Unhappy with 6.1 Samurai Adjustments

[Theodric_Thorne]

I think talent trees if done right would be a great boon to resolving a lot of these issues with people saying aspects of a job are too complex or not rewarding enough, because a player might be able to drop an ability they don't like or enhance one that they do like. However I think it would create a slippery slope that would risk starting to dilute the identity of jobs. I might be really annoyed with the direction that SE has taken its job design lately, but I think one of FFXIV's strengths is that each job has only one role. There are no specs, no talent points, no trinkets, no enchantments, no armor set bonuses, no legendary items. Maybe we shouldn't mess with that formula.

WoW was built for talent trees, FFXIV was not. WoW has greatly altered its talent system throughout the history of the game, but for the most part the system has always had the same function and purpose. I don't know if such a system would be as good in practice as we'd all love it to be in theory.

Another important thing to note is that most of WoW's classes have at least two group roles covered. There are a few "pure DPS" classes like the mage, rogue, and warlock. But no "pure healer" or "pure tank" classes. Whereas every job in FFXIV is purely devoted to one group role. If we start letting jobs branch out into multiple group roles, that will effectively create more jobs for SE to balance. Each spec in WoW is almost a class unto itself, which is frankly why I'm shocked that Blizzard is adding Evokers. I'm looking forward to trying one, but I don't envy their balance team having to juggle roughly 40 different specs at this point.

[Roxus]

I think talent trees if done right would be a great boon to resolving a lot of these issues with people saying aspects of a job are too complex or not rewarding enough, because a player might be able to drop an ability they don't like or enhance one that they do like. However I think it would create a slippery slope that would risk starting to dilute the identity of jobs. I might be really annoyed with the direction that SE has taken its job design lately, but I think one of FFXIV's strengths is that each job has only one role. There are no specs, no talent points, no trinkets, no enchantments, no armor set bonuses, no legendary items. Maybe we shouldn't mess with that formula.

WoW was built for talent trees, FFXIV was not. WoW has greatly altered its talent system throughout the history of the game, but for the most part the system has always had the same function and purpose. I don't know if such a system would be as good in practice as we'd all love it to be in theory.

Another important thing to note is that most of WoW's classes have at least two group roles covered. There are a few "pure DPS" classes like the mage, rogue, and warlock. But no "pure healer" or "pure tank" classes. Whereas every job in FFXIV is purely devoted to one group role. If we start letting jobs branch out into multiple group roles, that will effectively create more jobs for SE to balance. Each spec in WoW is almost a class unto itself, which is frankly why I'm shocked that Blizzard is adding Evokers. I'm looking forward to trying one, but I don't envy their balance team having to juggle roughly 40 different specs at this point.

I don't have much experience in WoW so I can't comment on that part, but I want to bring up Lost Ark and it's tripod system (talents). The talents don't drastically change the core of the class, they only alter the gameplay around the same identity. I think it's the perfect solution if they want to have an easy tree and a hard tree. It's a Risk vs Reward, where both talent choices are within a few % of each other. There are also minor deviations you can do that are purely preferential, and most do not care what you bring so long as you don't straight up troll (IE Take two talents that cancel each other out).

The formula as it is has been hacked away at so much that hacking any further will leave us with nothing. Something needs to be built on this, starting now. That's how I feel on the matter.

FFXIV originally had a joke of a talent system before, they just removed it because the direction they were going made everything rigid. Everything that was problematic was simply removed.

[angelar_]

The cone hate in 6.1 frustrates me in every single dungeon. I can't think of a single time I went "thank god Tenka Goken is now a circle," but almost every dungeon contains "cool the tank decided to move as soon as I needed to do my cast bar PBAoE," and/or "there's too many AoEs during my cast bar PBAoE so I can't attack." I wish they would please revert this solution in need of a problem.

[CelestiCer]

The cone hate in 6.1 frustrates me in every single dungeon. I can't think of a single time I went "thank god Tenka Goken is now a circle," but almost every dungeon contains "cool the tank decided to move as soon as I needed to do my cast bar PBAoE," and/or "there's too many AoEs during my cast bar PBAoE so I can't attack." I wish they would please revert this solution in need of a problem.

THANK YOU!!

Like I am not the only one. This change frustrates me to no end. I hate the Circle. I genuinely hate the circle. There's no reason for me to spam Dungeon and Fates like I used to. Cause it's not fun anymore. It's made braindead, stupid, and going from a Shinten Gauge to a Kyuten Gauge doesn't do anything for it either.

[cjbeagle]

I think talent trees if done right would be a great boon to resolving a lot of these issues with people saying aspects of a job are too complex or not rewarding enough, because a player might be able to drop an ability they don't like or enhance one that they do like. However I think it would create a slippery slope that would risk starting to dilute the identity of jobs. I might be really annoyed with the direction that SE has taken its job design lately, but I think one of FFXIV's strengths is that each job has only one role. There are no specs, no talent points, no trinkets, no enchantments, no armor set bonuses, no legendary items. Maybe we shouldn't mess with that formula.

You're not wrong, but to be clear, when I say talents I don't mean anything like WoW's systems. WoW's talents were completely game-changing and had massive impacts on balance - what I'm contemplating is more along the lines of "Do you want X AOE to be circle or cone?" - same damage, same kenki generation - just pick the AOE type you like. Or, even for the ones that do alter gameplay, like the example with Seigan, it's still based on successfully mitigating damage with Third Eye and gaining a damage output by doing so, the question is if you want that damage to ultimately come passively from Shinten spam, or from Seigan, Seigan requiring an additional button to press.

If not careful, it could absolutely disrupt balance, but at this point it seems worth consideration considering how often and thoroughly they've been undermining job design that people enjoy(ed). I'm generally very tentative when it comes to messing with a formula that is known to work well, but the changes they've been making don't work well - virtually every job if not literally every job is unhappy with various changes they've received, and usually because the changes move ever toward job homogenization. I agree that every job should have a unique identity, but that's what we've been losing. With talents perhaps we could keep job identity for the more complex choices and leave the homogenization as a matter of choice that newbies can opt into to make things easier while veterans who want the full experience of the job can keep it.

I'm not advocating, or even entertaining the idea of letting tanks be dps or dps be tanks or healers to be dps or whatnot, just some minor tweaks that could either make jobs more enjoyable based on player preference without affecting balance, or make the jobs a little easier at the cost of a little performance.

The three main goals would be entwined: 1) let players tailor their kits to their liking while also 2) introducing ways to simplify kits for those who want simpler kits, albeit at a cost to performance, which 3) prevents the need for SE to simplify kits across the board like they've been doing, sparing those of us who don't want simplification.