AST (and DRG) had their improvements pushed to 7.0 PLD are getting theirs in 6.3

[Renathras]

The 2 minute burst meta simply needs to go, it creates more problems than it solves on top of being just really boring.

I'm genuinely curious if there was a survey on the topic to the community, if the result would be that people like it or dislike it, collectively. Pretty much everyone - hardcore and casual - seems to agree it's a bad direction.

[T-Owl]

Your view of the community as a whole, I think, seems rather...skewed.

To be honest, I think your's is kinda self-centered. There is also the issue, aren't people who are basically just doing social stuff or running old content once its yoloable the people Devs can legitimately least worry to maintain? Same with the people who are deeply into the social stuff and either make FF14 the one single game they play or outright the center of their social life. And tons of the content you mentioned boils down to people engaging in hardcore stuff and making videos from that point onward.

And most of the content you mention outside of Bozja and soloing PotD is basically stuff you get start to do if you set your eye on a specific piece of glamour and be done with it in a day or so. Beast Tribe Reputation is really more of a leveling catch up system if you ask me and not really a good one, with how limited it is and with how little experience they give and the new relic weapon farm zone is literally only gettinf released once the expansion is halfway done. And I hate to break it to you, if I don't really need to play the game as a social plattform and want to focus on combat oriented content, FF14 is still kinda lacking with the amount of content that is released, especially since a great number of it is really do it a few times and grow bored of it. With how big it is, SE should at this point slowly start to expand the team and ramp out production to catch up to the amount of Content WoW releases during a regular expansion. Criterion Dungeons look like a good first step, though I hope it doesn't end up like a system where we get only 1-2 new ones each expansion.

I'm genuinely curious if there was a survey on the topic to the community, if the result would be that people like it or dislike it, collectively. Pretty much everyone - hardcore and casual - seems to agree it's a bad direction.

If you ask me, it just makes the game much harder in the most nasty way, because with how most classes rotations are centered around building towards this strict, big two minute burst and to a lesser extend the 1 minute one, it makes recovery from death pretty much impossible. If you mess up once, you are basically out for the entire fight. I kinda feel like WoW is less stressful in this regard, because its really much less about pooling and slowly building everything for this big burst windows. There are burst windows, but these usually require much less preparation and usually you can recover from death and resume your rotation much much easier. Like if you're a BoS Frost DK and die, it isn't taking that long to pool back that runic power.

[ty_taurus]

There is also the issue, aren't people who are basically just doing social stuff or running old content once its yoloable the people Devs can legitimately least worry to maintain? Same with the people who are deeply into the social stuff and either make FF14 the one single game they play or outright the center of their social life.

This reminds me of a video from Misshapen Chair from back when Kaiten was announced to be removed. He brings up the question of who are the job changes we see meant for? Who is being appeased by the oversimplification of job design? I think the entire video is really good and worth watching, but here's a timestamped link for anyone interested that basically summarizes the discussion of the video.

[Renathras]

To be honest, I think your's is kinda self-centered.

Are you capable of one reply to me that isn't an insult?

Self-centered would be if I was arguing for content just for me/my interests. We aren't arguing about that. We're talking about the likely statistics of the playerbase. This is like two people talking about what percentage of stars are like our Sun and you coming in and calling one self-centered for saying Red Dwarves make up the majority of Main Sequence stars.

There is also the issue, aren't people who are basically just doing social stuff or running old content once its yoloable the people Devs can legitimately least worry to maintain?

So wait, which is it, we need new content to keep people interested (and must make new content for only 5-10% of the hardcore community), or people don't need new content to keep interested?

It's hard to say. People still want new content. This game has a lot of stuff, but if the game had no expansion for the last 8 years and only added new raid tiers, I'd probably have left. So while the Devs have to worry LESS about those people, they still need to make new content for them to keep them around.

Speaking for myself, if they go too many expansions without stuff like Bozja or POTD and only do raids, I might eventually lose interest, yes. So they DO still have to make content for casual and social players. Now, a lot of casual/social content doesn't require the same level of resources as a Savage raid. For example, adding a new emote and slapping it in as a PvP reward or MSQ quest completion reward. But these things still have to be added to maintain interest.

And tons of the content you mentioned boils down to people engaging in hardcore stuff and making videos from that point onward.

Except none of the stuff I mentioned was hardcore stuff? You guys can't just call stuff hardcore when it suits your argument but consider it casual the rest of the time.

and ramp out production to catch up to the amount of Content WoW releases during a regular expansion.

Setting aside the rest: How much content does WoW release during a regular expansion?

And I don't just mean raids and dungeons. New emotes, glamour/transmog, deep dungeons, exploration content, etc etc that FFXIV releases. I don't think WoW releases more overall content than FFXIV does unless you limit that metric to "raids only", but I'd be interested to see an actual comparative analysis between the two.

EDIT (for space):

If you ask me, it just makes the game much harder in the most nasty way, because with how most classes rotations are centered around building towards this strict, big two minute burst and to a lesser extend the 1 minute one, it makes recovery from death pretty much impossible. If you mess up once, you are basically out for the entire fight. I kinda feel like WoW is less stressful in this regard, because its really much less about pooling and slowly building everything for this big burst windows. There are burst windows, but these usually require much less preparation and usually you can recover from death and resume your rotation much much easier. Like if you're a BoS Frost DK and die, it isn't taking that long to pool back that runic power.

Combat raises in WoW are much less common though, aren't they? If you die, is there a "recover from death" in WoW if you aren't an important thing (e.g. main tank or someone)?

That said, agree on the 2 min thing entirely.

This reminds me of a video from Misshapen Chair from back when Kaiten was announced to be removed. He brings up the question of who are the job changes we see meant for? Who is being appeased by the oversimplification of job design? I think the entire video is really good and worth watching, but here's a timestamped link for anyone interested that basically summarizes the discussion of the video.

I think I saw that video. But I disagree with the analysis.

Changes like this are made for the Devs, it's that simple. They aren't made for casuals or bads or whatever. These changes are so the Devs can balance their numbers easier. To a lesser extent, changes are made for the midcore. People who aren't QUITE hardcore, but are trying to push themselves to be closer to it, and who didn't ask for these changes, the Devs just thought it would slightly close the gap. And I do thing Misshapen Chair focuses WAY too much on combat - "Why did I even play this Job/learn this?"

Because it was fun? If it wasn't fun, why would one do it? And if it was fun, isn't that an end unto itself?

Though I do agree with him that as long as something is viable, there's no reason to change them. I still don't know why WAR's cone was changed to a circle instead of just taking their 2 in that 1-2 AOE combo and turning it into a cone so the two would be normalized to each other.

[Zolvolt]

My ast request is if we keep collective unconcious that the damage mitigation from it last an meaningful amount of time after hitting the button.

[Archwizard]

I think it really depends on the kind of reworks each of them is getting. There are different kinds of reworks a job can receive during an expansion compared to an expansion launch; for instance, MNK got a rework in the middle of Shadowbringers to address immediate complaints about its Greased Lightning mechanic and specific abilities like Tornado Kick and Six-sided Star, before getting another one at Endwalker launch that completely rewrote its mechanics from the ground up.
The latter required significantly more assets and development time all made with expectation of the new abilities it would acquire to further refine them, where the former was mostly streamlining, and at worst needed programming adjustments (like altering number values and adding a bonus effect here or there).

The goal of a mid-expansion rework is to keep as much of the existing system as possible so people don't have to learn a completely new job, while resolving key issues so people don't hyperbolize that it's "literally unplayable", at worst as a hold-over for a more extensive rework to be provided by an expansion launch.

So if PLD sees changes in 6.3, they'll come from a single-minded focus to resolve what they see as an immediate, pressing issue; the most significant changes with the least amount of work.

If they're waiting for an expansion launch for other job reworks, expect things like completely new gauges and mechanics, or trimming/replacing abilities you think are keys to playing the job right now. And trust, AST definitely needs a trim.

Not... sure why DRG is in the mix, though...

[ASkellington]

I think it really depends on the kind of reworks each of them is getting. There are different kinds of reworks a job can receive during an expansion compared to an expansion launch; for instance, MNK got a rework in the middle of Shadowbringers to address immediate complaints about its Greased Lightning mechanic and specific abilities like Tornado Kick and Six-sided Star, before getting another one at Endwalker launch that completely rewrote its mechanics from the ground up.
The latter required significantly more assets and development time all made with expectation of the new abilities it would acquire to further refine them, where the former was mostly streamlining, and at worst needed programming adjustments (like altering number values and adding a bonus effect here or there).

The goal of a mid-expansion rework is to keep as much of the existing system as possible so people don't have to learn a completely new job, while resolving key issues so people don't hyperbolize that it's "literally unplayable", at worst as a hold-over for a more extensive rework to be provided by an expansion launch.

So if PLD sees changes in 6.3, they'll come from a single-minded focus to resolve what they see as an immediate, pressing issue; the most significant changes with the least amount of work.

If they're waiting for an expansion launch for other job reworks, expect things like completely new gauges and mechanics, or trimming/replacing abilities you think are keys to playing the job right now. And trust, AST definitely needs a trim.

Not... sure why DRG is in the mix, though...

AST's slated reworks are their cards. If there's anything more to be changed I do not believe the devs have officially stated what those are.

Personally I don't believe changing the card effects is an expansion worthy wait if it was originally intended in 6.2. And even if it is, they should've changed it like we wanted at the start of this expansion. It wasn't as if AST mains were quiet about it all through Shb.

/shrug Who knows. There may be more they aren't saying.

[Supersnow845]

AST's slated reworks are their cards. If there's anything more to be changed I do not believe the devs have officially stated what those are.

Personally I don't believe changing the card effects is an expansion worthy wait if it was originally intended in 6.2. And even if it is, they should've changed it like we wanted at the start of this expansion. It wasn't as if AST mains were quiet about it all through Shb.

/shrug Who knows. There may be more they aren't saying.

To be fair they have never changed the cards significantly mid expansion so that’s probably their reasoning, though 5.0 also changed their entire healing kit as well so it’s not exactly a 1 to 1 comparison

[ASkellington]

To be fair they have never changed the cards significantly mid expansion so that’s probably their reasoning, though 5.0 also changed their entire healing kit as well so it’s not exactly a 1 to 1 comparison

I believe their reasoning for holding off changes is due to Kaiten backlash and them wanting to reevaluate what they originally planned because the state of AST cards is a hot topic. As in, they understand they alienated old mains of the class by changing the cards and people want them back but they want to acknowledge that people also like the current seals system... in practice.

On paper both iterations in my honest opinion were trash from the ground up.

That's fair, but it doesn't make me any less bitter. Because from my perspective:

• They changed AST cards by taking the easy way out and made all 6 of them to be Balance.
• To keep the RNG flavor they made the Seals system so that while the CARDS don't really mean any thing the SEALS do.
• The Seals system in 5.0 was flawed because 6% damage on Divination vs 5% (coupled with old Sleeve Draw and even guarenteed seal Sleeve Draw afterwards) was not worth the effort you put into it.
• Seals System 6.0 moved it to Astrodyne but still kept the same issue. Constant refresh replaces Lucid Dreaming in 80% of content because we don't have high mana costs, Haste when you get it doesn't amount to anything and neither does having 6% damage on top.

They had a chance to make the Seals system decent while keeping the cards flavorless by having Moons, Celestials and Suns in certain set ups = certain buffs so that you could control when and where you got them (for example, don't like the refresh on 2+ Moons? wait for another draw and change it to something else) this expansion and didn't do it and honestly? I don't want it any more.

PvP AST has card effects even if it is only 3 at a time. PvE AST can have the same with Melee/Range split and I would prefer that.

[Archwizard]

AST's slated reworks are their cards. If there's anything more to be changed I do not believe the devs have officially stated what those are.

You do realize how central their cards are to them? Their main gimmick?
We may not just be talking about a tweak to Astrodyne and the Seals system here, but completely reinventing the whole thing. And considering how much feedback they've been getting about how people hate Astrodyne, it wouldn't shock me if they decided to pull the trigger on the whole damn thing but need time to figure out how to make a RNG-based 6-8 card system continue to work on a job that has already hit peak button bloat, without Astrodyne or Divination as incentives.

Personally I don't believe changing the card effects is an expansion worthy wait if it was originally intended in 6.2.

And they probably have changed their plans about the rework prior to their decision to cut it from 6.2.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that either:
1) Whatever we were originally slated to get in 6.2 was just a delay on something that was in the pipeline prior to expansion launch, when they were already reworking the job in 6.0 and it would make no sense to wait this long to drop it if they had it in mind this whole time.
OR
2) Whatever we get with the expansion will just be a tweak that could have been a patch cycle, when the entire conceit of them pushing it back was that they realized their plans would have to go way bigger than just Draw, Redraw and Astrodyne.

6.2 was gonna give Rework Plan A, which would have been bandaid fixes on the job; we are no longer on Plan A, but something more significant. The stated 7.0 Rework =/= 6.2 Rework =/= any hypothetical 6.0 Rework besides what we got.

And even if it is, they should've changed it like we wanted at the start of this expansion. It wasn't as if AST mains were quiet about it all through Shb.

Yeah, and they did change things with the expansion, and their decision about the rework was affected by the feedback they received since those changes.
And by the way, 6.2 dropped almost a year into Endwalker; of course they've had new ideas since then, it's not like everything is just sitting in a hat fully-formed, waiting to be pulled.