WARs and DRKs

[Kalaam]

Wasn't this part of Yoshi-P's presentation when he came in ? "Listen to complaints. If players complain it means they still care" or something of the sort.

[Recon1o6]

Wasn't this part of Yoshi-P's presentation when he came in ? "Listen to complaints. If players complain it means they still care" or something of the sort.

When he came in yes, but its not exactly true nowadays unless the job literally doesn't function

We'd have fun healers if that was the case. Or dark's with livign dead being actually useful. Or the many problematic levelling kits being fixed

[Rymi64]

When he came in yes, but its not exactly true nowadays unless the job literally doesn't function

We'd have fun healers if that was the case. Or dark's with livign dead being actually useful. Or the many problematic levelling kits being fixed

Healers are currently the way they are because they listened to ppl. Just the ones they listened to and were louder were the ones that didn't enjoy healers having more dps options. LD is probably because they can't think of a method that's not too samey as the others

[Lyth]

Living Dead isn't doing anything novel. It's a more convoluted version of Holmgang that has an unnecessary penalty attached.

We've been giving them alternative suggestions to Living Dead for years. If you want to create something that's sufficiently different, there's a really easy way to do it:

If an attack would reduce your HP to less than 1, you are rendered impervious to it.

In short, it invulns big attacks, but little attacks still go through, until your HP gets chipped down low enough. Another alternative is to prevent incoming damage and healing.

That being said, if it's that difficult to come up with reasonable invulns, they should probably scrap them altogether. They'll need to introduce in more tank jobs eventually. What then?

[OdinelStarrei]

A recent poll on reddit showed that DRK is currently the most popular tank, and second most popular job overall after RDM. I noticed none of the tiny vocal minority of DRK haters brought this up anywhere.

Dont talk about drk on the forums. You'll get HWS fans or DA spam boys. Yes it sucks they're similar but there is a big difference between pushing buttons and pushing the right buttons.

100% legitimate olive branching being done right now. As someone who from the very start has said the ShB DRK was a dumpster fire of design, and have actively told players, both new and old, to not play the job or drop it for GNB or DPS, after doing every piece of content in FFXIV on ShB DRK in some capacity, I now possess a more nuanced opinion.


I will admit frankly, that I uplifted the previous versions of DRK, when ALL of them had issues that crippled them from being able to grow in future versions of XIV tanking. I said it in a previous post before, and I'll say it again, regardless of how fun past iterations may have been to some people, I don't think DRK has ever been well-designed, it's too inconsistent. Mistakes have been made with implementation on every step of this job's lifespan. They wanted to remove the MT = DPS gain, and dependence on Int Down/Damage down via GCD combos, so HW DRK had to go. They wanted to address LEGITIMETE complaints about Dark Arts in 4.0, so we have what we have now, on top of the complete restructuring that tanks got in general, of which, only GNB really coming out ahead on, with PLD remaining mostly untouched. DRK was ALWAYS the most burned by overarching system changes.

DRK is popular, and that's fine. It's the worst tank, but it's actively played, even if by spite. That's actually good, because now, there's a possibility that we, are for the first time, going to get a EXPANSION on the job. Instead of trying to appease people who cannot play previous designs, or trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by making very stupid design choices (some of which are being made on ShB DRK and have not been fixed), there is real room for growth, and the entire foundation of the job will not be compromised trying to meet the demands of a very divided group of players. We are not at that conceptual breaking point that SMN and BLM are at, but the exact opposite.

Another thing I think goes understated is how the only reason we're able to do things like Souleater combo for 50 seconds straight is because the developers are not designing DRK for fights in full single target uptime, outside of basic 12K MP per minute mandates. When you consider that they're making DRK in the lens of dungeons where you have way higher MP regen out of combat, things make a little more sense. When you view it in the lens of something like TEA, where you are ENCOURAGED to use your AoE combos to generate more resources quicker, it makes sense. Where you actually have downtime doing mechanics where all your skills are allowed to come back on cooldown while the boss is untargetable. Skills like Flood of Shadow actually have practical use in fights with more than just 1 enemy you hit, positioning for both you and the enemies becomes way more important. We were missing too much of that this expansion. Situations where we could leverage our superior resource acquisition AoE toolkit to make GCDs less boring, and maybe increase the amount of oGCD Edges/Floods in the encounter. And that is an encounter design issue, not specifically a DRK one. DRK is so boring on a target dummy, because you don't have raidbuffs to optimize in, you don't have two target cleave, you don't have DA procs to store, and that's a big problem, because none of target dummy gameplay we have in most encounters extrapolates on the jobs strengths.

That's why people keep saying, IT'S JUST A WAR CLONE, all day. The game itself is not making the bit of complexity this design offers more obvious, or rewarding enough to the players to manifest, through the rotation itself, the encounters we find ourselves in, or the performance/numerical difference between DRKs who optimize and DRKs who don't. Skill expression is big on every job. When I play this job in hard content that really demands usage of Flood, Stalwart, and my team supports me with raid buffs I can abuse, I am really enjoying myself. But when I'm stuck on target dummy #94 like E10S and I'm just Souleatering forever with no raidbuffs, no optimization, that's where I start to hate the job again.

If we got more frequent updates, more information, from the developers, things would be so much less vitriolic. I can admit that I was very harsh on the rework, to the point of where it clouded some of my objectivity (ie you took away my favorite toy, every other toy sucks!), but I will never concede that SE is outright incompetent at communication towards this niche of tank/healer feedback.

More than anything, I hope that we can come to a real consensus in ten days with the Live Letter and job action reveals, and we can all stop fighting and be happy like other jobs are. I'm sick of this.

[FoxCh40s]

I will never concede that SE is outright incompetent at communication towards this niche of tank/healer feedback.

More than anything, I hope that we can come to a real consensus in ten days with the Live Letter and job action reveals, and we can all stop fighting and be happy like other jobs are. I'm sick of this.

Not gonna happen, they are 1000% going to screw healers again; 8 years of being completely ignored and the same thing happening over and over again had told us it won't change.

They're going to dumb down tanks even further, and I suspect even further homogenization of Healers, and like the removal of the singular dot we all have now.

As for Dark Knight, get ready for disappointment, because they just don't know what to do with the job, and will likely again completely rework the job for absolutely no reason, into a even worse incarnation.

The crux of the issue is they need to hire some god damn battle team designers, period.

Enough of the making excuses for SE, they are 1000% doing this because they know they can get away with it, especially now that's it reached similar popularity to Wow, and the new players wouldn't know Assize from their own ass.

[Lyth]

What communication? This entire business model hinges on one-way keynote speeches from Yoshi-P. There is no player dialogue here, simply because there's nobody either qualified to or trusted to talk to the playerbase on a direct conversational level. What would you do if you were interested in engaging with tank player concerns? For starters, I think the obvious approach is to put someone in charge of 'tank design', and have them engage with players directly. Here is what we think are the main issues with tanking. This is our vision for tank A, B, C, D. This is why we designed ability X this way. Players would naturally step in and engage with that. At the moment, you're left to rummage through a dozen random interviews and live letters from a single mouthpiece which may or not mention something actually relevant to your interests. There's much too diverse a pool of information that is expected to come from a single source.

I don't doubt that they're working on changes. Healers weren't ignored for 8 years, even if it feels like that. Players were fiercely arguing amongst themselves about whether healers should be doing damage at all as late as in Stormblood. The community has provided about as much direction as the dev team has on this. Things have finally come to a head this expansion, primarily as a function of DPS jobs reining supreme over everyone else. But that's where they needed to introduce someone with some half-competent communication skills in as 'healer design lead', and have them engage directly with you on what the problems were and how the dev team intends to fix them. There's no point quietly putting something together, because the community needs to buy into it as well.

I likewise don't think that DRK's problems are particularly difficult to solve. Stormblood was a thousand times worse than what we have now, even if they have swung to the other extreme on the resource generation/expenditure spectrum. We've fairly clearly laid things out, I'd really just like to see acknowledgement of the key issues and a timeline as to when they'll get sorted.

[ItMe]

What communication? This entire business model hinges on one-way keynote speeches from Yoshi-P. There is no player dialogue here, simply because there's nobody either qualified to or trusted to talk to the playerbase on a direct conversational level.

What about all of the Q&A's they host? Both the ones specific to journalists and to regular players?

[Kalaam]

Being angry and resentful won't help create a conversation either. Complaining is fine but let's keep it respectful (of devs and other players with different opinions).
I understand the frustration of not having answers, and I really hope someday they'll put up a more direct way of communication (like an AMA or a special forum in which they sometime share what they took our of the general feedback and suggest stuff for players to give an opinion on)

[Lyth]

The Q+A sessions used to be relatively good. The problem is that the questions are increasingly filtered. Previously you'd wade through a bunch of questions on housing and glamour (can we have more personal houses per server?) as well as questions that you could easily look up the answers to elsewhere ('will there be new dungeons next expansion?) mixed in with timewasting banter to get to the actual gameplay questions. Now, those actual gameplay questions are getting rarer. There doesn't even seem to be a correlation to what gets upvoted. They're just cherry picking questions that they want to answer, rather than what the playerbase wants to see answers to. Even the so called 'live Q+A sessions' have consisted of pre-prepared questions ever since the NA Vegas Fanfest in 2018.

Which is fine, but I really just want to see the dev team sit down and talk about the design of the game. Not the lore. Not the artwork. Not the music. The actual battle system and raid design. Don't spare me the details. Why are various jobs and actions designed the way that they are? Introduce the person who designed DRK this expansion. Sit them down in front of us, and have them talk through all the actions and why the are designed the way they are. Why certain actions are changed or not changed across expansions. What's the overarching job direction, and what can we expect in the future? Because if I was designing a job, that's the very first thing that I'd want to communicate. It's actually okay to disagree with what your players are suggesting, as long as you can talk them through your reasoning. If your players don't understand the why, they won't get on board with your design.

It's this one-way flow of information that I have a problem with. I think that many NA/EU players expect their devs to interact more directly with the playerbase. I think part of it, again, is that they're afraid of disagreeing openly with the playerbase on design decisions. Even the no-s in most of these sessions tend to be elaborate 'well, we would really like to, and we'll maybe look into this, but, we can't.' The most hilarious version of this was during early Stormblood. Tank damage output gets severely nerfed at the start of Stormblood, accessories don't have strength, and tanks can't equip melee dps accessories anymore. Tanks asked the dev team to do more damage, but the nerfs were deliberate. "Oh, you want to do more enmity you say? Here, have some more enmity. What's that you say? You're not asking for more enmity? Well, I can only here 'enmity' from up here." And then we proceeded to equip i270 STR accessories from Heavensward until they begged us to stop. "What was that? There's STR on tank accessories now?" Of course, then they came back and nerfed our dps properly this expansion. Rather than trying to be cute about it, they should have just said what they had intended to do openly and implemented it. And opened up discussion on other ways to give tanking value.

The dev team is great at PR, but terrible at communication.