Does 14 Promote a Culture of Mediocrity?

[Caurcas]

As the title ask, does 14 create and promote a culture of mediocrity within it? I say it has been sliding that way since ShB. The healing and tanking roles have been reduced to dull, hollow shells of what they were in HW and SB. The skill celling and floor no longer exist for these roles. DPS roles are heading in this direction as well with all the flavor and mechanical complexity being slowly striped away. See the removal of synergy and reduction of positionals, and reduction of punishment for rotational screw ups. These issues, however, are nothing compared to how the community and general attitude have shifted toward shielding the bad from valid criticism, and a general apathy towards self improvement. Even the devs have admitted to designing content in this manner. It's all quite disheartening, given 14 was at in time one of the most mechanically engaging MMOs.

[Denji]

besides some absurd self-healing buffs that should probably be nerfed, war feels mostly the same. in fact i'd argue i have to think a little more as a war now because i can't just 'fell cleave/decimate goes brr' while squeezing in non-gcd attacks. it's less frantic keysmashing. it used to be vengeance, maybe (the old) nascent flash and inner release (not in that order) followed by 5 fell cleaves/decimate while squeezing onslaughts and upheavals between them. it was not good for one's fingers lmao but if you got off only 4 fell cleaves you'd always feel like a failure.

and then once it was all done you would be forced to cone of shame the rest (overpower) and maybe try to get surging tempest back if stuff still has enough health. repeat 10-15 times per dungeon.

i make fun of overpower although i do find that it's why i like warrior so much. it forced me to learn how to gather enemies close enough together so that they can all be hit at once AND to consider how to allow DPS with positionals the freedom to move around and maximize their damage.

[Hysorn]

I don't know, but I went from playing DRK, to PLD and now to BLM(Which I am still leveling, in fact) and I gotta say, BLM feels like playing a whole new game, when I was running EX1 and EX2 in the beginning at the xpac as tank and off-tank in EX2, I would almost fall asleep in the middle of the fights, I was pretty much on auto-pilot. BLM has a lot more going on and I can't just turn off my brain, which makes it 2x as enjoyable to me. It makes me almost sad how simple tanks are, and from what I hear, back in Heavensward, DRKs were actually really complex.

[Sacred-Oblivion]

These issues, however, are nothing compared to how the community and general attitude have shifted toward shielding the bad from valid criticism, and a general apathy towards self improvement.

Your attitude is what needs adjustment. The game has, and will always have, a diverse playerbase with a wide variety of skill levels. Deal with it. Usually I get DF groups where I can pull wall-to-wall, but sometimes I get groups that can only handle single pulls which is totally fine. The latter group has a lower skill level but that does not make them "bad", especially if they're sprouts or returners. If you can't adapt to the vibe of your group or things going wrong in a run, and you're not a sprout or returner, then that makes you bad.

That said, I would totally support changes that make tanking and healing more challenging, like the reintroduction of aggro management. Yes you'll occasionally get tanks who can't hold aggro very well, but if you can't adapt yourself to the challenge then that's your failing.

[Wolwosh]

I hear, back in Heavensward, DRKs were actually really complex.

It was def more complex, but Tanks in general had to think more about keeping hate, which made Tanking in general a bit harder. If you f'ed up your MP management as a DRK and lost hate you couldn't Unleash and everything turned into chaos A good DRK and a bad one were very easy to tell apart xD

[IdowhatIwant]

As the title ask, does 14 create and promote a culture of mediocrity within it? I say it has been sliding that way since ShB. The healing and tanking roles have been reduced to dull, hollow shells of what they were in HW and SB. The skill celling and floor no longer exist for these roles. DPS roles are heading in this direction as well with all the flavor and mechanical complexity being slowly striped away. See the removal of synergy and reduction of positionals, and reduction of punishment for rotational screw ups. These issues, however, are nothing compared to how the community and general attitude have shifted toward shielding the bad from valid criticism, and a general apathy towards self improvement. Even the devs have admitted to designing content in this manner. It's all quite disheartening, given 14 was at in time one of the most mechanically engaging MMOs.

Personally I am glad positionals are becoming less important. I remember in ARR when you would not even combo if you didn't land the positional which was annoying. I think with the ping issues this game suffers it is for the best. Same with how they changed things like inner release / delirium into stacks vs a duration. Big problem with punishment for rotational screw ups were they were not consistent as far as classes went and some were punished more than others. Messing up a rotation on a monk would cause your grease lightning to fall, blm lost enochian, drg would lose botd but then you have classes like rdm, sam, or ninja where it did not hurt them as much. I think the way they are set up now works a little better from a consistency stand point and for the most part, if you knew how to play those buffed becoming traits should not really matter.

That being said though, I was not a fan of removing tank/dps stance from tanks, I liked the different debuff synergies classes had in the past, and itemization has gone down hill. I remember when piety gave you more mp, just for the lols I melded all piety on my pally once to try and get a extra clemancy back in HW but it sadly wasn't enough. I think sadly though, over time most MMOs go through this. I know this example gets beaten to death but WoW is the same way. As the game went on more classes just feel like they do what every other classes do. I think with FF and WoW the big difference is the DPS in WoW feels homogenized and the tanks/healers shine and in FF it is the opposite.

Materia system needs an over haul of changes in my opinion to make gearing more fun and unique. Mp should no longer be capped at 10k except for maybe tanks that use mp as a resource. I think all classes need to have uniqueness to them instead of skills that do the same thing with a different name.

I still like most of the DPS classes as most retain a sense of uniqueness between them but like you said that is slowly going away. You can really see this in the Ranged DPS the most currently where Bard and Dancer have the same Party buffs. The only different is how they achieve them and the buffs between that. Most class reworks they have done have over simplified the classes smn, drk, mnk, and mch all suffer from this currently I would probably go as far to say that even new classes suffer from this when you look at gbr, dnc and rpr. Although sage may be an outlier I have not tried this class not a healing fan in this game for obvious reasons.

I think an over arching problem with this game and retaining more complexity is that a majority of the player base is more casual, therefore it caters more towards that style. But I can agree that the culture of the game does commend more mediocre things vs more unique things and will personally attack people who criticize the game, saying they are rude, have an attitude, or what ever deflection they can.

[Equitable_Remedy]

Does 14 Promote a Culture of Mediocrity?

It's a game, friend. FF14 is a leisure activity that has content for a wide range of players (which is in no small part responsible for its success).

If you want to be l33t, excel, or feel a sense of accomplishment over your peers, I would suggest that you put that energy into your actual life rather than trying to box other players out of the game.

[TheMightyMollusk]

It certainly promotes a culture of mediocre trolls, at least.

[aveyond-dreams]

As someone who survived the gameplay of Heavensward and ARR I do not miss it one bit, especially for how convoluted some classes like DRK were and how...strange some abilities on others were. Anyone else remember Flash? Of all the abilities to lift from FFXI that one was definitely not the one to pick.

[LittleImp]

As the title ask, does 14 create and promote a culture of mediocrity within it? I say it has been sliding that way since ShB. The healing and tanking roles have been reduced to dull, hollow shells of what they were in HW and SB. The skill celling and floor no longer exist for these roles. DPS roles are heading in this direction as well with all the flavor and mechanical complexity being slowly striped away. See the removal of synergy and reduction of positionals, and reduction of punishment for rotational screw ups. These issues, however, are nothing compared to how the community and general attitude have shifted toward shielding the bad from valid criticism, and a general apathy towards self improvement. Even the devs have admitted to designing content in this manner. It's all quite disheartening, given 14 was at in time one of the most mechanically engaging MMOs.

The game is meant to largely appeal to casual audiences, which is where most of the games financial success originates. Many of the old HW / SB era systems that were streamlined were pointlessly punishing to casual players, but had very little real impact on high-level gameplay. They've made a few missteps, but seemed to have fairly solid reasoning behind most of their decisions. Rather than stripping away 'complexity', it's more replacing convoluted design with overly simple design. 'Complexity' just gives a little too much credit to some of the bad systems in SB/HW.

This game has a lot of bad players and weird white-knighting no doubt, but I feel like a lot of people just defend "bad" players because they find it more satisfying and entertaining to get under the skin of people who whine about performance in casual content.