Famitsu Interview - YoshiP 3 Year Anniversary Interview

[Nalien]

They have a lot of Options to to add newer Abilities without leaving your Hotbar a mess. Adding 50 - 60 Traits is an Option aswell and could alter Rotations and make it easier for Players

I still think their best bet is trashing the cross-class system in favor of a series of specific Job skills that we pick from... Like, some skills already fall in there anyway... Is Paladin ever going to set Cure, despite that practically being a staple of the Job in the Final Fantasy franchise? Nope... Cure sucks on Paladin... Clemency is effectively Paladins version of Cure, though...

I guess I've just never been a fan of the cross-class system though... While I guess it's very Final Fantasy, it just seems lazy... Why does Ninja have pretty much the same TP and HP recovery as Dragoon and Monk? I'd much prefer to have something which does the same thing, but in its own way... Kiss of the Wasp and Kiss of the Viper are woefully underused IMO, I'd say give Ninja Suiyaku (a skill some NPCs have used) instead of Invigorate and Second Wind, and make it so with Kiss of the Wasp it restores TP, Kiss of the Viper it restores HP. That strikes me as much more interesting than giving Ninja Invigorate and Second Wind, like we currently have... I mean, all three tanks have Provoke... They all need such a skill for tank swap mechanics, but do they all need the exact same skill? Couldn't Warrior have something similar to Holmgang, that forces the enemy on him for a while, regardless of enmity, and just boosts enmity generation so Warrior can effectively take hate? Couldn't Dark Knight effectively have a reverse Shadewalker, with a Dark Arts effect that boosts its potency? It's so boring that they all just have the same skill that sets your enmity to that of whoever has hate, +1... Then you've got Bard, also sharing Second Wind and Invigorate... Why not give them a traditional Regen Song? Then throw in a skill that alters the effect of the next Song, making it instant rather than persistent; Regen Song becomes a flat Second Wind style recovery skill, TP Song becomes an AoE Invigorate, and so on... That's much more interesting to me than the current cross-class system... So much potentially to give Jobs "new" skills, without actually loading up our hotbar with new skills... Cut off the lame vestige of 1.0 and give us something interesting instead...

[Sandpark]

Trashing a cross class system is very un-final fantasy. The whole idea of leveling everything on one character is based on that. Your story, skills, rites of passage, is all based on a cross class system. Toss that aside and you might as well make the game alt based.

[Nalien]

Trashing a cross class system is very un-final fantasy. The whole idea of leveling everything on one character is based on that. Your story, skills, rites of passage, is all based on a cross class system. Toss that aside and you might as well make the game alt based.

To be fair, in the past when I've suggested this, I've also suggested tying it into Classes anyway...

So rather than leveling Dragoon and setting Invigorate on Ninja, you go to your Ninja trainer, having finished the Lancer quests, and you get a quest/s in which you go to the Lancers guild to learn the new skill. Although for the skill I just suggested, you'd need Lancer and Pugilist quests complete I guess, since Suiyaku would be an Invigorate/Second Wind hybrid...

Achieves the exact same thing cross-class skills already aim to achieve; Having you try out other Classes, but it standardizes it... No more "I need Lv34 Lancer, but Lv42 Pugilist"... Not sure how it would mean you might as well make the game alt based though... Not needing Pugilist leveled for Mantra, because a Job quest gives you a more appropriate and mechanically fitting version of it for your Job, doesn't suddenly mean we're locked to one Job... I haven't leveled multiple Jobs on one character because the game forced me to, I did it because I wanted to... The only reason the game would become alt based is if they remove the ability to level everything on one character, and refining the cross-class system isn't going to cause that... If the cross-class system is the only reason this game isn't alt based, then why do I have Dark Knight and Scholar leveled on the same character? As far as cross-class skills go, they don't interact at all...

You'd also still require certain sub-classes to unlock Jobs anyway... Really going to have to disagree with you on the whole "leveling everything on one character is based on the cross-class system" though... The cross-class system is a vestige left over from 1.0, which IMO is just a lazy fix... All the DPS need a TP recovery, so just give them all Invigorate... It further homogenizes Jobs (they're literally sharing the same skills...) and wastes potentially to play with Job specific mechanics... Heck, even as a throwback to classic titles, the cross-class system is pretty pathetic... Sub-classes gave much more freedom to create interesting combinations, cross-class skills offers nothing remotely close, unless you count setting Physick on White Mage for some reason... I imagine the main reason we can level everything on one character is because SE acknowledges that this is a story heavy game, and having to redo the entire story to level something different rubs people the wrong way...

[Jynx]

Trashing a cross class system is very un-final fantasy.

Getting rid of a useless system isn't something I'd call "Un-Final Fantasy" I'd call it getting rid of a system they don't use to focus on making the jobs unique unto themselves. Having the jobs be unique and all feel different is very "Final Fantasy" if you ask me.

[Nestama]

Keep in mind, though, that Titan HM was such a frustrating roadblock that it caused many players to quit the game. I'd say Titan HM was definitely more difficult than coil turns 1 and 2. I don't really remember T4 well enough to make that same claim.

I feel T2 may have been slightly tougher than Titan HM (Rot mechanic). Much like Landslide in Titan HM, the laser attack ADS used was pretty tough to avoid (I recall a gif where a BRD steps out of the AoE and maybe a second or so later, still gets hit by the attack, almost getting KO'd). I'm not sure when the Enrage strategy was discovered, but I think it was near 2.1's release... or after?

[Ametrine]

Titan HM however, was pushed on to players more as it was part of the relic quest, and not pitched to players as the super hard raid mode as Coil was.

Simply put, more players fought Titan HM and felt the sting of bad latency there than T2. That, and we didn't have an optional tactic you could cheese the fight away with.

[Welsper59]

You and I played a different 2.0 then. Tons of people had a major roadblock with these three primals, especially Titan. The game just got released, most players were still adjusting to the game. Not much was expected from you until Praetorium. Even then, Ifrit hard was definitely a fight where you had to start taking things seriously. Sure with our experience today their mechanics are a walk in the park, but when people were just starting, it was quite an ordeal. It did feel very rewarding downing Titan and finally getting to see Coils for the first time. Experiences feel better when they were earned, not simply just handed to me.

Yes, but you and I weren't referring to the rewarding experience, we were referencing the methodology and exposure to learning. Unless I misinterpreted it, you said it yourself here...

Its not so much about the difficulty, it is about how well you are worked into that difficulty.

For the most part, we already learned what we needed to, so the same types of mechanics are thrown into easier situations like dungeons. Even for new players, they're being shown at least some similar mechanics as they level or progress their character, alongside completely new ones. The main difference being the watered down version it is, although part of that is due to what I mentioned. The fact we can ignore a lot of them is a testament to it. That being that our characters are over powered compared to how they were during 2.0. Managing MP, for example, was more of a factor progressing than it is now. I mean, its never been a situation where you OOM for casting wasting a couple heals or anything, but it's hard for someone to argue that we have the same or greater degree of difficulty with MP now than we did then. Again, just as an example.

I know it's by design that we are be able to faceroll those types of learning experiences now, but it doesn't change the fact that they ARE still something everyone experiences as they level or gear up. It just comes down to 1) our own outlook of accepting how powerful/OP our characters have become (as in little to no worries about anything like resources outside of messing up scripted content or rotation) and 2) the devs design philosophy behind why we're that OP. Learning the mechanics about something is one factor about difficulty, but it will become stale because once we learn it, we know it. You'll almost never have that same degree of difficulty again with the same mechanic thrown at you and there's only so much that can be done before that well of completely unique ideas runs dry.

[SpookyGhost]

Simpler rotation can work fine - WAR is fundamentally pretty basic but due to it's unique stack mechanic it can get really min/max-y when planning out your GCDs. Same thing with MNK w/ maintaining stacks, hitting positionals, Fracture usage, etc. etc.

That said, with simpler rotations needs to come more engaging mechanics, so whether this change is good or not hinges on the direction they take content in general.

Glad they recognized finally that WAR/SCH offer too much utility and it's nice to see that they're not just going to neuter the two and instead find a nice balance.

There wasn't much positive stuff in this interview, though - I can see why everyone's a bit gloom and doom about it. I'm not exactly optimistic but I'm just going to wait and see how things go.

[Hyrist]

Just skimming over this thread has me seeing the usual suspects speaking up as their playstyle is suddenly threatened. I'm not surprised but I'm sorry to say that this time we need to play by the actual metrics.

This pretty much confirms what was implied by the unofficial census - that hardcore clear rates were unsatisfactory. Now we know that's not only an opinion of a good number of the people spoken here, but also of the developers as well.

As far as the simplification of a normal combat rotation. This can be a matter of making conditional status buffs longer in duration (Extending the duration of Disembowel and Chaos Thrust's Dots, for example, will reduce complexity of a Dragoon's rotation, as well as increasing the gain returns off of a completed 4 step weaponskill, which would truncate the need to be overly watchful of the Blood of the Dragon Timer Mechanic.) This would not take away from the class, and, in fact, pave the way for more situational skills to be both implemented and useful.

Speaking of Skills - Yoshida has an opportunity here to re-define what it means to progressively raid. Obviously not in 4.00 as this is planned out already and adjustments may be difficult. But possibly in 4.xx iterations or even in 5.0.

I will likely be writing a series of threads in the future on the topic of re-examining what it means to raid, (or do any endgame content, really) and how we might best find that 'sweet spot' players and developers are both looking for. Unfortunately my time during the week is severely limited so most likely this will occur during the weekends, as I'd rather be spending my weekday free time playing the game.

[Sandpark]

Getting rid of a useless system isn't something I'd call "Un-Final Fantasy" I'd call it getting rid of a system they don't use to focus on making the jobs unique unto themselves. Having the jobs be unique and all feel different is very "Final Fantasy" if you ask me.

Well the current class setup is sort of as you say. However, Final Fantasies that have had job systems, most had systems that let you cross something. Call it sphere grid, crystarium, whatever you want to call it. Stripping it completely would be Swtor.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post3822071