SE, the concept of "Limited Jobs" is a really bad idea, turn back now

[Melichoir]

Hello,

Lynn Nuvestrahl, the salty Machinist theorycrafter here. The highlight of yesterday was the Q&A where Machinist and White Mage job issues were recognized, thank you Square-Enix. Our voices were heard. Please hear me out again because the day was all downhill from there.

I wanted to bring attention to the concept of Limited Jobs from yesterday's LLP. TL;DR:

This is an extremely bad idea. Please cut your losses: adjust the new class for group play and never introduce another Limited Job.

Dear Square-Enix, yesterday you announced the concept of Limited Jobs and "the first" limited job Blue Mage. From the slides presented, the concept seems to imply that the job will exists "outside" of the normal jobs used group content, a solo job if you will, because it would break the balance or somehow not fit into the normal gameplay. The notion of "first" gives me the chills because that would imply there's others on the way.

You should not have this reaction as you do not know how it is currently being fully implemented. Meaning, youre having a strong emotional response to something thats not even in the game yet.

The reasoning was that Blue Mage has many game breaking abilities that wouldn't work in an MMO and you couldn't have the class without those abilities in order for it to be fun. This is absolutely false. Many jobs have been greatly adjusted to fit into the FFXIV system, such as Summoner, which is nothing like its offline counterparts. You can absolutely balance Blue Mage for group play if you wanted to. Look at all the CC effects that don't work on bosses, for example.

Again, you do not know that it would not be possible to effectively balance. If the goal of BLM is to learn monster skills, then gimping those skills so they "fit" within the current games construct seems silly. Part of the allure of BLM is having skills that are directly from monsters (like Bad Breath). If you were to take that and dumb it down so it could fit within the constructs of the wider game, the skill would probably become moot due to the fact its a CC ability. Given the nature of BLM, its more than likely many skills would fall into that category. That they would be to strong by design, or by numbers.

And because of that factor, that would mean a few things. You would have to re balance the game around BLM (and likely make it a must take on any raid/EX/Etc), or you would have to dumb it down and gimp it so hard that it loses its identity and just becomes purely aesthetics of the skills and nothing more.

Furthermore, just as you can't have balance breaking abilities in an MMO, you also can't have a solo-only class in an MMO, because it's literally pointless if you can't play the rest of game with it. The initial response from the raiding community has been overwhelmingly negative. While I'm sure a solo-oriented player here and there might be happy, personally I wasn't even looking forward to this class and I was still let down, because instead of fixing current job and balance issues, a massive amount of resources was spent on this elaborate... mini-game. FFXIV is an MMO, not a solo-player game. People want more options and aesthetics to challenge the content in game with. Making a job unable to participate in said content basically makes it dead-on-arrival for most people.

This is purely wrong. What is the point of Fisherman in the game currently? It offers little to nothing in the sense of an MMO currently. What is the point of Chocobo racing, or being able to solo things like HoH/PotD. There is a lot of Solo content in FFXIV already, and people do play and enjoy it. So yes, you can have solo play in an MMO, which is what this is. Its Solo play with some party/MMO elements. The Raid community, btw, isnt the entire community. Theyre not the only driving force of the game. Not every bit of content that gets introduced to the game has to be in service of the Raid crowd.

Furthermore, how do you know that therye not working on job rebalances. Far as I know, we know nothing about how job balance will be handled in 5.0. Chances are high there will be some reworkings. Just because they did not announce it here does not mean it isnt happening. There is likely a lot of things that they didnt talk about in the first Fan Fest.

Lastly, people do want more content. And t hat is exactly something SE is giving them. MORE CONTENT. Its not in the usual vein of the game, but it is something to fill down time with. This is why it has a cap, and why it will slowly increase over time. They do not want you to "main" BLM. They want you to have something between tiers that you can play. This is also why NewGame+ exists. To give you things to do when things slow down. Because yes, there are actually a lot of players who wnat to do Solo content in FFXIV. They want to log into the world and just do things without having to interact with others. Sometimes, it's fun not to need a party to do things and still have a good experience in an MMO. And there is nothing wrong with that.

It also sets a dangerous precedent where great job concepts might get shoved into the Limited category, a category that nobody wanted. What about Puppetmaster? Beastmaster? Dancer? Suddenly we don't know if we'll ever get a working FFXIV version of interesting jobs from previous games. If you want to have unique leveling experience and skill acquiring mechanics, that sounds like a great idea, but please make sure all the jobs can be used in regular battle content.

The precedence is only dangerous if it poses a problem to your view on how the game should be. Again, your view seems to be centered around the concept that everything needs to work either in service of Raid, or atleast in service of multiplayer. If it doesnt, its not worth while and shouldnt be implemented. That way of thinking would make this game far more barren and much more uninteresting. We do not know how this is going to play out. We dont. And speculating that this new system is going to be a huge disaster because it doesnt fit your perception of how MMOs should operate is silly. This could be a great thing thatll give us players MORE stuff to do in game, and you are arguing to scrap it before it even is in the game. Good job saying "If it doesnt work the way I want it, then no one should have it."

Limited Jobs are a terrible concept. Please, reconsider. I'm saying this now so that we don't have another disaster like the current White Mage Lily system, a problem that was called out before Stormblood launch but has remained an issue with no solutions throughout the whole expansion.

This is that call out. Don't repeat history.

Not everything SE implements works. We all know this. But Id rather they try and implement new things and fail, then have them stay within the margins. We wont get fun, new, and interesting things in the game if they listen to nonsense like this.

[Canadane]

Am I the only one looking forward to more solo content?
Just because it's disguised as a job doesn't mean it isn't solo content, and it's something we could really use.

[kikix12]

The pet version of "potency" is different from the player version, and they don't benefit from certain buffs and debuffs. 135 potency from Ifrit is less damage than 135 potency from Garuda. In addition, pets do different damage types -- Ifrit, for example, benefits from Dragon Kick.

So...what's different between pets and player character?! I'll have you know that my Red Mage deals different damage with Jolt (180 potency) than my Black Mage with Blizzard (180 potency). Oh, these classes have different damage calculations!

Yeah...no. It's just that it's not a calculation without input. And part of that input is in stats. You know...those thingies that you get when you equip various stuff? Mobs have them too. Yeah, crazy, right! They have stats even though they don't get equipment!

And pets doing different damage types is irrelevant seeing as player characters do as well. The calculations, function...they're all there.

There is only one unique aspect in pets. Their resistances/immunities. They cannot be stunned (or several other debuffs), they aren't targeted for most player-target skills (duh, they aren't players) and they receive less damage from AoE specifically even beyond having high defensive stats.

Pets don't behave like monsters. For example, ever wonder why most monsters don't immediately spam all of their skills in a row at the start of a fight, but pets do? The pet AI being stupid is literally baked into the Summoner rotation.

What are you talking about?! Many mobs open the fight with their skill and use it "on cooldown". The fact that it's their ONLY skill hardly matters here.

Mobs use their skills depending on how they are programmed which varies from monster to monster. The only difference is that pets don't have aggro variation. The moment something pulls their aggro they're gonna whack at it until told not to, master moves away too far or one of them is dead. Everything else is just variation normal to them which is...nothing unique.

Am I the only one looking forward to more solo content?
Just because it's disguised as a job doesn't mean it isn't solo content, and it's something we could really use.

Nah. There are many people that look forward to more solo content. It's just that they're drowned under all the "It's an MMO game! There should be no solo content in it!" crowd.

[odintius]

If their going to go down this road they should expand more on the open world concepts have it's own reward system separate ect from the current structure. I just find the current areas very underwhelming and could under go some changes to spice it up a bit more. /shrugs

[Melichoir]

If their going to go down this road they should expand more on the open world concepts have it's own reward system separate ect from the current structure. I just find the current areas very underwhelming and could under go some changes to spice it up a bit more. /shrugs

We dont know if this might already be in the works. Problem with a lot of this sillyness is simply that Fan Fest only revealed a small bit of information, so there are a lot of conclusions being made out of thin air and assumptions. Dont even know how cool the BLU line will be. Point is, we should wait and see what happens, and not jump on a bandwagon that decries this as the greatest ill to ever plague FFXIV.

[omgitslos]

100% in agreement here.

[Fyce]

Everyone that has asked for BLU has anticipated the standard fair of abilities that every class gets.

Common sense isn't so common anymore apparently.

You used the word "everyone", when there are countless examples of people being happy with what they presented, as well as people absolutly never asking for what you suggested in the reactions following Yoshida's stance on BLU in 2014.

I thought not making baseless and dishonest generalities to make your point was common sense. But you're right, doesn't seem common enough.

Whatever the case, speak for yourself, not for "everyone". Thank you.

[Shadowshinra]

You used the word "everyone", when there are countless examples of people being happy with what they presented, as well as people absolutly never asking for what you suggested in the reactions following Yoshida's stance on BLU in 2014.

I though not making baseless and dishonest generalities to make your point was common sense. But you're right, doesn't seem common enough.

Whatever the case, speak for yourself, not for "everyone". Thank you.

While he worded it slightly wrong, He isn't that far off. Imagine Yoshida came up to you and said simply "We're adding Blue Mage into the game" and nothing else. Would you expect to see a job in the sense of the others we've gotten so far? Eg 10-24 abilties and a rotation to use them in. I find it likely that a lot of people would since that's how every job until now has been handled regardless of FF11's version of BLU and it's "customisation"

[Fyce]

While he worded it slightly wrong, He isn't that far off. Imagine Yoshida came up to you and said simply "We're adding Blue Mage into the game" and nothing else. Would you expect to see a job in the sense of the others we've gotten so far? Eg 10-24 abilties and a rotation to use them in. I find it likely that a lot of people would since that's how every job until now has been handled regardless of FF11's version of BLU and it's "customisation"

It's not "slightly wrong", it's using a false generality to give their opinions more credit than they actually have. By saying "everyone", they included people who actually never shared that view. It's disgustingly dishonest and disrespectful not to consider other people's opinion and trying to stomp their with yours using false and baseless claims.

Anyway.

Why would I need to imagine Yoshida saying something like that when he actually said the exact way they would do BLU if they were to implement it, and that it correspond perfectly to what they presented during the FanFest? Weird job not fit for party play that'd need heavy tweeking. That's what we got, because that's what a Blue Mage is about: having to learn an arsenal of gimmicky and situational skills from enemies to use in battle.
Blue Mage, and the toolkit given by Blue Magic in general, was never fitted to be in FFXIV. Whoever thought that a toolkit heavily based on status effects, gimmiks, enemy level, and exploiting elemental weaknesses was something that could easily fit in XIV is a fool. Edit: or very naive/ignorant.

Just look at what SMN became. A lot of people still criticize it today for not actually being a "true summoner" but a glorified pet job, which doesn't even handle pets very well. Do people really think that BLU would turn any better? Really? Or are they just lying to themselves?

[Vunak]

You used the word "everyone", when there are countless examples of people being happy with what they presented, as well as people absolutly never asking for what you suggested in the reactions following Yoshida's stance on BLU in 2014.

I though not making baseless and dishonest generalities to make your point was common sense. But you're right, doesn't seem common enough.

Whatever the case, speak for yourself, not for "everyone". Thank you.

Its pretty easy to deduce that when you go through and look at threads for ideas on how to implement BLU and at the time they conformed to the amount of abilities that FFXIV had at that point and time and then go forth and try and find a thread that breaks that mold. Common, yes. Common sense doesn't mean 100% factual information there buddy. It means using information provided to formulate a sound judgement on a topic or understanding, which is exactly what I did. There are no immediate outliers on the BLU topic where someone specifically asked for 49 abilities or more than what we have in FFXIV as a general ability number. So yes common sense was used. NOW people might because SE presented it as such, but up til this point there hasn't been. Using it as an excuse to limit the job further again correlates to my - they are going out of their way to make it hard to balance so they don't have to make it a proper job.

Perhaps you should research the word baseless and then move onto common sense from there.

Wait nevermind, so there isn't further explaining that needs to be done, i'll do the research for you:

Deduce: to determine by reasoning

Baseless: not based on any good reason.

Common Sense: good sense and sound judgment in practical matters.

The burden of proof is on you to show that my argument is without reason. So off you go minion find a thread in the past speaking on BLU that breaks the mold that FFXIV has followed to date, that does not include the actual reveal on BLU since that isn't what was being talked about. Then if you do, I will amend my statement to "most everyone".