their own."

- Quote from Original Post: "Well that doesn't matter. I'm a -really- good Machinist, so—" The problem isn't that Machinist will be so bad you do no damage. The problem is that people in the community will end up avoiding certain classes because they're not meta, even if the group is mid/casual."
Response to Quote: "This can't be understated, it's also not exactly rare that a certain spec actually is absolutely garbage in WoW. Historically Feral, Survival and Windwalkers know the pain of being so bad it's actually griefing to play those specs."

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Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...going_to_have/

Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves or propose your own ideas below. Cheers.

Some notable comments from within this thread:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aurora428

Can we stop using any comparison to WoW as a shield against criticism to FFXIV?

When someone says healing is more fun is in WoW you don't need to pull out a list of whataboutisms as to why FFXIV should never change anything ever.

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"wow style" is misleading; FF fans already know this from FFXI.
Of course some jobs will be OP while others will be looked down upon, that's fine as long as it's not blatant to the point where it feels on purpose.

As for everything else, they should not design jobs around savage/ultimates; instead they could have 2 modes for jobs like they do for pvp. One balanced for raids, one balanced for non-raiding (this one is the default for the game).

there being a meta is fine, dont have to follow it and your free to go against it

I didn't play WoW in my life but from videos I see FFXIV has more interesting job and art style + dev reputation are not comparable

OP still unable to come up with original ideas on their own I see.

no interest in WoW design. I went to that dance and came here. no thank you.

If we want a relevant trinity we have to have wow type of game?

I don't think so. They can undo the years of dumbing things down and I'd wager a good amount of people disgruntled at the moment would be pleased. I at least would be quite happy!

I think a lot of the people against the healers wanting changes have even less faith that devs can make a positive outcome than the healers complaining do. Each one I talk to more in depth seems to think that there is simply no way to make a healer be needed in a dungeon without gating bad players from completing MSQ or making the dungeon take an hour. Then their fall back of just do ultimate falls apart when you point out the majority of your casts are still glare, broil etc.

Healers want to heal, they want to need to heal in ALL content not just ultimates and savages. I think SE are capable of doing that and not making the MSQ unplayable for bad players. Heck most bad and inexperienced healers issue is that they overheal, so higher healing requirements wouldn't even hurt them. They wouldn't notice much difference when they spam cure II and medica II anyway.

I don't want the MSQ to become unplayable for people, I want to not be bored to tears anytime I need to do roulettes. The content that a majority of the playerbase experiences shouldn't be so boring. Yoshi P said himself that they took too much stress from the game, having some bumps in the road for players is a good thing.

Every game has meta. There is always a meta. What's good in ff is that it doesn't matter the vast majority of the time. OP talks about dps needing to move off of melee cause of uptime.. what does that have to do with changing HEALING? Nothing. They could keep every endwalker dungeon exactly the same and if they made the packs for double pulls hit a bit harder and dungeon bosses had more unavoidable raidwides to make us heal that would be something.

You can increase the unavoidable damage that is coming out in dungeons (both the frequency and damage taken), to a point that prevents tanks and dps handling it themselves. Decrease the damage that is avoidable (same mechanics just less damage if you eat it) to allow for people to make mistakes without them being lethal instantly, ensure there is reasonable time between the two so that should a player eat something avoidable the healer has the time to top up before the next raidwide. The healer should have the time to top the group up after the raid wide and the next lot of avoidable damage. It's still plenty time for the healer to manage the situation, but ensures that to complete the dungeon you MUST have a healer. And that as a healer you will always have reason to actually heal.

In the long run I would like to see the healing and mitigation abilites of tanks and dps be lowered and the ogcd heals that healers have also lessened. FFXIV has been the only MMO I've played whose healers spend upwards of 70% of their time not healing across all content. It's really weird.

I think SE could take some design ideas from WoW when it comes to varied boss encounter design with some cleave/aoe fights instead of most everything being a single target dance. Could even do more environmental things we have to counter with fight mechanics to like arena shrinking through a fight and we have to do certain mechanics properly to get parts of the arena back. I do wish they would look to class design in WoW for getting ideas on different ways to approach job design outside of having a static rotation for example having a more proc based job with a priority system.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

#6: WoW's turbo-addon support.

You can't compare the two. While it's an open secret people use addons, nothing in the 14 community is as prevalent as Deadly Boss Mods or Weakauras in terms of helping you play the game. This has further warped the scene and a lot of fights are designed around automatically having these tools. Yoshi P has committed that he wants content to be clearable without major addon support...which would likely be at odds if you borrow heavily of WoW designs to 14.

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I see this as being one of the major issues, citizen. One game heavily relies on add-ons and the other game outlaws their use. I can say with certainty that Square will not budge on their position concerning add-ons.




Forge's glow watch over you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by WeebPolice

I see this as being one of the major issues, citizen. One game heavily relies on add-ons and the other game outlaws their use. I can say with certainty that Square will not budge on their position concerning add-ons.

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not just that, when the game updates, in WoW you are basically on hold until the mod authors update, which means half of your REQUIRED UI is non functional. I prefer FFXIV not needing mods simply because, you can always play without one arm being held hostage by slow to update required mods.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by WeebPolice

I see this as being one of the major issues, citizen. One game heavily relies on add-ons and the other game outlaws their use. I can say with certainty that Square will not budge on their position concerning add-ons.




Forge's glow watch over you.

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Oh yeah, we'll never hear the end of it when it comes to the debate on addons/mods etc. I've heard that the current iteration of wow practically designs its boss encounters around the likelihood that the player will use an addon such as Deadly Boss Mods, so wow devs will intentionally make certain boss mechanics difficult to notice and they'll bank on DBM making up for the lack of visual and audio cues.