Thoughts on the removal of skills

[Kaiserdrache]

This game has tons of poibtless skills that should be better removed by merging their effects into other skills, lets look only first on all those completely obsolete role skills...
None of them offers anything special, that couldn't be done via updated and upgraded skills from the jobs too, making this way space for alot of new better designed skillls to complement the jobs with more interesting skills.

Then there are pointless skill combos, with certain skills, that are on effective, if used right after a specific other skill, visible through a glittering box around the skill icon. These combo skills should be transformed to the PVP type of function, because it makes no difference if I press constantly in combat rotations of 123 123 123, or if I do 111 111 111, the fact is only, the latter SAVES 2 skill slots, which can be used for more new different skills to make the general gameplay of all jobs more diversive and fun.

Then there are skills, which shouldn't be skills, but better rather some kind of passive traits that change the overall gameplay of the class, than to force the player to press like every 2-3 minutes a button, just to use the effect.

Then there are also skills, that feel like they'd be better upgrades of existing skills, than own individual skills that are rarely used due to too long CDs.

Not to forget that alot got removed with 5.0 out of reason, that should have been kept, or hopefully returns reworked later when we learn new stuff on the way to 90.
Then there exist whyever skills that exist only for Pvp - total idiotical, but sadly fact - which should be brought to PvE gameplay too, I see no logical reason why the jobs need to have Pvp only skills. PvE only makes sense, but not the other way around.


SE made with the Machinist a great, not perfect, but great job. For a perfect job they erased slightly too much skills and among them the best one that made the most fun, the AOE immobile turret that reacted only you with AOE with hit by you targets. The abklity to use turrets together with mechs has to come, then would Machinist truly be perfect. That mechs completely replace turrets is just stupid and feels like as if from 79 to 80 the job completely forgets what turrets are and how useful in combat they can be.

All Jobs should receive the same treatment like Machinist and should get a close look to it, how the gameplay mechanicst and skills/traits can get optimized so that playing them after the changes feels smoother, more fun, technically and conceptionally closer to what you'd expect from these jobs to do in the game.
Summoner n Scholar need finally a complete redesign n cut from each other to be completely individual jobs with summoners not using Books anymore, but instead Warhorns with that they call their summons and which is also summoner headgears in FF have originally horns on top to symbolize the bond with their summons by calling through horns. scholar takes over then all book skins from Summoner.

But the issues with these jobs are only the most obvious elefant in the room. All jobs have their own issues, monk for example feels uninspired and disconnected, which would profit alot from a Machinist Treatment, Astrologist got literally conceptionally destroyed and feels being without identity anymore with its screwed up card system and so on and so forth

[Eloah]

With this new patch and BLU updates, please prune some of those annoying skills.

[Kaiserdrache]

@Eloah

Blue Mage is a job that should get better redesigned to a normal job, otherwise it starts becoming feeling unfairfor all other jobs, why that one single job gets always cooked one bonus extra sausage in regard own own special unique content, just to be able to justify, why that class has basically everywhere restrictions.

The Blue Mage should just like all other classes a basic set of skills to use, around 28-32, and the monster skills are just learnable bonus on top, that they can use under certain Mechanic Conditions just like a summoner calls summons, the blue mage should call Beast Spirits that perform then the Monster's Signature Skills.
This way could participate the class independable in game content instances together with all other jobs, despite of that does it feel just being wrong when the other jobs have no content that you can do only with group members of the same job.

From a developer like SE one should be able to trustfully expect from these guys, that they should be creative enough to come up easily with working base skills for a Blue Mage, that feel fitting for a mage class, but dont must have monsters invelved in the skill designs, keeping this just for the class special mechanic that starts at say Level 50.

[VenKitsune]

Considering I picked some of the jobs I play based on the number of abilities, I do think bloat is a possible concern.

Some of the MMOs I've tried are WoW (Legion/BfA), SWTOR, STO, ESO, Tera, BDO, DCUO, (some Marvel MMO), AoC, Rift, and some other I've forgotten, and honestly, none of their controls are as nice as FFXIV for me. The only two I've played at max level are WoW and SWTOR and they have comparable number of abilities to FFXIV, and maybe even less in actual combat for certain classes for day-to-day dungeon playthrough.

What do you mean the controls are more comfortable? You can literally change the controls 100% - You could move your hotbar to the middle of the screen and make it cover half of it if you wanted. You could make the movement keys GLN and R if you wanted. I dont see how FF14s controls are comfortable...Considering you can change everything about them.

Also, yes while Wow might have a comparible ammount of skills to FF14 you have to remember that wow's GCD is MUCH shorter than FF14s. In FF14, you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for your GCD to come back when you're not weaving. Any more buttons in wow would be a chore for players, any more in FF14 however, is a necessity as far as im concerned.

[linay]

What do you mean the controls are more comfortable? You can literally change the controls 100% - You could move your hotbar to the middle of the screen and make it cover half of it if you wanted. You could make the movement keys GLN and R if you wanted. I dont see how FF14s controls are comfortable...Considering you can change everything about them.

More comfortable in terms of usage during combat. It's simple: FFXIV has the best controller implementation that I've tried. Changing things on screen affects visuals, and I have no problem with visuals. Changing keybinds doesn't change the fact that it's still easier for me to use a controller as a primary device (supplemented with keyboard and mouse as I play on PC, so best of all worlds).

Also, yes while Wow might have a comparible ammount of skills to FF14 you have to remember that wow's GCD is MUCH shorter than FF14s. In FF14, you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for your GCD to come back when you're not weaving. Any more buttons in wow would be a chore for players, any more in FF14 however, is a necessity as far as im concerned.

Adding more abilities wouldn't necessarily change anything unless they're OGCDs with regard to the longer GCD, and I would actually say that FFXIV has a good number of OGCD considering its GCD, for the most part. I just recently leveled Bard to 80 and was reminded once again why I don't play it on a daily basis even though I like its theme, aesthetics, and combat role. Also, part of my enjoyment in combat is experiencing the animations, and the longer GCD also takes that into account, but there is animation lock and other problems, and more OGCD would not be good in my opinion.

[Zakon]

While EQ2 is not a big name in the MMO scene, I can give them credit that they have rarely, if ever, removed skills over the years. Some newer skills may replace older ones to the point that the older ones are no longer used at all, but they don't remove the skills themselves. I haven't played EQ2 in about two years, so my info may not be entirely accurate anymore, but it is how they did things for over a decade.

EQ2's skills were all bland as hell though. There's a middle ground between WoW where each skill feels distinct but you have like no buttons, and EQ2 where you have a million buttons that all do very similar things.

FFXIV is currently in that middle ground.

[Shurrikhan]

EQ2's skills were all bland as hell though. There's a middle ground between WoW where each skill feels distinct but you have like no buttons, and EQ2 where you have a million buttons that all do very similar things.

FFXIV is currently in that middle ground.

To be fair, it's not really a compromise between the two. You have a total amount of gameplay control, and split that between x many buttons, but ultimately the limitation is that total amount of gameplay control more so than the number of buttons it's split among. Shallow is shallow, no matter if it takes 30 keys or 3 to do the same thing. And while it certainly gets harder to pack all that into fewer keys, I can think of a few systems that have had more challenge and nuance in its combat playflow across some 5 keys than this game has across its 25.

[Ruinfeild]

I wonder if it would help if some skills were combo'd and then the original
skill was chained. You know like in PvP you use 1 skill, and that
skill changes into a next potential combo? That would be nice.
Sorry if I'm miss-explaining :x

Will never happen. I don't want to go and search from the quote (again) but it was brought up several times during interviews and he said it would make the game far to easy (or at least easier than it already is) and also make it boring. That and I think he said something about how it would mess up the players abilities to pay attention and react during encounters or something.

[EtherRose]

I'm not concerned. It's essential to remove skills or change them as level cap increases. The main reason is because you would have WAY to many skills on your hotbar. It would be littered with skills so yes, they change or remove skills to keep things less cluttered and manageable. I personally have no problem with the changes to some jobs. People get used to certain jobs early on like as you say, DRK specifically in heavenward and then it's completely different in Shadow Bringers and then they complain. Yes the job is different on how it used to be but i see no problem with it currently.

Also i think maybe they should add a few more traits.

[Grann-Goro]

I'm very concerned about this too !

I don't wont to see old content (lv 50 content, lv 60 content, etc...) be too much distorted because of a so called "expansion". (Heavensward was perfect in that sense !)
An "expansion" to a game is not supposed to make previous content less interesting, either because too many old skills were removed, or because of some global gameplay changes (like the addition of new stats in Stormblood).

I can understand however most of the changes that were made up until now.
Despite the fact we already lost a good number of lv 50 abilities, lv 50 content is still quite good today when played in minimum item level mode (not AS good it was though...)
But at one point, the removal of skills at each expansion will have to stop (like the addition of new jobs by the way) !


For that, I can think of two possible solutions :

1) If SE thinks that a particular skill is no longer useful for the new level cap of the new expansion, make sure that this skill is replaced by a new one once a certain level is reached, just like Stone 2 replaces Stone 1 for instance.
Even if the new skill is completely different from the one which will be replaced, you can use this "trick" to preserve the old skills without increasing the total number of usable skills.

2) Use the same method as the blue mage : don't limit the number of skills we can learn, just limit the number of skills we can "equip".
Of course, there will always be only one optimal set of skills at max level that everyone will use, but that's not a problem at all.
Again, even if a skill becomes useless at max level, it doesn't mean this skill is useless in older content, where the more usefull skills aren't available.