Please Share Updates on 8.0 Job Design

[ty_taurus]

I know a lot of people say players don't want difficult or interesting job design (it's just forum people crying) but ironically like 95% of people i've met in game (or social media about the game) have mentioned how bad job design has got.

I do think we have to admit that we need some friction with job design and in general it needs to be more appealing, playing a different job should feel unique and give you reason to repeat a content, maybe a reason why it feels like theirs nothing to do is the fact that once you clear or do something on one job, playing a different job isn't going to offer much of a different experience.

Though theirs honestly a lot they need to do, job design is just a big part of that.

I think that's mostly a bad assumption (people who think most players don't want interesting job design, I mean) that stems from a very bizarre notion that job complexity means do the rotation correctly and optimally or fail the content. Which in all fairness was never the case not even in the notorious Heavensward. But for some reason, a lot of people have come to treat optimal rotations as the entry point and raising the ceiling means anyone who can't do it perfectly is going to suffer constantly hitting 1% enrages. But really, I would argue that sentiment comes from a subset of players even smaller than the group of players unhappy with oversimplification--people who want to be perfect at their job but have no desire to put in any effort to learn it. There was a Misshapen Chair video that talked about that mentality in gaming, and his term was a not-so-friendly one.

But I don't know if I believe that's entirely who the design team designs jobs for either. I think it more prominently comes down to something that's been said here before is it's easy for the designers to balance. Rather than take the time to properly design and balance jobs that are still fun and engaging to play, they'd prefer to cut corners and aggressively simplify jobs so they don't have to work hard at job design. They've probably been cutting corners on job design for so long because of constraints on the budget and the schedule paired with the ever increasing number of jobs. Spend more time over designing fights that apply to players universally and minimize time spent actually thinking about and adjusting job balance. I am sympathetic to the issue of restricted resources, but job design should not be an area we are slacking off on, especially when the balance ends up janky anyway.

[MatchaokaCha]

- They'll remove Glare, Dosis, Broil, and Malefic in 8.0

- Tank stances will be removed, and tanks will gain 2 charges of Benediction to "ease the burden on healers"

Yoshida's just giving lip service at this point. 8.0's already in development, and I seriously doubt they want to fiddle with their budget to make the deep changes necessary for a complete rework of 20+ jobs. They're not going to reverse course on their initial announcement that they made at the start of Shb's release in turning FFXIV into a theme park. Then again, that would be such an SE thing to do. I don't have faith they'll pull it off even if they go through with it.

[NaoSen]

This is probably because FFXIV cannot truly have job identity, the proof of that is what happened with Pictomancer.

It launched overtuned in terms of DPS, and the effects were immediately noticeable: DPS checks in Savage were getting trivialized. SE eventually responded with a potency nerf to bring it in line, and things settled to the "It still needs a nerf but ok for now" category.

Then FRU arrived, and it revealed just how powerful a "downtime-optimized" job could be in Ultimate content. Player outrage flared up once more.

So another adjustment comes in, this time the nerf stripping away the aspects that let it overperform in downtime-heavy content. Once again, the balance complaints stopped… and the usual "grr, homogenization" talk returned.

Unless every encounter is tightly controlled to suit every job equally, which is impossible, true identity will always create imbalance somewhere in current fight design.

The only real thing they can do is make jobs homogenized pre-8.0 (for older content), then have identity post-Dawntrail, where encounters are designed around each job's uniqueness.

It's a poor implementation to have your job play one way pre-8.0 and another way post 8.0 but what else can they truly do ?

[Valence]

I know a lot of people say players don't want difficult or interesting job design (it's just forum people crying) but ironically like 95% of people i've met in game (or social media about the game) have mentioned how bad job design has got.

I do think we have to admit that we need some friction with job design and in general it needs to be more appealing, playing a different job should feel unique and give you reason to repeat a content, maybe a reason why it feels like theirs nothing to do is the fact that once you clear or do something on one job, playing a different job isn't going to offer much of a different experience.

Though theirs honestly a lot they need to do, job design is just a big part of that.

I'm going to go out on a limb but I'll assume that what people confuse is that players may be afraid of getting obnoxiously bloated and endlessly long series of sheet music to play to pass for job rotations, and not necessarily job toolkits that are actually fun, engaging, and interact in a clever way with the gameplay they're presented with.

[ty_taurus]

This is probably because FFXIV cannot truly have job identity, the proof of that is what happened with Pictomancer.

It launched overtuned in terms of DPS, and the effects were immediately noticeable: DPS checks in Savage were getting trivialized. SE eventually responded with a potency nerf to bring it in line, and things settled to the "It still needs a nerf but ok for now" category.

Then FRU arrived, and it revealed just how powerful a "downtime-optimized" job could be in Ultimate content. Player outrage flared up once more.

So another adjustment comes in, this time the nerf stripping away the aspects that let it overperform in downtime-heavy content. Once again, the balance complaints stopped… and the usual "grr, homogenization" talk returned.

Unless every encounter is tightly controlled to suit every job equally, which is impossible, true identity will always create imbalance somewhere in current fight design.

The only real thing they can do is make jobs homogenized pre-8.0 (for older content), then have identity post-Dawntrail, where encounters are designed around each job's uniqueness.

It's a poor implementation to have your job play one way pre-8.0 and another way post 8.0 but what else can they truly do ?

“Can’t” is a really strong word to use especially given the example you’re citing. On the topic of Pictomancer’s identity… To my knowledge the issue is that the combat design team failed to perform one of the most basic steps in launching adjustments, which is quality control. It seems that there was no math done or basic numbers testing to preserve the integrity of the rotation which can happen to any job if the pushed changes are sloppy. If Samurai needed a nerf, and they reduced the potency of Higanbana such that the combined total potency was lower than Midare’s, that would impact the integrity of Samurai’s rotation, and that’s what essentially happened with Picto’s painting, to my knowledge. If they had taken the time to quality check their pushes, there would be no issue. And that kind of proves to me that my previous assumption is correct. They are cutting corners with job design at every step, both with identity and with balance. Job quality seems to be a very low priority to CBU3.

Additionally, I don’t think Pictomancer having a ln advantage in Ultimates is a bad thing. The degree of Picto’s power was, but some jobs having downtime advantages is really not an issue. It’s okay for some jobs to thrive better in certain environments as long as all jobs get a chance to shine somewhere and are viable otherwise. That makes the job system more interesting. Identity should not be sacrificed for balance, because what good is balance if the game isn’t enjoyable?

[Derio]

They say job adjustments. I want them to during a LL state how they are going by that. That would either open the door for player feedback or give devs the confidence that players are looking forward to the changes.

[Gyson]

I wouldn't expect much. What people want for the job system to change is basically a different game.

Yes, I think people are setting themselves up for disappointment if they think there will be significant changes. So many encounters have been designed with the more simplified versions of our class design, which is why there is more emphasis on movement, reaction, and paying attention to what the boss is doing instead of focusing on your hotbar. There are probably a few Bards crying as they read this, and I feel for them. The point is, if they dramatically change the designs of our classes then they will need to go back and redesign countless encounters. That is just not going to happen.

[ty_taurus]

Yes, I think people are setting themselves up for disappointment if they think there will be significant changes. So many encounters have been designed with the more simplified versions of our class design, which is why there is more emphasis on movement, reaction, and paying attention to what the boss is doing instead of focusing on your hotbar. There are probably a few Bards crying as they read this, and I feel for them. The point is, if they dramatically change the designs of our classes then they will need to go back and redesign countless encounters. That is just not going to happen.

I can't speak for others, but me personally... My expectations are very low. I've already been gone. I'm just putting in a last ditch effort to share my feedback after Yoshi P promised to better listen to player feedback, but I'm hesitant to believe that sentiment is genuine. But I don't agree that fun, healthy, and unique job design is at odds with the current encounter design or that fixing the atrocious state of job design requires reworking years of encounter designs. How can you possibly know if any particular set of changes to the job roster will or won't function with the current encounter design? We have no frame of reference for what such a set of jobs could even look like other than at best looking back at Stormblood, and jobs in Stormblood were not so complex that a player today couldn't navigate any of them through whatever dungeons are currently in expert roulette or Savage even.

[Gyson]

I can't speak for others, but me personally... My expectations are very low. I've already been gone. I'm just putting in a last ditch effort to share my feedback after Yoshi P promised to better listen to player feedback, but I'm hesitant to believe that sentiment is genuine. But I don't agree that fun, healthy, and unique job design is at odds with the current encounter design or that fixing the atrocious state of job design requires reworking years of encounter designs. How can you possibly know if any particular set of changes to the job roster will or won't function with the current encounter design? We have no frame of reference for what such a set of jobs could even look like other than at best looking back at Stormblood, and jobs in Stormblood were not so complex that a player today couldn't navigate any of them through whatever dungeons are currently in expert roulette or Savage even.

My personal observation has been that earlier content focused more on tactics and respecting mechanics, and later content focuses more on mobility, dexterity, and awareness. The latter works better with more simplified rotations and combat (what we have now), while the former allows players more opportunity to babysit their UI and take advantage of procs and situational skills (what we used to have/what Bards largely still have relative to other classes).

Think about the style of boss fights in, say, World of Darkness back in the day compared to today's Jeuno: The First Walk. In the former we had people needing to focus on specific tasks, mechanics that would wipe the raid if not respected, etc. Today we have dodge, memorize and dodge, run run run dodge.

At any rate, I don't believe you can radically change every job and then just believe it'll all mesh well with all the content without running into problems. Much of that content has been balanced under the current class design.

[Kaurhz]

Isn't asking about 8.0 job design a bold move when we're still waiting to see new encounter design?