Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[OgruMogru]

Our players are the devs now. We need the players to come to a concensus how to develop our game.
I don't know how you can go from saying that into blaming the playerbase for THEIR own decisions.

Come to a consensus with no tools to communicate this to the dev team and no indication once you're sent that letter up the chimney to santa that we aren't gonna be left on unread for another 5 years. More realistically we'll all get pelted with a face full of coal. [all these christmas analogies are only gonna be good for the next few days so i'm getting my moneys worth]

[ty_taurus]

Honest question, no snark, what would less homogenization look like to you? From the little I understand, if you change up all the buff/skill timers to have them not all line up nicely, you start to get issues where some job fit in awkwardly to high end fights, which means that some jobs will simply not be wanted for certain fights.

If it were up to me...

Different approaches to DPS...
WHM: Low APM, relatively simple set of attacks with a combination of longer cast times and higher MP costs. Skill comes in managing slow vs instant casts and MP management.
SCH: DOT focus with ways to interact with DOTS, resource management focus with Aetherflow.
AST: Indirect DPS generated through engine-building--the setting up of buffs and heals to detonate later. For players who don't like DPSing, you still are DPSing in order to stay competitive, but your DPS is disguised as support.
SGE: Feels like a caster DPS lite. More fast paced and hyper aggressive. The healer that plays like a DPS (the foil to Gunbreaker).

Different approaches to core healing:
WHM: High raw healing, reactive healing (heals when target sustains damage).
SCH: Barrier healing, provides large, singular barriers to nullify damage.
AST: Healing over time, delayed healing, but weaker reactive healing than WHM. You need to set up your heals ahead of time.
SGE: Staggered barrier healing--layers of small barriers that automatically replenish when the last one breaks, heal through DPSing.

Different approaches to utility:
WHM: Free Raising, AOE Debuff cleansing--can erase bleeds and poisons from bleedbusters and bleedwides, Float: the party can ignore puddle damage and floor damage (implies bleedbusters and bleedwides can all be cleansed with Esuna now)
SCH: Expedient, abnormally high amounts of raw damage mitigation
AST: Instant Raising, Macrocosmos--can ignore Infirmity, MP battery for your cohealer
SGE: No unique forms of utility--sacrifice utility for higher damage, or in other words, their utility is more easily clearing DPS checks. The Black Mage of healers.

[Sebazy]

I'm sure they know how to address the problem, the real issue is the devs are absolutely lazy and/or new.

It's easy to balance the jobs when they all play nearly identical (2-minute designs), and its easy to design boss fights around that as well (major boss mechanics taking place during that 2-minute buff window).

Can't expect them to make healers fun to play if they refuse to make the gameplay enjoyable.

I've gone into this in a fair bit of depth in some other threads so I'll try to be concise. TLDR: I'd actually gladly take some fresh devs over what we have now. They might make things worse, they might make things better, but at least they would have some fresh ideas and the game would see a shakeup for it. The current job design team of 4 has had 1 member change since the release of ARR, and perhaps more importantly, it's never increased in size to keep pace with both the scale of the game and player base.

It's not really fair to blame this on the job design team themselves, either Yoshida is spending his budget badly, SE's bean counters aren't giving him enough money to invest into the team and actually hire the right people (Which will involve competing against potential gacha game bonuses) or Yoshida himself blindly thinks his team has everything under control and the current status quo is fine.

[AsiTsurugi]

Our players are the devs now. We need the players to come to a concensus how to develop our game.
I don't know how you can go from saying that into blaming the playerbase for THEIR own decisions.

I am just a salty samurai player who is still upset over Kaiten being removed -- which was followed by "give us your feedback" into said feedback not being acknowledged, and no proper reason for why it was being removed being given -- and I have to say the part I have bolded in the quote (which is part of what Yoshida said) actually irks me to read. I would love to see this consensus on Kaiten being bad that every single samurai player unanimously agreeing on for them to remove it.

Also the topic of the thread is also somewhat related to my usual rant about Kaiten: Kaiten was removed in the same patch that DSR dropped. I loved DSR and I think it was one of the best designed fights in the entire game, but it also essentially got my favorite class gutted for a singular %hp difference mechanic that they could not bother testing beforehand, and not introducing such a class altering change in 6.0's launch. How come Yoshida tells us to "play ultimates" to "have fun", when an ultimate is what resulted in my favorite class being significantly less fun than before? (I am aware that he said this in context with healers, and I do believe healers deserve to be more engaging than they are now, but I am not a healer nor do I have any experience healing content, so all I can offer is my support to healer players in that regard)

[Rithy255]

Our players are the devs now. We need the players to come to a concensus how to develop our game.
I don't know how you can go from saying that into blaming the playerbase for THEIR own decisions.

I think fully listening to complaints is the issue as the vocal minority, that leads to removing things that people were mixed on or thought could use improvements, A lot of things that were removed/simplified/changed ect. Were a result of feedback not being positive for sure, but again theirs a negativity bias.

Also when "changing" something the track record is either completely remove it, as a example tank stances (yes this had some pretty major issues but were actually fixable) or Reworking something to fit into being a clone or similar I mean look at any Healer or Tank job here, look at how all buffs are.

I think another issue is that certain jobs shouldn't be designed for everyone, I didn't really like kaiten or cone AOE's, Do I think they should have been changed? No. I may *like* samurai slightly more now, but the Job wasn't for me in the first place, let people who enjoy those aspects enjoy those aspects.

I mean job design might seem small and the argument I hear a lot is "well silly job design doesn't matter, it's all about the fight design!" To a degree that's true, but varied jobs and how they interact with the game makes those fights better and have more replay value too. At this point even Tanks and healers are less about being fun support jobs that have a massive spin on how you play the game, they're just slow boring DPS that press a utility button sometimes or kitchen sink CD's.

Personally I'm just going to wait and see what happens in DT, I just hope they actually listen to the current feedback that the current direction is not a good one to take. Honestly I just want non-dps jobs to actually feel fun and unique, even if it's not 100% balanced, because the current design maybe balanced but it's so boring... games should be fun, not just for ultimate's, savage ect. It should be fun and creative for even casual or midcore players.

[Aravell]

Honest question, no snark, what would less homogenization look like to you? From the little I understand, if you change up all the buff/skill timers to have them not all line up nicely, you start to get issues where some job fit in awkwardly to high end fights, which means that some jobs will simply not be wanted for certain fights.

I've been playing since ARR and I don't think I've ever seen any job get excluded for fitting awkwardly into fights. The times I've seen jobs get excluded widely were SAM in early SB, WAR and PLD in early EW and MCH for the first half of EW, and in those cases, the playerbase sees those jobs as not bringing enough to the table to justify taking a party slot (mostly they don't do enough damage). Let's take the most recent example of a job fitting awkwardly into fights, MNK and WAR in E12S back in ShB, both were 90s jobs, both had trouble in Basic Relativity, neither were locked out from parties.

Now, if you're talking about log runs and speed kills, then that's another story. Obviously they'd want to take the team composition that gives them the greatest chance of success.

[Absurdity]

I'll quote from the interview:

Yoshi-P: "But the reason it's like this today is that we've received, in the past, feedback from all over the world saying that the timing of fights were difficult, it was difficult to align skills between classes, we were asked to unify everything, and precisely because we received these requests to homogenize this, we homogenized it".

This statement just makes me facepalm every time I read it.

Of course it was difficult to get the timing right during a fight, that was the entire point, that's what made it satisfying to execute and why it's so incredibly stale in Endwalker, because now it just happens.
There is no thought involved in pressing a button whenever it's ready and no real satisfaction from aligning raid buffs and burst windows correctly when that is the default state.

[Saraide]

Most of those are DPS spells, which isn't the core aspect of a healer...

Great logic, lets take away pld's spells and war's fell cleave.

[Menriq]

This statement just makes me facepalm every time I read it.

Of course it was difficult to get the timing right during a fight, that was the entire point, that's what made it satisfying to execute and why it's so incredibly stale in Endwalker, because now it just happens.
There is no thought involved in pressing a button whenever it's ready and no real satisfaction from aligning raid buffs and burst windows correctly when that is the default state.

I am certainly not saying your opinion is invalid. I am just refuting the point that they are lazy or new. They did provide reason for the direction they took. Not agreeing with that directions is perfectly fine. I would also say that holding your buffs for a specific window feels bad is also valid opinion for someone to have. At the same time, there are fights where you do hold or modify your rotation based on mechanics, timing, etc., so there is still that aspect of knowing when to actually go with the burst window and when not to.

[SailorCeti]

I don't have much to say on this, besides this one note. Engaging doesn't neccessarily equate to challenging. That is all.