Melbourne International games week Interview about content

[Teno]

This actually made me remember what made support roles actually interesting and miles ahead of what they are today. Sure, they had a few other battle mechanics, but they also had variable rotations. As a healer you didn't have more than tetragrammaton for example in HW as an OGCD heal, the rest, you had to hard cast. This fundamentally changed your rotation since you had to adjust to incoming damage profiles and encounters, and also to what your allies did. As a healer in dungeons you had to manage your MP a lot and the time taken to take down a pull and how much you needed to heal the tank would inform how many holy you could cast in between, and between pulls you wouldn't recover your MP like today either. As a caster besides BLM, MP also mattered (remember when Ruin III costed 1300MP to cast out of Dreadwyrm?). This in turn made rphys role fundamentally important. As a tank, you also had to adjust to aggro management and what your allies would do, as well as the party damage output and the encounter layout. This meant that your rotation would also not be static as you'd have to go between your aggro combo and your damage combo. All of this in spite of tanks and healers never having any RNG elements in their rotations whatsoever (AST excepted with cards). Fully deterministic toolkits, and yet the whole battle design made it so that you constantly had to adjust.

What's support today in comparison? It's so bland and braindead I have even stopped playing those jobs.

How I wish we didn't have so many redundant ogcd heals. ARR/HW SCH was peak gameplay. Kinda like what blizz is doing with healers right now, where you can lean in a more hybrid damage/heal style and have multiple mini bursty dps abilities to weave in. Which in itself is inpired by old scholar, so it circles back.

[CuteBucket]

Yeah. People love to rag on WoW for reworking practically the entire game every couple of expansions, but that's how you keep things fresh, and why so many people still play it this many years later. In FFXIV it often feels like we're still just playing HW part-5, and for the long time veterans, that's super boring.

So here's the thing. I really, REALLY don't want FFXIV to try and reinvent the wheel every two years. Yes, some jobs are feeling stale and homogenized, it's true. But it also really sucks to play a class, get really good at it, get all that muscle memory built up, and then have the rugged yanked out from under you with "We reworked you job and now you have a totally different rotation and buttons!" Sometimes the change, as hard as it is, can be an improvement. But sometimes it's not, or it's actually a downgrade. I don't want change just for the sake of change. I don't want my jobs getting gutted and remade if the new version is just the old version rearranged to play differently with no actual improvement. That gets really frustrating and makes me want to quit. Sorry to those who have played for a decade and think "the job system is the same!" Isn't that...normal? I don't expect the way a game series plays to fundamentally shift with every new installment in the series (though Final Fantasy as a series seems to love to try and do this, and it's partially why I don't care for the newer games), so why would a game that came out in 2013 play all that radically different now? I'm actually kind of glad a lot of the jobs didn't change too much between Endwalker and Dawntrail, because even if they weren't all in a great state then, at least I don't have to relearn the whole thing from the ground up all over again and can jump right into the new content feeling like I know what I'm doing.

I'm not saying "everything is perfect, never touch it or change anything ever again." I expect some amount of updates as the game goes on. But man oh man, I don't want them "reworking practically the entire game every couple of expansions" just to "keep things fresh." That would seriously drive me up the wall and irritate me to no end.

[Supersnow845]

So here's the thing. I really, REALLY don't want FFXIV to try and reinvent the wheel every two years. Yes, some jobs are feeling stale and homogenized, it's true. But it also really sucks to play a class, get really good at it, get all that muscle memory built up, and then have the rugged yanked out from under you with "We reworked you job and now you have a totally different rotation and buttons!" Sometimes the change, as hard as it is, can be an improvement. But sometimes it's not, or it's actually a downgrade. I don't want change just for the sake of change. I don't want my jobs getting gutted and remade if the new version is just the old version rearranged to play differently with no actual improvement. That gets really frustrating and makes me want to quit. Sorry to those who have played for a decade and think "the job system is the same!" Isn't that...normal? I don't expect the way a game series plays to fundamentally shift with every new installment in the series (though Final Fantasy as a series seems to love to try and do this, and it's partially why I don't care for the newer games), so why would a game that came out in 2013 play all that radically different now? I'm actually kind of glad a lot of the jobs didn't change too much between Endwalker and Dawntrail, because even if they weren't all in a great state then, at least I don't have to relearn the whole thing from the ground up all over again and can jump right into the new content feeling like I know what I'm doing.

I'm not saying "everything is perfect, never touch it or change anything ever again." I expect some amount of updates as the game goes on. But man oh man, I don't want them "reworking practically the entire game every couple of expansions" just to "keep things fresh." That would seriously drive me up the wall and irritate me to no end.

That would imply the jobs don’t actually get reworked to make them worse versions of themselves every time

Does any DRG main think current DRG is better than EW DRG, same as BLM, EW SMN, AST’s 4th card system

If the jobs didn’t actually change at all that would be one thing but they do change them they just make them worse and more boring

[CuteBucket]

Yeah, I suppose that's what I'm trying to get at here -- I'd honestly rather they had not changed most of the jobs from when I first started than what we have now. I think some of the changes were improvements, or net-neutral, but there were a lot more changes that didn't seem necessary at all or were changes for the worse. So when I hear "I think they should change everything every expansion," I get wary. I already really don't like the changes I've had to endure since I started playing in ShB. Can't we just have job changes that are...y'know...good? and fun? I know it's subjective, but I genuinely don't know who asked for most of the changes (removing Kaiten from Samurai sure wasn't a thing I ever once encountered and everyone I encountered was upset by it). Frankly I don't think it has anything to do with player feedback anymore and is the devs trying to homogenize everything to make it easier on themselves (likely due to budget and employee number restrictions).

[Supersnow845]

Yeah, I suppose that's what I'm trying to get at here -- I'd honestly rather they had not changed most of the jobs from when I first started than what we have now. I think some of the changes were improvements, or net-neutral, but there were a lot more changes that didn't seem necessary at all or were changes for the worse. So when I hear "I think they should change everything every expansion," I get wary. I already really don't like the changes I've had to endure since I started playing in ShB. Can't we just have job changes that are...y'know...good? and fun? I know it's subjective, but I genuinely don't know who asked for most of the changes (removing Kaiten from Samurai sure wasn't a thing I ever once encountered and everyone I encountered was upset by it). Frankly I don't think it has anything to do with player feedback anymore and is the devs trying to homogenize everything to make it easier on themselves (likely due to budget and employee number restrictions).

I mean then that comes back down to when you started

You started in ShB so you don’t know for example my favourite version of the healers, which “version” of the class should we stop at

[Valence]

If you think the job system and the battle system as a whole hasn't changed since ARR, then you're probably a lot more tolerant and less sensitive to changes than I am. We've not been playing the same game at all for a while now. It's almost as if we had moved halfway to another game genre beyond the MMO part and that's my main gripe. Things changing and evolving to shake things up is to be expected, but changing the fundamental core of the genre is the best way to alienate veterans, and generate chasms in the community between the old guard and the new audience.

[BunnyQueen]

I barely touch this game anymore, I went back to WoW. A game where healers matter.

[Brightamethyst]

Does any DRG main think current DRG is better than EW DRG

Current DRG is absolutely better than EW DRG (Spineshatter/Winged Glide aesthetic change aside.)

[mallleable]

Kinda off topic, but not really, but this thread title really highlights why I can't stand how everything is called 'content' nowadays. It's such a corporate soulless term that lets them get away with delivering less, and less. A new emote in the cash shop is given the same weight as like battle system changes or social features when everything is 'content.' Grrr...

[BunnyQueen]

Kinda off topic, but not really, but this thread title really highlights why I can't stand how everything is called 'content' nowadays. It's such a corporate soulless term that lets them get away with delivering less, and less. A new emote in the cash shop is given the same weight as like battle system changes or social features when everything is 'content.' Grrr...

That's because they see us as wallets and not people.