Keep overpower cone shaped!

[Shurrikhan]

You know what? I never actually looked at the listed radius, and I thought Tempest was visually bigger than that. Job fantasy further ruined.

I don't play a lot with WAR so I haven't had to get used to it yet, but I played it again last night and it still feels wrong and unsatisfying.

To be fair, I do feel like it makes plenty of sense (A) for Warrior to have bigger AoEs than most tanks (it's supposed to be the battlefield behemoth, after all), and (B) for later-step combo moves to have larger AoE radiuses befitting their larger, more powerful-looking animations.

Yes, the latter bonus will largely go to waste from having to engage with our first step (which... really just means making good use of Provoke and the healer not being late in pre-shielding/HoTing us), but that's fine. Our skills, though, should more closely match they're animations, and if that animation covers nearer to a 8-yalm range, go for it, especially if that capacity would fit the job it's on.

My main concern, again, is just this community's quickness (and I'm sure I've been a part of this) to demand overly specific parity, sometimes at cost to identity or without acknowledging what precedents they would set (or those precedent's implications in turn). How do we convince a frequently soured-to-Warrior tank population that, hey, Mythril Tempest really does deserve its flavor/fluff buff of an 8-yalm range while PLD's and GNB's circular AoE combos do not? And if we can't draw the line there... where does it end up?

They're already making most "friendly" abilities have a "whole arena" range, and if they really think positioning is too hard for most then making AoEs same range as Earthly Star seems the logical next step.

Would I like it. Nope, but it's clear most changes to jobs aren't made for those enjoying the jobs, but rater despite them and for those not playing the job.

I think we need to seriously question that latter trend, though. What does removing a presumed tiny part of a job's initial required investment (it's "fundamentals" to some, its "barrier to entry" to others) cost players' maximal enjoyment of that job?

In the end, we have finite time and interest, so we'll ultimately spend both across what jobs we like best. A job designer's goal, then, ought not to be how many or what portion of players can "enjoy" (threshold value to be determined, if such is even possible) each job, but rather what portion of players feel enjoyably engaged by/through the span of jobs available to them.

If, a few months or so after omni-leveling, I'd have ended up only fully enjoying myself on a handful of particular jobs anyways and my hours until the next expansion would mostly just be on them, those additional jobs aren't adding to the success of the job designers so much as to the success of pseudo-reiterative content: Though ultimately abandoned, those extra jobs got me to at least complacently (even if not enjoyably) play through leveling content more than I otherwise would have. But, in the end, my enjoyment of the current or more intrinsically enjoyable content will come primarily from my depth of engagement across those favored jobs more so than the breadth of engagement I have across all of them.

While we probably should replace mechanics that even the best users of a job don't particularly find "fun", but merely easily "dealt with", and which add far more to "barrier to entry" than to a job's ceiling, we need to be careful, too, of what effect even a more annoying or lackluster mechanic or consideration might have on those around it, as a sort of "keystone" element of the job's play.

Aside from the mere fact that the change was virtually unasked (and taken over the very frequent, very clear suggested alternatives), I think that was the largest failing of Kaiten's removal, for instance: Though worsened already by the changes to Ikishoten and Senei/Guren's costs before it, the removal of Kaiten finally allowed Kenki to work basically just as a Shinten charge counter. To some, perhaps that is a change for the better, but if the long-term benefit to them (i.e., from SAM then becoming one of their favored jobs, from which lens they come to better enjoy content) doesn't exceed the long-term cost to others (e.g., SAM mains), then the playerbase could only have lost job quality on the whole.

[marelooke]

My main concern, again, is just this community's quickness (and I'm sure I've been a part of this) to demand overly specific parity, sometimes at cost to identity or without acknowledging what precedents they would set (or those precedent's implications in turn). How do we convince a frequently soured-to-Warrior tank population that, hey, Mythril Tempest really does deserve its flavor/fluff buff of an 8-yalm range while PLD's and GNB's circular AoE combos do not? And if we can't draw the line there... where does it end up?

It's the dev team's job to know better, and especially to understand what the intended "flavour" for a class is, and preserve it. But it would seems that, aside from the classes the devs themselves "main", they have no idea. Which is why I think any class not actively mained by one of the main devs will end up getting mangled at some point: they rely on user feedback for "changes" and clearly people that enjoy a class won't be whining on the forums about it, well, not until they decide to mess with it and ruin our enjoyment, at least.

Many more of these recent changes just seem to come entirely out of left field: the other day I ended up in the Aery in a roulette and noticed they removed the disappearing platforms on the last boss (Hraesvelgr)... I was literally lost for words... Was that really ever a problem for anyone in recent years? Really? I mean, I guess it required the tank to think about positioning, so it just had to go...?

We meme'd about brainless unga-bunga, but it most certainly is brainless now...

[Iscah]

Many more of these recent changes just seem to come entirely out of left field: the other day I ended up in the Aery in a roulette and noticed they removed the disappearing platforms on the last boss (Hraesvelgr)... I was literally lost for words... Was that really ever a problem for anyone in recent years? Really? I mean, I guess it required the tank to think about positioning, so it just had to go...?

You're confusing the Aery with Sohr Khai, but anyway. The change was made at the same time they introduced duty support NPCs for 2.0 duties, so it's assumed that they're changing it in preparation to add support for those duties as well. The NPCs might not be able to handle the variable path as the number of platforms changes, or maybe teaching them to do it would be more time than they want to spend on a single fight.

It's not like you could fall off the old platforms anyway, when the wind jumps just took you to the next safe platform, and the boss dies too fast to worry about positioning anyway.

[Absurdity]

You're confusing the Aery with Sohr Khai, but anyway. The change was made at the same time they introduced duty support NPCs for 2.0 duties, so it's assumed that they're changing it in preparation to add support for those duties as well. The NPCs might not be able to handle the variable path as the number of platforms changes, or maybe teaching them to do it would be more time than they want to spend on a single fight.

What I'm asking myself is, is that actually a good thing? Because if they do not want to invest the time to make the NPCs work with certain mechanics then all this does is limit their design options and stifle creativity.

Sure it allows some players to entirely solo the content where they are implemented but it also potentially makes the experience worse for everyone.


Right now nobody is really bothered by it because it only affects dungeons and those are a joke anyway, but what happens when the Duty Support system bleeds into other content as well in SE's perpetual attempt to make the game appeal to solo players?

What happens when every mechanic, and even environment design, needs to be so limited that the NPCs can deal with it? Their current dungeon design is so incredibly stale that I can't be bothered doing them more than once or twice already.

[marelooke]

You're confusing the Aery with Sohr Khai, but anyway.

Indeed I was. One of these I'll be able to keep the names straight, but today was not that day

The change was made at the same time they introduced duty support NPCs for 2.0 duties, so it's assumed that they're changing it in preparation to add support for those duties as well. The NPCs might not be able to handle the variable path as the number of platforms changes, or maybe teaching them to do it would be more time than they want to spend on a single fight.

It's not like you could fall off the old platforms anyway, when the wind jumps just took you to the next safe platform, and the boss dies too fast to worry about positioning anyway.

To be fair, I've had runs where DPS was low enough that it got close. I doubt it'd ever actually happen, but it at least added some sense of urgency.

What I'm asking myself is, is that actually a good thing? Because if they do not want to invest the time to make the NPCs work with certain mechanics then all this does is limit their design options and stifle creativity.

Sure it allows some players to entirely solo the content where they are implemented but it also potentially makes the experience worse for everyone.


Right now nobody is really bothered by it because it only affects dungeons and those are a joke anyway, but what happens when the Duty Support system bleeds into other content as well in SE's perpetual attempt to make the game appeal to solo players?

See, FFXIV dungeons aren't/weren't as much of a joke as those in many other MMOs. There's quite a few dungeons that have mechanics that require some thought, experience, or at least a brief explanation of tactics. While certainly the trend seems to been downward when it comes to dungeon complexity there's still the likes of Pharos Sirius out there.

What happens when every mechanic, and even environment design, needs to be so limited that the NPCs can deal with it? Their current dungeon design is so incredibly stale that I can't be bothered doing them more than once or twice already.

The ability to have mechanics of a type that can't easily be handled with AI is one of the things that makes MMOs stand out from single player games. When one cuts that out the only thing left is arguably the social aspect.

Question then is whether the social aspect is enough. Guess SE thinks it is. Given how barren the MMO landscape is when it comes to quality games, it might well be, at least untill some game comes around that combines both of these aspects again, and players start migrating. Should it ever come to that then the ship will have sailed, as dumbing down "normal" content is borderline irreversible (see Blizzard's "let's make heroics hard again" disaster in early Cataclysm)