Please stop alienating the playerbase with job total reworks

[Aravell]

Yes, changes are really bad.

But "no changes" is also really bad:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...nother-2-years...





Cheers

The point of the OP isn't "change is bad", it's that radical change risks alienating the current playerbase of that job and that the dev team should be mindful of that.

[VentVanitas]

I'm probably going to make monk enemies out of saying this, and I do agree that not everything was cool, but I think it could be safely argued that it didn't face riots as much as summoner, and for a reason.

when you're the least overall played job for two whole expansions, it's kind of hard to start an uproar when no one plays it lol. you're not gonna make enemies of any MNK mains when there are none

if you had to ask from my own perspective as someone that's been deep in Monk discussion ever since Shadowbringers and has mained the job since 2018, the job already faced SMN-level riots all throughout 5.X to the point where it became a joke about how the DPS board was just a Monk main board and was pretty much the only DPS other than Summoner to get +100 page threads complaining about them at the time.

EW MNK, regardless of my personal feelings, is simply not as bad as its ShB iterations. anyone that felt burnout or ennui from how SE handles the job would have already moved on or accepted by now that they do not care about it. after all, prior to Endwalker, MNK's biggest claim to fame was about how hilariously mishandled it has been.

after +2 years, I'm not convinced that Blitz isn't a fluke, and any and all nuance the mechanic happens to have has a very good chance of being obliterated come 7.0 considering the amount of people I see crying because they can't use Phantom Rush in their opener.

[Sebazy]

I'd take a full healer rework and the risks associated with that without hesitation TBH. I don't care how bad it could potentially be, at least it (Hopefully!) wouldn't be as monotonous as pressing the same button 100+ times in a duty.

[TheMightyMollusk]

A lot of job changes feel like they were trying to respond to player requests, but took it too far. Summoner, for example, had a very long and involved rotation, which felt pretty punishing if something happened and you got interrupted. It also didn't really feel like summoning much until Demi-Bahamut and Phoenix. So they streamlined it, and now it's one of the simplest jobs in the game (and also obnoxiously flashy, but that's more a visual design complaint rather than a mechanical one). The carbuncles now doing nothing but standing there being cute also makes them feel like a leftover with no purpose. They could've at least kept an auto attack so they'd look like they were doing something. Right now it feels like the framework for a job rather than an entire job. Like, this is what it should've been twenty levels ago, not at current level cap.

I liked HW machinist, aside from Gauss Barrel. When mobility is a job's biggest strength, giving it a cast time feels counterproductive. Otherwise, though, I liked the utility aspects, and the ammo system gave it a little bit of resource management. Then Stormblood turned into a ping-dependent mess, which to me was just too annoying to play. I guess it was supposed to be some kind of risk-reward system with the heat management, but when the entire risk factor is out of my control, it felt like I was being punished for my ISP screwing around rather than anything I actually did. Shadowbringers dialed that back, but also stripped out a bunch of utility (RIP mana turret). So machinist was apparently supposed to become the "selfish" ranged damage job, but it's never measured up to the other selfish jobs. It can't even claim uptime benefits over the melee jobs anymore, since boss hit boxes keep getting bigger and bigger.

[ThaCa]

Considering how much baggage and clunkyness a lot of the jobs have, I'd rather see them start fresh and just nuke most of them.

[Raikai]

Thing is, not just in FFXIV, but any game with this kind of vertical progression... there's only so much you can add across expansions before having to rework stuff, especially on XIV where the combat design is so 'on-leashes'.

Unless they fundamentally change stuff like the 2min meta, damage profile or even improve server responsivity, we may see in the future even jobs deemed 'perfect' like BLM, due to a rework to add new things, because it's unrealistic to expect an expansion that adds absolutely nothing other than just trait upgrades.

[Lyth]

...

I think the statement was intended to be ironic.

The linked thread claimed that the PAX east panel said that there would be no job changes whatsoever, which seems rather bizarre when you consider that DRG and AST are scheduled for reworks in 7.0. The OP of that thread still hasn't come back to substantiate their claim. I think this thread makes valid points in isolation; it's just interesting to see the same people express their frustrations around both thread topics simultaneously without raising any eyebrows. I think its more a reflection of the culture of this place than it is about the state of gameplay.

That being said, it's a known fact that reworks in MMOs are always controversial, because you have to please fans of every iteration of that job. This predates FFXIV. This also naturally becomes more challenging the more times that a job has been reworked, simply because there are more sets of mutually exclusive expectations.

[Boblawblah]

tldr; "Please don't do anything some players might not like."

Yoshi-P:

[Jeeqbit]

whenever you decide to rework a job entirely for X or Y reason, please be considerate into what you're about to do.

You really think they aren't considerate? They are in Japan and people in Japan are more considerate than most people in the west. Dealing with people in the west is exhausting tbh. Me this, me that.

When they did the DC split (where Aether was split into Aether and Crystal), they knew it would disrupt friends and FCs and cause some people to quit the game (and it did). But it was also necessary to grow the game. They apologized a lot and expressed a lot of empathy for it, but they had to do it as well. They felt bad enough about it that they overcame the technical hurdles to create DC travel to allow friends to reconnect.

I could believe that some western companies wouldn't think about things like this, but this is SE, a company that is so considerate they will warn people for hurting others' feelings in a dungeon.

if you start turning the job into something entirely different where it could just be a new job, you're essentially deleting a job out of the game

They do have to weigh it up. Take MCH for example - a job that virtually didn't exist it was so unplayed. They redid it like a whole new job for Shadowbringers. Did it upset the few people who played it? Sure, but when weighing it up, they didn't affect the scale next to the amount of people who didn't like the job in Stormblood.

the issues you were trying to fix were deemed too problematic to even try and fix them to begin with.

Sometimes when trying to fix a job you discover that it requires a bigger overhaul. Most likely in trying to solve problems they kept running into other problems and determined it just needed an overhaul.

People always asked to have a job that feels more like an actual summoner of primals, summoning more than a single pitiful egi. I get that you tried to address that and turn it into actually rotating between impressive summons. However, you forgot halfway that a summoner job implies summoning pets that you control. Maybe it didn't in early final fantasy titles sure, but it did in XIV and has since its inception, even if the egis were absolutely underwhelming in that regard.

Many, many people are glad it's an actual Summoner now. It's a very popular job now as well. And although some people like the "constantly out" summons, I personally prefer it like the old final fantasy titles where they are temporary. Regardless, you can glam Carbuncle to make it seem like it's out all the time.

You also deliberately chose to change the gameplay entirely, removing cast times

You still have 3 casts, and Ruin as filler if you didn't delay the GCD enough prior to repeating the rotation.

removing spell choice

You can literally choose earth, wind or fire and at level 90 you can choose between two buttons, such as the ifrit dash or the ifrit casts.

the dot system

Garuda's wind AoE would qualify as a DoT, technically, except it doesn't have 100% uptime.

Did you seriously expect the fans of the job would get behind such a drastic change?

Obviously they didn't. It was intended to make it super popular and "an actual summoner". It was worth it in my opinion because the egis just weren't fitting. Most of the people playing it, did so for the gameplay, not "because it was a summoner", and SE could easily make a new job that is similar to it "for the gameplay".

Did it warrant a full rework though?

Of Machinist? Absolutely yes.

Monk was reworked extensively and I'm sure a lot of people mourn greased lightning stacks.

I personally preferred the old Monk. It became my most-played DPS in Shadowbringers. I didn't like the aesthetic, I just enjoyed playing it a lot for the gameplay, much like I did Bard in Stormblood.

But I have to admit that nobody else could get their head around Monk. It's always been one of the least-played DPS, both for aesthetic reasons and complicatedness reasons. So I can understand it having been reworked.

But quite honestly, it doesn't seem... less-complicated now. So I'm not sure that it helped anything lol. I still don't see any Monks.

[Bun_Vivant]

The point of the OP isn't "change is bad", it's that radical change risks alienating the current playerbase of that job and that the dev team should be mindful of that.

Radical change also risks thrilling the current playerbase of the job. The dev team should be mindful of that, too.
And at least with a radical change (as opposed to zero change, i.e.: neglect) we can be confident the devs care about the job.

tldr; "Please don't do anything some players might not like."

Yoshi-P:

"You can't please all of the people all of the time." -- John Lydgate.