"Players who already like the way things are can feel at ease..."

[ty_taurus]

I could go line by line on the rest of your post, but I want to focus on this first.

The players aren't complaining about the right thing. The problem isn't job design. It's fight design and server design.

Saying job design isn't a problem is as bad as saying combat design isn't a problem. They are two halves of gameplay and both matter. Fight design is the race track, but jobs are the vehicles we drive in. You could make the most breath taking race track in the world, but if everyone's stapled to tricycles because we're too scared of someone hitting a wall or falling off a pitfall, then we're still screwed.

And I've never said fight design isn't a problem, but job design is so far beyond worse right now that it's my main focus.

[Raikai]

Saying job design isn't a problem is as bad as saying combat design isn't a problem. They are two halves of gameplay and both matter. Fight design is the race track, but jobs are the vehicles we drive in. You could make the most breath taking race track in the world, but if everyone's stapled to tricycles because we're too scared of someone hitting a wall or falling off a pitfall, then we're still screwed.

And I've never said fight design isn't a problem, but job design is so far beyond worse right now that it's my main focus.

Think their fights fall into a categorization, by design, where job mechanics are really hard to end up being extremely interesting.

Simply put, they don't allow jobs to make creative usage of their kits as everything is very on-rails. If we end up somehow having more interesting dps gameplay in 8.0, it all ends up "inwards" for each job. A new dance, a new mudra combination, a new motif to paint... That's great if ends up promoting more interesting rotations (especially outside of the 2min meta), but still, I ask: how this kit interacts with the fight beyond damage and healing?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that is hard to even think about a very interesting thing to add with the current paradigm they set up in Dawntrail's "new fight design". Like, when we think about a new utility action for the DPSers? What can they even come up with besides a heal or a shield? Why I can't feel rewarded for being an aiming job that can kite something important with the Grazes when there's zero instances of that kind of necessity happening? Heck, is crazy how even in side content like Deep Dungeons and Field Operations, that kind of crowd control only works sometimes.

Do you all remember when Yoshida said that they were thinking about giving the other healers AoE actions an added effect to be useful like Holy?

Anyway, they both set themselves up in a corner with their fight design, but they also won't even try to push the limits of that corner. I'd love to be proved wrong in 8.0.

[Valence]

Saying job design isn't a problem is as bad as saying combat design isn't a problem. They are two halves of gameplay and both matter. Fight design is the race track, but jobs are the vehicles we drive in. You could make the most breath taking race track in the world, but if everyone's stapled to tricycles because we're too scared of someone hitting a wall or falling off a pitfall, then we're still screwed.

And I've never said fight design isn't a problem, but job design is so far beyond worse right now that it's my main focus.

People always forget the third wheel of the trinity when they talk about job and fight design, which is the battle system design, and I think this is actually the backbone of the two others. If your only metric is damage, then good luck designing interesting and unique jobs. If everything is judged and balanced around damage application, then good luck designing interesting and varied fights because people are immediately going to complain that a class sucks here or there otherwise.

What the battle system has lost in SHB:

- Party based cooperation and interplay beyond healing (MP, TP, support)
- Failure conditions based on resource scarcity and management (today it's just on body checks or if the healer dies)
- Aggro and boss positioning management
- Enemy damage and crit variance

Doesn't take a phd to understand that the loss of the first two literally informs the current direction on body checks and binary OHKO or party wipe mechanics as there is no building brick left to challenge the players in any other way. We're not playing with RPG systems anymore beyond healing and mitigation.
The latest two completely removed any semblance of rng and adjustment required on the side of the player to ensure that every encounter behaves exactly the same no matter what, completely negating player agency in the process.

This is also why we won't see us having the agency anymore to pick up from a list of role actions to customize our job and comfort our different playstyles (or just to adjust to the encounter), this is why encounters can't really offer the type of threat buildup that ARR/HW's used to do a lot like bosses (the Zu, the Sasquatch, T1, Mustard dragon in the Aery, etc) slowly enraging by gaining damage stacks over time because in the current environment it's bland and binary (up to how many stacks a healer can just spamm heal through), this is why encounters can't offer any meaningful use of crowd control iconic FF abilities (heavy, slow, etc) because those don't do jackshit in a damage focused system where positioning doesn't matter and every enemy is the same with giant telegraphs everywhere.

Without a properly fleshed out RPG battle system we're bound to see fight and job design absolutely stifled because it has literally no building blocks and no basis to build upon in the first place. It's been removed instead of improved over time.

This is why I do feel confident in saying that Yoshida's statement is accurate: no, we won't see meaningful change and people that already like it can rest easy, because bringing any meaningful change is asking for a colossal amount of work trying to undo the damage that 3 expansions have done, do a full 180° on the game's current direction (DDR lalaland) by rebuilding a proper combat system, and on top of this, come up with 21 new jobs adjusted for the system, as well as new encounter models. Yeah, good luck with that, they'd just be better by making a new game at this point.

[Oizen]

We gettin cross skills TWO

[Sunhwapark]

this is why encounters can't offer any meaningful use of crowd control iconic FF abilities (heavy, slow, etc) because those don't do jackshit in a damage focused system where positioning doesn't matter and every enemy is the same with giant telegraphs everywhere.

Along with the examples you gave, it really saddens me that we can't experience more variance in dungeons/raids nowadays compared to stuff like POTD/Eureka and stuff where you can make use of interrupts, CC is useful in most general cases and enemies can have more interesting properties - like undead monsters being aggressive when low on health, sprites being sensitive and reacting to magic spells, mobs that can only detect enemies with 'sound' but can't detect you if you're walking around. Combat feels to rigid and binary with no variance outside of basic parameters, I suppose it explains why I hardly do any PvE content compared to in the past.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

We gettin cross skills TWO

I’m going one step ahead of that by adding a caveat: “Only available in non EX/Savage/Ultimate due to balance reasons.”

[Valence]

Along with the examples you gave, it really saddens me that we can't experience more variance in dungeons/raids nowadays compared to stuff like POTD/Eureka and stuff where you can make use of interrupts, CC is useful in most general cases and enemies can have more interesting properties - like undead monsters being aggressive when low on health, sprites being sensitive and reacting to magic spells, mobs that can only detect enemies with 'sound' but can't detect you if you're walking around. Combat feels to rigid and binary with no variance outside of basic parameters, I suppose it explains why I hardly do any PvE content compared to in the past.

I'm not gonna pretend that CC or stealth used to be better in the past (except perhaps stun in ARR), because frankly it's always been the red stepped child of SE as far as I can remember. And being forlorn like it has always been, players have also constantly complained at the devs as to why certain abilities stayed for ages, like tri-bind for those who remember, etc, where they had zero use in standard pve content (but could have some in deep dungeons, eureka, etc).

[Daralii]

I'm not gonna pretend that CC or stealth used to be better in the past (except perhaps stun in ARR), because frankly it's always been the red stepped child of SE as far as I can remember. And being forlorn like it has always been, players have also constantly complained at the devs as to why certain abilities stayed for ages, like tri-bind for those who remember, etc, where they had zero use in standard pve content (but could have some in deep dungeons, eureka, etc).

Didn't Tri-bind get some use in Coils?

[Valence]

Didn't Tri-bind get some use in Coils?

Yeah, ARR still cared a little about CC, then SE dropped the ball completely and let it be a thing for the overworld and deep dungeons (and then eureka in SB). Yet jobs kept a lot of actual CC: WhM had fluid aura, RDM had Tether, AST had Stella, MNK had Arm of the Destroyer, MCH had Point Blank Shot, Head Graze and Suppressive Shot, etc. Those skills for some of them stayed for ages and the last surviving ones were removed in ShB. Considering people kept saying they were useless and should be removed, and every new expansion seeing they were still there (looking at tri-bind and tether especially), people were very surprised, so I assumed SE just had a reason to keep them, either for class identity or just everything in pve that wasn't standard. Hard to say why they kept them for so long.

[Striker44]

Simply put, they don't allow jobs to make creative usage of their kits as everything is very on-rails. If we end up somehow having more interesting dps gameplay in 8.0, it all ends up "inwards" for each job. A new dance, a new mudra combination, a new motif to paint... That's great if ends up promoting more interesting rotations (especially outside of the 2min meta), but still, I ask: how this kit interacts with the fight beyond damage and healing?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that is hard to even think about a very interesting thing to add with the current paradigm they set up in Dawntrail's "new fight design". Like, when we think about a new utility action for the DPSers? What can they even come up with besides a heal or a shield? Why I can't feel rewarded for being an aiming job that can kite something important with the Grazes when there's zero instances of that kind of necessity happening? Heck, is crazy how even in side content like Deep Dungeons and Field Operations, that kind of crowd control only works sometimes.

From my view, I think a difficult part of adding truly unique abilities for different jobs is the way they can potentially imbalance fights, and SE has been big on trying to prevent certain jobs from being "required" or locked out by the community because of their skill set (that hasn't stopped it from happening due to potency imbalances, but those are much more easily correctable). I think back to my WoW days when a particular raid fight had an add phase that was completely trivialized by Mass Dispel. But only Shadow Priests and Blood Elves had that ability. The fight favored Horde raiders because only they could be Blood Elves, while Alliance groups virtually *had* to bring a Shadow Priest to clear the fight. Personally, I'd rather have jobs feeling more "similar" than situations like the WoW example popping up in FFXIV.