Concerns about " Getting rid of unused and ineffective actions"

[Dzian]

There's a lot of useless skills that could be amazing skills with just a small tweak. surecast for example is absolutely useless. but if it was tweaked to allow you to cast the next spell uninterrupted while moving. it'd suddenly be an amazing spell and a great help for many blackmages, surecasting blizzard 4 for example to keep there enochain up even if they have to dodge mechanics.

All crowd control is useless by game design. shadowbind heavy freeze, sleep repose. a blm will never sleep anything instead they'll just fire 2 the whole lot till its dead, nothing hits hard enough to warrant sleeps or any form of crowd control and everything is simply rounded up and aoed down.

then you have skills that are used but totally innefective or not used for there intended purpose. pacifys, stuns, silences etc, the only thing these are ever used for 99% of the time is a small dps increase, so when you find mechanics you could stun you inevitably can't because the boss is immune because everyones been spamming stuns for the small dps boost.

silence is the same. think I can name 2 things of hand that silence has ever been usefull for. high voltage in very early coil days and requelling mist in the forgall fight in weeping city. again blunt arrow is only ever used as a dps increase 99% of the time.

then you have situations like paladins. where a good portion of its toolkit is basically useless in a remotely decent group. cover is one example, divine veil also. it's a pretty strong shield admittedly but it isn't really needed or usefull that often. if you pass a dps check before big aoe damage that damage is trivial. and divine veil is a joke, if you fail the dps check you wipe regardless of how many shields you can throw up.

so many skills are made useless simply from the way content is designed

[No2631]

Only read the first post. Excellent exercise in building strawmen, but the intent of the devs seems clearly aimed at some skills which see extremely limited and niche use that it's hardly worth justifying having them on a hotbar. Especially because the amount of buttons you can reasonably and comfortably reach is finite.


Tempered Will, for example, is useful in an extremely limited number of fights, and where it is useful it's used as a crutch to prevent dealing with mechanics rather than feeling like an extension of your kit; a PLD can use Tempered Will to negate Sophia EX's tilt mechanic, but it's a lazy escape from doing mechanics and hasn't a lot of use outside that in contemporary content. I tried using it in Gooball Library and was pushed back by the book attack from the first boss, for example; maybe I used it too late but even there circumventing the pushback hardly seems worth having a (pretty long) cooldown skill for.

Monks have Haymaker, which virtually never comes up in any content with a tank (hint: 90% of content), and Dragoons have Feint─the use of which is a loss of DPS in most cases and, off the top of my head, only slightly useful against Garuda Extreme provided you hit a very narrow window of opportunity for a marginal benefit.

These three are skills that have little to no real effect on your raiding experience or even dungeon-conquering experience. Re-assessing these skills may result in them being combined with other skills, or adjusted through traits gained after level 60 to transform them into more useful skills. I think the idea of "re-assess" isn't to outright delete them and pretend they don't exist, but to provide additional support to make these skills useful in more content than they currently are.

EDIT:

Honestly, BLM sucks for combat space in general anyway, if they combined thunder 1 and 2, or thunder 2 and 3 together I could fit Transpose onto my front bar. So I'm all for them removing something from them.

Just to point out, but at level 50, a Dunesfolk Lalafell Black Mage could use Thunder 2 instead of Thunder 1 during their Umbral Ice moment. Thunder 2 definitely saw some more use back then, and even now I sometimes manage to squeeze in a Thunder 2 instead of Thunder 1 without losing any uptime.

[Pondera]

Only read the first post. Excellent exercise in building strawmen

In what regard? Most of what I said was emphasizing on how much earlier spells build into later ones, and attempts to remove or simplify such a system are probably going to blow up in the devs' face. Also, I'm not just pulling theories out of thin air. I've seen people writing in and suggesting things like "instead of tanks have a zillion cooldowns, why not just 1 with a short cooldown?". Things that really make me happy that they're not to ones in charge, and also things that exacerbate my already intense paranoia.

But, as I said before, this is mostly just made worse by a lack of specifics. Once Yoshi P and the rest of the FF team start stating more precisely what they have in mind, my worries will either be soothed, or I'll have more concrete stuff to go on.

[Nezerius]

But, as I said before, this is mostly just made worse by a lack of specifics. Once Yoshi P and the rest of the FF team start stating more precisely what they have in mind, my worries will either be soothed, or I'll have more concrete stuff to go on.

They specifically showed three abilities that are being considered for removal/adjustment, which were Fists of Wind, Feint and Fracture. With that in mind, jumping straight to the assumption that they're adjusting (or even removing) fundamental abilities is just silly.

[Duelle]

My entire mentality when playing PLD is different to playing WAR. For WAR, my primary objective is to beat on the boss, however as a PLD, I am very spatially aware, dealing less damage on the boss, but keeping an eye on other party members, being aware of when healers struggle, and do what I can to assist with the toolkit that I have, which is how PLD should be, and I don't want to be turned into a WAR that has smaller hits but bigger shields.

You're looking in the wrong places for uniqueness. What makes PLD different from WAR is that a PLD can mitigate things with the press of a button, and the gameplay revolves around knowing when to press buttons to take less damage. The simplicity of our combos means that yes, it's a lot easier to be aware of the environment and pay attention to other things (which is why I roll my eyes whenever people complain about PLD combos).

WAR, on the other hand, is designed to mitigate things through actions. Hence why they have Storm's Path and Inner Beast. The self heals arguably fall into this category as well. They also have to generate a resource to spend on said mitigation (Wrath), whereas PLD does not.

The only way PLD would turn into a WAR would be by nerfing or removing defensive cooldowns and giving PLD a clone of Wrath stacks. Which is not likely to happen.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I'd say you're kind of going full-tilt conspiracy here.

In the OP's defense, people held the same belief with WoW's skill consolidation and look how that turned out. Seeing FFXIV borrows plenty of ideas from WoW, the OP's concerns aren't without some merit. Do I think we'll see something like Full Thrust combo become a single button? Hopefully not. That being said, some jobs will have to see some pruning. Even if you take away Piercing Talon, Keen Flurry and Feint, Dragoon still has a massive amount of buttons to its rotation. In fact, I don't even have Feint on my hotbar and still use 27 abilities. As I didn't count the aforementioned two or Elusive Jump since those are all situationally used, if at all, adding an additional five like they did in Heavensward would be cumbersome.

What I suspect could happen is combo ability are merged into one button-- with each changing based on proc duration. So True Thrust becomes Vorpal Thrust and then Full Thrust. Blade & Soul does this it, though I'm not entirely certain how I feel about it. While technically three different abilities, you are still pressing only a single button, albeit three times.

[Pondera]

In the OP's defense, people held the same belief with WoW's skill consolidation and look how that turned out.

Couldn't have said it better myself. People can say all day long that it was a content drought that brought WoW's declining popularity, but if you look at the sub count graphs, you'll see that subscribers started to drop off LONG before that was an issue, even before Mists of Pandaria was dropped. It was around when Blizzard removed the talent trees, basically slapping everyone who spent hours agonizing over the most efficient spec in the face and laughing at how much time they wasted. I reason that you can have amazing foes all day long with brilliant dungeons, creative enemies and complex mechanics, but what is the point if you can't do anything cool or engaging in that content?

A lot of combos can already be condensed through the use of macros, a point I've made several times before during this thread. We most certainly don't need devs to hold our hand in this regard, skilled and talented though they may be. They are called expansions for a reason, and if your character that you've spent hundreds of hours on, is made lesser not through any triumph of evil, but because the powers that be have declared a play style that you've come to cherish as "too complicated" for people who aren't going to dodge that AoE no matter how simple the game is for them, no amount of shiny baubles is going to fix that feeling of "used to be able to do that cool thing, but now you can't because reasons"

I'm really hoping my fears are unfounded and Yoshi-P is going to pull out some more gaming wisdom. I'm hoping that when he says "reassessment", he's talking about why Skull Sunder and Savage Blade are cross-class skills. Or why Black Mages have access to a cross class skill that increases damage based on dexterity. I'm hoping that he's looking at Cross class skills and realizing that, with a selection of imperative ones, a selection of okay ones, and a selection of ones that simply don't do anything, people are making the same choices 100% of the time.

[Ayer2015]

Unlike the vast majority on posts on this thread, I’m actually in favor of a far more significant job revamp come 4.0. Time will tell what actually happens.

[Felis]

They specifically showed three abilities that are being considered for removal/adjustment, which were Fists of Wind, Feint and Fracture.

Feather Feet, not Fist of Wind, if I remember it right

[Shurrikhan]

There's a lot of useless skills that could be amazing skills with just a small tweak. Surecast for example is absolutely useless, but if it was tweaked to allow you to cast the next spell uninterrupted while moving. it'd suddenly be an amazing spell and a great help for many blackmages, surecasting blizzard 4 for example to keep there enochain up even if they have to dodge mechanics.

What seems difficult about something like this is that you're then blending two functions, which can then step into the domain of another ability (in this case, Swiftcast). You now have two skills the provide mobility. If you went the way of allowing BLMs to use Surecast to simply stand in a given AoE instead such as by taking reduced AoE damage or their cast's potency absorbing incoming damage during the cast itself, then you essentially have a second Manaward, functionally speaking. To be honest, one of the things that I think could go a long way is to simply allow for dual-casting or blended animations, e.g. being able to use Surecast during another cast (flame gathers around your staff while your hand, otherwise unused, forms the Surecast, Manaward, Manawall, next-spell Swiftcast, etc.). One of the main inhibitors of Surecast right now is the clipping it causes. Keep the animation, but kill the clipping, and its use may well be more attractive.

Without that change, or even alongside it, SE will just have to figure out what blends of functions they actually want to assign to n abilities.

All crowd control is useless by game design. shadowbind heavy freeze, sleep repose. a blm will never sleep anything instead they'll just fire 2 the whole lot till its dead, nothing hits hard enough to warrant sleeps or any form of crowd control and everything is simply rounded up and aoed down.

Just a quick question: would it be preferably to you that your AoEs hit slightly harder, and your CCs were far more applicable (less effective but still usable against enemies that would otherwise be immune), but most enemies hit substantially harder? Maybe throw some added active defenses, for non-tanks especially, into that mix as not to kill off all melee when a tank isn't present, but at that point you really are more dependent on coordination in order to go whole hog on your enemies. If playing in the current mass-pull style, tanks get to feel a bit more mitigation oriented and healers a bit more healing oriented as a side-effect.

Then you have skills that are used but totally ineffective or not used for their intended purpose. Pacifys, stuns, silences, etc, are ever used for 99% of the time is a small dps increase, so when you find mechanics you could stun you inevitably can't because the boss is immune because everyones been spamming stuns for the small dps boost.

Similar question: Would you prefer that stuns were balanced in such a way as to be more useful as ways to guarantee positionals, improve uptime of other skills, or reduce (tank) damage taken, etc., than as on-cooldown bonus damage?

Then you have situations like paladins, where a good portion of its toolkit is basically useless in a remotely decent group. Cover is one example, divine veil also. it's a pretty strong shield admittedly but it isn't really needed or useful that often. If you pass a dps check before big aoe damage that damage is trivial. And divine veil is a joke, if you fail the dps check you wipe regardless of how many shields you can throw up.

What I'd say you're looking at are flaw-specific outputs, which can be fine (albeit perhaps a bit overpowered in new settings as sort of a safety mechanics-learning job) if their relative cost onto the rest of the toolkit is low. Granted, I don't think the Paladin toolkit is actually limited to emergencies and team mistakes. Divine Veil is still a very real output even outside of emergencies; I'd argue its best uses are regularly scheduled, as to negate the need for a particular healer AoE, and it can save the raid from certain AoEs, such as all Almost Holy casts going off at once within minimal or no other shielding. Cover itself would seem useful only when a target who would otherwise die is marked for or in a zone for incoming physical damage—extremely niche—but is actually used primarily to cheese mechanics, such as on T13's Ahk Morn, A5, etc., as a strategy-bending gimmick. So they're both useful even when no mistakes are made, and actually have relatively little uptime to support the team when mistakes are frequent. But I have to ask, is something useful at all times even what you really want, especially if the cost for failure-specific outputs are low, when you're playing a more... thematically defender-type tank? I'd agree that these tools should see more use to bend strategies further and more frequently, but I'm not sure they need to be regular outputs.

So many skills are made useless simply from the way content is designed.

And this is where I blame the distinct metas wherein CCs and such go from fully applicable to suddenly useless. There should be a more analog range of effect here to allow for different strategies as enemy resistances increase, rather than merely creating two distinct rulesets wherein a number of previously useful skills go by the wayside.