And the slow death of the RPG based battlesystem

[KenZentra]

I knew there was a way to do that, i just didn't remember how to do it though. Thanks for the heads up.

As for Balancing. Ironically enough Stormblood had (Supposedly from what i've heard) better Role Balancing that Endwalker did (Bard, MCH and the casters were pretty even with the Melee DPS)

I really miss Stormblood, it wasn't perfect of course, but I miss AST so much from then. I mained it and when I heard AST cards were going away in ShB I had quit until the last patch of ShB. Im still so salty about it I even keep Royal Road on my bar, though I think I've hardly touched the class at all since I've come back. I'd do literally anything to get the time aspect and card effects back. It pains me to no end that they are all dmg up buffs, like so many buffs in the game currently.

[HikariKurosawa]

It is not good game design, actually. Also... really like a martial art system? I don't think martial arts have a combo system or rotations lmao
Mastering your rotation is just hitting a training dummy for hours on end. The. Exact. The. Same. Way. For. Hours. Its literally, press this button, then this one, then this one,then this one, then this one, .... .... ..., they might as well just consolidate the entire song and dance into a single button to have you spam forever.

PVP, of ALL things in this game, has deeper player expression and im not even talking about something like "the better player wins a mirror match", but that you have more options that you actually get to USE in gameplay, such as ways of disengaging from combat, escaping danger, Crowd controlling important targets, shutting down problematic targets, removing powerful buffs, positioning, foresight, and so much more.
A player being able to express their skill in their Job, like holding onto a specific cooldown to remove, say Guard, from a group of targets as that their team is on the way to pinch. Or keeping up with map awareness and enemy movements to position yourself and maybe others accordingly.

PVE is "Do thing, Same thing, Forever, Until Perfect". Its such a joke. Its a shame PVP isnt that great cause its depth in Job design is way better than PvE.

It's fine to have that kind of opinion I just don't think you should act like it is objectively correct. It's just your opinion, and it happens to be a negative one. Also what? You're surprised that pvp has more dynamic gameplay than pve? Is this your first and only video game?

[SieyaM]

That's just how their combat philosophy is in this game. It's called good game design. You have the rotation of the job and you work towards mastering it. That is expression of player skill. Treat each job like a martial art system instead and you'll have a better experience. If you want improv, play a different game because that's not the design philosophy here.

So you believe that not needing to know what your skills do or what they even are and just memorizing the order of buttons is good design?

[HikariKurosawa]

So you believe that not needing to know what your skills do or what they even are and just memorizing the order of buttons is good design?

Absolutely. You could do the same thing with any game though if you read the right guides. What a silly argument. Want a solution for your problems in this game? Stop reading guides and learn to think for yourself.

Like rofl, you will appreciate the impact way more if you take the time to learn why your rotation is the way it is and what each skill does. If you're not interested in that and just want to read a guide to get by, what's the issue? That's your choice. A well designed rotation will just work that way though.

[Valence]

I knew there was a way to do that, i just didn't remember how to do it though. Thanks for the heads up.

As for Balancing. Ironically enough Stormblood had (Supposedly from what i've heard) better Role Balancing that Endwalker did (Bard, MCH and the casters were pretty even with the Melee DPS)

They were not. Same-ish ranged tax was already here, and no role bonus to cover for it. What kinda made up for it was the resource party support.

[Shurrikhan]

They were not. Same-ish ranged tax was already here, and no role bonus to cover for it. What kinda made up for it was the resource party support.

And that, sadly, was largely just an unnecessary racqueting scam, wherein parties had to pay the Ranged toll to be allowed to play for more than 3 minutes of gametime without being reduced to half-apm. (No, I'm not sad to have seen that "RPG mechanic" removed, at least as it was implemented before.)

That said, DRG/SMN/MCH/BRD was... plenty good even in Stormblood.

Thereafter, though... it's almost as if we just forgot to give back the value of being helped by Piercing Resistance Down to Rangers' party DPS contributed once weapon types were removed (if we were to count that as split between both the DRG and the Rangers)?

[Commander_Justitia]

I really miss Stormblood, it wasn't perfect of course, but I miss AST so much from then. I mained it and when I heard AST cards were going away in ShB I had quit until the last patch of ShB. Im still so salty about it I even keep Royal Road on my bar, though I think I've hardly touched the class at all since I've come back. I'd do literally anything to get the time aspect and card effects back. It pains me to no end that they are all dmg up buffs, like so many buffs in the game currently.

Same, receiving a buffed extended arrow as skillspeed MNK, you felt like Bruce Lee reborn...

I think devs had their fun with gameplay mechanics in content like Eureka and Bozja, giving players popular spells like Protect, Shell, Reflec etc. back to experiment with. I don't think such skills are boring, even if it is required and standard/mandatory.

What player binds to a game is an interesting gameplay design, if they just want to attract new players they will do further casualization. I fear it will be the latter, for the next addon aswell.

[Valence]

Hey, I just remembered that I forgot about actual pets that we used to have. You know, the old clunky pets that you needed to command and had HP bars and whatnot, but which were the basis of actual pets.

Current pets are another example of things that got nuked and left as an empty husk forever instead of actually addressed, and as it stands right now I'm not gonna cope and say that it's more likely to see actual pets reintroduced than what current pets are remaining being removed completely.

[Shurrikhan]

Absolutely. You could do the same thing with any game though if you read the right guides. What a silly argument. Want a solution for your problems in this game? Stop reading guides and learn to think for yourself.

Like rofl, you will appreciate the impact way more if you take the time to learn why your rotation is the way it is and what each skill does. If you're not interested in that and just want to read a guide to get by, what's the issue? That's your choice. A well designed rotation will just work that way though.

...No, that's literally the critique in question. In XIV, you can memorize 1-3 openers to have covered literally all combat in the game, because our rotations are so consistent across fights / noncontextual. That is not the case in most other games. In other games, simply memorizing a sequence of actions cannot replace needing to know what your actions actually do and how they compare to each other or synergize with each other because not everything is just a striking dummy with additional dance steps.

Here, learning what your skills are and why the optimal rotation was set the way it was is a fun bit of extra trivia. In many other games, it is instead vital. And masterful play having more to do with memorization than understanding is not an objectively better quality of a game. Far from it.

[Taranok]

What further cements me in that line of thought are the recent criterion dungeons, and while the introduction of a chill but challenging light party mode to the game is actually great to get out of savage/ultimate/savage/ultimate, it even further tries to limit the amount of raises and recuperating actions...

Personally, I consider Baldession Arsenal and Delubrum Reginae Savage to be the best pieces of content the devs have made because they limit ressing, which allowed the devs to make easier but 'mess up and you might lose your ability to progress,' mechanics. This, in contrast, is about 20000 times more interesting than Endwalker's endless body checks at a frenetic pace where one death = wipe. DRS' philosophy also allowed for actually fun gameplay for casters and still produced actually interesting fights and mechanics.

- Aggro management

Staring at the UI to make sure you're not messing up is not, and has never been, good game design. The only interesting threat-related gameplay is tank swaps. The only reason I'm mad about threat combos/threat management going the way of the dinosaur is because Power Slash has a fantastic animation. This design philosophy can die in a fire.

I took aggro so many times as a Black Mage in stormblood not because I didn't use my threat reducers, but because tanks didn't do their own job. This added nothing to the game, I am glad it's gone. This is speaking as an omni player who has played all roles in all forms of content, including ultimates.

- MP/personal resources management with negative MP/TP regens

This game already has punishing DPS checks in all tiers, especially on fresh prog. TP was a massive "Kicking you when you're down," mechanic. It was insult to the injury of weakness/brink. MP management is very much a: "What system are you in?" MP management doesn't work in FFXIV's buster meta. But it works exceptionally well for the triage meta. As for DPS MP management, see above. What applies for TP also applies for MP, with the added caveat of in-combat ressing. If the devs moved to a triage system, and moved away from in-combat resurrections as standard, I wouldn't care as much because fights are better with easier mechanics that are extremely punishing of repeated mistakes, but also lacking body checks. This is very much a philosophy thing, however, and I would personally like to have Triage healer/tank gameplay, since I think it allows for more interesting and varied healer and tank gameplay.

- Party resource management (MP, etc)

This is kind of the same thing as above. Party resource management was primarily used as an insult to injury and didn't really offer much else otherwise. I am not mad I got rid of TP management resources, including NIN's unique 'other person' TP restore. I had fun with it, but not having it felt especially punishing, just as using Bard/MCH MP for support instead of damage was punishing. Likewise it didn't feel good having an implied 2.5m cooldown on the damage buffs as seen on BRD/MCH because of MP regen. Though, admittedly, I partially miss old AST cards, especially throwing MP when you had to at a Bard/MCH to convert it into more damage faster.

- Progression based on damage, mitigation, raising, limping through

I call this type of gameplay 'Disaster Recovery Gameplay.' Personally, I deeply miss this, and find Endwalker fights the worst fights the game has designed since Gordias because they've destroyed disaster recovery. Hell, DRS has its own strats designed around disaster recovery, such as healer LB3. Losing this gameplay, alongside losing gameplay that was good and fun for casters, is why I will quit the game if Dawntrail continues this design philosophy.

- Job rotations based on constraints like tactical nukes with long cast times (3+ seconds Flare, 3s Fire IV, 2.5s Glare, 5s Flamethrower, etc), homogenization of actions...

So, the only arguments I accept on homogenization of actions are this: Addle/Feint being turned into crappy versions of Tactician, casters being turned into ranged physical. Every healer being variations on White Mage's toolkit, every tank being variations on Paladin's toolkit. Other arguments I don't buy, since, especially for DPS, you can vastly shake up the gameplay going from MCH to DNC, which shares a lot of gameplay overlap, nevermind something like DNC to NIN where the 2 really couldn't play any more differently. But, you brought up long cast times. One of the ideas I have for a hypothesized BLM rework involves button compression to remove bloat and drop out the skill floor from the class, but also to add an entire gameplay loop for BLM (a class gimmick, if you will,) around doing a 5s+ cast time for some super attack in umbral ice. Homogenizing caster DPS into the same gameplay as ranged phys has been disastrous for my enjoyment of the game and I actually want BLM to lose most of the movement they got in EW, while also making SMN a caster again. Oh, and...

- Homogenization of raid burst timers, often combined with hard raid mechanics just to artificially inflate difficulty (pinax, act 2/4, superchain 1, superchain 2A, classical elements, pangenesis, caloric theory 2... notice a pattern yet? You'll find the same in criterions)

This is the final bit of homogenization that I find acceptable to complain about, alongside the generally homogenized healer/tank gameplay. Not because of layering burst on top of difficult mechanics (seriously, whoever decided this was fun should be fired, disciplined, or moved to another department outright,) but because it homogenized classes in other ways. For example, BRD is more of an over-time class than a burst class. But PLD and BLM were both heavily over time classes. PLD needed an emergency rework because its gameplay flat out made it 20 times harder to clear DSR/Tiers 1 and 2 of Pandaemonium because of boss jumps. Over-time classes cannot exist in a 2m homogenized meta, and when combined with EW's absolutely garbage fight design has fundamentally killed off classes.

- Actual pets with HP pools as their own entities.

I only accept this argument in the context of a class that actually has a pet that does its own thing 100% of the time, but also requires no pet health management. Dropping GCDs to heal a pet sucked. Having a pet break encounter design (Ramuh Extreme says hi to chicken nuggie-egi,) was interesting but unhealthy for the game. Everything about old-SMN's design sucks, including how carbuncle is still implemented in EW. The old pet-queuing system also sucked and could be very frustrating in modern fight design because of boss jumping if the pet did something especially stupid.

That's not to say I would mind seeing a class with pets that can do things like ShB summoner did between demis, but rather that the game's back-end made this a nightmare, and fight design was too easily broken because the devs never factored in the problems and benefits of pets with separate HP bars.

Also losing pets to raidwides was just never fun gameplay.

What we have left so far:

- Healing

Do we? I can go on an entire dissertation about how every single healer more or less heals and mit plans the same way, as well as how every single tank tanks fights the same way, with the only notable exceptions being the immunities and the slight texture difference of Rapture vs Celestial opposition, or the more significant difference of before-the-attack healing (barriers) vs after-the-attack healing (medica 2 and other similar placement abilities.) Hell, at this point, even WHM has before-the-attack healing while SGE/SCH has after-the-attack healing.

- Mitigation, in fact we have a crapload of those now, but you could do with half less and still be fine...

As above, all tanks mitigate identically. It's not even close to true variety. This has been homogenized to death. The only notable exception is cooldown timing on immunities because you need to have a vastly different mit plan with a warrior + anything else in DSR versus no warrior with especially paladin. Beyond that? It's usually long cooldown+short cooldown, or 2 long-ish cooldowns (E.G. thrill of battle+Rampart) + short cooldown. It is a snooze fest compared to WoW's triage mitigation design where brewmaster monk is so wildly different than everything else in their game. Tanks are badly designed DPS with a panic binary pass/fail interspersed in between. Healers are even worse DPS with substantially more binary pass/fail checks interspersed throughout the fights. Hell, as I brought up, Addle and Feint were both turned into bad versions of Tactician et al, and have completely morphed into the same category of abilities as those, plus tank mits, plus healer mits. Everyone has party mits on roughly the same cooldown now, it's unbelievably homogenized. I don't know how you can stand here and say one of the first pieces of homogenization in the game somehow isn't. It's so bad now that people will wipe because these homogenized mits aren't stacked enough. It's trash.

What's left is rarely what's killing or wiping you. What does is someone [deleted] up a mechanic most of the time. The rest is essentially DDR and running all around artificial platforms. I'm not saying that mechanics were not a thing back then, far from it, and I still enjoy the ones that feel tactical enough (part 2 of 4th savage fights, etc), but it's a matter of ratios. Those days it feels like 95% of fights are just doing mechanics. I could have a third party tool playing my rotation for me and it wouldn't even matter, because there is no real choice and player agency left anymore to begin with, no party support, no player toolkit coordination and synergy. I'm not saying rotations are easier or anything, I'm just saying choice and tactics have progressively left the field to focus on Dance Dance Revolution. I feel that the game isn't going in a direction I like, and while I'm sure some players do like it, I don't, so here is my useless feedback. At least I do hope it works as an observation of the game mechanical evolution...?


( edit maybe I should have posted this in other battle systems... )

Edit 2: I forgot to add pets to the list of casualties. Maybe they removed the clunk and jank, but pets are now essentially tied to your character casting an ability on your own hotbar, activating the pet's mirror ability, and introducing some lag and delays for little reason. It's a joke.

The fights of endwalker have universally done a handful of things.

• Every mechanic is multiple GCDs worth of movement across absolutely massive arenas. Screw you for being a caster, screw you for not using sprint. Seriously, if sprint makes a mechanic substantially easier, it's a badly designed mechanic.
• Made every mechanic extremely tight. From Dungeons all the way to Ultimates, the precision of movement is so tight that a ping of 100 with slight instability can cause you to see mechanics out of order and wipe because someone messed up somewhere. It is beyond dumb.
• Made every mechanic a body check. It is extremely easy to mess up mechanics due to the raw precision involved in both timing and movement, and if anyone fails, everyone dies.
• There's a long-running joke in basically every group I'm in. All prog is snakes prog (P8S.) It's not even just that every mechanic is DDR, it's that every mechanic is functionally identical with very slight differences. Hell, I had trouble on P12S Limit Cut because it was so similar to TEA's various limit cuts that I kept going 12/56 24/78 instead of 13/57 24/68 on movement. I've even said to statics I'm in that "Wormhole in TEA is easier than this limit cut," in reference to P9S, because it actually is. They can't make new mechanics, they just copy old ones and refurbish them without tearing the old stickers off.

I get it, FFXIV is limited and they technically ran out of ideas back in Stormblood for the most part, but they're just making things frustrating, not fun, in their efforts to, I don't know, turn FFXIV into an action MMO?

It's awful. I am going to quit the game if this continues because I truly fell in love with ARR for its janky ARR content, and decided to fully stick around because of Stormblood's fight design. I miss stormblood, despite its massive balance and jank problems. Even with its awful threat system and tanks who were too greedy to properly maintain aggro if DPS were creeping (seriously, my casual static's tank wanted me to slow DPS so they could not do threat combos,) I still would prefer its general fun fight philosophy. Sure, it was easy enough that people could one-pull O1S, but that's a hell of a lot better than what EW has given is.

I digress.