Is Dawntrail going to bring new things again?

[CelestiCer]

You say that, but I would think the game was better for it. Not because I fear positionals, but they've been slowly removing that bandage for years, and it's getting sad.

While i think melee design would suffer alot for it, fight design would improve without needing to take melee positioning into account for every fight, at least imo

Existence of Melee Positionals never stood in the way of any mechanic or fight design being developed. Square already creates encounters/monsters/fights/areas where they don't care if you can or need to land any, most or all your Positionals. Think P2S (which is an extremely boring fight)or any wall boss of which most to me are extremely boring with the exception of P10S in EW. Players are incentivised to manage their True North charges on-top of a tiny layer of depth towards weaving it properly during busy moments and encouraging optional movement without forcing developers to make every fight have mechanic vomit at any difficulty.

• Are they hard to Land? technically No
• Does it take effort to land them all perfectly all the time? Yes
• Will its removal make the game easier? Yes
• Even if removed, are better mechanics Promised due to it? Definitely No...

Removing anything from Jobs does not translate to Square promising Better/Unique/Engaging Monsters-Bosses-Encounters-Raids-etc. Positional removal also does not make Square promise us that its going to be replaced with anything more engaging Job-wise or have more depth ( like with pretty much everything else they cull/rework from Jobs ). It just adds another thing to the list towards what they done to have made XIV simplified and streamlined which to me is terrible.

If I wanted to throw skills at the boss from whatever angle? I have that choice already that's called " Don't play DPS Melee ". Though I know some Parsers would be happy to have it removed. Read this many a times on the Balance Discord, this mindset towards removing anything getting in the way of a perfect parse ( players included )

" B-But I miss my pwositionals cause the bwoss always wotates wandomly wuining my perwfect pwarse run, whaa "

[MitsukiKimura]

Why would they do back to old design when Shadow ringers and Endwalker proved to be more successful and popular than anything that came before? The formula was established in ShB and brought unprecedented success. It was repeated in EW and success repeated. Don't expect change to something that works.

Shadowbringers was good for 2 things. Bozja and MSQ.
Endwalker had an alright story but serious issues with content being out of touch with whatever goal they had in mind. Both expansions took away more and more from the jobs to now I can safely recommend my 62 year old mother to play any job cause there's no challenge. It feels like we got a whole new development team behind the wheel because there's just so much that needs to be fixed and I feel like they don't play their game as much as the community does.

[Raikai]

Question: Didn't Yoshi P mention during either the first or the second Fanfest that Dawntrail would have a brand new battle content? (which I presume it was not the unknown fate of Field Missions, because that's not a new feature-

I might be completely mis-remembering this, though, but I know it was one of the things I was looking forward to hear in the JP Fanfest.

[Valence]

Ok, so you think the fights did not used to be scripted... you can literally play those fights now. They are still scripted/rehearsals. The scripts are online in guides and wikis. The mechanics happen in a certain order mostly.

You're putting words in my mouth and being disingenuous on purpose. I'm not interested.

edit: for the purpose of trying one last time conveying the point, I never stated anywhere that nothing was scripted or not rehearsed, especially in savage. I've only mentioned that fights were not EXCLUSIVELY about dance dance revolution and nothing else. There was resources to manage, and a lot of other scarcity based elements to take care of, and while it eventually became more and more rehearsed as well once you had a fight cleared and cleaned up, it was still part of playing those fights besides pure encounter mechanics. During prog though, or when a run went pear shaped, those elements suddenly took a considerable importance to juggle with. Obviously, it was a lot more prevalent in casual content where nothing was truly rehearsed and randoms would just be random variables. I'm not asking to make savage like this, even though I'm a huge proponent of adding the most chaos possible to generate player agency and tactical choices on the spot everywhere possible.

[BRVV]

Question: Didn't Yoshi P mention during either the first or the second Fanfest that Dawntrail would have a brand new battle content? (which I presume it was not the unknown fate of Field Missions, because that's not a new feature-

I might be completely mis-remembering this, though, but I know it was one of the things I was looking forward to hear in the JP Fanfest.

Yeah. I only saw a part of the presentation of the first DT fanfest. I remember it saying "brand new battle content" or smth without further specification. A lot of fans take this as "Bozja or Eureka like area" but of course that could be completely wrong. I mean the variant dungeons are also "brand new battle content" or not? But i don't know if they already told us more about that

[Ardeth]

Existence of Melee Positionals never stood in the way of any mechanic or fight design being developed. Square already creates encounters/monsters/fights/areas where they don't care if you can or need to land any, most or all your Positionals. Think P2S (which is an extremely boring fight)or any wall boss of which most to me are extremely boring with the exception of P10S in EW. Players are incentivised to manage their True North charges on-top of a tiny layer of depth towards weaving it properly during busy moments and encouraging optional movement without forcing developers to make every fight have mechanic vomit at any difficulty.

• Are they hard to Land? technically No
• Does it take effort to land them all perfectly all the time? Yes
• Will its removal make the game easier? Yes
• Even if removed, are better mechanics Promised due to it? Definitely No...

Removing anything from Jobs does not translate to Square promising Better/Unique/Engaging Monsters-Bosses-Encounters-Raids-etc. Positional removal also does not make Square promise us that its going to be replaced with anything more engaging Job-wise or have more depth ( like with pretty much everything else they cull/rework from Jobs ). It just adds another thing to the list towards what they done to have made XIV simplified and streamlined which to me is terrible.

If I wanted to throw skills at the boss from whatever angle? I have that choice already that's called " Don't play DPS Melee ". Though I know some Parsers would be happy to have it removed. Read this many a times on the Balance Discord, this mindset towards removing anything getting in the way of a perfect parse ( players included )

" B-But I miss my pwositionals cause the bwoss always wotates wandomly wuining my perwfect pwarse run, whaa "

Or just don't do them. Which is what 90% of randoms do. But in saying that, I never do high-end, so grain of salt with the parsing crowd. I'm not saying removing them is some galaxy brain play. I'm saying that most people dont do them and don't care. And since none of them are tied to anything anymore, they exist only to make that crowd excited because number went up. So it really doesn't matter anymore.

[Nizzi]

It's incredibly funny that people try and attribute the success of ShB and EW to the massively simplified job design as if job design is the only thing that those expansions offered.

Perhaps you should remember that ShB had a fantastic story that a lot of people highly rated and EW is the climax of 10 years of story build-up. That explains the success of the game more than the simplified job design.

I love it because it just doesn't pass the smell test at all. Are we all really supposed to believe that a ton of people were going like "Whoah, they removed the DPS buttons from the healers down to 1 spam spell and a uniform 30s DoT! Time to start playing this MMO now, healers are fixed!"
Of course not, they didn't. You can apply this for any job that was changed going into ShB, the reality is that the other parts of the game are what drew people to it, and just as many of these ShB/EW players hate the way healers/tanks/etc play. The gameplay changes had nothing to do with its success.

[CelestiCer]

Or just don't do them. Which is what 90% of randoms do. But in saying that, I never do high-end, so grain of salt with the parsing crowd. I'm not saying removing them is some galaxy brain play. I'm saying that most people dont do them and don't care. And since none of them are tied to anything anymore, they exist only to make that crowd excited because number went up. So it really doesn't matter anymore.

Features not being utilized happens enough with other skills as well at all difficulty levels. Think Legsweep/Addle/Feint/Bloodbath/Secondwind etc, yet I don't find that a good basis to just outright remove everything.

Job-Depth is not limited to High-End it applies to all PvE combat as optionality i.e its not required to do it all as most in XIV's content has no enrages, but there is a desire in players to go beyond what is required. Party complimenting each-others performances for making a Dungeon go fast? Hey, that's that Job-Depth kicking in and proper rotation, utilizing features even as mundane as positionals all adding up ( cause content is braindead and get me the f-outta-here asap xD ) Or we can advocate for people to do less and less making both the content and the gameplay duller then a 1 button Job rotation... I'm sure we don't have those yet.

XIV's Skill-Floor being beneath the Floor is w/e vs the Skill-Ceiling dropping of Jobs left, right and centre. It's not a galaxy brain play? But I rather draw the line at " Somewhere " vs " Nowhere " when it comes to more and more and more simplifications, if that makes sense. Cause Square has had a good track record of removing a lot of features? and not giving us any depth back, making the gameplay extremely shallow. Would love to see Square change that in Dawntrail or any expansion or patch... but hey, lets remove more things amirite

[Ardeth]

Features not being utilized happens enough with other skills as well at all difficulty levels. Think Legsweep/Addle/Feint/Bloodbath/Secondwind etc, yet I don't find that a good basis to just outright remove everything.

Job-Depth is not limited to High-End it applies to all PvE combat as optionality i.e its not required to do it all as most in XIV's content has no enrages, but there is a desire in players to go beyond what is required. Party complimenting each-others performances for making a Dungeon go fast? Hey, that's that Job-Depth kicking in and proper rotation, utilizing features even as mundane as positionals all adding up ( cause content is braindead and get me the f-outta-here asap xD ) Or we can advocate for people to do less and less making both the content and the gameplay duller then a 1 button Job rotation... I'm sure we don't have those yet.

XIV's Skill-Floor being beneath the Floor is w/e vs the Skill-Ceiling dropping of Jobs left, right and centre. It's not a galaxy brain play? But I rather draw the line at " Somewhere " vs " Nowhere " when it comes to more and more and more simplifications, if that makes sense. Cause Square has had a good track record of removing a lot of features? and not giving us any depth back, making the gameplay extremely shallow. Would love to see Square change that in Dawntrail or any expansion or patch... but hey, lets remove more things amirite

I don't see flank and rear as depth. Especially since they keep making it completely meaningless. If my combos broke like they used to sure, but it doesn't, so again, it's completely useless. It's just there, so some parsing moron can feel special.

[Supersnow845]

I don't see flank and rear as depth. Especially since they keep making it completely meaningless. If my combos broke like they used to sure, but it doesn't, so again, it's completely useless. It's just there, so some parsing moron can feel special.

I agree with what you are saying in principle, the fact that more content ignores positionals than stuff that cares about it and even when they do make you do it when you can’t ignore it with true north the potency gain is tiny but still if they removed positionals it still reduces the skill ceiling for no benefit

I’ll take functional illusion of complexity (even if it’s something as simple as phlegma being melee range for example) over no complexity at all at this point which shows how low my standards for the combat system are