How will 7.0 make jobs even more dumbed down?

[Zarkovitch]

BLM, casting, no posiontal for melee and combo rotation in 1 button. There still a lot ways of making the game easier.

[Kewitt]

FFXIV PVP buttons will likely be a part of the change. I'm having issues with the button blot as is.

[Shurrikhan]

FFXIV PVP buttons will likely be a part of the change. I'm having issues with the button blot as is.

As much as it makes no sense to spend 3-6 buttons (DRG) on what amounts to a singular decision ("Single-target rotation... go?"), I really hope they won't just settle for the jank of consolidating those actions while still having every ST and AoE combo start from the same sub-action. I'd kinda rather just rehaul combos altogether before that.

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For instance, let's take DRG, which has its ST Priority Combo, ST Filler Combo, and AoE Combo. (Yes, the Priority and Filler are lock-step, effectively turning them into just one combo on any single-target, but in precisely one circumstance, they can at least be worth holding separately!)

Remove all strict combo requirements and just imagine 3 buttons each with up to three skills:

BACKGROUND CHANGES:

• Dragoon gets a trait that makes its combo actions immediately prior to a given weaponskill can fulfill its positional requirements. E.g., if you made a Rear attack just before Chaos Thrust, that Chaos Thrust would also count as having struck from the Rear.
• DoTs/HoTs tick per second, instead of per 3 seconds, since they already tick separately from the MP/TP/HP server tick anyways. Periodic potency divided by 3 and then rounded to the nearest multiple of 5, with direct damage being reduced slightly [to the nearest multiple of 5] if need be.)

BUTTON ONE ("Thrust")

• True Thrust (grants bonus Crit chance to next skill)
• Double Thrust (causes a short bleed, with each strike having a chance to cause a tick to deal its damage instantly, consuming that duration; each hit counts separately) [FLANK]
• Full Thrust (just massive immediate damage)

BUTTON TWO ("Drive")

• Impulse Drive (has twice the normal crit bonus, but deals less damage than True Thrust) [REAR]
• Disembowel (increases your damage dealt to the target)
• Chaos Thrust Drive (significant damage over time) [REAR]

BUTTON THREE ("Surge")

• Doom Spike (after a brief delay launches you forward 8 yalms, snapping to a safe position; grants bonus range on next melee weaponskill, if used within 2 seconds of Doom Spike ending; long linear AoE)
• Sonic Thrust Surge (each hit counts separately, allowing it to rapidly deplete Double Thrust's DoT; narrow conal AoE, not as long as Doom)
• Coerthan Tempest (just a big hit, as long as Doom and as wide as Sonic; three hits in total)

BUTTON FOUR

• Fang and Claw (short linear fall-off AoE that repeats a portion of the previous skill's potency and additional effects' duration to the primary target)

BUTTON FIVE

• Wheeling THRUST Lash (radial fall-off AoE that repeats a smaller portion of the previous skill's potency and additional effects' duration to all enemies struck)

You're completely free to mix and match. Hitting any of those buttons progresses all three, resetting once you've used any finisher.

Chaos Thrust grants Wheeling Thrust and Full Thrust grants Fang and Claw; after Lance Mastery, they each also grant each other (if they hadn't already been granted by the other). Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw can be used at any time, allowing you to spread not only FT and CT, but also DT and Db, etc.

(AoE potencies have been increased to function just fine without Power Surge, since you can now spread Disembowel via Wheeling Thrust anyways.)

Voila. With that you don't have the ugly jank of PvP combos taking up, say, 2 buttons for action-chains that are 33-67% identical, there are no finger-traps, AND the kit's a bit more interesting and versatile.

[Cabalabob]

I’ve been thinking less about how they can dumb down jobs and more about how they can dumb down stats in general. There are a lot of meaningless stats in this game and with how streamlined it is these days and how much SE wants to have vice like control over our timing and output I feel like there are some stats that just don’t mix with that design.

Primary stats: These can all go. We simply don’t use them anymore, all our moves scale off one stat and that’s it. Even if jobs have moves that should realistically scale off another stat they don’t… PLD, DRK and RPR magic? All based on their primary stats rather than INT/MND, so why even bother having these stats? So SMN can continue to have it’s one exception to this rule in physick? (which the community at large has been questioning that design choice since HW). Just remove all primary stats and replace them with power and HP. Power = STR/DEX/INT/MND, HP = VIT.

Skill speed and spell speed: Either, they’ll merge skill and spell speed into haste/speed which will just be both stats as one because most jobs either only use one type or the jobs that use both just get needlessly gimped on some of their kit since they don’t have any access to the other stat. OR they’ll outright remove these stats. Looking at the way the game is changing, we are getting more and more abilities that are stack based so how fast you go is irrelevant and the moves that are duration based are being set at intervals that we can’t squeeze anything extra into them (look at the PLD rework with FoF). So why even have the ability to manipulate our speed if SE just wants to control our rotation and how many attacks we can fit into our buff windows anyway?

Crit and direct hit: Similar to the above, I can see them just removing these stats. Change moves like battle litany and soul voice to just be straight damage increases, remove auto crit/d.hit moves off jobs like SAM and WAR and just increase their potencies…. What really changes other than our numbers become more consistent?

So what do we have left for secondary stats? Determination, this would take the place of crit as the “must have” stat, good for all jobs and will be the capped stat on all the BiS gear and the sub stat on all prog gear. Then we have tenacity and piety as the alternate stat for tanks and healers and then we just need a new stat exclusive to dps, something like evasion that just gives them a chance to take no damage from auto attacks and raidwide attacks. And finally we’d need one extra fluff stat for pentamelds, maybe bring back parry?

So our stats would look like this:
HP
Power
Determination
Parry
Role stat (Tank: Tenacity, Healer: Piety, DPS: Evasion)

Our gear would look like this:
Lvl
Ilvl
Power +#, HP +#
Determination +#, choice of role stat +# or parry +#
Meld slots for extra role stat or parry

[Raikai]

I mean, the whole stat system is already pretty bad to being with, 'dumbing down' would actually be a positive QoL gain in the end.

That being said, I wish that instead of streamlining, they would just overhaul the whole stat system. If they cut the redundant Direct Hit, there's space for a new, more interesting stat (would love to see something like WoW's Mastery for example). Merging the Speeds are just overdue at this point, but I'd like to see if they're able to make speed desirable for more jobs without hijacking the whole pace. Tenacity and Piety definetly should be reworked from ground up.

In a perfect scenario, we would have a group of offensive stats (left side gear) and a group of defensive/ultity stats (right side gear) not having to change one for the other when it comes to melding materia.

[Shurrikhan]

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I don't really see the point in changing STR/DEX/INT/MND into just "Power" if you're not going to thereby merge armor classes anyways. The redundancy costs us nothing while indicating the gear type in a more at-a-glance fashion. But, neither would I care if they were officially consolidated into that single term, instead of that just being the community term for the resultant Attack/Magic/Healing Power.

And if we're not going to do anything with our Primary Stats anyways, I'd just go with...

• Speed (SkS+SpS+Sprint recharge speed*, with MP instead ticking per half-GCD and fixed GCD timers made to instead scale with the GCD),
• Break (Crit chance + Dodge chance + Parry chance),
• Will (Determination+Tenacity), and
• Spirit (Mastery, with effects dependent on one's job).

Simple and intuitive, but this allows Will to indirectly take over the "Big crits" role so that Crit doesn't self-contain its biggest synergies, while Speed is no longer so self-defeating/inefficient for Casters or users of (previously) fixed-length GCDs, and Spirit offers more variable gameplay effects.

Alternatively, split Tenacity, Piety, and Mobility (replacing Direct Hit) into a separate class of stats, buff the usefulness of Piety to non-Casters/Healers, strip the attack value from Tenacity, and just have those QoL/survivability Tertiary stats (TEN/PIE/MBL) compete only with each other, opposite the throughput-affecting Secondary Stats SPD/BRK/WIL.

From there, just ramp up the effect per point of stat and we might yet see some decent customization of gameplay.

[Mansion]

I'm expecting the Astro rework à-la SMN in 6.0 before anything. While I do recognize AST is in need of work because of its high weaving windows, I wish they would do something sensible and keep the planning of healing CDs that makes AST fun, and the cards identity (or at least what is left of it).

[Supersnow845]

I'm expecting the Astro rework à-la SMN in 6.0 before anything. While I do recognize AST is in need of work because of its high weaving windows, I wish they would do something sensible and keep the planning of healing CDs that makes AST fun, and the cards identity (or at least what is left of it).

I really don’t think the AST rework is going to touch their oGCD’s (unless they entirely retool the healer oGCD philosophy)

That side of AST gets nothing but praise

[Mansion]

I really don’t think the AST rework is going to touch their oGCD’s (unless they entirely retool the healer oGCD philosophy)

That side of AST gets nothing but praise

I hope they keep most of the oGCDs!

I fear they just look at all the weaving that happens in the opener (usually 3 cards (possibly some redraw), minor arcana and divination, maybe astrodyne, whatever healing might be needed depending on the fight) and just think it's too much, let's cut it.
I wouldn't mind Draw on a Step/mudra like GCD for instance, but that would mean re balancing those "lost" GCDs potency wise and I'm afraid they just would not look that deep into the job design (as past iterations of healer jobs sadly show).

[Xuled]

Healers lose DoTs, DPS gets their cool signature moves (think Enshroud or High Jump)rolled into your 1-2-3 combo, Tanks invulns will get their CD matched so PLD isn’t 4mins longer than WAR while the other two fit in between. How much do I think will come true? Just the first one since they seem to enjoy butchering the healer role in this MMO specifically.