FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[Connor]

I just wanted to chime in again and say that I'm happy that quite some people appreciated HW BRD, that was one of my favourite iterations of BRD, I greatly enjoyed both bowmage and gunmage. But I concede that a great many people hated it and it was a bad thing to give BRD cast times just to match with MCH, also SB BRD was also a lot of fun and quite well-designed.

However, I still firmly believe that them backtracking on their original vision of MCH in HW caused irreparable damage to the design as a whole. The SB form of MCH was obviously hastily slapped together and was a hot mess (heh, heat) of a job. I really wished there was a way to preserve the gameplay of gunmage and I firmly believe that it's a huge mistake to force onto BRD what MCH is designed for and vice versa.

Honestly after Heavensward’s BRD/MCH buff-battle every patch I genuinely don’t think the developers are even going to bother trying to balance them. Bard will forever remain a lacklustre, boring dps with some barely existent ‘party support’ (if you can call dps skills that incidentally buff the party ‘support’ lol). Machinist will forever remain the Wish version of Black Mage / Samurai, built upon the same concept yet literally incapable of utilising it because ranged tax.

Then there’s Dancer which I honestly think is a devs main or something lol, they basically took everything good from the ranged dps role and slapped it all on Dancer. And even then from what I understand Dancer is mostly used for dps/parse padding and not because it’s a valuable job to take lol.

The whole ranged dps subcategory desperately needs to reworked.
Being a shit dps ‘that can move a bit more than everyone else’ is the most ridiculous justification for a subcategory to exist lol.
‘You can play this sub role, but you’ll be eternally shit, your gameplay is going to be dull as hell…’ Bard is literally just hitting Burst Shot and Procs now, and yet only healers complain about having a one/two button rotation. I honestly feel like Bard is just as bad as healers in terms of ‘one-button spam’ and occasionally smashing an oGCD with your face. Least Bards buff party members when they run their face across the keyboard lol. I mean their only unique support ability now is fucking Mantra now, the Monk ability lol. Except Monks is on a shorter cool-down so they literally offer the party more frequently used unique support than the so-called ‘support dps’. Bard’s is 5% stronger, sure, but honestly I’d rather use it more frequently than get a measly 5% extra healing (that nobody ever wants lol)

‘Oh but it’s ok, you can support the party - with dps. Except your dps is never as good as anyone else’s. So you’re a support whose support is their damage…but you cant do damage…you can’t use meaningful support because bAlAnCe (mocking the devs here not the players lol).

Basically if you want to play a ranged dps you’re either relegated to Dancer for someone’s parses or you’re a Bard / Machinist which is just a shittier version of something else (Dancer and Black Mage / Samurai respectively)

If you ask me the developers desperately need to go way back to the original concepts for the jobs. Bards buff the party by casting songs (1.5 cast times reduce necessity of ranged taxes and doesn’t affect oGCD usage), Machinists debuff the enemy with their tools, auto-turrets and the like, Dancers provide stronger buffs but they’re contingent on the Dance Partner. All this ‘dps padding to make it look like they’re as good as the others except they never are’ is just getting really silly at this point.

[ForsakenRoe]

Well, BRD has a spammed move, a proc off of that spammed move, a short OGCD with charges (bloodletter), a short OGCD that forces a proc (empyreal arrow), a gauge that charges each time you get a proc to spend on a powerful hit (apex), dots (lets call it one because iron jaws resets both), and three separate 'stances' which all have slightly differing gameplay, and cause the procs to affect you differently. To have parity with healers, BRD would have to lose the songs (imagine you're in army's paeon all the time), Bloodletter, one of the two dots, the Apex gauge, Refulgent, and Empyreal would stay, but changed to be 40s CD

I didn't care much for bow mage in HW, but I found the cast times on MCH completely fine. It was designed around the idea of the cast times, the ammo made it instantcast, procs of your 123 made those instantcast, it worked together. Now we have constant flips and jumps everytime you want to do a simple 123. Can we rework the 5 Heat Blasts into 'Heat Blast, Heated Slug, Split, Clean, finisher of some sort (maybe the bazooka from diadem)' so we don't have to see the flips constantly, they get hella stale with how constant they are (and it's an excuse to bring back regular Clean Shot's animation)

[Aravell]

I didn't care much for bow mage in HW, but I found the cast times on MCH completely fine. It was designed around the idea of the cast times, the ammo made it instantcast, procs of your 123 made those instantcast, it worked together. Now we have constant flips and jumps everytime you want to do a simple 123. Can we rework the 5 Heat Blasts into 'Heat Blast, Heated Slug, Split, Clean, finisher of some sort (maybe the bazooka from diadem)' so we don't have to see the flips constantly, they get hella stale with how constant they are (and it's an excuse to bring back regular Clean Shot's animation)

Oh, I agree with you that the constant flipping is ridiculous, they've also already proven that they can do a nice casting animation for MCH in PvP. Honestly, I'd rather they just get rid of Hypercharge and the "Spam 5 in a row" gameplay and just bring back the old longer Wildfire where you actually had to set up beforehand and use your brain during it for maximum impact.

[Renathras]

Right, but 'no change' means 'no change', so it'd be more like them being 'rates stay as is' as one end of the scale, and then the rest of the scale being 'rates cut by 30%', 'rates cut by 60%' and 'the government actually pays the students a grant to go to uni, and it also doesn't have fees at all'. I don't see how 'Mini rework' can equate to 'the fees stay exactly as is' because nothing is getting reworked in that example.

I'm pointing out there are four camps in the question bank, so that's the best way to make a parallel. It's very likely if you asked "remove DPS buttons", there would be a few takers (not many, but more than zero - had a few in the long-form survey say that's what they wanted, too). But we can't just make what we want, we have to work with the questions asked. No change isn't necessarily the opposite of "Major Overhaul", but that's another point entirely.

Again, subjective causes problems. I'd consider "No change" to be literally NO CHANGE, so Expansion alterations would be considered very minor changes, especially if they actually change the rotation at all. For example, WAR got Primal Rend, and while it's very small, it changes the rotation of the Job, so that's not "No change".

I think the problem is you're thinking of what the categories mean to you and thinking that's what everyone else meant by the terms. I'm kind of pointing out that's the problems with the terms being vague. Even "No change" we can debate over the meaning, and it's the one that would be the most straightforward of the options.

Anyway, the short version is that the AST/SCH results indicate people largely want a major rework, leaning towards total rework for AST and leaning towards minor rework for SCH (but pretty major overall), and that WHM/SGE players want minor changes that don't alter the Jobs too much but nudge around the edges.

I just wanted to chime in again and say that I'm happy that quite some people appreciated HW BRD, that was one of my favourite iterations of BRD, I greatly enjoyed both bowmage and gunmage. But I concede that a great many people hated it and it was a bad thing to give BRD cast times just to match with MCH, also SB BRD was also a lot of fun and quite well-designed.

However, I still firmly believe that them backtracking on their original vision of MCH in HW caused irreparable damage to the design as a whole. The SB form of MCH was obviously hastily slapped together and was a hot mess (heh, heat) of a job. I really wished there was a way to preserve the gameplay of gunmage and I firmly believe that it's a huge mistake to force onto BRD what MCH is designed for and vice versa.

Not in a mechanics sense (I didn't play either back then except in passing) but in a lore/physics of weapons sense, I always felt cast bars on an archer made more sense than cast bars on a gunner. Having shot both guns and bows irl, With bows you have the draw, set, release, which all take a good deal more time than shooting a gun. Gun aiming is also faster (to me) than bow aiming. For people of equal skill, bows will always have slower fire rates (cast times) than guns since both can acquire their target extremely quickly and from there it's just an argument of moving your finger a cm vs notching, drawing, and releasing with a bow.

Then there’s Dancer which I honestly think is a devs main or something lol, they basically took everything good from the ranged dps role and slapped it all on Dancer.

Agreed. This was so dumb to me.

ShB Announcement: We don't think Jobs should be reliant on other Jobs to do their full damage, so we're removing the party buffs from BRD.
Players: Okay, so no more buff abilities for other players, got i-
ShB Announcement: Incidentally, we're adding DNC as the new Job.
Players: Ah, cool, so it's a new Hea-
ShB Announcement: It will be a Ranged Physical DPS Job.
Players: A...what?
ShB Announcement: And it will buff allies so they can do their full damage.
Players: The...the what now..?

The whole ranged dps subcategory desperately needs to reworked.

Agreed. I actually REALLY LIKE current MCH, but a "selfish DPS" in a subrole that has a DPS tax makes no darn sense, and the role as a whole is fubar.

I honestly feel like Bard is just as bad as healers in terms of ‘one-button spam’ and occasionally smashing an oGCD with your face. Least Bards buff party members when they run their face across the keyboard lol.

It is one reason I think this survey (or the participants) are somehow particularly tilted against Healers. In most forums where BRD is talked about (both here and elsewhere), it's almost universally being ragged on. Yet here, it's scoring higher than Healers despite people being more negative on it basically everywhere. Which kinda tells me the survey results are being affected by a bit of sample bias or something.

[yookilaylee]

Very happy and relieved to see a lot of Bard DoT defenders around!!

[Semirhage]

I find it fascinating that it *must* be bias. Has to be. Sampling or otherwise. No *true* population canvassing could possibly report dislike or boredom toward job design that involves rotting your brain mashing the Glare key six million times over the course of two expansions. It's such a brilliantly-designed set of jobs. No way people could find them boring or poorly-designed. It's got to be the encounter design fooling them into thinking that Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is boring. Has to be. It's. So. Fun.

[ForsakenRoe]

Yeh if I see Bard at a 6 and healers overall at a 5 (or slightly less for AST), it doesn't say to me 'there is sampling bias', it tells me that both camps see there's a lot of room for improvement. With BRD, I assume that quite a few believe a previous incarnation of BRD was better, likely SB when the DOTs were a more integral part of your kit (they triggered your procs on crit after all), and they still had powerful useful utility skills like Refresh, Palisade, Tactician (lol TP), Minne's CD was busted good back then too iirc

Now, if they were to delete the DOTs from BRD because they don't really do anything anymore, I'd expect that 6 to go straight down to a 3 or less, because then they would be one step closer to that glorious 'one button, one braincell, impossible to f*** up' gameplay that everyone subconsciously desires /s

edit: my theory on why BRD is 6 and healers are 5 or less: they're both in the position of 'they function i guess, but the older versions were way more fun'. But the difference that gives BRD that extra point is that 'BRD retains some of it's interesting gameplay when doing solo stuff', you still have your songs, your DOTs, your procs

I'm pointing out there are four camps in the question bank, so that's the best way to make a parallel. It's very likely if you asked "remove DPS buttons", there would be a few takers (not many, but more than zero - had a few in the long-form survey say that's what they wanted, too). But we can't just make what we want, we have to work with the questions asked. No change isn't necessarily the opposite of "Major Overhaul", but that's another point entirely.

Again, subjective causes problems. I'd consider "No change" to be literally NO CHANGE, so Expansion alterations would be considered very minor changes, especially if they actually change the rotation at all. For example, WAR got Primal Rend, and while it's very small, it changes the rotation of the Job, so that's not "No change".

If you want to look at 'no change' as literally zero changes, that's fine. But you have to also remember, 'absolutely zero changes whatsoever' is never going to occur when an expansion comes out (which would be the best time to rework things anyway). So right off the bat, that category is an impossibility, because 'some changes' is a literal selling point for the expansion. While I can't speak for anyone else, I'd assume that at least some respondents would have thought similarly

The only way 'no changes at all' would work is if the reworks occurred in a random patch like 'oh it's 7.1 here's a big overhaul of how SCH works, have fun learning how it works in two weeks before the new ultimate lands', so that the expansion changes had already occurred by that point. But then, if the expansion had added stuff, that breaks the whole 'no changes at all' clause, doesn't it, what a conundrum

[ty_taurus]

It’s true that what constitutes as a minor or major rework may differ depending on who you ask, but in general, a “rework” in games defines a fundamental shift in the play style of a class or character. As Roe stated, that does not mean literally nothing is added or removed, because that is never the case. Every expansion, every job is required to include new abilities because if they don’t, there is a fear of backlash.

No rework was meant to imply a normal amount of new actions, and maybe some subtle cleaning up of existing tools. For example, I do not think the removal of Shadowbringers Fluid Aura constitutes as a rework, and I imagine most people would agree. But I think we’re getting in the weeds over the semantics. The point of that question was to see how people felt about how each job’s gameplay feels.

No rework = this job has good gameplay and nothing specific is needed.

Minor rework = there is some clunkiness that needs to be ironed out, but otherwise the job is good.

Major rework = the job has a good concept, but does not feel fun/satisfying/rewarding to play and/or is not functioning properly.

Overhaul = The job is completely failing to deliver on its design and/or job fantasy and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

I wanted to keep each answer short and clear though, which is why I didn’t try to add that much detail to each response option. If it’s too long wordy, it may have gotten ignored.

[SieyaM]

Wow, I didn't realize there were 5 melee but only 3 casters and ranged jobs.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Wow, I didn't realize there were 5 melee but only 3 casters and ranged jobs.

That's due to them splitting melee into subtypes by gear.

Lightweight STR based (MNK, SAM)
Mediumweight STR Based (DRG, RPR)
Lightweight DEX Based (NIN)

Then again they also used to just call the rest Ranged DPS and separate them into 2 subtypes.

Physical Ranged DPS (BRD, MCH, DNC)
Magical Ranged DPS (BLM, SMN, RDM)