Korean Live Letter Summary

[Lauront]

There is no way to make it optional. If implemented, they simply aren't going to prune skills anymore, thereby forcing people who dislike the combo consolidation to deal with excess button bloat or conform.

I have no idea why people keep bringing up whether it takes more skill or not. Yoshida only said they wanted players in PvP to press less buttons likely because of how fast pace everything is. Granted, considering how well the PvP overhaul as been received. That approach didn't turn out too well. Regardless, it's not a skill issue but merely a psychological one. For a lot of people, myself included, the simple moment between keys gives the illusion of more engagement. Spamming 1-1-1-1-2 feels very repetitive hence why so many healers, especially Astros, want more DPS abilities.

I mean it isn't even that fast paced compared to some of the high end PVE content, unless you mean that enemy players die a lot faster than bosses. This is what he said:

Skills automatically comboing (aka press 1 button to combo) is not going to be implemented in PvE. The reason we did this in PvP while reducing the amount of total skills is that we want players to focus more on team strategy and tactics. In PvE we feel that the effective use of branching combos is one sign of player skill.

To me, he is saying that pressing more buttons = more skill, because otherwise he would treat branching combos as an independent thing and not as a follow up to his prior sentences, which discuss the 1 button combos. I think he's wrong and that the two are distinctive things.

You're not spamming it in that way for a melee dps, because you have positionals and OGCDs to weave in, too, as well as other abilities, and you still have to make sure you're sequencing it correctly. Healers do in fact only have a few spells to press (usually 1 filler, 1 dot), but that's by design. If they're expected to DPS, I can agree, though, that they need more embellishment than a main attack and a dot. What I think would benefit both casters and healers are a few more OGCDs, but healers would still need a base rotation to be built up from where they are now.

1 button combos just tidies up your hotbars and you're still using the same amount of abilities, just with less button bloat. Some people may not like this, psychologically, but if there's two or even three expansions to go, SE will have to get clever about how they prune (e.g. using traits which modify them instead of adding more, 1 button combos), or simply not add any more abilities, which would be sad.

I'm sure there are a lot of skills that could double up this way. Not combo hits, but other 'occasional' skills that you can only ever use one at a time. Summoner's Aetherflow, Dreadwyrm Trance and Deathflare could all go together, as could Summon/Enkindle Bahamut.

Although I wonder if there's some kind of issue with switching in skills that have different recast timers, or something.

I use a macro to combine Deathflare, DW:T, Summon Bahamut and Enkindle Bahamut. Maybe a tad less efficient than separate buttons for each but I like it. That is certainly one area where they could consolidate more of the spells into one button, since which spell was cast previously/which state you're in modifies the spell. Same with Geirskogul -> Nastrond.

I hope if they add Megiddo Flame (hint hint SE <3) or Comet for BLM, they will e.g. modify Flare for it.

[Raiya]

In term's of skills I'd agree skill bloat is something you want to avoid as too many skills means your ending up with too many abilities to fit on the hotbar. That being said I don't agree with removing skill's unless they're completely and utterly useless. What I would prefer them to do though is rework the skill's so instead of outright removing skill that end's up screwing up lower level gameplay that lower level weaker skills are either replaced with upgraded improved versions like the numbered spells or that these lesser abilities are moved to the cross class menu and can be swapped back in for lower level combat and traded out for higher level abilities as you level.

[Aerlana]

I wouldn't get my hopes up. They know people want it, but housing is becoming a huge investment because of the choices they made (ward system, equal wards per district, etc). If they do give us Ishgard housing however, I'd guess it may be the last new one we see without server restructuring (merges), resource sharing (datacenter based housing instead of world based) or non-ward based housing.

housing is a good content on itself, but finally bad.
Good content : when you have your house, all is good
Bad : too much need for more plot (and i dont even speak the matter of 66% of "small" where great part of people can take at least M and would love M/L)

It also makes the "need" to autodestruction. (lets see my sign...)

There is "only" one solution : getting more plot. with many many different ways. (instance housing, more ward, fully rework the system and others)

The "more ward" creating ishgard housing is this. it would add 18 ward. lik if you had 5 more ward on each actual area. (ok it would be 20...)
As "work" it mainly add to create a map. not so much work.


Buuuuut... after the burning forums due to 4.1 they did +50% ward everywhere, the "1 house per account" limit, and said "we will add even more wards during patches"
And as so much other promises... we wait. YES he didnt say which patch. but we could have expected one or 2 ward at 4.3 or 4.4... They did a move and did this promise only because of the burning forums... ... and seems to not wanting doing real move after.



Finally : the announcement will come during one of the fan fest. i think they leave this for 5.X

[Bright-Flower]

To be fair, 4.2 added a TON of new plots.

4.0 added an entire new housing area. 4.2 added a total of 24 wards, for a total of 1440 new plots per realm.

On the other hand I don't trust anything SE says about upcoming content until I see it. I remember a quote about them having a special plan for ala mhigo that had never been done in a MMO before. Turns out Ala Mhigo was just a dungeon and Doma is getting all the actual development via the doman reconstruction quests.

[Zojha]

To me, he is saying that pressing more buttons = more skill, because otherwise he would treat branching combos as an independent thing and not as a follow up to his prior sentences, which discuss the 1 button combos.

If 1-2-3 does not take more skill than 1-1-1, then that logically means 4-8-2 or any other 3-step combination does not take more skill than 1-1-1 either, because they're fundamentally all the same.
That also means that the combination of 1-2-3-4-8-2 does not take more skill than 1-1-1-1-1-1, as these can be broken down into their respective micro-combos. And you can repeat that argument for any chain of any length ad infinitum. 12-4-1-5-2-11-8-1-4-2-6 clearly isn't harder than 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1, except it is, in fact, a lot harder to memorize and perform flawlessly under combat conditions.

In other words: Yes, it does add skill. People commit the fallacy of looking at it in a vacuum, but in a vacuum, all skills are very non-demanding. Most of the OGCDs are, in a vacuum, literally just one button press every 20-90 seconds. You could make the argument that this adds so little gameplay that you can remove them entirely. But you have multiple OGCDs on top of your combo on top of your job mechanics on top of the boss mechanics. It all adds up, the 1-2-3 as much as the single button presses every 60 seconds.

[Duskane]

We are also aware of the synergy between DRG and ranged DPS. We feel that this is an issue that reduces the freedom of choice in party composition, and that something needs to be done. The dev team has acknowledged this.

Cant wait for them to just make Brd and Mch to flat damage

[Fhaerron]

Guess I'm the only one using macros and having keybindings on everything and have no issue casting anything from 4 hotbars?

I should clarify that I'm using a Naga mouse with 16 thumb buttons which I've been using since forever.

[Riardon]

So they want to remove skills once again like it worked really well with SB huh?
Remove skills and replace them with generic even more useless ones making us scratch our heads to find out our new rotations
then destroying the job balance and making months to balance them out again.
Not to mention last time they removed skills some of them were iconic ones destroying the key aesthetic of some jobs
and creating a lore issue.
Have you ever considered upgrading the current ones with a bigger potency/effect and a slightly different animation thus keeping the same number of occupied slots on our skill bars?
It's something that most MMORPGs do. (for example DRGs True Thrust II and Vorpal Thrust II)
Or adding different skill paths for us to use (aka skill customization) ending up using again new and different skills but the same occupied skill slots and perhaps add 1 or 2 entirely new skills for each job).
Though the last one would require a missive effort on fine tuning calculations/balance smth that SE is not doing very well.

[Lauront]

If 1-2-3 does not take more skill than 1-1-1, then that logically means 4-8-2 or any other 3-step combination does not take more skill than 1-1-1 either, because they're fundamentally all the same.
That also means that the combination of 1-2-3-4-8-2 does not take more skill than 1-1-1-1-1-1, as these can be broken down into their respective micro-combos. And you can repeat that argument for any chain of any length ad infinitum. 12-4-1-5-2-11-8-1-4-2-6 clearly isn't harder than 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1, except it is, in fact, a lot harder to memorize and perform flawlessly under combat conditions.

In other words: Yes, it does add skill. People commit the fallacy of looking at it in a vacuum, but in a vacuum, all skills are very non-demanding. Most of the OGCDs are, in a vacuum, literally just one button press every 20-90 seconds. You could make the argument that this adds so little gameplay that you can remove them entirely. But you have multiple OGCDs on top of your combo on top of your job mechanics on top of the boss mechanics. It all adds up, the 1-2-3 as much as the single button presses every 60 seconds.

So basically to make your argument work, you need to stretch it to chains like 12-4-1-5-2-11-8-1-4-2-6, i.e. something like playing a piano (where the skill lies in executing particularly long sequences of key presses, among other things), because it's pretty transparently ridiculous when you compare say, maybe, 1-1-1 or 1-2-1, to 1-2-3 or 2-5-6, i.e. 3 button combos. There is no skill differential between the two - not any that really matters on any level, because the difficulty increase between 3 and, say, 10 buttons is not at all linear. For FFXIV, it's all keyboard memory and two sets of 3 button combos is not particularly hard to execute. So I'm not buying that. The sequencing and timing is, as always, what matters for melee combos. It's in fact easier when the number of buttons falls to lapse into pressing the wrong one.

They don't need to do it exactly like PVP, where the entire combo is contained in just one button, but they can at least make it so that, e.g. buttons 5 and 6 are reduced to one, i.e. shared moves between sets would be fixed to a single button, so you'd have 1-1-1, maybe 1-2-1, and so on.

[Ryaz]

Seems like a lot of people want to turn this into WoW where you have 4 buttons to press for your rotation.