Why is the game going down every expasion?

[Kandraxx]

What's the point when you can cheat everything with plugins or just buy it on your random boosting store for 30 dollars?

They know they can't save this game one way or another so they just milk it as the Barbie & Ken house game it now officially has degraded to.

Maybe it has a different feel to it in Japan where everybody is on console but as far as the west goes this game has joined the ranks of Diablo II Bnet.

[Taranok]

It's simple. The devs forgot that the 5 roles are supposed to approach the game in 5 very different ways, even if they softly overlap with each other. While there has been homogenization issues dating back to ARR, the second the devs forced everyone to do every mechanic the same way, which started being the norm in mid-ShB, the devs lost the ability to have both diverse class and encounter design.

This in turn forces them to homogenize classes that can't do the ever-stricter encounter design, which in turn dilutes any differences the classes have both between roles and each other. Compound this with a desire to make every class have something 'new' while forgetting to prune old stuff in each expansion and you get situations like BLM's leveling experience or GNB getting a third cartridge for some reason as the devs slowly draw the class further from its relatively perfect launch state.

It's like the devs are stuck in some sort of demented loop where the only solution is dragging the game more and more into the extremes, and people either love the extremes, or leave.

[Colt47]

Well, this is what happens when someone rushes the story out the door in two expansions and then tries to make it somehow work after already having the most powerful, dangerous threat of the universe quelled by the power of the main character. Now we're in what should have been a freaking summer vacation episode and they tried the same apocalypse thing all over again. All the while having the exact same crafting, exact same beast tribe thing, literally zero changes in formula for anything.

[Vintersol]

I think it's not bad to have a pattern that works. Other games aren't really different in this regard but i cannot understand, that things are limited for no reason like endgame dungeons. We have 10 or 12 Dungeons over the course of the leveling phase. Why are they pretty useless on max level? Everything is shoehorned in into a tiny space of activities without much variety.

[RinaB]

I kind of regret it but I skipped all the story this patch just to get into the new dungeon and raids. DT main story only had a couple of interesting parts mainly Shaolani (I absolutely love the western theme and wish they did more with it) and the solution 9 stuff while the rest of the content was an absolute slog of boring story and pointless dialogue. I'm gonna get recaps from now on until things start sounding a lot more interesting.

[Absurdity]

I was actually counting the minutes until someone would say that lol.

20 Gauge OS was amazing design because it discouraged spamming it, the opportunity cost (DPS loss when not used to keep uptime) meant it was an actual situational utility skill more useful for its intended design (closing gaps) than an extra bland and boring damage button you try to keep for your burst window.
Whether it was used often in the fights back then or not is irrelevant, the skills design was much smarter then than it is now. That being said, good for you that it was not needed on your strats, I got my mileage out of it and it was fun to use when I had to because for some reason I did sometimes end up in Narnia and had to keep my GCD rolling.

(ETA - yes i know that you still get mileage out of the current iteration of the skill by using it to close gaps and keep the GCD rolling - thats not the point I am making here)

Not only was it a utility skill, it was also important for gauge and more importantly GCD manipulation in Stormblood. Depending on downtime and boss invuln phases you could spend the gauge on Onslaught (since it was roughly equal to Fell Cleave on potency per gauge spent) instead of Fell Cleave to end a phase on a combo finisher instead of just sitting there after a Maim and having your combo drop while you couldn't attack.

Anyone saying Onslaught was just a button you didn't want to press outside of IR simply didn't understand it's uses properly.

The same goes for Inner Release. I don't know why people praise the current 3 stack system when sure, it fixed latency issues, but it also removed any interaction between your kit and the guaranteed direct crit for 10 seconds. No longer can you aplify Onslaught or Upheavel, or selfhealing through (at the time) Inner Beast and later Nascent Flash, or counter damage from Vengeance.
But that's ultimately what all the warrior changes over the years boil down to and why I also consider it to have gotten worse, the removal of small optimizations that were never required of the casual player but brought depth to otherwise incredibly basic gameplay.

I also find it incredibly funny when people call Warrior's gameplay "just spam Fell Cleave" when every change since 4.1 has just continued devalue Fell Cleave itself as an ability.

[TheDustyOne]

<snip>

In regards to the job identity criticisms, it largely has to do with attitudes like these:

There was nothing good about the 20 Gauge cost (to Onslaught).

YOU ARE A HEALER. Your job, by definition, *should* be *healing*.

Yes, exactly, I want to be a "HEALER", not a DPS or I would have picked it.

Effectively this ends up sounding like:

Different jobs within a role aren't allowed to do things in a way that's different from the other jobs in that role, because that might mean it has certain downsides, upsides, and quirks that set it apart. Roles are only ever meant to be something set in stone and never have deviations in how they function.

When Square listens to this, we get things like the ShB gutting to healers where they lost their DPS buttons. After all, they're *healers* and should be *healing*. It also leads to Warrior losing Onslaughts gauge interactions because it wasn't something you mindlessly pressed on cooldown like the other tanks.

When I play WHM, I'm not just player a healer; I'm playing a job that has mastery over the natural elements, and at higher levels, attunes to light aspected spells. Why does my gameplay then only consist of casting Glare and occasional lilies? Why not have a suite of earth, water, and wind spells that charge up light themed spells to show that mastery of elements? SCH wasn't just a healer that would throw big shields on teammates, but a master of diseases and tactics, able to both cure and cause them, and spread them with Bane. A lot of these motifs and mechanics are lost when you decide that they should only have minimal actions outside of healing, and there's only so many ways to fill an HP bar in interesting ways.

Tanks have 2 problems; extremely homogenous, and practically invincible. The Onslaught example is just one, but most of the tank kits have 1-to-1 analogues that have so little deviation and flavour that you can learn one tank and you've effectively learned all of them outside of the DPS rotation. The sheer amount of raw defence, healing power, and lack of threatening damage from enemies means that it's hard for tanks to actually achieve a fail state outside of high end content.

[Souljacker]

In regards to the job identity criticisms, it largely has to do with attitudes like these:

Effectively this ends up sounding like:

Different jobs within a role aren't allowed to do things in a way that's different from the other jobs in that role, because that might mean it has certain downsides, upsides, and quirks that set it apart. Roles are only ever meant to be something set in stone and never have deviations in how they function.

I respectfully disagree - because we can clearly see the end result of your argument. We have ended up with roles who all are expected to do DPS, and since there is no longer any meaningful separation of tank\healer\dps\support, jobs now get so so much self-healing or damage\debuffs we might as well just replace all the dungeons with one-mans and call it day. What's even the point of having a party with different "roles"?

I don't know when this attitude shifted, but it was pretty recently, because I don't remember ever hearing complaints in FFXI that jobs like White Mage didn't do enough damage in enough interesting ways. It certainly wasn't expected - if it happened it was a bonus. Loads of complaints over there, but killing the uniqueness of each role was never an actual player request.

Part of the problem is limiting party size to 4 - to this day I have no idea why they made this design decision. It means you HAVE to limit the party to 1 tank 1 healer and 2 DPS instead of tank, healer, mix of DPS and support as we liked when we had 6 man parties in XI.

The other part is an aversion to the hard work of balancing. Teams are getting so squeezed and talent is getting shed left and right - it's no wonder so many of these tasks seem out of reach for the team that's left... So we get systems that are a shadow of what they were in this game's predecessor.

[Hallarem]

Its because the devs fail in a lot of aspects:

- worldbuilding
- their own lore
- cant pick a lane with what aesthetic they want
- people wanting class identity
- people wanting QoL more than once every 4 years
- people wanting open world mmo stuff to do
- and a plethora of other issues like honest communication on what they cant and can do

[Fhaerron]

Was very clunky back in ARR, HW & SB but was more interesting overall.

While ShB is on of my most fav time in the game it also started the downhill of how the jobs feel.