Fundamental Changes You'd Like to See for 7.x and onward

[Midareyukki]

This resonates with me, but it begs a further question: Where do we draw the line between an initial tool for/towards a given capacity and a redundant one?

I understand what you're saying about OGCDs and GCDs not being as redundant as they seem, and indeed the ability to press, for example, Tetragrammaton, implies you're not wasting a GCD to cast Afflatus Solace, or worse, Cure 2. So it's not like every single skill in the game is absolutely useless. That's not what I'm trying to imply xD

I technically have two issues. So I'll start with what you said, which are skills that end up "replacing" others. Even if there is a use for these skills, it doesn't mean that they will see as much use as before. And when you make a different, separate button for it, you risk that skill becoming niche.

Do you use Synastry every fight? Odds are you don't, and if you do, it feels bad because you need to use healing GCDs on it, on a class with a lot of healing OGCDs.
You cannot rely on the Lady of Crowns for things because it's not a guarantee, and the heal it provides is anecdotal.
And I've legit seen people say they forget stuff like Horoscope and Neutral Sect are there. Less so on Neutral Sect (though I have heard that comment before) because it is indispensible in raids for mitigation. But people often snooze on Horoscope, when really I find it a pretty good tool to use.
And on top of all this, AST also has Exaltation for mitigation and posterior healing, as well as Celestial Intersection for two small single-target shields.

And I get what they're saying. Odds are that these skills have their purpose in raids, and having a bunch of options that do similar effects allows you to have a robust kit that can provide an answer to almost anything. But it causes button bloat, and some skills just become latched onto the kit as "yet another skill". When odds are you won't need to use all of it for 95% of the content in the game.
Now, other, more experienced healers are able to give you a much better answer, because those are the healers I'm referring to. The ones who, in the healer complaints thread say that half their kit goes unused, and that healing is super easy. Both because of how fights are designed, but also because they don't feel like they need these many answers. If you want a better answer, go ask them. But if that's how they feel, and given that my assessment is literally "We have so many skills for such esoteric situations, whereas our damaging kit is a single button spam", then the amount of healing skills Square provides needs to be looked into. Not every skill needs to be in here, and some (even if they have a use) just are far too niche to remain in consideration as-is.

The other issue I take is how the skills are designed overall. WHM imo suffers the most of this, where despite every skill being a bit different, they're really just reworks of the base Cure 2 spell. You have Cure 2 on an instant cast, Cure 2 on an OGCD, Medica on instant cast, Medica on OGCD and deals damage, Stronger but Shorter-Ranged Medica, Medica with Regens. Hell, Plenary Indulgence is literally "Do you want Medica with that Medica?" and Lillybell is "Have medicas whenever the healer is hit by something".

There isn't much to their design, they really are the same spell, but done "differently". And like I said, "not every single skill in the game is useless", meaning that even if these skills are "the same spell but differently", it's that difference that makes or breaks it. But there's nothing new about those spells. Their design is insipid. It's fine if it's a couple spells, other healers have that sort of design (read above, in fact...). But WHM's kit is nothing but the Cure spell reworked half a dozen times. It has no originality, and because of that it's quite bland to play.

Other healers also have heals, they also have regens. But the rest of their kit is unique even among the rest of their skills. The only thing I feel WHM has that's "unique" is Assize, and that's just a glorified Pneuma with MP generation. Hardly innovative. To me, that causes button bloat.

I imagine forcing participation in the Halls of Novice could be done easily enough as part of the MSQ (for one's role) and DF UI (can't matchmake as roles not yet completed), but speaking of abandoned "try-out" systems, I wonder if we might also do something to revamp Halls of Novice and Guildhests alike (some of the later challenges there could actually be quite interesting if [A] they weren't so easily cheesed and [B] if, once thus constrained, they weren't more complex than any actual instance thereafter). Granted, that last bit gets into the ideas of not requiring every dungeon to be a complete face-roll, but... /shrug.

Guildhests and Battlecraft Leves for that matter were suggested before in a different thread by Atelier-Bagur to also be a potential system to bring back and expand upon. I gave the suggestion that they could allow the game to further expand on other things (for example, allow people to take on quests and kill Blasphemies, thus making it look like the Blasphemy problem was more widespread than what we see in the MSQ). Deveryn, however, disagreed and said that current FATEs do what those are meant to be doing, so I assume that's why Square dropped the content overall.

[Eraden]

I would like to see a proper full 3-axis furniture system for housing put in place. This would include the ability to resize and even stretch funrishings.

[ElysiumDragon]

Personally speaking, here's the changes I'd like to see.

Combat:

Smooth out the leveling experience for all jobs, so that jobs aren't too boring at lower levels.

Give healers a more complex damage rotations, instead of a single button.


Raiding:

Either commit to the 2-minute meta and have fights be more mechanically complex, or drop the 2-minute meta and have the jobs themselves be more diverse and complicated.

Reduce book requirements to 4 across the board to allow for faster gearing of alts, and redistribute loot drops so that the first fight of a tier drops the Accessory augment material.

Criterion Savage dropping tokens that can be traded for tome gear augment materials (Hardcore raiders won't be affected, but it'll give midcore/casual raiders another way of earning augment materials a little earlier than an entire major patch later).


Housing:

Upgradeable interiors for Ward Housing and Apartments.

Item slot increases at least once per expansion going forward.

Remove the current gardening system, and replace it with a system that allows for the creation of flower features using garden patches.

Have the various rare items that originally were from gardening instead be obtainable from either Grand Company Seals or Cowries.


Quality of Life:

Implement a system that allows for an infinite number of glamour plates to be created/stored in the dresser, whilst allowing up to X number of plates to be 'assigned' as active plates.

Allow 'replicas' of dungeon gear from non-current content to be purchased with gil from a vendor once the item is initially acquired. The system already exists for relics, so an expansion of it would likely be possible.

Rework the camera on Lalafell characters in a way that prevents the issue of Lalafell not being able to target larger bosses.

[Ozzmal]

100% a complete overhaul of the glamour system. Something similar to transmog in World of Warcraft would be amazing.

[ThaCa]

I think the largest change that would be overall beneficial to the average player would be introduction of intermediate difficulty content that serves as stepping stone from Normal to Extreme. Currently aside from few outliers the Normal difficulty content is absurdly easy in comparison to Extreme and even more so compared to Savage.

Having something that eases people to higher content while still offering some level of base challenge would be really nice for more midcore player, especially if it comes in multiple variants of player numbers.

Along with that, it would be nice if they widened the itemization at bit. Like have the Alliance raid items have different secondary stats to tome or raid gear and make them upgradeable by Book mats or something. This would make them more worthwhile to run few times instead of like once for raiders to further optimize their gear during the catchup patches and potentially offer some carrot to chase for players newer to high end stuff to at least make attempts to first floor or two of Savage.

Future Criterion dungeons should have their base form be retuned to either the new mid difficulty or Extreme, giving Extreme level non-weapon gear. Savage version should be the all-out current one and reward something like the upgrade items for tome gear, uncapped during the catchup and maybe early capped during raid patches.

Biggest upgrade would be rebuilding a lot of things from ground up for more responsive gameplay and whatnot but that's unlikely to happen due the sheer size of the task.

[Midareyukki]

Rework the camera on Lalafell characters in a way that prevents the issue of Lalafell not being able to target larger bosses.

What do you mean there are players who struggle to target a boss?? Who designed this? xD

[Yeastyloins]

Actual dps checks in normal raids. This excludes MSQ trials though since those should have a lower bar to trip over so people can enjoy the MSQ.

[Soge01]

Less focus on job balance and more focus on fun and engaging job designs.

I literally play Summoner when I'm feeling too lazy to actually try, while I frequently play Ninja and Black Mage when I do.

[Shurrikhan]

What do you mean there are players who struggle to target a boss?? Who designed this? xD

I think that comes from --for reasons unknown to me-- that we don't actually target units, but rather their nameplates. (Note that other anchors, such as a more 'center mass' or 'head' anchor are used for attacks and therefore could have been used instead...) And so, if the nameplate is too high for your camera, due to its proximity to the ground and being too close to the potential target, you will not be able to tab or even "Target Nearest Enemy" to it. v.v

Ultrawide also adds a further degree of annoyance, as an otherwise comfortable angle/view may be narrowly too short to tab-target bosses.

[Shurrikhan]

Guildhests and Battlecraft Leves for that matter were suggested before in a different thread by Atelier-Bagur to also be a potential system to bring back and expand upon. I gave the suggestion that they could allow the game to further expand on other things (for example, allow people to take on quests and kill Blasphemies, thus making it look like the Blasphemy problem was more widespread than what we see in the MSQ). Deveryn, however, disagreed and said that current FATEs do what those are meant to be doing, so I assume that's why Square dropped the content overall.

FATEs are pretty hard to curate or even sequence (outside of particular chains, which wouldn't really fit that wide-spread apocalypse we want to flesh out), though, so I can't see how that could really substitute revamped guildhests or leves (depending on the degree of revamp) as a way to flesh out the Blasphemy incursion/encroachment, let alone function at all as learning tools or things that'd deliberately offer new mechanics (though maybe that's thinking too much in terms of higher level 1.x leves?)...

I understand what you're saying about OGCDs and GCDs not being as redundant as they seem, and indeed the ability to press, for example, Tetragrammaton, implies you're not wasting a GCD to cast Afflatus Solace, or worse, Cure 2. So it's not like every single skill in the game is absolutely useless. That's not what I'm trying to imply xD

Sorry for my ambiguity there. I didn't think you were implying anything like that. It's just been kind of a go-to definitional criteria elsewhere and I thought you might shed some light on how we might take that further towards more useful precision.

I don't think we've gotten there just yet, but with your elaboration I think we can agree on and better describe the most egregious examples of "redundancy" and the problem cases near(est) it.