Have they considered giving more skills early on

When you level for the first time the pacing is great, you have the MSQ and you are also focused on the story so the often painfully slow combat is acceptable, at least for me though I know many people have the misconception that FF14 is really slow due to how slow early on combat is and that is so wrong when there's jobs like Samurai that honestly feel faster than most mmorpgs out there but only at max level.

Anyway problem is once you are done with the MSQ and decide to level another job and you arent ultra knowledgeable and stack multiple XP buffs have Potd and hoh unlocked at specific floors with ridiculously stacked aetherpool leveling is incredibly slow, and sadly many jobs are incredibly and painfully slow even at 50, Samurai only gets faster at 70+ for example.

Have the devs ever mentioned of remaking the leveling experience for new jobs once MSQ is finished? Maybe increasing the armory bonus even more or preferably starting to give most of the skills way earlier on so at least combat is more enjoyful, or maybe make MSQ+ reward XP so you can replay the story on a different job etc.

As it stands it feels like a big issue once people have finished the MSQ is leveling jobs feelings like suffering through the incredibly slow and unfun combat which you have to grind through for days, something that would be a lot easier to do if we got stormblood skills for example at around level 35-40 so the job was mostly complete by then and you could practice while leveling.

Isn't that elitist to ask new players to learn more buttons so early in the game?

yeah, I'd feel that'd make people turn into tryhards...

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Originally Posted by Endariel

Isn't that elitist to ask new players to learn more buttons so early in the game?

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Wait, what?

Some people starting the game haven't played an MMO before or just aren't very good at buttons or rotations. I even see a lot of videos of people who have played MMOs before who can barely do their rotation right even though it's only 2-3 buttons.

That's why the slow build up of the skills over so many levels really helps ease people into what are some pretty lengthy rotations later on. For someone like yourself it may be boring at the early levels but it's helping people who are not like you, and that makes more people play the game overall.

The armory bonus doesn't really need increasing because leveling is easy in this game already.

I don't think the combat is really unfun at lower levels on an alt class. I like that when I leveled alt classes I was eased into the rotation such as positionals on a monk. One button isn't necessarily boring because that's what it's like to play a healer most of the time and they are still fun.

If you only have 2 buttons in Sastasha, be the best at pressing 2 buttons of anyone and make them count more than anyone else would. Sprint to your enemies so you can start using them right away, use them on an enemy that still has a lot of health left so they don't get wasted, use damage buffs right and make use of stuns so the healer doesn't need to heal.

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Originally Posted by Endariel

Isn't that elitist to ask new players to learn more buttons so early in the game?

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Originally Posted by Rinhi

yeah, I'd feel that'd make people turn into tryhards...

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I see what you guys did there.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Wait, what?

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OP is notorious for screaming "elitist tryhard" in particular any thread that asks for even the slightest degree of effort beyond the barest of minimums. They've even defended players using below ilvl gear in Savage who only met the minimum ilvl requirement because of accessories propping them up.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Some people starting the game haven't played an MMO before or just aren't very good at buttons or rotations. I even see a lot of videos of people who have played MMOs before who can barely do their rotation right even though it's only 2-3 buttons.

That's why the slow build up of the skills over so many levels really helps ease people into what are some pretty lengthy rotations later on. For someone like yourself it may be boring at the early levels but it's helping people who are not like you, and that makes more people play the game overall.

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The problem is we spend a lot of our time synced yet so many jobs feel completely awful to play below 70. It's the main reason I outright refuse to touch Leveling Roulette. Players who barely can barely do their rotation will still struggle mostly due to the lackluster teaching tools this game offers. But at least those who don't will have more to actually work with. To each their own, I suppose, but I find leveling certain jobs on an alt dreadfully boring. Bard, Dancer, Warrior, Paladin, White Mage and Black Mage all come to mind as jobs that just aren't very fun at low levels.

To be honest the problem with combat isn't about how many buttons you have It's about what they do.. you can incredibly fun combat with only 5 or 6 buttons at your disposal. If those buttons impact or shape the fight in some way...

The problem 14 has is all your skills lack power or impact there's no weight to anything. Mashing buttons in a rotation that never changes is nothing more than a glorified auto attack..

But so many of the buttons we have now essentially do the exact same thing just with a different set of fireworks..

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Originally Posted by Endariel

Isn't that elitist to ask new players to learn more buttons so early in the game?

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Well like I said the experience for new players is pretty balanced and great, but if you decide to level a new job once you finished the MSQ and thus understand the basics of mmorpgs jobs at low levels are dreadfully slow.

That has two major negatives
-It has created a false reputation that FF14 is a slow game due to le 2.5sec GCD which is extremely false considering many melee jobs feel faster than the average wow class
-It also makes the difference between level 50 jobs and level 80 to be so enormous they are two completely different jobs and that is something I believe shouldnt be happening, the curve for example for a samurai jumps incredibly fast once you get to stormblood for example and it imo you would want to give an accurate feeling of the job from an earlier level so you avoid those huge jumps in gameplay.

Ah, I was wondering where Ralph disappeared to on the wow forums. Glad to see he still uses the same buzzwords.

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Originally Posted by Bruhai

Ah, I was wondering where Ralph disappeared to on the wow forums. Glad to see he still uses the same buzzwords.

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Perfection never changes once attained uwu

I think adding more complexity early on goes against the philosophy of SE, and may incentivize a style of play early on SE does not agree with. Think about the chaos if they gave everyone an AoE at level 15? It would lead to a toxic overtake by speedrunners and meta slaves.

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Originally Posted by Awha

I think adding more complexity early on goes against the philosophy of SE, and may incentivize a style of play early on SE does not agree with.

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Well you cant really say that when SE has designed jobs at 80 to be nothing like they are at 50 so they are clearly incentivizing a pretty advanced combat design, issue is jobs feel so slow early on that it has even put off people when they could enjoy the endgame job.

Thankfully FF14 is mostly safe from metaslaves though i wouldnt be surprised with the influx of wow players some sweaty simmers will try to advertise how a specific 8man comb is producing 1.3% more dps and thus the metaslaves will start running around pretending the dps jobs outside that comb are "unviable"

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

To each their own, I suppose, but I find leveling certain jobs on an alt dreadfully boring. Bard, Dancer, Warrior, Paladin, White Mage and Black Mage all come to mind as jobs that just aren't very fun at low levels.

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That's exactly the thing though. You have this problem on an alt character, because presumably you already learned how to play them on your main and once you've played them at 80 going lower is hard. For someone leveling those jobs for the first time it's usually different and the gradual introduction helps them a lot. I think given the decision over whether to cater to a minority of veterans' alt character experience or cater to the majority of fresh players, the latter is better both from a business and game health point of view.

Then you should still try to find "perfection " because that signature ain't it.

I think classes should all have a base kit by level 15-20 or so. Like DPS should have an AoE, Single Target, and burst cooldown. Healers should have an OGCD heal, single target, and multi target heal. Low level tanks feel fine atm.

I agree though not sure on tanks. Granted you get gunbreaker at a higher lvl i cant remember when you get access to demon slice but I do remember not having it in lower dungeons.

DRG, MNK and WHM have to be the most boring jobs below 50

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Originally Posted by Bruhai

I agree though not sure on tanks. Granted you get gunbreaker at a higher lvl i cant remember when you get access to demon slice but I do remember not having it in lower dungeons.

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You get it at level 10 https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/gunbreaker
It's required for tanks to have it in their first dungeon so that they can get the attention of multiple enemies. Even years ago tanks had some form of it like Flash for Gladiators.

They used to have more abilities at the beginning of the game, but due to the button bloat at higher levels and simplification of the jobs in general, they stripped it down to a very basic rotation by level 18-20.

Those early levels go so fast it shouldn't be that much of an issue anyway - you can hit level 10 in an hour of levequests and murdering things on the hunt log, and then add in guildhests, then hit the first dungeon by 15.

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Originally Posted by Ralph2449

Well you cant really say that when SE has designed jobs at 80 to be nothing like they are at 50 so they are clearly incentivizing a pretty advanced combat design, issue is jobs feel so slow early on that it has even put off people when they could enjoy the endgame job.

Thankfully FF14 is mostly safe from metaslaves though i wouldnt be surprised with the influx of wow players some sweaty simmers will try to advertise how a specific 8man comb is producing 1.3% more dps and thus the metaslaves will start running around pretending the dps jobs outside that comb are "unviable"

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I am sorry jobs at 80 require very little thought to clear content. All adding extra skills early on is create an unreasonable expectation of skill from the get go. I mean why should one be expected to use AoE at the lower levels.

I think it would alter the current social contract of the game. As it stands if people want to try and learn how to play they are free to do so and if not it is up to the community to carry them to victory.

I know it will never happen. But I would like all classes to have all the basic rotations before level 10 and a few of the situational abilities. And when we get new expansions instead of trying to come up with some new rotation they just update each rotation with new skills. Also when you get level synced you would still push mostly the same buttons. I have been in a few low levels and pushed a button and wonder why it didn't go off, only to remember it has been locked.

How many people remember jobs before SB pruning of skills? Before then at low levels you had a lot more skills especially if you cross classed. I felt it a lot in SB after having lost so many skills going into low level dungeons, especially on WHM which lost about 8 or 9 skills

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

I know it will never happen. But I would like all classes to have all the basic rotations before level 10 and a few of the situational abilities. And when we get new expansions instead of trying to come up with some new rotation they just update each rotation with new skills. Also when you get level synced you would still push mostly the same buttons. I have been in a few low levels and pushed a button and wonder why it didn't go off, only to remember it has been locked.

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The way to think of it is like this. When you sync down to level 70, you are playing the Stormblood expansion and doing the Stormblood rotation. When you sync down to level 60, you are playing Heavensward and doing the Heavensward rotation. When you sync down to level 50, you are playing ARR and doing the ARR rotation.

I know the rotations have changed a bit, for some classes more than others, but that's really the intention. You are syncing down to that expansion, rotation included.

As comparison, with Guild Wars 2 you had like all of your 9 or 10 endgameskills placed by lvl20, think players would be fine with a bit more skills and responsibility here too. They also already removed niche low lvl skills because of the addons, making some classes even more boring to play, or changed potency values that made it more efficient to spam the same skill over and over than to use the actual rotation (looking at lancer)...

The real problem is balancing all the low lvl dungeons again around new or existing skills, our lowlevel damage is now already 2-3 times as high as during ARR release, adding even more existing or new skills would likely make it even faster...They would have to nerf damage, but problem is, you might want those potency values at high level. Even if they use the upgradable skills, like from blm or smn (e.g. Fire - Fire IV), to balance it out, it wont make much sense for melee builds who don't have upgrade skills so much.

I guess it would be easier to let you pick 1-3 skills you want from your full skill set to be used in low level synced content. It would be a reward for having that class at max level and it would make them minimally stronger. It would be a bit more fun, you could use jumps as drg or benediction on whm at synced lvl 20.

I don't see why scaling down your level needs to remove your skills. Someone might say it would trivialize the lower level dungeons but that's already the case anyway.

If they'd just scale things down harder for higher level characters so that you'd need to do your full rotations to do slightly higher DPS compared to the sprout with two attacks, at least it would be more engaging than spamming a single combo. I realize that most people doing duty roulette don't want to play old dungeons. They just want to get the rewards at the end of the chore and since that's most likely the case, encouraging people to put more effort into their gameplay seems like a good solution. If they still refuse to play, then it has all been just a convenient excuse to be lazy.

People who step into 70+ Dungeons barely know what half their skills are used for.

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Originally Posted by Endariel

Isn't that elitist to ask new players to learn more buttons so early in the game?

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Originally Posted by Rinhi

yeah, I'd feel that'd make people turn into tryhards...

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Originally Posted by Nyarlha

I see what you guys did there.

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I love ya'all lmao

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Originally Posted by Endariel

Isn't that elitist to ask new players to learn more buttons so early in the game?

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Yep, the job's toolkit is delicate to begin with.

No one goes out to dinner at a restaurant and orders everything on the menu in one sitting.

A bit late to the party here, but since I've said stuff along these lines before... yeah, I would generally support this.
The lack of abilities at lower levels makes most classes & jobs feel underwhelming during the early game and when sync'd down.

That being said, this has a few conditions to make it work properly:

• You have to reach the same endpoint for number of abilities. The balance between jobs at the level cap is exceptionally good, we don't want to throw that off.
• You still want some sort of progress with ability learning as you level up through higher levels. WoW, before the most recent expansion, had the issue of having every class be close to "complete" at around level 40-50 when the level cap was 120.
• The tuning of content would have to be adjusted to compensate, to keep the same approximate difficulty for leveling content. The lack of abilities may make the combat a bit dull, but simply giving players more of them runs the risk of making low level content too easy even with the level sync system working as it does now. This is a balancing act, but they should be able to find a good middle-ground.
• The best time to do this is during an expansion launch. Everyone's abilities get re-jigged at this time to make room for new ones, so it's definitely the best time to do so.

That being said, we can take a look at the when abilities are learned... specifically from class & job quests:

• One skill learned at level 15, and maybe another at level 30, as part of the base class questlines.
• One skill every 5 levels from the level 30-50 job questline.
• One skill every 2 levels from the level 50-60 job questline.
• One skill from the level 70 job quest.

There are still abilities & traits learned passively from leveling alone (particularly for levels 60-80), and those tend to line up more with the pace from the 50-60 job quests.

The one observation I've made is that jobs REALLY come into their own (at least in terms of entertaining gameplay) during that 50-60 job quest. Most are "functional" at level 50, but nearly all of them become "fun" by level 60.

Probably what's really needed to help out the early game is to have the 1-30 job questline award abilities with each quest; the pace of skills learned passively during this time would remain as-is, but adding in more abilities from the quests would help flesh out the low-level gameplay more. This also reinforces the point of doing class quests early on, setting the tone for players to know how important your job quests are.

To reach the same endpoint of total number of abilities, you could take out some of the ability rewards from the 50-60 job quests to shift them down to a lower level. Perhaps not learning something new every 2 levels, but rather only at 52, 56 and 60? Or alternatively, you could throw in traits to "upgrade" already learned skills.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

To be honest the problem with combat isn't about how many buttons you have It's about what they do.. you can incredibly fun combat with only 5 or 6 buttons at your disposal. If those buttons impact or shape the fight in some way...

The problem 14 has is all your skills lack power or impact there's no weight to anything. Mashing buttons in a rotation that never changes is nothing more than a glorified auto attack..

But so many of the buttons we have now essentially do the exact same thing just with a different set of fireworks..

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It also makes fighting non-bosses a really dull chore because it's like playing the same bloated chords of a song a 100000 times and nothing more.