New Missaphenchair video makes great point about the direction of job design

[Kalaam]

There is a difference between accessibility and a job being mechanically complex.
Accessibility is done through the ways the game's controls are made mostly. It is indeed an important, very important topic that is not discussed enough.
It isn't however the topic we are discussing here.
That some jobs are easier to manage than others is fine, however have subtleties between different jobs is nice, having meaningful mechanics within a job is satisfying. It is pleasant to feel yourself progressing and using your kit better when you want to progress.

And I am not talking about raiding and stuff, I don't even touch that content.
For all the clunk HW jobs might have had, I enjoyed it. It gave room for expression and learning how to work with it. It was fun, to me at least.

[Magikazam]

I don't disagree with that but aesthetics is a huge factor in htis game.. the problem is with the jobs your heavily limited on choice.. if you like big bad battle axes, there's only one hob to play. If you like bows only 1 job. If you like hand to hand.. just one job. So in many ways playing another class isn't really an answer. Because aesthetics is such an important factor in this game and the devs know it. Its exactly why they made darkk knight a tank. Because its an aesthetic many people wanted shoved into a role they didn't.

I love bows but don't really play bard much the singing dancing aesthetics doesn't appeal to me. But if they added a new bow job. A more traditional glass cannon "ranger" job. I'd pick that up in a heartbeat

The other issue comes from a level of hypocrisy.. players want balance balance balance. But at the same time its OK if some jobs are harder to play than others... but players also want jobs that are harder to play to perform better or reward that hard work.. why should a job thats braindead easy do the same dps as my job that takes a phd in rocket science to master. which then breaks the balance. Because those jobs would then be the only ones anyone ever wanted in there parties..i

I could complain about aesthetics being bad in-game too rn. DRK in the Franchise are more like their PvP version, to me it is somewhat a stupid concept to put the '' I use hp to deal big damage'' class as a tank and just turn it into a guy with darkness and sword edge thing. Why is my summon punny as SMN? We used to be able to summon Alexender Core as a pet in XI now we can summon egi and they ain't pet anymore. They killed the game pet dot class just so people could DPS with a book. See, making the class more accesible don't solve the problem.

Also, there is another way to reward harder/weaker class than damage. BLM is a harder class than deal tons of damage but does nothing else, it rewards you for playing it correctly by doing more damage. SMN is easy braindead to play, you deal way less damage, but you got mobility so it's easy to adapt to the pattern, more room for error, you get a raid buff, and you get battle rez.

[Kulve]

Unless you're doing Extreme, Savage, Ultimates, you are not forced to play optimally as some people would prefer to play. You can press whatever button, miss positionals, drop dots occasionally. There's nothing wrong with that and you can still clear the content. Forcing players that enjoy having jobs that have a certain level of complexity so they can enjoy at high level content is fine too. The idea that "I can't play the job at 100% efficiency, make the job conform to me and everyone else should play to my own capability" is down right selfish and hurts the game long term. Also name calling people that are of different opinion of you an 'elitist' is just telling that you don't care of anyone else's enjoyment of the game other than yourself by attempting to invalidate them.

Also, there are handicapped players, but they still are still capable of playing high end content by working around it. Don't invalidate their efforts to overcome their own limitations. Is there certain aspects that can be tuned to make it more accessible? Sure, Remove all complexity? No.

This is an MMO. There are players of different play skills that find different parts of this game fun. One of the big things that's been pointed out is that FF14 end game is what you make of it. The devs have to find a balance that allows players just wanting to clear normal content and have fun without stress, and players who want to take it further in high end content. It's been said before, jobs should be designed with low floors for entry and accessibility, while providing varied high barriers to master for prolonged engagement. Never should the devs develop or tune all jobs for only one half of their community while alienating the other.

[ThorneDynasty]

Says the elitist.
Some people can't or handycap, and yes want easy. Not everyone going be a pro at games.

Good day.

You don't have to be a pro to play any of the jobs. That's point. There's zero reason to dumb them down when you can already play them dumb and clear all normal/old content. It's the opposite elitism: People are telling you no one cares if you play a DPS job badly until you go into current savage.

[ThorneDynasty]

Unless you're doing Extreme, Savage, Ultimates, you are not forced to play optimally as some people would prefer to play.

You don't need to play optimally for Extreme either. Not meeting the DPS checks almost always comes down to the number of KOs. Their anecdote about "almost rage quitting" because the normal trials were too hard is a completely nonsensical argument for any kind of job difficulty - You practically never fail normal mode trials because of job difficulty, you fail them because of encounter mechanics. They don't even know what they are arguing (or are just trolling).

[ExcogEnjoyer]

I love that he's the type of guy square enix listens to for job changes.

[xAFROx]

Says the elitist.
Some people can't or handycap, and yes want easy. Not everyone going be a pro at games.

Good day.

If you think I'm an elitist, then you really have no clue what anyone here is saying.

Good day, sir.

[Shurrikhan]

Says the elitist.
Some people can't or handycap, and yes want easy. Not everyone going be a pro at games.

Gaining Flare doesn't suddenly make Fire II do literally nothing. If you were AoEing before, you would still be AoEing thereafter.
Switching between Fire and Ice doesn't suddenly implode because you haven't yet gotten used to using Umbral Hearts.
Your Astral Fire usage doesn't suddenly break apart because you haven't learned to end your AF phases with Despair.

What is easy within a kit is always there. A kit will never stop offering what is easy. It merely adds onto it, to use if you so wish.

And when you're doing casual content, most are satisfied with your just Sprinting before entering combat, using AoEs when there are 3+ targets, and not too often dropping your core rotational buff. The bar is not high.

There is no reason to be disturbed by there being more in the game than you personally wish to interact with, let alone any reason to demand that span's removal.

[Sorzai]

I hope yoshi and the dev team actually listens to our plead. Unfortunately I doubt they will.

[aloneatsea]

There is no reason to be disturbed by there being more in the game than you personally wish to interact with, let alone any reason to demand that span's removal.

I think this is such an important point.


Using an example from a different game -- once upon a time, I played Horizon Zero Dawn. Unfortunately, the combat just didn't land at all with me. I hated it, and it felt like an obstacle to getting what I actually wanted out of the game -- the storytelling elements. You know what that game offered to me? A easy difficulty, so I could breeze through combat and much more quickly get to the parts of the game that were enjoyable to me. You know what else the game had? Harder difficulty modes, for people like my friends who adored the combat design, and wanted to challenge themselves and push the game to its limits.

Final Fantasy 14 needs to thread this line, by creating content that has simple enough DPS checks in story-mandated content that a player doesn't have to engage with the 'optimal' way to play their job in order to drag themselves through the combat, if they're not interested in it. We're already doing that in an even better way by providing the trust companions to run dungeons with in ARR content, soon to be more. Trials and other normal-difficulty content specifically don't have enrages because the developers understand that there are more draws to this game than combat. This is a good thing, even if it makes my roulettes painful sometimes when someone doesn't want to go at the same pace as I do.

Outside of story-mandated content, there is no obligation for content to be made easy enough for someone who doesn't want to engage with the combat system to clear. In the same way that I didn't expect the combat-related achievements to be handed over to me in Horizon Zero Dawn, as I wasn't interested in engaging with the combat, players shouldn't expect Extreme and Savage-level content to be made easy for them, because it's not for them in the first place. It's battle content for people who enjoy battle content. Why be interested in it if the content itself doesn't seem fun to you?

Of course, this ignores people with disabilities that impede their ability to play the game. I'm a huge advocate of making the game more accessible, but this absolutely has no need to come at the cost of job complexity. Things like being able to adjust the colour scheme of mechanics in fights to better help people with colour blindness (or simply designing them to be visually distinct from the outset), offering jobs with a variety of APMs, providing compatibility with a variety of different types of controllers, allowing heavier customisation of the UI to increase font size across the board, making the tab-targeting system suck less are all things FF14 can do to improve the accessibility of the game without impacting the complexity of the encounters or jobs.