Skill Descriptions Suck And Should Be Better

The template for skill descriptions being a choose-your-own-adventure book is terrible and is pointlessly tedious.

"Can only be used when [X] Ready" should just be "Can be used after [move], [move] or [move]."

And while I'm talking about it, you know what you could do with all the space this frees up? Put in lore descriptions of what each move is actually doing. This is far and away the best part of Blue Mage and there's no reason every other job couldn't have them. It is such a minor thing so many other games nail and FFXIV all but completely lacks. The flavorful descriptions of DoTs, buffs, and debuffs is fun - extend it to every move, please.

Given the increasing shrinkage of job quests in favor of genericized role quests, this would go a long way towards jobs even having an identity. If you don't agree that this is an issue, I would posit a question: What do the gauges Viper has actually represent from a flavor perspective? Why is it Viper can sometimes go into a super fast attack-spam mode? Is it harvesting the blood of its enemies? Is it building up some kind of internal energy that it releases in a frenzied burst of energy? I don't know, and neither do you, because there is no explanation anywhere. That's just what it does, and that's all we've got.

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Originally Posted by Rydia_Misuto

What do the gauges Viper has actually represent from a flavor perspective? Why is it Viper can sometimes go into a super fast attack-spam mode? Is it harvesting the blood of its enemies? Is it building up some kind of internal energy that it releases in a frenzied burst of energy? I don't know, and neither do you, because there is no explanation anywhere. That's just what it does, and that's all we've got.

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They announced at Dawntrail’s release that they flat out do not develop lore or backstory for job abilities anymore. Reason being: ‘because then it won’t make sense when we inevitably change them for balancing ’ lol.

The sad truth is there simply is no answer. Why do Bards suddenly gain the ability to conjure pillars of light that drop onto enemies without a weapon? What is Solar Bahamut? Wtf is going on during Seraphism?

These questions all have literally no answers because the developers can’t be bothered to do job lore anymore. It’s the same reason why they don’t do job quests anymore; ‘there’s too many jobs so it’s too much work and we might have to chance them anyway’

Pretty poor excuse if you ask me, but it is what it is lol

Pretty sure Bio used to 'cause target's lungs to collapse, dealing damage over time' and Combust dealt damage over time due to 'proximity to a theoretical sun'. Don't think they still do, but I haven't checked.

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Originally Posted by Connor

They announced at Dawntrail’s release that they flat out do not develop lore or backstory for job abilities anymore. Reason being: ‘because then it won’t make sense when we inevitably change them for balancing ’ lol.

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This is a complete arse reasoning lol.

If they "change the actions for balancing", just rebrand the whole thing and change the flavor text as well - assuming that's just lore pills written in the vacant tooltip space that the OP suggests. The bigger implication would be questlines centered around the action itself, like ARR/HW ones, but we don't even get that kind of thing anymore anyway.

To the OP, I do think that the tooltips really could use a better UI/UX pass, both layout and written text. Less text, more icons - if you're referencing another action, why not add their icons? Stuff like Ten Chi Jin or Starry Muse can give a new player a headache trying to figure out when in fact they're really straightforward.

Yeah, tooltips are a mess. There are a lot of effects that have their own names for...some reason. I remember being incredibly confused way back when I picked up Astrologian by Collective Unconscious giving the "Wheel of Fortune" effect. It turns out it's literally just a regen. I have no idea why the tooltip doesn't just say "adds regen with cure potency X over Y seconds".

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Originally Posted by Raikai

This is a complete arse reasoning lol.

If they "change the actions for balancing", just rebrand the whole thing and change the flavor text as well - assuming that's just lore pills written in the vacant tooltip space that the OP suggests. The bigger implication would be questlines centered around the action itself, like ARR/HW ones, but we don't even get that kind of thing anymore anyway.

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That would simply be too much work for poor small indie company SE, so they’re just not doing it instead (lol). Again, pretty poor excuse I’d say. I mean, I can’t speak for anyone else but I’d much rather have like 1-2 quests per job than the 4-5 lame role quests we get. Even if it’s just like, contextualising some of the new abilities or some random lesson about the job’s history. I’d enjoy it more than uh, whatever the hell you’d call the role quests lol? Calling it ‘Slapstick’ feels like an insult to comedy

Removing job-specific quests was one of the bigger Ls in FFXIV's history. Nobody said that they needed to be as long as in the past, nobody said they needed to have abilities locked behind them. 2 or 3 quests per job for context would be enough for me.

Tell me where the WoL Machinist got the big lasers and the Full Metal gundam backpack from. Show me why Ramuh, Shiva, and Leviathan were beyond the ken of the WoL Summoner, but some screwed up version of Bahamut wasn't. Let me see the process of the WoL Dark Knight gaining access to new powers. Hell, give me an inkling of context behind WoL Scholar's Seraphism.

For a game so heavily lauded for its worldbuilding and story, this seems like simple stuff...