Hopefully constructive criticism regarding the current state of FFXIV

[Kohashi]

I'm making this forum for the devs and hopefully the health of FFXIV moving forward. I've taken my own opinions as well as opinions I've heard from the community to put this together.

1.) I think dawn trail achieved that. the leveling dungeons were slightly more difficult and interesting.

2.) Personally I didn't mind the story so much but def not the best that was told. For me at least it was better than ARR and that's already a win in my books.

3.) The pace of releasing content is a huge minus for me. Probably one reason why this slog exists it's due to the fact the FF14 team is really not all that big to begin with, however, they had 11 years to come up with a better engine so, it's a grave they dig themselves in. So, SE ultimately still gets brownie points from me.


4.) I personally don't mind the 2-minute burst window. I always thought combat was the weakest point of FF14, however, it makes sense if you tie it together with everything else in-game and the awful code behind it.

5) I would love data center-wide PF. I like that you can travel but it makes no sense not to have data center PF as well. Also, I think it would be cool to be able to travel to all data centers not just region-based. JP can stay in their bubble if they wish, but I would like to be able to travel freely between EU, NA and OCE.

I would add something to the list as this comes up very frequently

6) There is no reason why Island Sanctuary cannot have instance housing or why you are unable to build your own instance house there as well. You can put outdoor furnishing so, why not just make it properly? It's our retreat spot and would make sense to have a proper house as well.

7) revamping old systems. And here it can be from Glam to Grand companies to FC. The fact you cannot interact with your FC if you travel is just annoying, let alone not having access to retainers, buffs.. etc.

[Manamaru]

4.) I personally don't mind the 2-minute burst window. I always thought combat was the weakest point of FF14, however, it makes sense if you tie it together with everything else in-game and the awful code behind it.

The combat and different UI elements honestly gave me the impression of an Arcade-like version of WoW. From the cast bar countdown, damage/heal bar indicators, timers on duties and field ops, to even when you have that blinking "INTERRUPTED!" UI. The combat itself is based off of Yoshida and his team playing WoW Cata and referencing off of that, yet given their own spin on it with combo followups. As expansion after expansion came into planning along with the subsequent trying to deal with button bloat, the tweaking and removing of abilities started into that descent of losing job identity; and adjusting things towards the 2 minute meta because of the players that asked for it proliferated that degrading of job identity. Does anyone remember before SHB when tanks used to have a DPS stance and a Tank stance?

So the question becomes should CS3 piss off the high end and other players that want that 2 minute meta or keep it?

[Kohashi]

The combat and different UI elements honestly gave me the impression of an Arcade-like version of WoW. From the cast bar countdown, damage/heal bar indicators, timers on duties and field ops, to even when you have that blinking "INTERRUPTED!" UI. The combat itself is based off of Yoshida and his team playing WoW Cata and referencing off of that, yet given their own spin on it with combo followups. As expansion after expansion came into planning along with the subsequent trying to deal with button bloat, the tweaking and removing of abilities started into that descent of losing job identity; and adjusting things towards the 2 minute meta because of the players that asked for it proliferated that degrading of job identity. Does anyone remember before SHB when tanks used to have a DPS stance and a Tank stance?

So the question becomes should CS3 piss off the high end and other players that want that 2 minute meta or keep it?

It's nothing new for games to copy from one another but it's also the main reason why I have played every single other MMO out there before FF14. I never like WoW combat style and also lowkey wished they didn't copy that system.

I mean for the most part looking at how fights evolved, dungeons, or high-end duty I would say bringing back tank stances is simply redundant at this point.

IMO to really make jobs truly unique they need to completely re-design fighting as a whole, including dungeons, raids, and whatnot. The likelihood for this to happen is very slim, let's be real now. They couldn't update old systems in 11 years and they just did a GFX upgrade after 10 years and you want a complete overhaul..heheh.

I mean..hope dies last no?
As long as they can give me skill expression, complexity, and rewarding, fun experience while executing combos, with none of the button bloat I am all for a completely new design. If they make this Combat Action while they are at it, all the better .

[SongOfTheWind]

They stopped because the community complained every time they were presented with a dungeon that slowed down their breakneck speedrun for even a second. So no more interesting side rooms or mobs with unique abilities because that makes roulettes take 0.00000001% longer. And that's just unacceptable.

It's why you see people bail when they get Aurum Vale or Pharos Sirius or the like in DF. I had a Stone Vigil Hard the other day where just one dps remained when I joined in progress as a healer.

Really a lesson in being careful what you ask for.

This is true. I think the core issue is that a lot of players who don’t want to be in the content are forced to be there by the system (as in - they are there for the rewards of the rlt and not the process). I think it is a broken system really if it operates on having people hostage or punishing them to actually cooperate instead of people, at least majority actually enjoying the content first and foremost. Most players from what I observed don’t want to be synced down, they don’t want to sit through the same cutscenes or run 2-3 the same dungeons every day but they feel they have to. So the bar is lowering more and more to not aggravate them even further, which is not how you deal with the core problem at hand, in my opinion.

[Valence]

1.) I personally enjoy the slightly more difficult dungeon content. The problem is I don't enjoy the dungeon format. After years of playing FFXIV the standard format of the dungeons have become bland, I unfortunately don't know how you could adjust the dungeons to make them more enjoyable. Maybe people could give more constructive feedback on this subject.

The same way any decent tabletop GM can conceptualize and customize a dungeon's battle content really. Amount of bosses, enemies, swarms, environmental effects during a fight, adds to take care of, ranged adds that can only be taken down by ranged, enemy healers to primary... In fact the old guildhests had a lot of nifty ideas to play around.

Bosses are also the most boring part since they're just mini version of the same old DDR already found in trial and raid bosses with the same mechanics in the same circular rooms (or if they feel daring, a square, le gasp). Remember that raids actually used to have more than a boss before Stormblood? Or the variety found in Coils?

Trash mobs could take example on what I consider to be the most successful part of Criterions, which is... the trash! It doesn't have to be as challenging, although criterion trash is nowhere close to its boss difficulty, it's closer to the upper end of casual. It's very varied, no two packs look the same, there is environmental effects going on, and mechanics on how to handle them.

3.) There are a lot of complaints about the lack of content, I somewhat agree, but I'll take a different approach to it. In endwalker we weren't given an expansion zone or relic grind and I believe that exasperated the issue. The expansion zone is releasing on par with previous expansions eureka was 4.25 and bosja was 5.35 but I believe in the future it needs to be released at launch to keep the casual playerbase happy.

This is what has been done in ARR and HW.
- In ARR: the first stage of relics was part of the VANILLA content.
- In HW: the first stage of the relics was part of the 3.15 content, Diadem 1.0 also appeared in 3.1.

Why this has been pushed back again and again I do not know.

4.) Job homogenation, the jobs of ffxiv feel very similar to each other, in some cases that's a good thing in other ways it's bad. It's good in terms of balance, lining up raid buffs, and playing efficiently, but it's bad because it makes jobs feel boring over time. My suggestion would be to take notes from WOW, I fully understand it's a nightmare to balance and the playerbase will attack you for balancing issues, but I believe it could be very healthy for the game as well as good for the immersion and role playing aspects of the game.

I want to challenge the idea that it's either balance or variety (or a slider between both), at least a little. Adding more and more layers of complexity doesn't necessarily mean a balancing nightmare. It's definitely harder to conceptualize and make viable initially, but the more variables a system has, the less clear metas, or at least ultimately objective metas can emerge, and the more they'll actually evolve and change. The more variables, the more different options can also emerge within the meta itself. It's been notably proven within the RTS genre, as the more playable factions one adds, the less stale and static the meta turns, with less clear dominant choices, and a lot more counterplay.

Obviously in the realm of XIV, encounters have by definition little to no variables since they're fully scripted, which tends to act against it, but still for the aforementioned reasons, adding more variables within the jobs and the battle system itself can only be a positive in my opinion, because balance has always been a problem, whether it is today or before, so the game has actually gained nothing out of it over time, not even balance.

And if the devs don’t want people to disband during levelling roulette, this makes a problem where tank and healer can’t be hard to play when doing the trash pulls. Imagine how many parties would disband if both your tank and healer needed to be good at the game in order to complete a dungeon. The devs have chosen “smoothness” at the expense of making dungeons less interesting to players who are familiar enough with how to play the game.

That's what they want you to believe, in my opinion. I've played since HW and support jobs didn't use to be the brainless slop they are today, and people were doing fine. True, i've seen some parties with wipes a little more back then than today. That's part of the challenge, but instead they decided that the challenge should instead be at the individual level with DDR mechanics everywhere, a tank that cannot die even with 16 vuln stacks, and a healer playing cheerleader just in case one of those pesky DPS die (why is the trinity still a thing again at this point?).

This community and its dev have become incredibly whiny when it comes to dungeons. Dungeon takes one minute too much? Immediate salt, but only behind the veil because doing it in public could get them reported. A duty actually fails? It's the second coming of the apocalypse.

I'd even dare and say that the less we confront players with some responsibilities per role, the more clueless they'll be whenever one crops up right in front of them. Dzemael has never ever been a problem more than it is today before they reworked it. We actually had people being pulled into the abyss all the time and it was actually FUN. Fortunately they kept the ranged mobs and patrols, which has never been done again past vanilla ARR and it's a shame, because it also encourages skilled play without making the run impossible otherwise.

[Voryn]

That's what they want you to believe, in my opinion. I've played since HW and support jobs didn't use to be the brainless slop they are today, and people were doing fine.
…
I'd even dare and say that the less we confront players with some responsibilities per role, the more clueless they'll be whenever one crops up right in front of them.

HW was before my time (I started shortly before EW released) but I’m of a similar mindset that there’s a situation now that causes problems: players do not need to learn to play their role/job (or at least not past a very minimal degree for tanks and healers) to complete normal difficulty content. If someone isn’t interested in learning that much about how to play the game well, the game still appeals to them, but now normal difficulty content “needs” to be simple so they can do roulettes.

I personally would appreciate it if the game asked for more from the players when doing dungeons and other normal difficulty encounters, so it would be more fun for people like us who enjoy more challenge. But the game has two audiences, and to me it seems this is partially responsible for the criticism that there’s a lack of content. If someone likes easier games, what do they do now after the msq if there’s no new casual content yet? The recent patches haven’t given us many significant things to do other than FRU and Chaotic, which isn’t what they’re here for. The game has drawn in this audience but doesn’t meet their needs at the moment.

[Valence]

The reason for why people got through dungeons just fine before even though we could have some failures here and there was precisely because the system back then wasn't all about DDR binary mechanics, where you either fail a mechanic individually and die, or don't. If the mechanic is too punishing it becomes closer to savage and challenging optional content, and if it isn't, then it will probably not kill you anyway, and you end up with big snoozefest dungeons because nothing can truly happen to you, which removed all the friction and stress and people complained last expansion, especially when tank can't die anymore from being hit or standing bad stuff.

Now they decided to reintroduced stress in Yoshida's words, but of course by doubling down on their obsession with more DDR, faster paced mechanics that are overall more punishing to players again, the result being, you end up in dungeons like the Cenote where the healer or tank keep dying at every pushback because they're overwhelmed and you can't do jackshit about it. Tanks and healers can actually die from certain things now, because they added actual, instant kill mechanics if failed where even invincible jobs can fall. The devs have been literally playing with two ends of the same stick where one ends tries to prevent party wipes with the ShB/EW model by making tanks unkillable and healers irrelevant, and the other end with the DT model where some casual DDR mechanics will actually oneshot or twoshot you (even a tank) precisely to overcome that safety net they introduced before. It really feels like to me that they're doing some kind of arms race with themselves where safety becomes too predominant, instead of dialing it down, will instead buff lethality until it goes through again. This is also seen in higher end content by the way, with the uncontrolled spread of body checks everywhere after they removed most points of failure not attached to encounter mechanics (jobs, battle system, non DDR mechanics like in coils or HW), because those are the only remaining things that can still act as a true hurdle.

So we're back to square one with dungeons that can actually generate friction and failure (and player frustration) like Cenote with its end boss, but with a crappy lopsided system where tanks are invincible, healers useless, trash packs still asinine, and bosses more homogenized than ever. I don't think it's rocket science to see which model is superior, when in the past you could actually overcome the struggles of your party especially as a healer or tank (but even as a DPS by just nuking out of the threats faster), precisely because not everything was about binary DDR mechanics almost exclusively relying on individual execution. Tank wasn't positioning mobs properly in HW and was taking a crapton of crits from the back? Time for you as a healer to show your skills and keep them alive in spite of it. Tank kept losing aggro left and right? Healer could do something about it, DPS could also use their defensives to survive a little. Healer was out of mana because the DPS were taking ages to kill the mob packs (and probably running out of TP as well)? Time for you as a tank to play conservatively and show your skills in survival.

Good luck doing that when the tank keeps getting pushed off the platform those days. And those changes were supposed to alleviate tanxiety?

As for dungeon creativity, why can't we have epic and engaging story reversal and setbacks? You come across a bridge but it's lifted, NPCs keep fighting at the edge to keep it clear from a horde of pursuing enemies, while they yell at the party to climb up that tower and make a way through the enemies inside so the party can unlock the bridge mechanics at the top before moving on? They could do so many epic things like this... you know, it doesn't belong just in tabletop roleplaying games? Like, actual RPG video games do it very well too?

[yesnt]

By not adhering to the format of a fixed number of bosses and trash. They could incorporate mechanics such as:

• Hopping on a mount and chasing someone.
• Falling in the sky like in Byakko.
• Using the G-Warrior or Magitek Armor or similar ideas.
• Melee DPS pilots a mount the whole party is on (like the raft in Dawntrail's first dungeon), while the ranged jobs attack from a distance and the tank tries to defend them.
• The fight with cannons in Stone Vigil HM.
• A dungeon that works similar to how Steps of Faith used to.
• Much of a mess as it is, the tentacle fight in Hullbreaker Isle is different and you have 2 routes to pick.
• Having interrupts on random trash mobs (they did this well in Shadowbringers dungeons and hunts as well as criterion). You can still make some pulls easier by interrupting these right.

I would like to add that these mechanics need to be mandatory. Not people cheesing and skipping or leaving it to the healer to clean up. You refuse to play the game as intended, you wipe.

[Nero-Voidstails]

I think the dungeon should have more to explore I hate and loved the thousand maws of toto-Rak because you could get lost yes it was annoying but it felt like a dungeon.

or make a multi path dungeon with harder trash mobs like legit if you could give them more power like a boss without being one would be nice clashing aoes or tiny mechanics could be interesting or a overworld interaction make us do something not just being a visual story or well stabbing thing

[Purrnauskis]

By not adhering to the format of a fixed number of bosses and trash. They could incorporate mechanics such as:
Hopping on a mount and chasing someone.
Falling in the sky like in Byakko.
Using the G-Warrior or Magitek Armor or similar ideas.
Melee DPS pilots a mount the whole party is on (like the raft in Dawntrail's first dungeon), while the ranged jobs attack from a distance and the tank tries to defend them.
The fight with cannons in Stone Vigil HM.
A dungeon that works similar to how Steps of Faith used to.
Much of a mess as it is, the tentacle fight in Hullbreaker Isle is different and you have 2 routes to pick.
Having interrupts on random trash mobs (they did this well in Shadowbringers dungeons and hunts as well as criterion). You can still make some pulls easier by interrupting these right.

This is just cringe,boring and disgusting gimmick fights that nobody wants as proven by people skipping dungeons like that in rolo.

It's not that hard to just make bosses and trash be more interesting alongside the combat not being a snoozefest instead of gimmicks.