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

[KenZentra]

No, it doesn't. Let's say you have 2 hours after work to raid (average raid time for a static is 2 hours on a raid day). You spend 1 minute buying gear from the market board before entering raid.

Whereas you could spend an hour figuring out stat allocations, or many hours grinding things you need, or days unlocking different classes to unlock different cross-class abilities. Many people just don't have that sort of time.

There are people who jump into it not really knowing much and are not very good in it. Just like you will surely have someone jump into the deep end of a pool when they are not entirely ready.

Their goal isn't always to clear. Many people's goal is the social aspect, or the fun of trying it even if they can't get very far. Regardless, there are resources that make learning how to play properly efficient, such as The Balance.

That is exactly my point. Right now, you don't need to. If we had the style of game we did in ARR and double-downed on it, we probably would do all sorts of grinding prior to entering it.

Maybe, but it's like saying people cleared without food, materia and pots. Probably happens, but a lot of players see an easy advantage as basic stuff that's expected.

My point was that in ARR and even HW, you didn't need to delve deep into any systems to be able to clear content whether that was on as casual or more hardcore level. It wasn't required of you then, and its not now. And you even agree with my point of that!

I'm not sure what you think the build up to going into a raid, say T1, was. Food, gear, pots? All of those things could be bought from the Market Board even back then.

You say folks only need to spend a minute to buy gear, and that its expected for players to bring food, materia, and pots. Aside from pots, since I think they are very simple, what food should they be buying? They just bought new gear, what materia should they be melding?

So people don't have the time to worry about what stats they need, but it is also so basic that it is expected of them to this day?

As I said before, you didnt have to have every cross-class ability for casual play, arguably you didn't need all of them for more hardcore play either. You weren't expected to be min-maxing to a degree that needed you to be casting a GCD with 90% or more uptime on nearly all party members to get clears on harder content, an aspect you do need for raiding today.

In Casual content then, it wasn't expected of you to know everything and it wasn't expected of you to have even a SINGLE cross-class ability just like today you can probably get by without using over 75% of your kit, but when it comes to dipping your toes into Savage/Extreme content today you are required to know your stat priorities with Materia and food. Buy the pot of your main stat. And you had better know your rotation near perfectly with over 90% uptime at all times. And whatever you do never miss the 2-minute meta burst for your class or else you'll never clear even the first boss.

Before, you were allowed to be suboptimal to an extent. You may be able to see some of the bosses, but you probably wont clear Titania (for example). Now, you must do mechanics perfectly, geared up with the correct materia, and know the mechanics WELL before you actually step foot in the raid since so many of them are body checks either going into, during, or coming out of the mechanic. I'd say the game is actually less casual friendly now because you have to do your homework before you even understand what happening around you in current difficult content.

[Colt47]

Honestly, actions and skills feel like they are two different things. Equipping a weapon in this game changes the class / job someone is currently running on and therefore changes the core actions, but the core actions are not the skills the job / class has. Like all the actions that are part of a combo are not individual skills, the are just a skill broken into several actions. It's a damage dealing skill that has no additional benefit other than inflicting damage. Where-as a spell such as raise is an action that represents a skill because it is one button that returns a character back to a fighting state. While we got a lot of actions, most jobs do not have a lot of real skills, or have duplicated skills taking up extra space in the trunk like white mage having so many redundant "heal everybody" buttons. Albeit healer design is about balancing who needs the most attention, much like someone in a trauma room running around dealing with tier 1 vs tier 3 patients.

[Raikai]

I know the cross-class actions were flawed in many of their iterations, but ngl... I'd love to see that properly overhauled rather than band-aided and eventually removed.

It's something that is kind of a staple in job-based FF titles like V, Tactics, etc - the way you can combine different jobs, even if just for a minor utility feature. For me there was something charming back then being able to incorporate the Thunder dot in the healer's rotations, or how as a caster I could just pick between Cure 1 and Physick for my self sutain utility based just on looks.

[PyurBlue]

Cross-class leveling to unlock Jobs.

This was not a good feature. You would be forced to level classes you had no interest in. It was removed for the best. If SE wants people to play multiple classes then just make them fun and interesting.

Role Actions

Not terrible, but with the scripted nature of FF14 it would just become memorize which ones you need for an encounter and then autopilot through and use it at the designated time. If FF14 was dynamic then I think role actions would be interesting, but the game is designed to be very static.

Character Progression

As above, a very static game means there is only one correct answer. This is just a new player trap, especially if points can't be reset.

Gear

Again FF14 lacks dynamic elements. A shield for example comes down to can you survive all scripted mechanics? If yes, then don't take the shield. If no, then take the shield. To me it's not very interesting. If on the other hand there was significant uncertainty in an encounter, I might actually think about it more.

Actions
Actions had much more potential than they do today.

I agree with this. One of the last remaining skills with extra effects is Holy. It's really straight forward, but it does make WHM AoEing a tiny bit more interesting. It would be even more interesting if we could turn the stun on or off, maybe we could have an additional AoE that is identical to Holy but without stun. That would actually allow for some dynamic planning, such as saving the stun ability for a particularly nasty mob attack.

Resistances

Another casualty of scripted content. You know exactly what is going to happen and when. All classes have to be able to do the dance/all bosses can't be too hard on a given class or players get excluded from content. If we had dynamic encounters and could make choices that work for/against strengths and weaknesses of jobs, then varying resistances make sense.

Materia

For me the only thing materia is for is tuning speed. Yes you can optimize damage, but that doesn't really influence the feel of the game. It's not interesting. However, outside of combat it is a part of the game economy.

At the very least I'd make materia more impactful than gear substats.

So many of these sections had a lot of potential.

While I agreed with or explained possible reasons for the removal of many, I do agree with you. However, these things have to exist within FF14, so how the game is designed to work is a huge factor. Without dynamic elements, it's hard to make a game that will play dynamically. FF14 has pretty much cemented itself in static scripted combat.

[Raikai]

For me the only thing materia is for is tuning speed. Yes you can optimize damage, but that doesn't really influence the feel of the game. It's not interesting. However, outside of combat it is a part of the game economy.

At the very least I'd make materia more impactful than gear substats.

Agree, Speed is the only actual tangible stat, but then it's bad enough that the 2min meta dominates job design so much that most of the jobs actually stand against speed because the potential mis-alignment it causes.

I wish materia melds were divided in offensive stats (left side) and utility stats (right side) and there you could have more freedom to choose which kind of utility you'd pick. Let's say:

- A revamped Tenacity (damage mitigation)
- Piety (MP regen)
- Endurance (Reduced duration of Vuln/Damage Down debuffs)
- Resilience (More healing received + reduced Brink of Death duration)
- Speed (Movement speed) *SpS/SkS could be merged and just renamed 'Haste'

It's quite hard to think about secondary stats for XIV, though... with how on leashes everything is.

[Jeeqbit]

My point was that in ARR and even HW, you didn't need to delve deep into any systems to be able to clear content whether that was on as casual or more hardcore level. It wasn't required of you then, and its not now. And you even agree with my point of that!

Right, but people still felt pressured to get things such as Provoke, Swiftcast, Protect, damage buffs and so on. Extending upon such systems may have got them to a point where you actually needed to do it, and extending them seems to be what you're implying with "the systems weren't that deep, but they could have been".

I have often thought that maybe content could have been done without Provoke then, such as having the PLD off-tank, then use Cover, have the tank invuln next one, Provoke next one, invuln next one, let aggro lapse back, then Cover, then Provoke and so on.

But realistically players felt that it was and treated it as such. In casual content, Provoke was expected if the tank died. Swiftcast wasn't needed but, again, players felt that it was because otherwise they are casting rez for 7-8 seconds. And Protect - how dare a healer not cast protect at the start of a duty? Everyone did this!

what food should they be buying?

Since SE ordered it by item level now, you just look at the highest one up that has crit, dh or det in any combination and it is probably a good choice.

what materia should they be melding?

Usually not going wrong with crit, dh or det either. It's mostly irrelevant as well. Melding one of these is a lot better than melding nothing.

You weren't expected to be min-maxing to a degree that needed you to be casting a GCD with 90% or more uptime on nearly all party members to get clears on harder content, an aspect you do need for raiding today.

I would say this was expected in Heavensward, although at the time, for melee jobs, it interrupted your combo to attack from range.

And although healers may not have all been doing DPS in ARR, that was when people were noticing that healers could be doing more.

In Casual content then, it wasn't expected of you to know everything

This is debatable. When I was new to the game and tanking, I was attacked a lot in dungeons. People regularly exited the dungeon near the start, they attacked all the little nuances about tanking that I wasn't doing (when those nuances existed), or when they incorrectly thought I wasn't doing them. They would run ahead and pull. They would attack me for not knowing a certain pull strategy for a specific dungeon. They would call out people spamming an enmity combo when it wasn't needed and things like that.

But there were plenty of people who were nice as well and it depended which roulette you were doing (leveling was really pleasant, the level cap roulettes were not).

Despite how much people desired dungeon players to "know everything", the fact is they never have, and never will, because a lot of the people you meet in them are new, returning or casual players. But has it been expected? Sure.

when it comes to dipping your toes into Savage/Extreme content today you are required to know your stat priorities with Materia and food. Buy the pot of your main stat. And you had better know your rotation near perfectly with over 90% uptime at all times. And whatever you do never miss the 2-minute meta burst for your class or else you'll never clear even the first boss.

Well all this depends. You've always needed all that to an extent when the content is new, but when the content gets older and you can get gear from alliance raids, hunt upgrades and so on, you've always had more leeway as well.

I think recently, the 2-minute burst window and removal of other advantages such as piercing and slashing damage have also meant SE doesn't have to scale DPS checks with the assumption that all these things aren't being done, because they removed the damage types and forced buff alignment, but the fights still get more leeway with gear regardless.

know the mechanics WELL before you actually step foot in the raid since so many of them are body checks either going into, during, or coming out of the mechanic. I'd say the game is actually less casual friendly now because you have to do your homework before you even understand what happening around you in current difficult content.

People have always watched guides and "done their homework" for raids. In fact, a huge percentage of people used to watch MTQ's guides for mere dungeon runs (because dungeons were less intuitive then and you can see this in the Hard Mode dungeons still). Going even back to ARR, MTQ and MrHappy made extreme and coil guides.

Personally, for Heavensward, I used the savage guides produced by some raid FCs on the internet that they pushed out week 1. Their strats weren't always the same as what PUG strats ended up being but they were solid.

[Volgia]

Well I can't speak to earlier versions of the game (like HW), but let's maybe do a thought experiment: Let's say you have a SET of armors that give you different stats, if you're playing through casual content it doesn't matter because casual content is designed so people can clear it with their eyes closed, the only thing that leaves is hardcore content like Extremes and Savages, so if you have 5 sets of armors for a given role (Melee, Magic, etcera), if you're going into savage you're going to wear what's meta so you can clear the content easier, which makes stuff like that irrelevant because no one is going to use the other 4 sets.

The gutting of all these systems that weren't expanded upon happened because there wasn't any relevant content you could experiment with. Even with the stats today there's no flexibility, try going full spell speed Red Mage, or full skill speed Machinist, you'll be subpar to the Crit/DH/Det supremacy. Why have cross class abilities like Cure if your WAR isn't going to use cure at all? Why limit role actions when you and your other roles are going to choose the same ones?

You could say oh okay, I understand, at the highest level of play you're going to gravitate towards the meta, but maybe it'll make early leveling a better experience. Except no. Early leveling is a big cutscene of talk to A, talk to B, kill 2 rats, Talk to A, and watch cutscenes. The other venues for leveling your other jobs tend to casual content which again is made so you can beat it with your eyes closed, so all these systems were irrelevant to the game design, just a clunky obstacle.

So you can have all these systems that can definetly end up being deep but if there's no relevant content to experiment and test it with they end up being little more than an obstacle for how the game is played.

[KenZentra]

Snip

Yes, players felt like they should have those cross-class actions, because they were good. Why are players incentivized to get better gear? Are you required to have BiS before an encounter? No, but you want it because its better, and will make you better.

Since SE ordered it by item level now, you just look at the highest one up that has crit, dh or det in any combination and it is probably a good choice.

A new player isn't going to know that. Whatever game they've come from, or maybe this is their first one, they could think having the Tenacity food is good.
The same goes for materia.

Usually not going wrong with crit, dh or det either. It's mostly irrelevant as well. Melding one of these is a lot better than melding nothing.

You could just look it up, but now you are having to spend time worrying about stats, the thing you said players don't have time to do.

But has it been expected? Sure.

Has it? About tanking when you are the tank? Yeah, there are going to be players like that, but players and devs weren't expecting you to know stat allocation or materia prioritization or every cross-class action. Each class was balanced around their kit with these other systems built around it for character progression and customization. Playing as a MRD/WAR, you'd quickly run out of TP spamming Overpower, you find out GLD/PLD uses their MP to hold threat with Flash, which is a resource you otherwise don't use at all! So to progress your character you could pick up this action. Do you need it? Not at all, but wouldn't it be great to have? Yes. Currently, there is no systems surrounding your Jobs kit, so for most players you are absolutely expected to know everything about it. After all, when it comes to playing your Job, its the only thing you have to interact with so you are expected to know everything about it.

Well all this depends. You've always needed all that to an extent when the content is new, but when the content gets older and you can get gear from alliance raids, hunt upgrades and so on, you've always had more leeway as well.

I really dont think it does depend. If you are raiding on content you are required to do those things at a bare minimum, even if you've upgraded your gear to BiS.

People have always watched guides and "done their homework" for raids.

Indeed they have. However, new players, based on what they've seen from dungeons leading up to the raid they are in, are not going to be able to breakdown mechanics such as Levinstrike Summoning without a guide. Im not saying they shouldn't use guides or anything. But considering my group likes to try to do things blind before looking at guides, we were on it for 4 weeks before deciding to look up how to do it.
But also again, you are claiming players don't have time to delve into the games systems, but then they also have to look up guides even to this day.

My point being, the time you say players don't have time to spare for learning ways to achieve Character Progression such as Cross-Class Actions, Stat allocation, and the such, is now spent on min-maxing to a near perfect degree.

[Jeeqbit]

Yes, players felt like they should have those cross-class actions, because they were good.

But was a grindy chore to prepare for what they really wanted to do.

A new player isn't going to know that. Whatever game they've come from, or maybe this is their first one, they could think having the Tenacity food is good.
The same goes for materia.

Yes, new players often don't know these things. But when they do, they are quick and simple.

You could just look it up, but now you are having to spend time worrying about stats, the thing you said players don't have time to do.

The difference between looking up these things is the answers are there. Whereas for resistances that vary per fight, per cast and are not used by people really, this information would not necessarily be easy to find, or to figure out. The resistances were not standard on gear, but you could find it on odd gear at the expense of other stats, and for me that involved research and obtaining the items.

Really my point is that if the answers are 1. not there and 2. take time to figure out on your own or grind, then it's taking up the precious 2 hours people have after work or at the weekend, and many players are trying to be more efficient than that with their time.

I really dont think it does depend. If you are raiding on content you are required to do those things at a bare minimum, even if you've upgraded your gear to BiS.

There are most surely people in parties lacking things such as food or pots (or sometimes their food runs out). One time in EU, during Shadowbringers, I joined a prog or clear party for the second savage fight. They did the fight flawlessly, but died to enrage. When I told them about pots, they did not know they existed, so we exited and they all went to buy them. Unfortunately, fatigue had kicked in and they couldn't replicate the flawless pull they achieved, despite now each using a pot 3 times per pull.

I felt that this lack of pot usage was a symptom of a larger truth, that hardly anyone uses pots in PUGs, or I have rarely spotted people doing it, especially when the raids get older and we get to the odd-number patch.

new players, based on what they've seen from dungeons leading up to the raid they are in, are not going to be able to breakdown mechanics such as Levinstrike Summoning without a guide.

The truth is, it's unlikely anyone would figure it out very fast, if at all, without playing the footage back or using slow-motion. Which is how the content creators figure it out. But looking at footage and pausing it can be done by new players (for example the streamers from WoW were able to do it). It does help to actually understand the game though, because there can be a lot of benefit from reading the status effects applied by the boss and on the boss' buff bar and in the battle log.

I don't think I even looked at any guide for it, actually, there were just people placing random markers and I was looking at my own footage of it for ages and then eventually it clicked with me what SE was trying to do. Pausing to see when the status effects come out and who they affect in footage is really massive for understanding what is going on.

But also again, you are claiming players don't have time to delve into the games systems, but then they also have to look up guides even to this day.

That's true and actually delving into guides is a big problem for them, because some people don't have the time to spend researching mechanics they struggle with and reflecting on their performance and therefore don't improve as much, or take longer to get the fight. It's understandable that if they have a busy job and can't spare anything but that 2 hours before they sleep, that they might struggle to invest a lot of time into watching playthroughs and brushing up on mechanics, but sometimes you will notice the players that are not doing this and struggling because of it.

[Cynric]

I think I can agree that in some cases actions were a bit more in depth.

At the same time as others have said, Cross Class actions were pretty terrible and didn't really add anything extra. It just made us have to spam fates until we hit the level required for the cross class skill and penalized players who didn't want to level outside of their mains. It wasn't really a great system, It might have added a small amount of depth, and in a future iteration maybe it could've added more depth, though I'm not sure they would've expanded on it much farther than what we have now with role actions. Though the number of cross class skills themselves would've probably grown a lot I don't think the number of slots would have matched it.

So it makes a lot of sense considering the system wasn't great for it to be pruned. I personally hated having to level Lancer just for invigorate and Thaumaturge just for Swiftcast.

Next, Character progression via stat allocation was really pointless, I'm not quite sure why they had it in at all. You gained points and simply applied them to the main stat, there was never a point in time where if they had kept the system and kept giving you attributes that it would've mattered. Even if you could say allocate points to Direct Hit or Crit instead, I don't think the system would've added any depth because stats have always been extremely simple.

Which brings me to the next thing, Gear and the stats themselves were never really all that in depth. Though I can agree that shields being there added a level of customization... I'm not sure it was a large level of customization where being able to block even was made use of a lot. I could totally be wrong because I didn't really play casters much , but I'm not sure if the shield thing was ever really a big deal. I guess we could say it'd be nice to have, though it doesn't add much value. Aside from the shield thing I'm not sure what more options we really had then. Back then our lack of horizontal progression in gear and stats was actually a major complaint, a lot of players were very outspoken about having a more FFXI style of progression, but that style wasn't very popular overall from what I could tell at the time so they never adopted it. So sadly, gear was never that interesting even back then, and in fact was one of the major complaints about the game until Eureka was added.

For actions, I won't say too much here, because I do believe actions used to be more interesting. That being said though, particularly piercing resist, slashing resist, etc. Were not interesting in all honesty, they simply existed and due to piercing resists existence , Dragoon basically always had a guaranteed spot in parties. That's probably part of why that system of buffs was removed. I remember being so excited for slashing resist to be on Ninja at the time, but it all amounted to just, if there was a warrior then I didn't need to do dancing edge, and if there wasn't one, than I would probably need to do it. Except more often than not there was probably a Warrior because Dark knight was in a weird place for a long time. Blunt resist pretty much helped only monk and the auto attacks of healers, and I don't think adding more resistance downs to other jobs would've improved it any.

If they had expanded it so that for example a boss was completely immune to damage from a type and required the resist down, then I think a lot of people would've quit honestly. Thankfully bosses didn't really have innate resistances to damage types.

Now as far as Magic vs Phys, I don't know honestly. I think the system of having a physical tank, damage tank, and magic tank was interesting. Though in practice it didn't seem to do very well. This is at least one thing that might've been interesting to see I think be expanded upon. Tanks are so samey and have been for so long that they aren't all that fun to play honestly.

Now when it comes to the elemental resistances. Those were just leftover from 1.x iirc. I don't think they ever intended to make use of that system at all. So I won't talk too much about it, elemental damage is an interesting concept but I don't think it would've really worked much in FFXIV.

Materia yeah I think could've been more interesting, this ties back to the complaints from the old days about a lack of horizontal progression that we used to see all the time. I would like to see the materia system expanded in some ways myself. But I don't really know what they would do that wouldn't turn out to be just cookie cutter in the end. It's nice that you mention vit because people did meld vit for the extra wiggle room. Tanks could meld strength for a bit, though this was really just to do more damage, that was the main reason to meld strength. Healers had mixed reactions about it though, some really hated tanks wearing str accessories and it could be a point of friction at times.

I personally wish speed materia was a bit more effective but I'm kinda weird in that I think.


Overall, I see where you're coming from, some of the systems weren't like the worst thing in the world. But a lot of the systems you mentioned were taken away for good reasons and didn't add very much to the game.