Balance was balanced

[Neela]

RIP AST? xD

...maybe she should change the game by her understanding of buff vs. nerfs... in general the majority is just locking for raw pots... on healers side like on dds side - potency is not the only thing what matters why can't people understand that by now... q.q

[RichardButte]

RIP AST? xD

...maybe she should change the game by his understanding of buff vs. nerfs... in general the majority is just locking for raw pots... on healers side like on dds side - potency is not the only thing what matters why can't people understand that by now... q.q

She skimmed it and saw the potency decreases but realized afterwards that it wasn't as bad.

...Just like I saw the increased potencies for MCH and thought it was a buff but MCH mains are saying it was actually a stealth nerf. :\

[NocturniaUzuki]

Note: This is more of a ramble than anything. Unlike my previous thread on the Spear, I wrote this quickly and just wrote my thoughts out in a jumble instead of taking the 8-ish hours it took to organize and edit it into a truly structured and understandable post. Maybe you can get something from it though.

RIP AST? xD

...maybe she should change the game by her understanding of buff vs. nerfs... in general the majority is just locking for raw pots... on healers side like on dds side - potency is not the only thing what matters why can't people understand that by now... q.q

Old post on this thread, since I have been too busy. But I'd agree with the general point (I have no idea of the context this was said in).

I feel like SQEX is very poor at developing in-depth classes that feel genuinely interesting to play. Regardless of whether I think the changes were good or bad for the functionality of the class (in case anyone was curious, my answer is that the changes are bad), SQEX is constantly focusing on direct DPS/HPS buffs. This is generally done with potency changes, or adding new skills that directly affect damage or healing output (like the new Spear's % increase). There's nothing inherently wrong with focusing on the direct changes. And such changes are usually quite popular because the masses can more easily see how much of an effect it actually had. The effect is also global, rather than being shoehorned into various niche situations. The Spear, for example, was a very potent and useful tool. However, since it was only exceptionally useful in a certain niche corner of the game, did players never bothered to consider whether it was useful in any situation or not.

Having a job mechanic that is only useful in very specific circumstances is not particularly good game design either. Despite being a Spear-lover, I can admit that. However, what Spear did was it resisted the one-dimensional gameplay that we currently have. It was very situational, but in a good way. It had a huge impact in the few situations where it mattered, and a player that knew to use it in that way had an advantage in those situations. Now, any fight that literally requires that one of AST's cooldowns be used just to survive, but also has that mechanic appear more often than that skill's base cooldowns allowed just became impossible to complete. Other fights simply became far more dangerous, demanding a higher level of player perfection. In case you're wondering, no regular content has these sorts of strict lines between 'possible' and 'impossible' that can be changed by a single patch, because regular content is designed to be completed. It's the special challenge runs that can run into this issue, like synced or unsynced undersized runs, or doing certain fights with no tank, etc.

This was in exchange for... more DPS. While more DPS makes people happy, it doesn't actually enable anything outside of a faster clear time; if you remove DPS potential, you lose out on clear speed and can't skip whole sections of boss fights, but the fight doesn't suddenly become impossible to complete. The bottom line is, DPS doesn't make the game interesting, it just makes it fast. I believe that what makes a job 'fun' to play is divided into:

• Whether the class feels impactful, and for the real DPS-lovers: how well the class performs, mathematically.
• Whether the class feels unique.

I think that FF14 is quite poor at both of these points, but especially the second point, which I think is most important. The reason I think this is that SQEX doesn't like to introduce new mechanics that actually do something new very often. Each class may have its own supposedly "unique" gameplay element, like the DRG's Blood of the Dragon, AST's cards, and WHM's Lilies and Confessions. But all of the mechanics are just variations on the same basic ideas that effectively amount to the same thing: "How well does this class perform, mathematically. Does this mechanic work out to have effective DPS numbers, or HPS numbers, or DRPS numbers? If yes, then it's considered "good" and people like it. If not, it's considered "bad" and people dislike it.

What gets left by the wayside, though, are situational abilities. These are abilities that have a huge effect, but only if used in the right way or in the right situation. FF14 does have a few of these abilities. One of them is Rescue, for instance. It does next to nothing unless a player is not going to get out of an AoE in time, but if the healer notices a player in danger, they can save a life. Other healer abilities may have some potential to do this, but people tend to look at them from the perspective of "How do I use this to maximize DPS?" For example, Largesse lets you heal faster and with less MP so you can DPS more; lightspeed reduces MP cost by 25% so you can DPS more; etc. Rescue essentially does nothing except in that situation.

Also, I feel that there is a serious lack of depth to FF14. Classes tend to be set up quite simplistically so that everyone knows how to play them. But getting the most out of the class is not actually all that complicated. The reason for this is because, no matter how complicated it may seem, people are always able to reduce everything to numbers. I think game developers should strive to create gameplay that cannot be reduced to numbers. This makes classes genuinely interesting - when a class' potential is reliant on the player's unique decisions, and not on how well the players follow a relatively simple set of instructions derived from the raw numbers. One game I feel has been very successful in this regard is League of Legends, actually. The game has... over 150 playable classes now, I think (I haven't played in awhile)? Yet each and every one of those classes not only feels unique, but they can't be reduced to mere numbers. People still do the math, but the game is so situational that the math's predictions are always being broken. Perhaps the champion Shaco might have poor numbers according to math, but if the player uses him effectively he can be very potent, making the math meaningless, to some extent (even at the highest levels of play). I suppose this is largely because LoL is a MOBA and a fully PvP game, which makes it less scripted by nature. However, despite FF14 being highly scripted, the healer role still has the potential for LoL-levels of player impact on the job's potential, because for a healer, the boss isn't the enemy target; their allies are the boss (healers don't fight the boss, they fight to keep their allies alive). And their allies are human. This is probably why I find the removal of Spear and the lack of creative impact of WHM's Lilies, among other things, so frustrating. In the case of Spear, they took one of the few skills that can have a huge effect based on player judgment and turned it into a mindless DPS increase. Meanwhile for WHM, they added a really cool system with a ton of player-judgment potential and made it completely pointless. The same can be said for Confessions. Both mechanics have so little control on the player's end that the player can't really make an impact with their own judgment calls.