The 5.2 Scholar -- Thoughts from a Returning Player

[Absurdity]

You are not crazy, my dude. It has been a year since the dark days of our kits being gutted, and we're looking at a year or more of this crap before there's a small CHANCE of change... But even then, the player-dev trust is in such a sorry, tattered state that many of us are more worried about things getting worse, rather than being hopeful for improvements.

This is one of the biggest fears I've had since I saw the ShB job previews. Why? Because I have already experienced it.

I had been playing XIV since ARR but always only for maybe a month or two because a different mmo was occupying most of my time, WoW. By the time I left that game in Legion I had been playing for about 12 years. When WoD came out in 2014 and they removed an incredible number of skills from every single class in the game I was already dreading the direction the game was going and only had those fears confirmed when the Legion expansion further reduced most classes to an extremely basic set of skills. Gone were the support or very niche but fun abilities you had and instead you would spend most of the time spamming the same 3 buttons with the occasional burst window. The gameplay was so mindnumbingly boring that no amount of content could keep me interested and I had to leave 12 years of memories and dedication to this one game behind. At that time I remembered that XIV had gotten it's 2nd expansion, Stormblood, a while ago, I picked it up and never looked back.



Now imagine my feelings when I look at Shadowbringers and see the same pattern emerging in XIV. It isn't nearly as bad yet but even in WoW it started with small things, removal of abilities that were rarely used outside of pvp or several skills simply combined into one, but this is not a road you want to follow to the end.

[Liam_Harper]

Now imagine my feelings when I look at Shadowbringers and see the same pattern emerging in XIV. It isn't nearly as bad yet but even in WoW it started with small things, removal of abilities that were rarely used outside of pvp or several skills simply combined into one, but this is not a road you want to follow to the end.

Exactly my fears. FF14's a long way off from being as bad as WoW, but it's starting to show the same signs. It's more and more about accessibility, trying to entice players into classes or content they don't enjoy and pruning stuff they see as unnecessary. Lazier players get used to this and start finding more things they find tedious and complaining about them, the devs prune them and the cycle continues. Look at some of the complaints on General, so far we've had requests to remove all DoTs, positionals, maintenance buffs, raid buffs, consolidate combos and move utility away from dps. Can you imagine if they implemented all these things?

Sadly developers get trapped into looking at numbers. They see that healers, or crafters, or gatherers or tanks or so on don't have a high participation rate, decide this is wrong and they need to change it so a large majority of players are doing that content. What they fail to see is that playing a healer (for example) is simply not everyone's cup of tea. That's normal. To tempt people over who don't enjoy these activities, you have to wreck them and hand them over for free, which is what they're doing. Even then, you won't get a high long-term participation rate because the players who don't like healing will get bored easily.

I wish they'd make classes for the people who like that class. Give people who enjoyed FF14 healing an indepth immersive experience. Stop designing classes for people who don't like that class.

[Absurdity]

Can you imagine if they implemented all these things?

I can imagine it a bit too well and it will be the moment where I will be gone without thinking twice. This shit got me to stop playing a game I spent 12 years of my life on, it sure as hell will make me stop playing any other game.

Look at some of the complaints on General

I only needed to look at the "Savage is too hard, pls nerf" thread in Dungeons to get the idea, it's almost as bad as taking gameplay advice from people on Twitter and Facebook that don't even have half their skills in their hotbars at lvl 80.


*edit*...I just looked at General...and now I want to wipe the last hour of my memory

[Kinks]

...It's beyond my comprehension how anybody on that team thought they were helping us.

I've said it before, I played Scholar because I loved the complexity, the challenge; If I was feeling potato I could focus healing, if I wanted to feel like a bamf dpsing, DoT healing, shields like I seriously was RPing in my head as this cool battle healer nerd thing muh dood it was da shih-tzu.

I actually really appreciated that they had healers that could accommodate different healing play styles, just like some dps classes have a higher skill ceiling.

But I was heartbroken that they killed my Scholar. It really has sucked the fun out of the game from me. I've been playing mmos over ten years and to have everything that I've learned as a healer, a player, skill wise, tactics, recoveries in sticky situations, etc etc

The dev team spat in my face saying "get used to it" and basically in a diplomatic way said f__k you, I don't care about what you think, this is our game.

Actually, even that would have been more communication than we've gotten so far.

[Yani-Madara]

Exactly my fears. FF14's a long way off from being as bad as WoW, but it's starting to show the same signs. It's more and more about accessibility, trying to entice players into classes or content they don't enjoy and pruning stuff they see as unnecessary. Lazier players get used to this and start finding more things they find tedious and complaining about them, the devs prune them and the cycle continues. Look at some of the complaints on General, so far we've had requests to remove all DoTs, positionals, maintenance buffs, raid buffs, consolidate combos and move utility away from dps. Can you imagine if they implemented all these things?

Sadly developers get trapped into looking at numbers. They see that healers, or crafters, or gatherers or tanks or so on don't have a high participation rate, decide this is wrong and they need to change it so a large majority of players are doing that content. What they fail to see is that playing a healer (for example) is simply not everyone's cup of tea. That's normal. To tempt people over who don't enjoy these activities, you have to wreck them and hand them over for free, which is what they're doing. Even then, you won't get a high long-term participation rate because the players who don't like healing will get bored easily.

I wish they'd make classes for the people who like that class. Give people who enjoyed FF14 healing an indepth immersive experience. Stop designing classes for people who don't like that class.

Oof, fully agree. The devs need to survey people who love a class instead of only making changes based on suggestions from people who hate or hardly ever play a class.

I was a former Nin main that abandoned it because I hated the 5.1 overhaul so much.
Now there's a bunch of angry Nin mains (some even quit the game) and a group of mostly new people that loved the changes because Nin is now a lot easier.

It's infuriating, if they hated Nin so much, why not just pick another easier class like RDM or DNC instead of ranting on forums and ruining others' class.

Reminds me of people asking for pet removal in summoner. Why even play it if you hate pets? Jeez

[Absurdity]

I was a former Nin main that abandoned it because I hated the 5.1 overhaul so much.
Now there's a bunch of angry Nin mains (some even quit the game) and a group of mostly new people that loved the changes because Nin is now a lot easier.

I have to confess I actually liked the 5.1 Nin changes, specifically the Ninjutsu change, couldn't care less about the rest. My main issue with the old Ninjutsus was that I lost count of how many times I pressed them too fast for the game to register, so instead of Ten -> Chi -> Jin I'd end up with Ten -> Jin and my Trick Attack was completely screwed. I hate having to stare at my hotbars to check if the game didn't arbitrarily decide that the skill didn't go off.

[ItMe]

Reminds me of people asking for pet removal in summoner.

No way ...
That can't be true, can it?
WTF...
Can you reply with a link to this?

[Grimoire-M]

No way ...
That can't be true, can it?
WTF...
Can you reply with a link to this?

I believe it mostly refers to people wanting the current iteration of Egi removed, specifically because they prefer the Demi-Egi model that focuses around a burst window where the Egi gets to uniquely affect SMN’s DPS rotation. I’ve pointed out to those people that this is just Bard’s songs dressed up with SMN’s aesthetics, and they’ve argued “it works, so why not?”, ignoring that part of what makes those windows work is the fact they’re limited to a subsection of the overall rotation rather than being the core, and that players can like jobs for their distinctive mechanical flavour in addition to aesthetics. It would, in effect, make the two “DoT jobs” less unique when compared to one another. I’ve been against the idea since the DPS threads first started popping up in stormblood. But I’ve also had to explain why SMN has DoTs for both lore and mechanical reasons before to the people who want to remove those, too.

Point is, people have a habit of designing their own fun away if they don’t look at the consequences of their choices overall instead of in isolation. There’s a reason I personally limit my suggestions to what the devs have already done before except in the case of pet AI specifically. I’m trying to lower the cost of development time by doing so. Numbers, however, are always interchangeable. Gameplay is much harder to enforce.

[Absurdity]

Right now I can atleast understand removing SCH pets due to their atrocious design, it's basically just a glorified oGCD but not even as reliable as one...


This does apply to SMN pets as well to a certain extend. Does that mean I actually want them removed? No, I would prefer SE to maybe not undo their pet fixes made in Stormblood in favor of making them infinitely worse.

[Deceptus]

I've said it before, I played Scholar because I loved the complexity, the challenge; If I was feeling potato I could focus healing, if I wanted to feel like a bamf dpsing, DoT healing, shields like I seriously was RPing in my head as this cool battle healer nerd thing muh dood it was da shih-tzu.

Seriously what was wrong with having one complex healer, one easy(er) healer

No way ...
That can't be true, can it?
WTF...
Can you reply with a link to this?

I advocate for a pet removal for summoner. I want summoners to, y'know, actually summon things. Where the summons do the damage. Not a wonky AI pet.

Imagine:

For Aoe: 3 part chain Ifrit > Garuda > Bismark

For Single Target: Titan > Ramuh > Ravana

It could be expanded but that's the general idea. Part of your job quests are going and communing with the summons to master them.