FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[aloneatsea]

1. How do you feel about the general state of job design in Endwalker in contrast to past expansions? Do you think this direction is good or bad for the game long term?

I've only been here since Shadowbringers, so I can't comment sincerely on this much as the difference between Shadowbringers and Endwalker in terms of design is rather small. That said, the current method of setting all raid buffs to the exact same timer (while having frankly insane potencies on certain abilities -- Tech Step, Hyosho, etc etc) is already incredibly detrimental to balance -- not even between jobs, but between making DPS checks reasonable vs coin-toss. We're likely headed into a world of auto-crits and smoothed potencies until 7.0. It's irritating because it's a band-aid fix, but it's better than having to fish for crits to beat a check, I suppose.


2. Which expansion do you think was the best for job design as a whole?
Again, I only have SHB and EW to reference, but between the two of them, SHB is the clear winner. While some jobs have distinctly improved in Endwalker, many jobs haven't, and the aforementioned damage variance due to raid buff stacking appeared (from my perspective) to be much less of a problem due to it being much more difficult to stack multipliers. It's not unusual at all that you might see up to +47% in raid buffs every two minutes in EW, plus any crit-up buffs that might exist. Spreading out raid buffs allows for burst windows that suit a job's natural rhythm (RPRs and RDMs, I imagine, would love to have something like Trick Attack or even old Brotherhood back, if only to have somewhere meaningful to put their excess burst).


3. Other live service games generally release official surveys fairly regularly. For example, Genshin Impact usually has a new survey near the end of each patch. These games also reward players who take these surveys with in-game items or resources. Should FFXIV be doing this too? What kind of rewards would incentivize you to give feedback on new content or job changes?

I think it would be wise for 14 to do this, but I don't expect it would result in any changes that anyone unhappy with the current state of job design would be pleased about. This sort of feedback would be, by nature, open to everyone, and it is my expectation that rewarding players for it would actually incentivise more casual/short-term players to give feedback, over less casual/longer-term players. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as you cannot reasonably only look at the top end of job performance/satisfaction and make adjustments based on that, but this will not result in the sweeping changes I'd personally love to see.


It might, however, lead to changes in some of the more persistent bugbears that most everyone can agree on, so I think it would be worthwhile overall. In terms of rewards -- well, I'm already here. I somewhat dislike the idea of rewarding feedback, as I'd prefer feedback to come from players who care enough about the game inherently to see it improve. That said, if it's unique glamour or otherwise genuinely desireable, even players who are jaded about SE's tendency to "ignore feedback" might throw their hat in the ring. Don't know.

[Arphene]

They murdered Summoner without giving us anything similar in exchange so all in all I've lost all kind of "hope" I had in the job design team, and I really doubt they will improve in the near future seeing how they like to pander to the lowest common denominator. Not blamming them tho, since clearly thats where the money lies.

[Renathras]

I think the most shocking thing to me about all this is...people actually like BLM. I'm kind of curious if that's a sample bias in the places the poll is posted or not, but it seems pretty wildly different from what the general perception of the Job is and what the census data postings tend to be. But I suppose it is a relatively small sample size of players (and we don't know if players are answering for every Job or only the Jobs the play or only the Jobs they really like/dislike strongly - EDIT: Correction, we KNOW players aren't answering for every Job based on the different response numbers, so it could be people are only answering for the ones they tend to really like or really dislike - strong feelings, in other words - or just the Jobs they more frequently play.)

But it is an interesting outcome I didn't expect to see.

The Healers seem to be bi-modal - with a lot of people liking them a lot and a lot of people hating them a lot, and SMN is the single most extreme bi-modal Job, I think. People that love it absolutely love it but people that hate it (probably a lot of old SMN players) absolutely hate it.

[Kaliesto]

This one is hard for me to discuss as job design from each of us is pretty subjective, but if I had to pick something I say Scholar since it has way too much going on, and can be confusing what to rotate with.

edit-
Well ok there is a couple of other problems I noticed:

1) Black Mages have been getting pounded hard into the ground by raids because the mechanics fly all over the place, so its hard for BLMs to just stand there to cast spells. I know their high DPS makes up for it, but you must be a really good player to do so.

2) I feel the current Limit Breaks 1 & 2 across all jobs are becoming somewhat obsolete, and it really should become unique LBs for each Job rather than copy-paste, in fact, PVP Limit Breaks was on the right path regarding that, and I hope we can see similar for PVE.

3) LB3s for healers & Tanks shouldn't be the same, they should be given something unique besides the basic effect.

4) DPS LB3s are just visually copy-paste huge damage numbers, they should be given some kind of debuff for bosses at least depending what the job is like a Dragoon LB3 can cause BURN effect as one example for 5 seconds.

[VentVanitas]

I think the most shocking thing to me about all this is...people actually like BLM. I'm kind of curious if that's a sample bias in the places the poll is posted or not, but it seems pretty wildly different from what the general perception of the Job is and what the census data postings tend to be.

It's not shocking at all to me. Of course the only job that has any form of lateral play and skill expression is rated the highest.

[ty_taurus]

I think the most shocking thing to me about all this is...people actually like BLM. I'm kind of curious if that's a sample bias in the places the poll is posted or not, but it seems pretty wildly different from what the general perception of the Job is and what the census data postings tend to be. But I suppose it is a relatively small sample size of players (and we don't know if players are answering for every Job or only the Jobs the play or only the Jobs they really like/dislike strongly - EDIT: Correction, we KNOW players aren't answering for every Job based on the different response numbers, so it could be people are only answering for the ones they tend to really like or really dislike - strong feelings, in other words - or just the Jobs they more frequently play.)

But it is an interesting outcome I didn't expect to see.

The Healers seem to be bi-modal - with a lot of people liking them a lot and a lot of people hating them a lot, and SMN is the single most extreme bi-modal Job, I think. People that love it absolutely love it but people that hate it (probably a lot of old SMN players) absolutely hate it.

If you'd like a clearer picture of how each of these examples is scoring:

BLM


SMN


Healers

I just used the challenging content and overall scores (the solo and casual content scores are not better, trust me). I mean SMN is just getting demolished here, meanwhile BLM is just rolling in perfect scores. The healers are a bit more weird. With the exception of SGE, for whatever reason, it seems outside of the staunch defenders and impassioned critics of the role, most players that are responding feel that the healers are mid (except in the solo scores, the healers are crumbling in their solo scores, which isn't surprising since they have nothing to heal in solo). Despite SGE having a higher average, I'd actually say SCH is doing the best because their scores do lean more positive for overall values despite still being fairly mid.

[WaxSw]

If you'd like a clearer picture of how each of these examples is scoring:

BLM


SMN


Healers

I just used the challenging content and overall scores (the solo and casual content scores are not better, trust me). I mean SMN is just getting demolished here, meanwhile BLM is just rolling in perfect scores. The healers are a bit more weird. With the exception of SGE, for whatever reason, it seems outside of the staunch defenders and impassioned critics of the role, most players that are responding feel that the healers are mid (except in the solo scores, the healers are crumbling in their solo scores, which isn't surprising since they have nothing to heal in solo). Despite SGE having a higher average, I'd actually say SCH is doing the best because their scores do lean more positive for overall values despite still being fairly mid.

I think creating a graph with median and average values across jobs could make your study more clear to see which jobs are really under/overperforming, numbers alone may create a distorted view of a 5-6 being "good" grades when if everyone else is getting 8-9s they are underperforming (and same if everyone else is getting 2-3 then they are performing better than it shows)

[Shinkuno]

I think the most shocking thing to me about all this is...people actually like BLM. I'm kind of curious if that's a sample bias in the places the poll is posted or not, but it seems pretty wildly different from what the general perception of the Job is and what the census data postings tend to be. But I suppose it is a relatively small sample size of players (and we don't know if players are answering for every Job or only the Jobs the play or only the Jobs they really like/dislike strongly - EDIT: Correction, we KNOW players aren't answering for every Job based on the different response numbers, so it could be people are only answering for the ones they tend to really like or really dislike - strong feelings, in other words - or just the Jobs they more frequently play.)

But it is an interesting outcome I didn't expect to see.

The Healers seem to be bi-modal - with a lot of people liking them a lot and a lot of people hating them a lot, and SMN is the single most extreme bi-modal Job, I think. People that love it absolutely love it but people that hate it (probably a lot of old SMN players) absolutely hate it.

whats shocking

flows nicely, casting based caster compared to summoner and hybrid rdm, no needless ogcd spam, rewards you knowing your job AND boss, lots of optimization

guess its shocking when you consider that a large part of the playerbase would want a 1 button class

[IDontPetLalas]

Well in the case of healers, it's a bit tricky to interpret why solo numbers are low. Is it because there is nothing to heal that someone rated it low or is because the healer's personal DPS is so low that solo content is a miserable slog?

i imagine there could be people in both groups, we don't know how many.

[Deceptus]

They murdered Summoner without giving us anything similar in exchange so all in all I've lost all kind of "hope" I had in the job design team, and I really doubt they will improve in the near future seeing how they like to pander to the lowest common denominator. Not blamming them tho, since clearly thats where the money lies.

Counter argument:

Summoner actually feels like a SUMMONER now instead of pick an egi and stick with it the entire fight. I'd rather be summoning than spamming Ruin x 100.

If I wanted to do that, I'd play Scholar.