Thread: What can the dev team do to satisfy the critics of 1.18?

Originally Posted by Neptune

The dev team also has a profound choice to make about healing. One of their goals is role identity. If there's a healer role it must be all-consuming to give it a strong identity.

100% Agree. As do a fair majority (with respect to any class/role) according to the New Years poll/survey.

Originally Posted by Neptune

On the other hand, the original design of FFXIV is that every class is back-up healer. That path avoids the kind of micromanagement gameplay of FFXI that became tiring to some healers, and a more rewarding type of gameplay where everyone shares responsibility. The two paths are mutually exclusive.

Very true - you can't have a well-defined, well-attributed, role-specific healing class while at the same time having a half-assed "generic" healing type class that everyone and their uncle, and on any class/role, can effectively use by spamming the few relatively useful spells with little to no fear of resource/MP depletion. Sort of like having having a chicken and the egg that created the chicken at the same time (mmm, chicken-fried eggs).

Originally Posted by Neptune

The dev team should make a White Mage job, and it should have micromanagement gameplay. MP costs should be lowered from what they are now to allow for backup healers. Access to the White Mage job should be through Thaumaturge and Conjurer until the game is relaunched.

I'm sorry, but I thought the whole notion of a solid, well-defined/specified healing class/job couldn't exist as one while also being low-managed, low-MP cost "backup" healing class because of the whole mutually exclusive thing.

Originally Posted by Neptune

Curaga spells should be White Mage specific,

...which they are. And I also 100% agree.

Originally Posted by Neptune

and aoe heals should be reinstated to Thaumaturge and Conjurer with lowered effectiveness, to allow for all classes access to Darkhold and not just GLA/CON/ARC.

So, what's the point of Curaga then if not to be overshadowed by spamming a spell that can be cast as AoE with "lowered effectiveness" but with lower MP cost and [potentially] cast time? What's the point of having a class/job designed for healing when other classes can do just as well? It sounds like what you're suggesting is nothing too different from DoM/DoW classes were pre-1.18: a bigger melting pot.

Originally Posted by Neptune

Auto-attack range should be increased for Thaumaturge and Conjurer, or Spirit Dart / Nature's Fury should have 3-5 second recast.

But, in order to auto-attack a mob you need to be in melee range. Are you suggesting that the DoMs should be able to stand further than what the DoWs have to stand away from the mobs in order to pointlessly whack away at a mob and give it TP faster so that it can use it's [more-than-likely] harmful AoE abilities on the entire party? I can't speak for all DoM players, but when I'm in a party I'm too busy casting many other spells to worry about the recast of Spirit Dart or other TP-based moves.

Originally Posted by Neptune

all of these changes were based on making Darkhold the best it could be. In the attempt to do that was any of the rest of the game set off balance?

I couldn't disagree more. This game is first a Final Fantasy game, second a Role Playing Game, and third an MMO; and what this patch, and many others, is doing for this game is making changes in order to conform to that. This game cannot be an MMORPG without first being an RPG, and it cannot be a FF-MMORPG without first being a FF game.

Furthermore, there is another choice that the dev team(s) can do in response to the critics that the OP didn't metion: ignore them. Why? Because everything that every negative critic has said is completely subjective; over-zealoused opinions sparked from upset of changes that removed the "comfort zones" the players have been used to playing in since September 2010.

Dev team(s) - keep up the good work!