Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[thevanguard]

I agree that 7.0 is going to be the make or break regarding the battle system. 2 Min meta is unpopular everywhere and has been the spawn of more balance issues than I've personally seen since starting this game. Crits, buff drift, DH, downtime, certain jobs being so genuinely bad at a fight that they are all but excluded, MELEEWALKER... They must know it's completely out of control or they wouldn't have nerfed the DPS check of Anabaesios into the ground.

Not only that, but none of the game has any difficulty while leveling. Then you join an EX fight and get your shit pushed in because you've been on easy mode for 100+ hours at this point.
The difficulty curve is bad. By Stormblood, dungeons should be asking more of people. By Endwalker, dungeon bosses should have enrages (still loose ones), insta kill abilities (make them slow casted), and mechanics that use at least two brain cells instead of one. Think of the Vault before we greatly outgeared it.

This is one and only area of CBU3 that I genuinely hope they just flat out fire everyone (job team) because they are incredibly incompetent.



- ultimate
- raid tier
- tons of fishing (please save me)
- housing
- place to hang out/RP with my friends
- too many hours collecting stuff
- leveling more jobs on my raid alt so i'm not locked into a certain role
- making gil for the ugly gold mounts and prep for ex shiny weapons I like.
- pvp

I'm having fun. I personally get my money's worth. Could it be better? Absolutely. See above.

Lmao fire the balancing team? More like firing everyone in SE starting from the NFT acolytes

[Tsumdere]

Lmao fire the balancing team? More like firing everyone in SE starting from the NFT acolytes

I just think everyone else COULD possibly learn. The job balance team has dents in their heads that destroyed the frontal lobe and there is no saving them.

[Iscah]

I don't think they're even catering to the Final Fantasy fans because they've stripped out so much of the RPG elements as well. If you're someone that enjoyed the older titles, you wouldn't enjoy how bland this game is in terms of RPG customisation and such.

Customisation has never felt like a defining aspect of a JRPG to me.

Like, sure, they might have some customisation to varying degrees but it's rarely ever something that excites me to play around with unless it can be freely rearranged and corrected later. Switching around jobs in FF3 is fine; picking who to permanently assign bonus skills to in FF4 Remake makes me dive for a walkthrough I can follow.

[Kes13a]

The job balance team has dents in their heads that destroyed the frontal lobe and there is no saving them.

I havent played any game yet where the developers have been able to balance to satisfaction. why? because of the players. unless all jobs are exactly the same, you will always have one that does more of something.

people complain about something being unbalanced so they "balance it" and then people complain about loss of "job identity"

bottom line is, the problem with balance is your fellow players. once someone learns a job well, they will naturally outperform people who do not. the player base screams for the mythical balance to counteract that, its an endless circle of demands that has led us to exactly what we have today.

[Tsumdere]

I havent played any game yet where the developers have been able to balance to satisfaction. why? because of the players. unless all jobs are exactly the same, you will always have one that does more of something.

people complain about something being unbalanced so they "balance it" and then people complain about loss of "job identity"

bottom line is, the problem with balance is your fellow players. once someone learns a job well, they will naturally outperform people who do not. the player base screams for the mythical balance to counteract that, its an endless circle of demands that has led us to exactly what we have today.

Hi!

Don't!

The hardest jobs in the game being lower than melee is not balance (except now BLM after buffs because we can't let BLM be bad! fuck the other guys tho.)
Being able to lose DPS checks due to poor RNG (happened to us once in TOP because we legit low rolled all LBs and none of us crit big skills) is not balance.
The devs admitting they overtuned something and it being basically impossible to beat in certain comps is not balance.

Removing Kaiten is not good design.
2 Min Meta is not good design.
Pruning meaningful skills while leaving AoE skill bloat is not good design.
Removal of a job archetype and not replacing it is not good design (DoT).
Healers not having to heal, but also not having a DPS rotation is not good design.
Oblation is not good design.
Enhanced Unmend is not good design.
BRD is not good design.

This isn't about perfect numerical balance, but their decisions making no god damn sense. They remove Kaiten because of button bloat but leave a ton of pointless AoE skills? Why does DNC do everything better than the other phys ranged - mobility, support, damage, and ease of use? Why is DRG getting a rework but not BRD? Why do they insist on taking everything away from healers leaving them as hollow shells of "press glare, sometimes assize". Why do both Crit/DH exist? Why keep making skills auto-crit? Because of damage variance? But it will continue to exist because of DH and the absolutely insane potency of some of these skills. What is the point of crit then?

They are dent heads.

[Deo14]

When I was looking into the Kaiten clown fiesta, I saw what Yoshi said about Kaiten in translation of patch notes reading stream. It seems like single dev suggested it, and then Yoshi agreed with it. So yes, this seems to be their workflow. One dev gets an idea, Yoshi (who has been half working of FFXVI) agrees or denies it, and then it goes live. So whole 1.5 devs do these decisions. This is just speculation (it was unofficial translations tbf) and seems pretty far fetched, but when you hear that game has just 4 job designers, it all starts to make sense.

I saw comments asking for the person responsible to come out and explain themselves, but even if they come out I doubt that they will say anything different than what I did. By the way, the adjustments you see here are the result of me debating with the person who worked on it, along with discussing the risks it come with, and in the end, decided and then signed on it after knowing and acknowledging that performing such changes are for the sake of the playerbase. So this is definitely my responsibility...so probably no matter how much I say here it will just be some speech where people either be convinced or not so...

[Iscah]

It seems like single dev suggested it, and then Yoshi agreed with it.

You make it sound like the whole conversation is just A: "Let's delete Kaiten!" B: "Okay, do it."

That's not what the quote you provided actually says.

[Sindele]

I assure you that it is extraordinarily normal for one designer to handle an entire class from the top-down, and for that designer to be responsible for multiple classes.

[Deo14]

You make it sound like the whole conversation is just A: "Let's delete Kaiten!" B: "Okay, do it."

That's not what the quote you provided actually says.

It's still discussion between mere 2 devs, and even then, no one can say if it's sincere or another PR talk, because few sentence later, he says that it was necessary so they're not restricted by it:

Of course there are times where I thought of just flip the table and not change anything...but still...yeah on SAM's guaranteed critical, having that will make SAM's performance jump really high but there are also parts where SAM doesn't see drastic jump as they should...and on Kaiten getting removed we did that because we want to do away having to be restricted by that move, and as for its sub stats, the influence of those stats as the patch moves on will become bigger and bigger and it'll jump the job's performance really high, more so than expected and in reverse the numbers on lesser patch will see the job not jumping as high as the job should....hmmmm...Indeed, it is true that the job's strength and weakness will depend on whether the job's amount of critical dealt and I agree the job relied on that aspect too much, and as for the strength and weakness...yeah that's what it is. I of course do understand that this is part of the fun for the job....and, as for this time, we saw specific actions determined the the composition of DPS and perhaps it leaned way too much so we let some of the weapon skill value loose and we know that if we just increase the potency of weapon skill it'll result in those skills at lower level being too strong, so we adjusted on those values as well by... please refer to the new traits added to SAM located below. So...yeah, this is the adjustments for the job we made for this patch.

... just to contradict it later, by saying that it was actually for "player's enjoyment":

Well, of course I am very well aware and understand that players will feel lonely and their displeasure will get really big when certain elements of the job they played and got used to for quite a long while now gets changed or removed, so it's not like we're purposely looking away these comments with disapproval or something, but it'll definitely be much appreciated if you can tell us which part you want us to retain or tell us more on which aspects are more favorable to you after touching on the adjustments so that we can take your comment as reference, and from there we'll know where to draw the line. I'll repeat myself that we really did all these adjustments for the sake of player's enjoyment here so I'll be thankful if you all can understand this. (The rest omitted)

Last but not least, one of many "please gib feedback", even though they completely ignore it.

Still, I of course do acknowledge that there are parts where people did not ask for, like Ninja or Samurai..and regarding Samurai's guaranteed Critical, we indeed struggled a lot on the balance adjustments due to the strong ratio fluctuation here, and we really attempted to close the variance gap for as much as we could, and we know this is done for the sake of job balance so I really appreciate if you can understand what we're trying to achieve here. You can send us feedback from there and if the voices of how a job's identity has been taken away too much then these comments will act as a reference to the direction of job balance and improvements we'll be performing in the future. So please, if you do think it matters to you, do send us a feedback regarding the matter.

I assure you that it is extraordinarily normal for one designer to handle an entire class from the top-down, and for that designer to be responsible for multiple classes.

Which would be fine if that dev actually played that job.

[Sindele]

To put it as gently as possible, you have no idea what went into that decision and have no grounds to justify that statement other than being mad. You're perfectly allowed to not like it and want it to go back - I'm still bitter about Kaiten and will probably die mad about it - but it's very likely there's telemetry data driving this decision that none of us are privy to.