7.0 wishlist

[Asako]

Take everything they done with Endwalker and do the complete opposite. Easily the worst expansion they have released to date. Shame too because the initial story 6.0 to 6.1 was handled well. Everything else has been absolutely shocking bad.

[Shurrikhan]

Take everything they done with Endwalker and do the complete opposite. Easily the worst expansion they have released to date. Shame too because the initial story 6.0 to 6.1 was handled well. Everything else has been absolutely shocking bad.

I doubt this would be very productive. Nearly all potential outcomes, decisions, balance states, etc., are bad; what would be 'good' is a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what's possible. Shooting into the dark any which way so long as it's not the same trajectory as Endwalker would most likely do worse than Endwalker.

And that's coming from someone who thinks that overall the game went to crap with 5.0 and has only gotten worse since.

Now, I do absolutely think that 7.0 needs to make sweeping fundamental changes before the opportunity (with this new arc) passes them by, but I do think those need to be deliberate per whatever new vision they take for the game, rather than merely reactionary (solely trying to undo recent gameplay degradation).



Are there some changes that should be reverted, especially with improvements to "solve" the "issues" those changes were meant to address? Absolutely.

Let's take melee movement consequent to differing AoEs, for instance.

One of the main pain points previous to changing nearly all conal AoEs into radial AoEs was that those who could not rapidly change targets would have to always move with the tank and out of melee-occluding AoEs respective to their target. As such, despite that conal AoEs had 60% more reach than circular AoEs, many a controller-based player found them annoying to leverage. The cost was that melee lost any sense of repositioning during AoEs, something that used to be at least as vital as positionals during single-target attacks. That greatly reduced a form of APM and engagement that didn't even require buttons. But there was a much, much less intrusive alternative fix possible for that: simply no longer require conal AoEs to have a target; that way they could be aimed according to player facing rather than solely according to player-to-target angle, removing the disproportionate penalty faced by those who couldn't simply click on a new target.


Or take positionals themselves.

One of the largest pain-points for positionals is that what the player sees isn't that close to what the server sees at the time our skills are actuated. This is hellish in PvP, too, of course, but at least in PvP there exists some reason not to let a lagging player melee and enemy from what would appear to the victim to be from 10+ yalms away. In PvE, though, there's no victim of that exchange if we were to, say, move the positional check to a quarter-second earlier and then repeat it twice more each quarter-second after and count success among any of the three as a positional success. In that way, whether we successfully reacted to our visuals OR predicted what the server would read, we still get our success.

The other is the "bloat" of True North. While it ultimately offers far more room for optimization than, say, the likes of Surecast or Arm's Length as knockback-negation, its impact obviously isn't going to be as noticeable to most players, and most seem to feel that rather than the skill offering some new featural capacity, it exists just to apologize its way out of a core mechanic (those positionals). But, we could as easily just replace it with the passive that allows us to bank, say, 4 charges of guaranteed positionals, where those charges are infrequently generated per X successful positionals, Y GCDs' time, or some combination of the two (success and time). Whatever -- so long as it costs no buttons, wastes virtually no successes, and just generally feels plenty smooth. That would also make it so that, unlike the remaining actions you could correctly position during True North, no successful positionals wholly go to waste unless capped (with only one such free positional per 15 seconds or so, overall). Therein you'd have a less button-costly and slightly more intuitive solution that'd also smoothly allow for, say, Monk to gain back its positionals on most skills instead of having only two of them.