Job progression pacing and how it affects old content

[PangTong]

With the big boom of new players I've been watching several people playing through the game for the first time. Seeing them go through the content of prior expacs has made me realize how much job ability adjustments and rebalancing have trivialized content from prior expansions.

I realize that story-mode content has never been "hard" per se, but I feel like it has reached a level that is just straight up not fun to play, even for a casual player. Bosses do negligible damage even when failing their mechanics, and they die so quickly you don't even get to see their cool attacks or hear all their music.

I see parties of new players coming into duties they've never seen and clearing effortlessly without understanding a single thing about what just happened, because the game won't let them fail no matter how badly they do. Is this really fun? Do people just want to press buttons at random for a few minutes, be told they've won, collect their loot and leave?

It's just so sad going into content that I used to have so much fun with and just totally deleting it, skipping half the mechanics and not even having to do the other half. I don't think this trend of old content becoming progressively easier is good for the game, either for new players OR veterans. I'm not even saying it should be difficult (no more than it once was anyway), but a game that you can win without even trying is hardly a game at all.

Besides just intentionally making the game easier, I also feel like the way jobs have been updated over the years is at least partially responsible for why things have become like this, and also part of why older content has become less fun.

Pacing of job progression

Every expansion the level cap gets raised, and jobs get some new abilities and traits to keep things fresh. Most of these new skills are acquired during the newly added levels e.g. 71-80 in Shadowbringers. But because the devs try to keep the number of abilities from getting out of hand, a few abilities also get removed or consolidated into other abilities. For the sake of adding new skills to the new level cap, skills are taken from the lower levels.

This has a number of effects. Firstly it means that when you run old content, your job is less complete than it was in the previous expansion. During Heavensward, a job at level 60 had its full, complete rotation. Now when you run level 60 content synced, most jobs are missing crucial parts of their kit and are extremely simplistic. The further you go back, the worse it gets. Some jobs don't even unlock their job gauge until the 60s.

This is not only really unfun for veteran players (how many times have you groaned when getting Copperbell Mines or Toto-rak in Leveling roulette?), but it has knock-on effects for new players too. FFXIV is a long game, and players spend extended amounts of time stuck in specific level ranges due to the MSQ. It seems crazy that a new player has to put in hundreds of hours of gameplay before their job even resembles what it will be like to play at endgame. I've seen many players talk about how they had to boost or repeatedly reassure their friends that the game gets better eventually, because the early game is simply so dull that it's intolerable for them.

The other big effect this design has caused is that because jobs don't become complete until endgame, the further back you go in levels, the more imbalanced the jobs become. Different jobs get crucial skills at different levels, so while jobs are all fairly well balanced at level 80, there are enormous differences in performance between jobs at level 70, 60, 50, etc.

To counter this, the devs simply adjust the damage calculations for earlier levels so that everyone is overpowered. That way there's no risk that you might fail an old duty because you were unlucky and got a group with jobs that sync badly. But this has the additional effect of trivializing old content to the point that DPS checks are non-existent and you don't even get to see a lot of what bosses do before they die, EVEN when running at Min ilvl/No Echo. When just playing synced normally, the content just falls over so quickly you wonder why they even still make you do it.

Conclusion

For the sake of the long term health of the game, I personally think this is something that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

The levels at which jobs acquire their skills need to be largely brought forward to match the pace of the content and the MSQ. Every job should have at least 1 AoE button by the time they start dungeons. By the time a job gets to level 50 (60 at absolute most), the core aspects of their rotation such as their gauge, their combos, and at least a few oGCD skills to weave, should all be in place. Jobs should not have to progress all the way to the current expansion to unlock something as basic as the second step of their AoE combo, or job-defining systems and gauges.

For levels beyond 50, new additions to the job should be limited to traits and 1-2 new buttons per expansion that simply add on to the job's foundation rather than changing it completely and drastically changing its relative performance.

This can hopefully not only serve to make older content more interesting to play, but also allow for tighter balancing of jobs at lower levels so that the devs don't simply have to buff everyone's damage/defense to the moon and make every bit of old content a joke. It doesn't need to be as hard as it was on release, just better than it is now. At the very least, running min ilvl/no echo should still somewhat resemble the original difficulty.

I understand that FFXIV is designed with players who are brand new to MMOs in mind, so the gentle leveling curve is intentional. But I think it has gone too far. I don't want to dread signing up for roulettes, and I don't want to be limited only to max level content just to have any fun. No matter how slowly something is introduced, if there's no noticeable difference between playing right or wrong then you can't learn anything. If you can win without understanding anything, then you don't need to understand anything.

I know this topic gets talked about a lot but this has been building up for years now and I honestly feel it's one of the biggest problems with the game today.

[Jeeqbit]

I see parties of new players coming into duties they've never seen and clearing effortlessly without understanding a single thing about what just happened, because the game won't let them fail no matter how badly they do. Is this really fun? Do people just want to press buttons at random for a few minutes, be told they've won, collect their loot and leave?

Yes, they do. Dungeons are designed so that you don't have to be good, but if you want to be good, then the skill will show amongst the majority who don't try to be good.

It's just so sad going into content that I used to have so much fun with and just totally deleting it, skipping half the mechanics and not even having to do the other half. I don't think this trend of old content becoming progressively easier is good for the game, either for new players OR veterans. I'm not even saying it should be difficult (no more than it once was anyway), but a game that you can win without even trying is hardly a game at all.

I agree with that, particularly in 8-person content and alliance raids. Bosses that used to be fun no longer are and nobody has to try anymore.

[DeaconMoore]

Well, they redesign the classes so that the current expansion is the leveling experience and all stuff previous is just filler till you get caught up to the new hotness. With that approach you are kinda forced to stretch things out awkwardly.

Personally I'd rather the classes fill out completely by level 50. Everything thing after should be about story and gear, not leveling up to get a new ability.

[Juun]

As a healer I disagree. Sprout runs either get my headscratching on what the heck they are doing as my mana gets drained having to heal them because no one does the simplest mechanics or tanks not using damage mitigation in a w2w pull or my favorite one not turning on their enmity skill and refusing to turn it on. Or I get the 1 pack pull tank then yeah then its very easy content.

So in the first scenario its def hard content.

[DPZ2]

OP has been on this forum for 5 years now, and is only now noticing a "problem"? Every MMO in existence has early encounters that are trivial for long-term players. The trash and bosses in an instance have not changed all that much from the launch of ARR.

Most of that trivialization is due to experience. And gear, of course. It has nothing to do with job skills.

[Jin-]

Square was too lazy to scale the bosses and mobs up when they tripled our damage dealt and mana reserves

[TheMightyMollusk]

Tighten the item level sync. We outgear everything so horribly that it trivializes a lot of content.

[PangTong]

Well, they redesign the classes so that the current expansion is the leveling experience and all stuff previous is just filler till you get caught up to the new hotness. With that approach you are kinda forced to stretch things out awkwardly.

That kind of approach might make sense if this were a game where you just jump straight to the current expansion and all the previous content gets left behind, but in XIV new players have to go through all that old content and veterans also play that content via roulettes and leveling alt jobs. I think that's a very good thing overall, it would suck if old content just never got touched again once a new expansion came out. So it'd be really nice if they could keep that content from becoming unfun due to wild imbalance. Even if they don't change the pace of learning job skills, just fiddling with enemy HP and damage output could go a long way. I also think it's nice to get at least a few new skills in the upper levels, otherwise it doesn't really feel like your character is growing, but the game is currently in an absurd state where nearly a full half of a job's actions come after level 50.

Most of that trivialization is due to experience. And gear, of course. It has nothing to do with job skills.

It's true that this has been a problem for a long time now, and in fact I made a similar post 2 years ago after 5.0 released. It is most definitely not due to experience though. Jobs just straight up do more damage in old content than they did when that content was new, even accounting for ilvl and echo. The players by and large have not gotten better, and that's immediately apparent when you do level 80 content where things are actually tuned properly. Bosses in lvl 80 dungeons take 2-3 times longer to defeat than bosses in 50/60 dungeons even though you're getting ilvl synced down in both cases. Compare how long it takes to kill things in Antitower or Xelphatol to something like Grand Cosmos or Heroes Gauntlet. It's not even close.

Tighten the item level sync. We outgear everything so horribly that it trivializes a lot of content.

That would help for endgame trials, raids and alliance raids which for some reason sync you to max ilvl for the expansion instead of max ilvl for the tier. But overall gear is not the main culprit particularly in dungeons and leveling content, player damage calculations are simply tuned significantly higher. Even if you go into content with min ilvl and no echo, you're still MUCH stronger than when that content was current. If you do Syrcus Tower you will never see Glasya Labolas' platform mechanic even on a min ilvl run unless you have players doing bad DPS on purpose.

[LianaThorne]

Pretty sure they tried to do harder content for older expansions (Pharos Sirius, for example) and then a lot of people lost their mind because they didn't want it to be hard. Hence why most, if not all dungeons, can just be ran through without needing to care about mechs, DPS output, etc in the present time.

[StriderShinryu]

I do agree that the levelling process per job is definitely something that needs a closer (re-)look. I've recently been levelling a few jobs I had basically abandoned as well as levelling an abandoned alt up prior to the summer event since it required level 30 and the different from one job to the next is pretty stark.

I know Black Mage gets a lot of flak for it's levelling, but I'm actually finding it really interesting because almost every skill you get feels like either an obvious improvement or makes you think about how the job works in a new way. Syncnig down with it can absolutely be a pain but syncing down is another system that I feel needs to be reworked anyway.

Rogue/Ninja on the other hand is abysmal when levelling. You get skills that are basically useless or do nothing for your actual minute to minute gameplay essentially until you unlock ninja at 30, and even then the first ninjutsu you get is kind of a nothing burger. You don't even get any AOE at all until level 35 or 38 depending on if you whether or not you count ninjitsu. I actually really like Ninja at 80, and even post 50 or so it can be interesting, but I had forgotten how bad the the early arc of the class is.

And that's just two jobs I have recent experience with.