Yoshi-P on Character Growth

[Bourne_Endeavor]

You immediately contradicted yourself, saying it's not meaningless, but it's a word synonymous with meaningless? Either way, easy is not synonymous with meaningless.

Evidently, I need another cup of coffee. I meant to say aren't synonymous. lol

This makes the presumption that clearing content is more important than enjoying the experience. While I agree clearing content is important, it lacks all importance if the experience is not fun.

Not necessarily. You also presume people will have more fun adjust their character builds. And that this novelty will not inevitably wear thin when content itself doesn't provide an impact. If I adjust my character to play a certain way, I want to notice those changes. Dungeons and whatnot wouldn't allow for that because they lack any demand. To give a recent example. I swapped a piece of gear while running Nidhogg EX and immediately noticed my DPS jump up. Skill trees need an equivalent feeling or what purpose to they serve? Okay, it might fun to mess around with silly combinations. But the developers can't build a system around a potential novelty.

For what it's worth, I actually find dungeons fun, even if they are easy. I just really wish they would drop Expert Roulette. Two dungeons gets boring after a while.

This is very true, look at Icy-veins on WoW. That said, I made an example how I use a sub-optimal talent set up on my mage, so that I enjoy the game more. When I got my mage to 110, I used icy veins build to make it the best. I hated it and stopped playing it. I then went back, re-did my talents, and am loving the job. My DPS is still adequate and I'm often top DPS in my Mythic Dungeon runs etc. I may not be Mythic Raid ready, but I am having fun while I play, and that is what is important.

I don't know WoW enough to compare in detail, but Mythic Dungeons are considered challenging, yes? This is where I feel FFXIV could improve on. That immediate impact is likely why you loved it. Unfortunately, you generally wouldn't notice that change outside of raid in XIV due to its ease. Velhart also made a good point in that WoW only allows for one class per character. FFXIV attempts flexibility by encouraging you to play a different class entirely if you've not happy with how one progresses.

But I suspect Yoshi is hesitant of skill trees because of people's tendency to follow the leader, so to speak.

The thing is, small changes to skills can make the class play more fluidly for you. For example, I want to play a Black Mage, I had a lot of fun with it in 2.x. However, I hate enochian and ley lines. I could talent away into something that plays a little bit more fun, so that I can enjoy BLM. It won't be my raid job (SMN), but I could play it in expert roulette and extreme primals for fun.

Fair enough. Blood of the Dragoon annoys me to no end at times. That being said, from a developer perspective, they have to weigh in whether a system like that would impact the game enough to be worthwhile. I'm not so certain it would be. Personally? I would like them to focus more on the content itself; expanding the raids; making more dungeons like Weeping City, because I think once the novelty wears off, people who were bored before will still be bored again.

I am not sure what joke you mean? That said, how can you be so adamant that everything must be fine tuned to min-max or it is meaningless, and then not pay attention to secondary stats?

Because Crit and Det are basically the go to melds for most jobs, MrHappy started saying to anyone who asked what they should meld if they "checked their Crit-det Report." I am not adamant about it, personally. I'm just acknowledging what people usually do. And I was just being facetious since secondary stats pretty much boil down to Crit over Det with some occasional ACC.

That is the point though, there are a few things here. First, the better players will master the optimal set up, but that set up may be too much for some who just want to run expert or be out in the open world. This could improve their performance and enjoyability of the game. Second, providing a more fluid gameplay can be like training wheels. That is, that black mage could learn their rotation without leylines, and then talent in ley lines in later - and can master that while already being comfortable with everything else.

But that setup isn't remotely required in expert or open world content. That has been my whole point. You don't need to follow any rotation outside progression, hence why I don't see a skill tree system having any impact. You could queue into Hullbreaker Hard, never once touch Enochian and do just fine. Once you did want to learn the Black Mage rotation, you'd be largely starting over because of how FFXIV's current abilities are designed. I just don't see it being as helpful as you're making it out to be.

And to be honest, I would have preferred that answer. Instead of making up some exaggerated example, he could have said,

"You know, we'd love to explore something like this. That said, we have a small development team and we are at our limits to keep what we are putting out balanced and fun. We are not confident we could invent or implement such a new system with the resources available."

That said, I think that they have systems in place and resources available to address this. They keep on making overly-complicated systems for things like Aquariums (just make a basic aquarium, the amount of extra junk that went into something so trivial is insane). Move those resources into something like this, and then use the features already in the game to do it (Cross class skills, Classes to Jobs, Materia etc.).

In Yoshi's defense, I imagine Square Enix wouldn't be overly keen about him being that direct. After all, it's basically him saying they're too cheap.

I do kind of agree with you here though. They do like making overly elaborate fluff content (we're all looking at you Lord of Verminion.)