Thread: 4.0 specialization

Originally Posted by Nezerius

They messed up with those abilities, as players looked at the RNG involved in most of the abilities, decided that it wasn't worth the hassle, and kept on making rotations with most of the 2.x abilities (and the few 51+ cross-class abilities that were introduced in 3.0). The whole "forced cooperation" thing didn't come into place until 3.1, when they added specialist recipes. It was really just a bandaid fix to get people to use the specialist system.

To be fair, they were already discussing the possibility of specialist recipes back before HW launched.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ast_interview/

However, they weren't implemented immediately probably because they already had another mechanism in place: the favor system and gated red scrip gear. Both were designed to differentiate crafters by limiting their gear progression and they likely wanted to see how those went first. I don't think the specialist recipes added in 3.1 were so much to force you to use specialization, but rather they were introduced to achieve what the favor system failed to do (it simply killed crafting). At the same time, they began to nerf the favor grind and eventually phased it out more or less by 3.3.

Feedback is extremely important as FF14 2.0 and post launch FF14 seem to have been designed differently. Back before the launch of FF14, the developers designed the game based on what they felt the players would want. Post launch, however, most systems seem to have been introduced and balanced based on player feedback (crafting changes, savage raid difficulty, etc). Players asked for a method for single class crafters to HQ master crafts and got it (it wasn't good and failed). They asked for a way to eliminate or minimize an omni-crafters ability to dominate all markets and got that too, first in the form of a favor grind/gear lockout and then in the form of specialist recipes. Players asked for specialization to be more useful and then got the added stat boosts in 3.3.

I would say that specialist recipes are easily the "lessor of the two evils" but they aren't doing what they were intended to do anyways and have largely been met with criticism. With enough feedback, some of these changes might be slowly phased out like favors. From the sounds of it, Stormblood will remove the limit on spec changes, assuming that souls are still purchased using scrips.

Unfortunately, feedback from core end game crafters make up the minority of the feed back the developers receive. Poll non-crafters and they'd probably still ask for the same things that players in ARR asked for, only implemented differently...