7.1 - Jobs, meet sandpaper

[BaconBits]

The job simplification will continue until morale improves.

[Aexnidaral]

It's really disappointing to see some of these changes and a lack of substantial buffs. Summoner's "buffs" basically just being fixing the potency bug for their Summons and giving Sunflare a little more potency would be comical if it wasn't so sad. Lots of discussion about the TCJ change but I don't really play Ninja so I can't speak much to it -- I think from the perspective of "ease of play" it's a good change, but from the perspective of the job having some pushback to require players to think and plan for FFXIV's very scripted fights it feels a little silly. GNB's Superbolide change is really lame, imo. I think the flavor of becoming invulnerable and going down to 1 HP is a lot cooler than what it got changed to.

I could go on, but I am really perplexed by these changes and it makes me worry that the promised identity reworks coming in 8.0 are not going to be good.

[SargeTheSeagull]

Is this how WoW players felt during Shadowlands? Because my opinion of Yoshi P is about as low as the average take on Ion I saw a few years back.

[Elissar]

Is this how WoW players felt during Shadowlands? Because my opinion of Yoshi P is about as low as the average take on Ion I saw a few years back.

hmmmm leme check
- uninspired lore (MSQ) filled with wasted potential
- devs isn't listening their own community or do not try enough
- repeating formula
- art, environments and music (not you smile) carrying the game

- items that used to stimulate FOMO (EXP earrings) now accessible by anyone in mogstation because why not

(btw, save it: they will put old feast pvp rewards as premium items in mogstation someday)


damn... you are right
FFXIV is losing originality in every aspect.

[Jangles]

Can't say it ever felt "good and fun" to use things like Anatman or Meditate, and I made it point to avoid using them.

As someone who enjoys NIN and MCH in part because of their feeling of quickness and mobility, I wasn't looking forward to unlocking TCJ and Flamethrower for that same reason, and they would have just ended up hotbar filler I never touched because they ran completely counter to why I played those jobs. (Passage of Arms will be fine though, it still has a part of it that persists after moving.)

It's also a large part of why I don't like playing SAM, because it's too slow and clunky for my tastes with the castbars and needing to trade DPS for mobility on the dash/backstep along with Meditate being tied to a part of their job gauge. Which is ironic, that people keep complaining about jobs being made "samey" and yet they want NIN to be a dexterity-based SAM, given I've also seen people demand elsewhere that since NIN is a such a "caster" melee, it should have castbars all over it too (while of course insisting it keeps its Mudra fail state.)

I guess homogenization is only okay when it goes in the one way people want it to, eh? Might I add, I'm a non-SAM main not asking for SAM to accommodate me by removing the before-mentioned immobility during build-up and finishers, but rather a NIN main being fine with this TCJ change the same way I didn't mind the Huton Gauge change, though I don't see anywhere near as many people begging for *that* to come back while decrying that the job became "brainless" without it.

What the hell are you talking about, the way SAM's cast and NIN's TCJ worked is completely different it has nothing to do with homogenization I don't understand why you think you are being sly with that.

Cool you might not like moves that force you to use more than one braincell, that's well and good everyone has different opinions. But you keep talking about a move you didn't even use (your own admission in an early post) before it was changed like you could have even formed an opinion on it. You don't know how TCJ's "immobility" worked in NIN's kit. It didn't work or feel like anatman or meditate, as someone who spent 99% of his time playing NIN it did feel good to sometimes think about whether to use TCJ earlier or later depending on the encounter.

Other than that it was just a cool class flavor (which the game severely lacks). Lorewise your character drawing a magic circle and having to focus and be still so they can cast back to back mudras was cool.

[Kaliesto]

It was the last straw that showed me there is zero chance of jobs being good again. Not with these designers. There is no way anyone who wants jobs to have engaging gameplay would make that kind of change so it's clear that is not their priority anymore. The game today isn't being made for the people who enjoy things like that and all the disliked aspects of job design are intentional. Those who are waiting for 8.0 are coping and should probably just cut their losses now and not invest another $300 on this game waiting for it to get better in two years. It's never going to be the same as it was in the past.

I think it really is about subscription numbers which is the words they won't say out loud, this game went really casual at a certain point and they want to keep that base over everyone else.

[Reimmi]

this is a good change

removing failure states is not a good change

[Taranok]

removing failure states is not a good change

It is when the devs have a love affair with making every fight a ridiculously long jog from one side of the arena to the other during burst windows.

I'm at the point where I just want to shout: "Why do you even have cast bars anymore if you hate them so much, devs?" They're designing fights that are anathema to standing still, and it's breaking every single class that has to stand still. The only cast bars not broken are 1.5s cast times or lower because you can slidecast a 1s cast on something like M4S Transition flamethrowers. So PCT doesn't care but BLM can be devastated by it.

TCJ itself is a fake cast time, but a 1-2s 'cast time' all the same. I can't speak from direct experience in current savage as I hated the ShB+ changes to NIN, but it wouldn't surprise me if NINs need to TCJ during M4SP2 towers and simply can't because of exact phasing of ability uses and when movement starts. You also can't slide cast it. So it stands to reason that if you have fight design that doesn't let you stand still, then things like TCJ not keeping you still or adding anti-drift mechanics to LL becomes, simply, mandatory.

The problem stems from the same general issue. Fights are too movement heavy. If you compare a modern fight to anything short of an ultimate from Stormblood through Eden tier 1 (oddly including TEA,) and you can see that movement has gone way, way up. It's also gone up in a way you can't simply greedcast because mechanics are also made so tight that things like the lag delay on character positions is so great that abilities like aetherial manipulation can't target someone in a safe spot and get there before the mechanic goes off.

This all cycles around to a very, very different problem. The devs messed up encounter design in mid Shadowbringers, and everything else has been an extension of slowly messing it up more and more. More movement, larger arenas, more instant casts, larger ability aoes to fit the larger arenas. There isn't a single true caster left in the game at this point. Even BLM had to be changed to fit the awful fight design.

That song and dance has happened twice before already. When they turned Warrior into Paladin and forced every tank to tank like a Paladin in 2.1, and when they turned every healer into White Mage in heavensward and Stormblood. People always say homogenization is happening and typically point to the 2m burst, that's not homogenization. The classes still play just as differently as they used to. The real homogenization is making all tanks tank the same, all healers heal the same (or similar, since barriers versus burst is a very different experience,) and now they're making all ranged DPS slowly have unlimited movement because they're designing a game to force it, just as Twintania forced Warrior to get Paladin cooldowns or things like it. Just as Astrologian and Heavensward savage forced SCH and AST to need to have heals like WHM had.

The devs may claim the game isn't stressing the player enough. In reality it's overstressing very specific roles while understressing others because they're designing a game that is incompatible with things like sustain tanking, HoT healing, and people sitting still and casting. TCJ is just another sacrifice on the altar that is homogenization.

[Kooper16]

Reading these changes were the most depressing thing I could read about this game. I would have been happier if they did nothing than this mess. I'm huffing Copium since ShB that SURELY things will become better soon but instead it just gets worse and worse with every patch for so many years now. My static mainly had to replace people because they lose interest in this game and it seems like we need to replace even more after FRU because this is too much dumbing down. At this point I don't even understand who the target audience is. They even found a way to dumb down summoner! SUMMONER! Scientists around the world don't know how one could mess up anything on that job and SE found a way to make it even easier.

I have built up so much frustration over the years and I'm not sure how much shit I can eat before I'm the next guy in my group who quits. Imagine making a great game and then thinking "how about we don't" and then remove everything that made this game fun. Every time a dev detects any fun in this game, they make sure to quickly fix this by removing it. I don't think they have time until 8.0 to fix their broken jobs. Especially not if they actively break them even further during DT. They should have done something about their job design in 6.0 already. People already complained in 5.0 but were still okay with it. 6.0 was a very obvious and big step in the wrong direction and now they are taking a leap even further away from where they should go. At this point I'm wondering what they will find out they can destroy for 8.0. Maybe our kit gets dumbed down to the level of PVP where we have like 10 buttons but having combos condensed into 1 button could be too hard so let's give every job burst shot instead. Have fun. This is not a request. You better have fun because it's not going to get better. It's like the current savage design where yes, the tier is fine. It's an improvement over EW. But EW was serving you absolute garbage. Are they doing the same right now with job design? Is their current goal to make jobs as vile as they can so when they add one new skill next expansion they can go "look guys! We improved!". Yes you improved. You went from a -20/10 to a -19/10.

I was trying really hard to not swear every sentence. Rant over (until next patch where some dev decides we are having too much fun and make things even worse).

[GoatOfWar]

The skill of remembering that this one random ability bricks itself if you move on a job that otherwise don't punish you for moving.

WoW, such skill.

If it was so thoroughly unimpressive to play a consistently good Ninja then why did it need to be removed?
All the jobs are progressively becoming more and more braindead. I'm just not going to be interested in this game anymore if there's not going to be any skill expression in the jobs, and instead, all the challenge is shifted and isolated into the fights.