Have they considered giving more skills early on

[Awha]

Well you cant really say that when SE has designed jobs at 80 to be nothing like they are at 50 so they are clearly incentivizing a pretty advanced combat design, issue is jobs feel so slow early on that it has even put off people when they could enjoy the endgame job.

Thankfully FF14 is mostly safe from metaslaves though i wouldnt be surprised with the influx of wow players some sweaty simmers will try to advertise how a specific 8man comb is producing 1.3% more dps and thus the metaslaves will start running around pretending the dps jobs outside that comb are "unviable"

I am sorry jobs at 80 require very little thought to clear content. All adding extra skills early on is create an unreasonable expectation of skill from the get go. I mean why should one be expected to use AoE at the lower levels.

I think it would alter the current social contract of the game. As it stands if people want to try and learn how to play they are free to do so and if not it is up to the community to carry them to victory.

[Moonlite]

I know it will never happen. But I would like all classes to have all the basic rotations before level 10 and a few of the situational abilities. And when we get new expansions instead of trying to come up with some new rotation they just update each rotation with new skills. Also when you get level synced you would still push mostly the same buttons. I have been in a few low levels and pushed a button and wonder why it didn't go off, only to remember it has been locked.

[Rosa_Frandlia]

How many people remember jobs before SB pruning of skills? Before then at low levels you had a lot more skills especially if you cross classed. I felt it a lot in SB after having lost so many skills going into low level dungeons, especially on WHM which lost about 8 or 9 skills

[Jeeqbit]

I know it will never happen. But I would like all classes to have all the basic rotations before level 10 and a few of the situational abilities. And when we get new expansions instead of trying to come up with some new rotation they just update each rotation with new skills. Also when you get level synced you would still push mostly the same buttons. I have been in a few low levels and pushed a button and wonder why it didn't go off, only to remember it has been locked.

The way to think of it is like this. When you sync down to level 70, you are playing the Stormblood expansion and doing the Stormblood rotation. When you sync down to level 60, you are playing Heavensward and doing the Heavensward rotation. When you sync down to level 50, you are playing ARR and doing the ARR rotation.

I know the rotations have changed a bit, for some classes more than others, but that's really the intention. You are syncing down to that expansion, rotation included.

[Commander_Justitia]

As comparison, with Guild Wars 2 you had like all of your 9 or 10 endgameskills placed by lvl20, think players would be fine with a bit more skills and responsibility here too. They also already removed niche low lvl skills because of the addons, making some classes even more boring to play, or changed potency values that made it more efficient to spam the same skill over and over than to use the actual rotation (looking at lancer)...

The real problem is balancing all the low lvl dungeons again around new or existing skills, our lowlevel damage is now already 2-3 times as high as during ARR release, adding even more existing or new skills would likely make it even faster...They would have to nerf damage, but problem is, you might want those potency values at high level. Even if they use the upgradable skills, like from blm or smn (e.g. Fire - Fire IV), to balance it out, it wont make much sense for melee builds who don't have upgrade skills so much.

I guess it would be easier to let you pick 1-3 skills you want from your full skill set to be used in low level synced content. It would be a reward for having that class at max level and it would make them minimally stronger. It would be a bit more fun, you could use jumps as drg or benediction on whm at synced lvl 20.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

I don't see why scaling down your level needs to remove your skills. Someone might say it would trivialize the lower level dungeons but that's already the case anyway.

If they'd just scale things down harder for higher level characters so that you'd need to do your full rotations to do slightly higher DPS compared to the sprout with two attacks, at least it would be more engaging than spamming a single combo. I realize that most people doing duty roulette don't want to play old dungeons. They just want to get the rewards at the end of the chore and since that's most likely the case, encouraging people to put more effort into their gameplay seems like a good solution. If they still refuse to play, then it has all been just a convenient excuse to be lazy.

[TTiscancer]

People who step into 70+ Dungeons barely know what half their skills are used for.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Isn't that elitist to ask new players to learn more buttons so early in the game?

yeah, I'd feel that'd make people turn into tryhards...

I see what you guys did there.

I love ya'all lmao

[Neoyoshi]

Isn't that elitist to ask new players to learn more buttons so early in the game?

Yep, the job's toolkit is delicate to begin with.

No one goes out to dinner at a restaurant and orders everything on the menu in one sitting.

[Raelsar]

A bit late to the party here, but since I've said stuff along these lines before... yeah, I would generally support this.
The lack of abilities at lower levels makes most classes & jobs feel underwhelming during the early game and when sync'd down.

That being said, this has a few conditions to make it work properly:

• You have to reach the same endpoint for number of abilities. The balance between jobs at the level cap is exceptionally good, we don't want to throw that off.
• You still want some sort of progress with ability learning as you level up through higher levels. WoW, before the most recent expansion, had the issue of having every class be close to "complete" at around level 40-50 when the level cap was 120.
• The tuning of content would have to be adjusted to compensate, to keep the same approximate difficulty for leveling content. The lack of abilities may make the combat a bit dull, but simply giving players more of them runs the risk of making low level content too easy even with the level sync system working as it does now. This is a balancing act, but they should be able to find a good middle-ground.
• The best time to do this is during an expansion launch. Everyone's abilities get re-jigged at this time to make room for new ones, so it's definitely the best time to do so.

That being said, we can take a look at the when abilities are learned... specifically from class & job quests:

• One skill learned at level 15, and maybe another at level 30, as part of the base class questlines.
• One skill every 5 levels from the level 30-50 job questline.
• One skill every 2 levels from the level 50-60 job questline.
• One skill from the level 70 job quest.

There are still abilities & traits learned passively from leveling alone (particularly for levels 60-80), and those tend to line up more with the pace from the 50-60 job quests.

The one observation I've made is that jobs REALLY come into their own (at least in terms of entertaining gameplay) during that 50-60 job quest. Most are "functional" at level 50, but nearly all of them become "fun" by level 60.

Probably what's really needed to help out the early game is to have the 1-30 job questline award abilities with each quest; the pace of skills learned passively during this time would remain as-is, but adding in more abilities from the quests would help flesh out the low-level gameplay more. This also reinforces the point of doing class quests early on, setting the tone for players to know how important your job quests are.

To reach the same endpoint of total number of abilities, you could take out some of the ability rewards from the 50-60 job quests to shift them down to a lower level. Perhaps not learning something new every 2 levels, but rather only at 52, 56 and 60? Or alternatively, you could throw in traits to "upgrade" already learned skills.