FFXIV's Systems Ain't That Deep, but They Could Have Been.

[Jeeqbit]

Cross-class leveling to unlock Jobs.

It was removed in SB for several reasons.

Because it was annoying and grindy. It caused you to detour doing the MSQ. Personally, I entered a level 30+ dungeon as a Gladiator and was told to unlock Paladin (I had put off my class quests until I returned to Ul'dah in the MSQ). Unlocking it turned out to be pointless because it was more of a gear problem, but it was not as simple as doing the class quests. I had to level Conjurer as well. This sort of thing is a pain point that can make people quit a game.

what you have now for role actions were pretty much the same you'd have all the time even in SB.

Those of us that enjoyed using our abilities well also got utility such as Mana Shift, Palisade, Refresh, Apocatastasis and Erase. The problem was the majority of players did not see the fun in using those because the majority are casual players that don't contribute their best or only focus on themselves instead of helping party members, so SE saw the low statistics and removed them. It felt good to save or assist people with these abilities though.

You used to get a attribute point to allocate to whatever stat you'd like.

True. This is good for character diversity, but ultimately there is a "best" stat as everyone knows and the less knowledgable players were going to be the ones that lost out from that needless complexity, so being removed made sense.

Actions had much more potential than they do today. Lance Charge increased damage dealt, but before it used to increase damage dealt while increasing damage taken under the name of Blood for Blood.

These sort of changes are the big ones and probably the most controversial. Having to work with a disadvantage in order to achieve an advantage was interesting and caused you to have to be more careful. However, I understand these sort of things being removed to a certain extent, because many of their implementations were just annoying, or didn't manifest as much of a disadvantage (for example, since DRG is not tanking there are only certain attacks likely to kill them while in that and that's if the healer isn't doing their job).

The support for most of these systems went as far as ARR.

That's true and that was part of the problem for the cross-class system in particular. It was painful that it did not extend to jobs, nor to Heavensward jobs.

But there was an argument that people had to level up Gladiator to get Provoke for the other tanks, and similar arguments for other jobs, which is another pain point if the person sees that as a chore.

WAR in SB had the action "Shake it Off" that originally had the following effect: "Removes most detrimental effects". This was changed very quickly to giving a barrier to your party members.

WAR had no utility at the time and it was not balanced with what PLD had so that was the beginning of WAR not being completely selfish.

A self full-cleanse should actually be pretty good, unfortunately for it to be useful there needs to actually be something to cleanse

PLD actually had something like this which I found useful. It was also PLD's knockback immunity and one of the few jobs to have one, so it was fun to use it strategically. Now it's not as special to use it because everyone has it.

Erase were extremely niche or unsupported from launch

Erase only worked on some things and not others, so it was really annoying to use it and discover it doesn't work on a lot of things. But it helped me to heal people on a Red Mage at level 50 prior to having Vercure.

"A player could potentially be able to passively mitigate more damage if they stack strength, dexterity or a resistance... They might even completely ignore an essential mechanic due to full resist, we should remove these inconsistencies."

Honestly, stacking an elemental resist for certain duties was a fun thought for me that I thought about a lot and was sad they decided to remove it when Eureka was being planned for the next expansion.

I went as far as testing where I could get it in duties and how effective it would be.

But it was always just that - a bit of fun. Nobody was seriously going to do this in raids on a regular basis. It would come at the expense of gear, materia, damage, pots, potentially HP. It could not have been a serious concern that many serious players would do it, especially with these resistances being different per fight and per cast, combined with it being flat out unnecessary.

It was more likely a concern that casual players that don't know much about the game would do it without knowing it's sub-optimal. But the bigger reason seemed to be that they wanted to use elements for Eureka and didn't want the two things to be confused.

I think the game suffers from increasing homoginization, simplicity, and a big focus on dealing damage with everything revolving around how much damage you throw out

I agree but the problem is really that the majority of players are casual. Nothing will ever change that they are casual, because the majority of people have jobs or a place of education that takes up their time or they are a parent or a mixture of these things.

They don't have the sort of time to be messing around with stats to this degree, figuring out all these little complexities, grinding this to unlock that to unlock this and meet all these requirements and unlock all the abilities necessary to raid.

Rather, they are happy they can just go to the market board, buy some gear and they are ready to raid.

Many MMORPGs have, in the past, not cared about this, but SE really has to this extreme degree that the game is what it is today.

[KenZentra]

I agree but the problem is really that the majority of players are casual. Nothing will ever change that they are casual, because the majority of people have jobs or a place of education that takes up their time or they are a parent or a mixture of these things.

They don't have the sort of time to be messing around with stats to this degree, figuring out all these little complexities, grinding this to unlock that to unlock this and meet all these requirements and unlock all the abilities necessary to raid.

Rather, they are happy they can just go to the market board, buy some gear and they are ready to raid.

Thanks for your insight! I don't think I understand the quoted section though. In terms of things I talked about, I was not coming from a place of even doing Savage content or anything like that. Until this expansion in fact, I havent even done Savage stuff if that can put it in a better picture? The "not having time to mess around with stats, etc." seems counter to also saying that they are going to buy some gear and go raid. Are you talking about doing Normal or Savage raids? Cause, at least to me, it feels like they'd need to know more about the game to raid savage as opposed to doing more casual content in the game. As well, even if they were raiding Savage, I don't think you need to know or grind every single ability to clear a savage fight at all. For better or for worse, my group was stuck on P9S for a month or two before clearing it. If every one of us learned how to do everything nearly perfectly im sure it would've taken less than a week, but you don't need to be perfect or even great at the game to clear some of the harder content.

I think that is also true for the past, where plenty of healers saved their GCDs for needing to heal Coils of Bahamut, so they spend a lot of time doing nothing rather than throwing out DPS. I am sure there are plenty more people that cleared many fight in Coils without leveling more than their starting class and whatever cross-class they needed for their job.

Anyways! Again, thanks for the insight!

I want to mention as well (to everyone I guess), Im not necessarily saying these systems were good or even deep. Hell, its probably good some of them were removed, but they were systems already in-game, with some sort of support at launch. They could have used them in one way or another, but decided to scrap them. However, nothing replaced them so we are at a total net loss for systems, character progression, or player mechanics. Character Progression, especially, is nonexistent beyond leveling up and getting gear. In fact, FFXIV has about the same character progression as FF1. Im not saying we should have them back, I'm only mentioning them as SE has effectively made the RPG aspect of the MMO... how to say it...

More like an MMOrpg