Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Zairava]

SCHs had the better idea of what a good oGCD is. Take Emergency Tactics and Recitation. Both abilities do nothing on their own but it modifies the properties of Adloquium - one transforms the barrier to healing and the other negates the MP cost and guarantees a critical heal + Catalyze. You can also combine both and make a mini-Benediction.

As for Aetherflow abilities: Lustrate, Excogitation are way better than Physick(in my opinion should already be taken away and buff the potency of Embrace to compensate) but both are limited to a number of casts per minute. The complaints with regards to losing ED to heal is forgetting that GCD actions have the same dilemma. They just spend different resources but are technically the same tradeoff.

When you put it that way, that's probably why I almost exclusively play Scholar when and if I ever do heal, which isn't often. It's my favorite healer to play by far.

[currentlemon]

It'll never not be funny to me that the general community treats the balance discord as a toxic elitist cesspool while simultaneously following their job guides like sheep.

All this talk about "Balance" and how some in the community is glued to it in this game is dumb in my eyes. It's one of the reasons why Healers and a few other Jobs are in this mess. While balance is important in some degree as all Jobs should be able to clear content, the focus that the devs, and the community to some extent, should be making Jobs unique and fun to play.

FFXIV isn't a fighting game. Cut loose a little bit and allow the Jobs to flourish and be as unique as possible.

Though to be fair, there were a few fighting game devs that did try to oversimplify their games at some point in the past. The result was a mixed bag. Yes, their oversimplification did bring new players, but they didn't stay and play very long while veterans just quit on their title outright.

[vetch]

Though to be fair, there were a few fighting game devs that did try to oversimplify their games at some point in the past. The result was a mixed bag. Yes, their oversimplification did bring new players, but they didn't stay and play very long while veterans just quit on their title outright.

Unfortunately not analogous since, unlike a fighting game, FF14 can pull in plenty of profit from the people who sub for a month whenever a new story chapter drops, so it doesn't suffer nearly as much from having uninspired gameplay.

[Remember_The_Name]

All this talk about "Balance" and how some in the community is glued to it in this game is dumb in my eyes. It's one of the reasons why Healers and a few other Jobs are in this mess. While balance is important in some degree as all Jobs should be able to clear content, the focus that the devs, and the community to some extent, should be making Jobs unique and fun to play.

Their obsession with "perfect balance" is the biggest issue with XIV job design.

The game take different shapes (aka jobs) - pyramid, cube, cylinder, cone, etc. And then over time removes all rough edges from them. Because players don't like them/they are making shapes too different. Eventually, after years of polishing, they all end up becoming same-looking balls. (Endwalker jobs sadly)

And if I wanted to play with a cube - too bad.

That's what happens when you want all jobs to be as close as possible to each other in terms of effectiveness. Balance is great, but in pursuit of it don't ruin the job identity and fun of playing it.

Watched Job Retrospective videos - this is mortifying how low the game has fallen.

Yes, their oversimplification did bring new players, but they didn't stay and play very long while veterans just quit on their title outright.

And this is what is already happening with XIV healers and will get increasingly worse in the future expansions without breaking the mold. Playing the neutered and boring class can only get you so far.

[ty_taurus]

Their obsession with "perfect balance" is the biggest issue with XIV job design.

The game take different shapes (aka jobs) - pyramid, cube, cylinder, cone, etc. And then over time removes all rough edges from them. Because players don't like them/they are making shapes too different. Eventually, after years of polishing, they all end up becoming same-looking balls. (Endwalker jobs sadly)

I'd also argue that it's not as much that players don't like certain things, but more like "players don't like certain things." What I mean by this is that when we play games, in the moment, we have a tendency to complain about anything that gets in the way of us doing something right or perfectly. "Why is there a pillar right there!?" "Really? You could've have given me 1 more piece of ammo?" But that doesn't mean any particular aspect of a game is inherently bad or negative. Sometimes it is, but not always. I think the 2 minute meta is a product of taking these complaints very literally. Aligning raid buffs manually made the road to perfect play not a straight hallway, so naturally people will complain when they turn at the wrong places, but that doesn't mean those turns are bad design.

They seem to look at anything one could describe as "difficult" and translate that as "bad." A game having difficult or challenging elements (of which something like aligning raid buffs isn't actually that difficult, it's just not something that happened automatically and thus required a modicum of thought to do) is not bad. Going on a crusade to sand down every possible edge that even sounds like it could be difficult ends up removing all the details of the piece you're sanding down. And what's ironic is that it doesn't actually create a perfectly frictionless sphere. You end up creating new edges in this crusade. Not allowing healers to have more than 3-4 DPS buttons and constantly having to update their basic attack so that their personal DPS output can keep up with the solo content power creep means every expansion, spamming your basic attack becomes more and more important. They don't want healers to feel pressured to DPS, yet EW is the expansion with the highest pressure to DPS as much as possible because every GCD is its own burst window.

[currentlemon]

Unfortunately not analogous since, unlike a fighting game, FF14 can pull in plenty of profit from the people who sub for a month whenever a new story chapter drops, so it doesn't suffer nearly as much from having uninspired gameplay.

To be fair, this did happen with fighting games in the past. Albeit, in a more extreme sense. When Street Fighter II launched in 1991 for example, four more versions of the same game released in the span of three years. Two being released in the same year (Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition & Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting). And you had to pay the FULL price of every iteration of the game!!

And this is what is already happening with XIV healers and will get increasingly worse in the future expansions without breaking the mold. Playing the neutered and boring class can only get you so far.

Street Fighter 5 and Guilty Gear: Strive say hi. Though the former has more baggage than the later. Tekken 8, which recently came out this past January, can be argued that the devs purposely made the game much easier and tailored it to casuals in many ways.

[Aravell]

To be fair, a fighting game being simplified isn't as bad as simplifying an MMO.

In a fighting game, you do still have the unpredictability of your opponents that comes with being a PvP game. As long as they don't remove the skill ceiling with niche stuff you can do to counter, it's totally fine to make the game more accessible.

However, in an MMO, you fight a script, it never deviates, it's never unpredictable, it's always the same. In that scenario, if you make the way you play also always the same, you turn hard content into nothing but memorisation. The only challenge is how much information your brain can retain (which is also why 3rd party assist tools are on the rise, it alleviates cognitive load by having a machine tell you what to do).

Honestly speaking, if the fights were entirely random and unpredictable, the current kits might not be as bad, but given that everything is on a script, sanding down job gameplay is unacceptable.

[ty_taurus]

Street Fighter 5 and Guilty Gear: Strive say hi. Though the former has more baggage than the later. Tekken 8, which recently came out this past January, can be argued that the devs purposely made the game much easier and tailored it to casuals in many ways.

I can't speak for SF5 or GG, but I do play Tekken. I'm not all that competitive at it or that skilled at it in the sense that I'm no ranked player or dedicated Tekken streamer, but I do learn from different Tekken content creators. Like in T7, playing Lucky Chloe as my main, I was watching a lot of Kaizur who is a tournament-level Chloe main to learn from, and play a lot casually with one of my friends.

Tekken 8 offers the most resources in-game to help teach you how to play the game and understand many of its more intricate elements, and there are some things that have received more quality of life changes that do make certain things a little easier. It also added a new system that does let you basically play on auto mode where each button can be spammed to have your character perform a specific combo meant to be a different set of core combos for each button. That certainly helps the button masher perform better and look a bit cooler mashing buttons rather than just throwing out nothing but jabs and kicks. But at the end of the day, there is still an ocean of intricate elements that continue to make Tekken a very technical game. And that's exactly what we want to see, right? A game that's easy to learn and get into but difficult to master.

[currentlemon]

I can't speak for SF5 or GG, but I do play Tekken. I'm not all that competitive at it or that skilled at it in the sense that I'm no ranked player or dedicated Tekken streamer, but I do learn from different Tekken content creators. Like in T7, playing Lucky Chloe as my main, I was watching a lot of Kaizur who is a tournament-level Chloe main to learn from, and play a lot casually with one of my friends.

Tekken 8 offers the most resources in-game to help teach you how to play the game and understand many of its more intricate elements, and there are some things that have received more quality of life changes that do make certain things a little easier.

True. I was, actually, referring to the Heat system and Tekken 8’s push toward aggressive play. So many characters gained new ways to skip the neutral game and be right in your face. And new players love that. Again, this isn’t a bad thing. The game is still fun and it’s only a few months old. New meta may emerge overtime, though series veterans are a bit turned off by the game’s current push toward aggression as past Tekken games focused more on a defensive play style.

[Maltothoris]

The memories of 3.4 and stormblood are just too strong for them to let go. I remember them saying somewhere they try not to look back at the past expansions per say or something like that, it does feel that 2 parts, the shadows are always looming over their heads.