Playing an expansion as current content has been a lacklustre MMO experience

[R041]

I'm pretty sure we've now been completely infested with hate filled ex-WoW players. Just festering, looking at how fun everyone's having in Dragonflight right now.

"NO FF IS BEST IN EVERY WAY! I HATE THINGS AND CONTENT!"

[Shurrikhan]

Oh this is the constant whine about one ability, Kaiten. Gutted? Dont be absurd.

• Samurai's minute-to-minute depth (not even counting Kaiten) being largely squished and sidelined through how they decided to handle the player-stated problems with TG...
• Monk's means of burst after choice of opener being reduced to just Blitz-inside-RoF and its older iconic skills not being revitalized for lack of space despite leaving shit like Form Shift needing a separate button (they could as easily have just given a 15% damage buff and recast time decrease per other Form used prior, stacking up to twice, and it'd have done everything the rigid form system manages, but with greater depth and fewer bloat buttons)...
• Machinist being gutted into a shell of a job...
• Ninja's physical rotation being reduced from 4 to solely a spam-combo and a maintenance combo and its Ninjutsu made more sluggish GCDs just so the devs would be excused from fixing the double-ping punishment to uptime on oGCDs that still cripples higher-ping players on several jobs and therefore needs solving regardless...
• DRG being removed of almost any macrorotational reason to hold CDs, despite its traditional ability to bank so much more than most jobs for precisely that purpose...
• BRD being stripped of its DoT interactions and reduced to essentially a RF>BS macro for 94% of its GCDs...
• AST's cards being devalued to a sliver of their old thematic range and value...
• DRK turning into a "oGCD-heavy Warrior"...
• SCH losing its DoTs and all but 1 (heavily nerfed in relative value) offensive Aetherflow spender, and somehow managing to make pets seemingly even less responsive with each reiteration...
• Warrior being stripped of its core balance of Wrath vs. Abandon, leaving Upheaval an uninteractive, dry-as-dust CD and Equilibrium a senseless misnomer...
• (Need one go on?)

No, Kaiten is not the limit of what people are talking about when talking about classes being gutted.

[Striker44]

I said every. single. class. Which is a fact, they have all been butchered every expac since Heavensward.

This is from a dishonest perspective, it's clear you're a new player into XIV and have a skewed perception of what's going on. Next you're gonna tell me to go play POTD just like all the other new players.

Nope, buddy. That's an opinion. Personally? I love the way PLD, SCH, and RDM play right now. And I only really stick with 3 consistently because that's what I have the time to play. I level up other classes such as BRD and DRG just to have one of each "role" type, but I pick one tank, one healer, and one DPS that I really enjoy to be my "main" classes.

And the moment you go into making claims like "you must be a new player," you lose the argument. Making claims like that is the only "dishonest" thing happening here. Stop trying to masquerade opinions as if they're facts, and then fabricate things about people who point out where you're wrong.

Sincerely,

(Someone who's been playing since 2015)

[Atelier-Bagur]

I'm pretty sure we've now been completely infested with hate filled ex-WoW players. Just festering, looking at how fun everyone's having in Dragonflight right now.

"NO FF IS BEST IN EVERY WAY! I HATE THINGS AND CONTENT!"

Although really Dragonflight does look pretty fun. Im happy for the WoW folks.

[VelKallor]

it's clear you're a new player into XIV and have a skewed perception of what's going on.

2019 - 2022 isnt new. Close to 4 years. My perception is fine.

To be precise: April 2019 to today, 3 years 9 months.

No I didn't like a lot about 1.0, but that wasn't the point in our discussion. It was you saying SE don't chainsaw things, which they do.

If you equate the major upheaval that was ABSOLUTELY necessary to save the entire damned game with what Blizzard does. I cant help you. No one can.

There is NO comparison between 1.0 - 2.0 and Blizzards massive deletion of old and CURRENT content. I pointed it out..they deleted content and questlines less than three weeks after the launch of Shadowlands.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I didn't say it would solve job homogeneity. But if you have content homogeneity w/o job homogeneity, you're going to have 1-5 jobs outperforming the rest and becoming go-to picks not just sometimes... but nearly all the time. And if you have both content and job homogeneity, imbalances are that much more sensitive to changes, since the jobs generally less favorable for underperforming in raw throughput over time, etc., can neither possess nor utilize any redeeming features.

No, content diversity won't solve job homogeneity. Content diversity merely reduces the likelihood of job design excusing itself deeper and deeper towards homogeneity because it offers new and different levers for diversity in job design to pull differently.

The problem then, though, becomes that without truly stellar design and/or many iterations of polish so that nearly every job can offer to a fight advantages that are distinct but roughly equal in value, you end up then with go-to picks on a fight-by-fight basis. While more diverting and offering objectively more to experience within the game, that can also be more annoying, given the time the game milks from (or to be a) multileveler(s).

You can still get a greater sum of diversity and parity in the meantime, though, by just making it so a given instance isn't as likely to pedestal or dumpster a given job by offering more choices by which that instance can be run, as per R041's example of multiple paths. That's something specific to dungeons, while the likes of trials and raids would need more sophisticated solutions, but we were discussing dungeons, after all.

Tl;dr:
If you want jobs not to play the same, there needs to be a playground in which for them to play differently. There's only so much distinction one can get out of {Pull All Trash and Just AoE it Down x2, Bossx1, Repeat}. Job diversity and content diversity pretty much have to be taken as a leap together.

Im saying in regards to the design that we have now. Changing encounters needs to also involve changing jobs themselves to be less homogenized so yeah I agree. Because the only real difference jobs have with current combat design is just all about damage and buffs. For the jobs to be truly unique they need to offer actual different strategies for a fight like in FFXI. But because encounter design lacks any actual strategy in the standards of rpg depth such as weaknesses, buffs, debuffs, resistances etc then you'll get what we have now where we live with the whole every class is a dps meme. The encounter design cant be changed for the better without needing to change the combat itself.

So yeah I thiiiiink I get what you're trying to say.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I said every. single. class. Which is a fact, they have all been butchered every expac since Heavensward.

This is from a dishonest perspective, it's clear you're a new player into XIV and have a skewed perception of what's going on. Next you're gonna tell me to go play POTD just like all the other new players.

Your opinions no longer matter to me if that's all you think was gutted, unless you're just trolling me. This has to be a troll right?

No I didn't like a lot about 1.0, but that wasn't the point in our discussion. It was you saying SE don't chainsaw things, which they do.

I argue a lot of changes in design can be considered improvements rather than just childishly calling them that they butchered them. Curious did people back in the day actually were truly satisfied with the current design in the game at the time? Like lets be honest and take off the nostalgia goggles.

[VelKallor]

Like lets be honest and take off the nostalgia goggles

Atelier? I have a feeling he wants to ask for 1.0 servers. Blizzard did that for Classic..and now they are ghost towns. Nostalgia is a great place to visit, but no one with half a brain wants to LIVE there.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Atelier? I have a feeling he wants to ask for 1.0 servers. Blizzard did that for Classic..and now they are ghost towns. Nostalgia is a great place to visit, but no one with half a brain wants to LIVE there.

Actually you know what that brings up a curious but dangerous question. Wonder if there any private servers of this game based off of a certain expansion era. You figure they might.

[Thaciscokidd]

Actually you know what that brings up a curious but dangerous question. Wonder if there any private servers of this game based off of a certain expansion era. You figure they might.

There are and they stay extremely quiet for a reason. There's a reason 2chan thought that people had private servers a while back