Why can't we have jobs with this level of depth and customization in FFXIV?

[Luvbunny]

This topic is less "XI had this, why doesn't XIV?" and more "XIV has jobs with very simple mechanics, here's an example of what a future class/job could be similar to."What's wrong with looking to SE's past works and examining ideas that worked that could be altered (probably heavily so it isn't super complex and it won't break the game) and implemented in some way into XIV:ARR (a game that is still growing in many ways). It's unlikely the combat system will ever change, but who's to say we can't have at least one class/job work with at least some more complexity than what we already have? .

But there is nothing remotely "simple" about FF14 game mechanic. Yes some stuffs are somewhat scripted in a way that you need "certain roles" in your party set up, mostly for 4 people duty finder to make it easier for everyone to clear contents. FF14 Jobs has more than enough rotation buttons, far more than FFXI set up, and far far far more complex for certain jobs to be able to play properly. There is nothing complex about FFXI, you swap gears with your macro when your perform certain stuffs, but you mainly spam "weapon skills" at 100 TP, and maybe a few job abilities, like 6-8 buttons macro at most for melee. Not sure where "FFXI is more complex" opinion is coming from.

Pet jobs are the BANE of FFXI existence, over 11 years in the making and the old team (and the new team) has no clue on how to solve this "complex" riddles. Puppetmaster was absolute trash job for years and years with no remedy in fixing the pet AI till recently, half baked solutions at best. Beastmaster was given a fix in Abysea era then the team could not evolve past that. Summoner in FFXI is a hot tranny mess, it was somewhat decent during Abysea era, and now it languishing and in dire need of revision.

[rwyan]

FF14's complexity is only skin deep. In its current state, it delivers beautiful graphics, an outstanding soundtrack, Final Fantasy nostalgia, somewhat entertaining storylines, and a very fun crafting system. That is about it.

I am firm believer in systems are that simple, easy to understand yet hard to master. However, the only thing that requires any significant challenge are things like telegraphs and boss mechanics. The buck stops there and that WILL be an issue for the long term health of the game.

Yes, FFXI is an older MMO with some arcane mechanics and awkward functionality. It also is bloated with content that is no longer worthwhile. However, the strength of the game is in its job and combat systems. Once again, simple, easy to understand yet hard to master. A job was abstracted via weapon skills, spell skills, stat bonuses, and abilities both active and passive. On top of that, the job system added quite a bit of complexity as it would open up abilities, spells, and stat bonuses that were not available to your main job. Combat required more than memorization. It required significant knowledge of your job and your encounters. Things like crowd control and enfeebles were vital to combat success.

Here, a job is abstracted via a single weapon and a set of abilities both active and passive. You cannot cross-class passives and the available cross-class skills provide neither flavor or interest to the system. Everyone has almost the same number of abilities. Everyone has the same number of job abilities. There is no flavor. There is no depth.

Yes, the FFXI job system had its flaws. Balance across its NUMEROUS jobs was always an issue. However, it made up for it in an amazing amount of flavor, depth, and theorycrafting.

I pity anyone who finds the current job system fulfilling. I pity anyone that finds the current state of the hunt system fulfilling. I pity anyone that finds the current state of FF14 amazingly deep.

There is a reason why these threads are becoming more and more regular. Yoshida and Co. did an amazing job hooking us, but now they got to hold our interest. Grinding tomes, grinding instances, grinding fates, grinding hunts... none of these are interesting and fulfilling outside the pixelcrack that they reward.

I will be looking very hard at the expansion. I think Yoshida and Co. are amazingly talented, especially considering they maintained the original 1.0 release while building 2.0 - that can never be understated or fully appreciated just how much work that required. However, anyone fighting these valid criticisms of the game's current state is a fool. Final Fantasy means a lot to all of us and want to be here. I think its fair that we are pointing out that while the game outshines FFXI on numerous fronts, it pales in other important areas.

The training wheels so to speak will need to come off soon, otherwise the future of FF14 will not be as bright as its present.

[Gilthas]

XI was designed for strategy in a slower paced game during earlier times.

People keep saying stuff like this but what exactly made FFXI more strategic than how FFXIV is? Seriously? People keep really overrating the depth and complexity of FFXI's battle system when most of it was far simpler than what we have now in FFXIV.

(...)

I made my original post before you wrote all of that, and interestingly, it still applies. "People keep really overrating the depth and complexity of FFXI's battle system when most of it was far simpler than what we have now in FFXIV." It's kind of ridiculous that you argue that the only thing you need in FFXIV is to memorize the combat, but FFXI "required significant knowledge of your job" (as if that wasn't needed in FFXIV) "and your encounters" (so memorize them). What a load of bull.

[myahele]

The game(2.0) has only been around for a year and whose combat is VERY fast. You won't have the luxury of waiting till its your turn while choosing which attack you wanna use.

Still, I would love more pet comands and gear/materia with special abilities.

[Tupsi]

Because this is XIV, not XI. Sorry.

It's not WoW either but alas.

[Alukah]

Perhaps if people stop using XI (or 1.x) as example for suggestions they wouldn't be ignored or refused. If that Miqo'te nose thread didn't pretty much ask to turn Miqo'te into Mithra the Com. Rep. response would have been different. It is important how you present your suggestion, specially when our devs are making sure this game looks and feels different from XI (or 1.x).

Even after reading the red bold words in the original post I still read "XI has this, why can't we have this?".

[Fendred]

It really baffles me that people think this game is too simple.... This game is "easy to pick up" and yet has its own complex system to master. FFXI melee is quite simple, pretty much auto attack, wait for 100 TP and cycle your job abilities with a few macros. That is it, no dance around, no avoiding anything much, you auto attack and hit abilities. Support and healing job maybe a bit more work and gear swap macro makes things more complex (a big waste of time). The amount of spells there for mage jobs is absurd... People think "simplicity" is bad... The hardest thing to do is to create a simple to pick up and play game but has enough complexity to master.

It's not that they can't make interesting jobs, but at end game things are about trying to create an interesting team experience. I love the complexity of the monk. However, all of the monk's complexity doesn't do anything to make teamwork interesting. Also, just because an approach didn't work in some other game doesn't mean that developers should throw their collective hands in the air and give up on finding different solutions. There is more than one way to cook an egg, and the same applies to building combat systems.

[File2ish]

But there is nothing remotely "simple" about FF14 game mechanic. Yes some stuffs are somewhat scripted in a way that you need "certain roles" in your party set up, mostly for 4 people duty finder to make it easier for everyone to clear contents.

By simple, I'm referring to the rotations. 1-2-3-A-B-C,repeat + weave other stuff in if possible. Fast paced, little time to think before GCD is ready for the next ability.

XI was simple as well. Buffs (if applicable to the job), Auto attack -> WS (preferably to skillchain with others) or cast strongest spell of the enemy mob's weakness. + Depending on skillchain, cast specific element for magic burst damage. Slow paced, time to decide best course of action regarding skills and magic.

Both of them are, in a word: Simple. (And yes, that was very abbreviated and didn't detail every single mechanic of either).

I'm very well aware of how XIV:ARR works, and how XI works. The "complexity" of XI is more along the strategies involved in gameplay and ability use, not the battle mechanics themselves. In the end neither XI, XIV 1.XX, nor XIV:ARR are very "complex". XI and 1.XX had more complicated mechanics such as elemental attributes that actually mattered, for instance. And XI had skills and spells up up the wazoo which gave a more complicated feel, if only because of choice (trust me, I mained Red Mage). Whereas ARR has more of a scripted approach (as you said) and are almost required to dodge. The current jobs in ARR, however, feel even more simple than the auto attacking-weapon skilling of XI.

Why not have a DPS job that works at least somewhat differently that what we have already? Not asking for anything like SMN, PUP, or BST from XI. Nor for Red Mage as it was in XI with it's insane list of spells; All of those would need a ton of editing, and the pet jobs would probably end up as Summoner did in ARR (small pet, player character does most of the work and damage) in order to work in ARR's battle system.

I'm not saying we should have the elemental attributes or anything of the like that we currently don't have or need (elements, skillchains, etc. would likely break the game as it stands). Nor am I saying the battle system should slow down in any way. But do we need to stick to rotations for all new jobs? Will tanks and DPS be forever locked to the same rotations as the level cap eventually gets raised? Can we get something more out of the system for another job fitting within the 3 roles we have?

Perhaps we can, Ninja might be the first job that shows "complexity" in comparison to say DRG and MNK. They said it will have mudras, right? Let's see how they work and how it pans out. ARR's mechanics definitely don't work for the auto-attacking being a main source of damage output, which is why we have rotations for skills. It's unavoidable to have skills being our main source of damage output. How will mudras change the gameplay style (if they do)? Maybe Ninja won't have a set 1-2-3-A-B-C repeat rotation like DRG and MNK that dictates the amount of potency an attack has (or for monk's case positional + being unable to use skills outside of a stance). Maybe it will have multiple stance you set manually or by using specific mudras? Or perhaps they found another way to change it up. It would be a welcome change for some, and perhaps a big turn off for others.

In the end: We don't want anything overly complex. Merely, I'm saying perhaps something to change it up a bit.

But there is nothing remotely "simple" about FF14 game mechanic. Yes some stuffs are somewhat scripted in a way that you need "certain roles" in your party set up, mostly for 4 people duty finder to make it easier for everyone to clear contents. FF14 Jobs has more than enough rotation buttons, far more than FFXI set up, and far far far more complex for certain jobs to be able to play properly. There is nothing complex about FFXI, you swap gears with your macro when your perform certain stuffs, but you mainly spam "weapon skills" at 100 TP, and maybe a few job abilities, like 6-8 buttons macro at most for melee. Not sure where "FFXI is more complex" opinion is coming from.

And you updated while I was typing =p

Just saying: rotation + amount of buttons available =/= complexity. FFXI had multiple jobs that weren't just sit and wait for TP and had reactionary gameplay rather than static. It offers the same complexity as ARR, but in different ways.

Thief: Sneak Attack Trick Attack. Position mattered in order to help the tank hold hate.

Dancer (my other main job): Steps use a small amount of TP to place a debuff, regain TP with reverse flourish from the stacks steps gave. Also healing with TP, party endrain/enaspir/enhaste buff depending on situation, etc.

Blue Mage: Wide variety of spells ranging from buffs to heals to attacks to debuffs.

Ranger: Range you shoot your bow/gun/crossbow from actually effected how much damage you do. Knowing when a good time to use barrage and other skills was, etc.

Corsair: Roll dice for effects.

Ninja: Proper use and timing of Utsusemi Ichi and Ni so you don't die (because Ninja tank) and use of other Ninjutsu for specific types of debuffs.

Scholar: Flipping between black and white magic stances when necessary (yes, in party situations as well).

I daresay there could be more complexity in XI than there is in ARR.

[rwyan]

I don't understand why players seem to think suggestions for depth and flavor in the job system equate to a FFXI makeover for FFXIV? No one is asking for the combat pace to be slowed down. There are plenty of ways they could deepen the current systems through itemization, some sort of job alternate advancement, or something else all together. Just because players will meta the system (see Hunts) doesn't mean choices and depth are bad. Balance is always an issue when choices are at play and has always been the case with every other MMO with a substantial amount of player choice. However, it is a POOR excuse as to not try and give the class/job systems a shot of steroids.

Example:
* Currently, each class can be viewed as some form of combat specialist. Gladiators are the masters for sword and shield. Rogues will be the masters of dual daggers. Etc...
* What if jobs and classes were completely independent of one another?
* What if jobs had their own set of self-contained abilities and passives that didn't rely so much on a class, but provided some complimentary benefit whatever class has its stone equipped?
* Imagine the Paladin job with abilities and passives that emphasized maintaining enmity, group enhancements, damage mitigation all with the flavor of a WHM wielding holy knight.
* If jobs and classes were independent, you could theoretically equip the Paladin job stone with most any class. Some combinations would be worthless... that is okay, others would be exceptionally fun, but most importantly, if done right, each combination would have some place in the game. That would be flavorful.
* Imagine bards equipped with bows, dual daggers, scepters, etc...
* Some jobs would have more inherit flexibility... once again flavor.
* Stats would be even more important as it would be a case of tweaking your allocation, your gear to best suit your class and your job.
* The armory system would be restored as some jobs could theoretically be very effective with multiple weapons

Of course, the usuals will "snip" and cry that something like this would lead to balance issues. But, I kind of would like theorycrafting to be bit more integral to the job/class systems. It is what kept me playing FFXI for so long. Balance issues sucked, but with an active dev team, the game would constantly move forward. As such, for a system like the above described, it would be OKAY for certain job/class combinations to be odd and off-putting. That or the dev team could limit certain combos if they didn't want players to accidently role with a "gimped" combo.

[Baneus]

It's not WoW either but alas.

Indeed. And unlike FFXI and WoW, FFXIV doesn't have 10(ish) years of development (yet. Here's hoping it does).

"Oh, but they should have learned from the past" You think they haven't? They have more access to what people do in the background of a game than any player ever will. All the "I think"s and "but all my friends" are not really good indicators of what the entire playerbase is doing.

The game is moving forward. What we have right now is the basic framework for the future, but it is not what the game will look like even one year from now (keeping in mind that expansions are often used as an opportunity to make sweeping changes to mechanics and classes).