Please, balance catering casuals with older players

[ItsUrBoi]

Since Stormblood, the design direction of jobs has been to simplify them further and further. Many jobs have lost some of their original design ideas a while back, and others have gotten quality of life changes.
That's alright, the game shouldn't require a PHD or an IQ of over 140 to play and have fun, however I feel like the game is heading towards a territory where the gameplay for more and more jobs is becoming way to homogenized and simple.

Looking at the 6.1 live letter changes, why would you change Ninja when its identity is within its flexibility with trick attack and its mudras? Trick attack is the reason many jobs got quality of life changes so their offensive abilities align every 60 seconds.
Its alright to lower / change numbers, or remove actions that do not make a lot of sense, but removing job identity for the sake of simplicity and homogenization of raid buffs to be strictly on a 2 minute timer is not.
What's next? Making sure you cannot mess up your mudras so they just get removed and now you combo a predetermined combination of mudra attacks?

The exact same thing happened with DRK in ShB when Dark Arts got removed. It was the identity of the job to upgrade attacks to stronger ones, but that was complicated, so instead of making it something along the lines of you can upgrade an ability for damage, one for mitigation ( and you get back the dark arts if its used well ), one for sustain, or something else entirely : here have Edge/Flood of Shadow to spam so you cannot mess up.
Speaking of DRK, I fail to understand how perfectly fine jobs that got plenty of quality of life changes ( Ninja - Huraijin for ex ), and were functionally great - got changed, while a job that has severe double weaving issues and sustain issues with a mitigation tied to damage didn't even get attention, besides a casual change to LD, which I hope was looked at in terms of you healing yourself too fast and removing the invulnerability early.

Samurai is also getting further homogenized despite its damage being perfectly fine and having variance if you mess up and don't fallow an actual rotation because you are missing raid buffs. But now, you cannot mess up, not only cause there will be no more Kaiten in case you somehow got to have a Iaijutsu without 20 kenki, but because dancer buffs won't matter as much, and neither will Dragoon's battle litany.

In terms of tanks, Warrior and DRK are already very similar, PLD being somewhat of its own thing and GNB too, despite just having 30 / 60 second burst windows.

I think we all understand and agree that this is a game where we want to have fun and challenge ourselves, but there should be a balance between complete homogenization and simplicity so that everyone can plug and play any job, and depth/complexity for people who like putting in the time and effort to understanding a job.
At the same time, I fear job feedback shouldn't be coming as much from people who for example barely play the job, or have little experience on it, but rather from people who have a deeper understanding of a job, preferably in a multitude of scenarios.

Let's say you are working on learning a subject like math - for someone without much knowledge or experience, they'd wish for it to be easier, while someone who mastered it wouldn't wish so, because then his knowledge would be less valuable.
In theory, if one would change a job to be less difficulty to get into at a basic level, while keeping the valuable knowledge of those who mastered it useful, that would be perfect. However, what is happening now is just basically giving up on complexity all across the board, even more, so the difference between an experienced/very good player and a newer player is less, and less distinguishable, effectively ruining hours and hours that people spent on mastering jobs.
The game shouldn't be in my opinion a 1 2 3 simulator where you empty a gauge every 2 mins, but neither should it require 50+ hours of studying per job...

[Jirah]

In SB and HW I loved learning and mastering my job with MNK taking the longest to adjust too after being spoiled by DRG and RDM which were at the time the easiest jobs.

But I digress I fully agree things are at such a critical state it’s giving those auto mobile mmos some funny looks. People can act like a apologist all they want and say “I’m glad DRG has fewer buttons” “Kaiton was actually bad and never said so before but because they removed it, my opinion magically changed” or “Now I don’t need to worry about mana at all to the point of redundancy”

So far the only appeal to the game that it has left is the fights themselves cause a massive imbalance between the jobs and the instance fights which unless your doing savage you’ll snore at due to how trivial they are (guess how many times you’ll do a stack marker because devs think it’s hard to pull off despite the fact it’s so light on damage you can easily 2 man it and survive)

[DanielNegreanu_Adamantoise]

Well the homogenization is probably the result of no two things being equal. If you have two jobs that do the same thing in the end but need to do it in different ways.
The end result may end up equal in effectiveness but if one way has quirks that another way doesn't, people inevitably compare the quirky way to the less quirky way and want the quirky way to change to the other way.

And whats there like 30 jobs? And we players we view the job design as if it should be build-a-bear. The things that make one job not a reskin of another is the same thing we want changed to be like the other way. Players complain about the some of the most inane things for being even slightly less optimal than its done on another job, and its not that they are wrong, but when you remove the quirks/differences, well, that is literally homogenizing the job

[HisShadowX]

Older players you mean Hardcore Players. If they wanted to appease Hardcore Players this game would have died a long time ago with FFXIV 1.0.

Removing things like the Cross Class System and other systems that only the hardcore players like is the reason why this game is now number one.

[Lyth]

The hardcore... cross-class system? What are you on about?

Most of the changes that we see are the direct result of player feedback irrespective of skill level. Take the move towards guaranteed Crit/DH actions, for example. Xeno popularized this idea and the playerbase latched on to it, because they figured that Crit RNG was the only thing that's holding back their otherwise perfectly optimized runs. Even after WAR got stuck with it and players realized that it was pretty dumb idea, I've constantly seen threads pop up on the DPS subforums complaining about the very same thing. It's actually more of a midcore sentiment than anything else. But you get what you ask for.

For that matter, the request for the conversion of Overpower to a circular AoE, as well as the request to remove the gauge cost from Onslaught, all came from this very subforum. You can do a simple search and find the threads themselves.

Another thing that I see quite often is that players use the 'complexity' of their job to leverage the claim that they should do more dps than everyone else. What do you think that the dev team does when a few outspoken people keep insisting that their particular job is super complex compared to the others? They simplify it. So when you repeatedly make that claim falsely, you end up with an overly simplified job. Go figure.

Most of the OP's post doesn't really have to do with tanks per se, but I think the bottom line is that you have to be careful about what you wish for. If your job is doing well and you're generally happy with it, playing the rework roulette to try and gain an advantage over everyone else is just going to bring you a world of pain. It's really only for the truly desperate. And if you see others making that mistake, you need to be vocal about it to protect the gameplay that you care about.

[ItsUrBoi]

Most of the OP's post doesn't really have to do with tanks per se, but I think the bottom line is that you have to be careful about what you wish for. If your job is doing well and you're generally happy with it, playing the rework roulette to try and gain an advantage over everyone else is just going to bring you a world of pain. It's really only for the truly desperate. And if you see others making that mistake, you need to be vocal about it to protect the gameplay that you care about.

I agree with this and its probably a better way to put into words what I meant. All I am saying is that jobs should NOT be hard at a basic level, but the optimization or understanding of a job should be rewarding. Job complexity also shouldn't be a reason for higher damage or performance.
For example I really care about Samurai's current gameplay because of 1 reason. You have to make sure that before every Iaijutsu you have to use Kaiten which cost 20 kenki gauge. Is it hard to get 20 kenki gauge? Not at all, its very easy. But its something you have to think about actively to some degree, and it makes enough of a difference between someone who mindlessly spams Shinten and someone who does spam Shinten but still does every Kaiten boost properly. This can be learnt easily and feels rewarding to use.

Even Warrior's kit as much as people joke about it being easy, still has a few tricks like using both Infuriates under raid buffs and making sure you maximize their CD with Fell Cleaves, by maximizing your beast gauge. That's easy, but its something you have to pay attention to and cannot just mindlessly use whenever without a difference being noticeable.

All I am saying is that there's no need for jobs to be overly complicated, like former Summoner. But neither should jobs be so easy that there's no difference between an experienced player and a newer one. No one is going to blame the newer player for not knowing, but they can learn if they wish to get better. This applies to tanks as well, actually every job - I just chose to post it here because Kaiten reminded me of Dark Arts and how the design idea behind it is very good since it offers a good skill floor - not too hard at all , but not mindlessly easy.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

Every expansion things become more and more simple, back then if you told me a mnk could have 50 broken combos by spamming dragon kick over and over between dot and buff and still be doing decent damage i would've called you insane. Something similar happened to black mage and paradox, but I'm not a black mage so I cant comment on that.

The next thing that happens is the pvp combo system being moved to pve, at this point 1-2-3 becomes 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1. Everything needs to be so simple that a player that unlocks the class at nearly max level can play it straight away? Imagine if the players that bought a boost would not be able to make use of it ...

SB had enjoyable rotations that were a bit more complex, you cant tell me a drk or war is currently happy with their rotation. Doing a proper Inner release in SB required you to use the 2nd braincell you have.

If you lower the skill celling and raise the floor constantly ... this is what you get and here we are in a world in which a tank can keep hate by simply putting in zero thought about combat and clicking flashing buttons.

[ItsUrBoi]

The next thing that happens is the pvp combo system being moved to pve, at this point 1-2-3 becomes 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1. Everything needs to be so simple that a player that unlocks the class at nearly max level can play it straight away? Imagine if the players that bought a boost would not be able to make use of it ...

SB had enjoyable rotations that were a bit more complex, you cant tell me a drk or war is currently happy with their rotation. Doing a proper Inner release in SB required you to use the 2nd braincell you have.

If you lower the skill celling and raise the floor constantly ... this is what you get and here we are in a world in which a tank can keep hate by simply putting in zero thought about combat and clicking flashing buttons.

I do hope Square Enix actually reads this.
I am not quite sure what you mean by keeping hate up by simply putting in zero thought?
And as far as people who buy a boost and are able to play the job straight away - that's honestly alright. They can play the job, but there should be somewhat of a big difference between someone who plays it and mastered it and someone who just unlocked lvl 90 samurai. ( lets say that would be possible for a second )
Of course, it should never be mandatory to study a job's gameplay or to get good at it, unless the content you are doing requires so ( savage, ultimate for example ), and neither should people who are new to the game be frowned upon because they are not maximizing their rotation/gameplay on whichever job - but the game should still highly reward good play. That cannot and will not be possible by lowering the skill ceiling. Lowering the skill floor so you can do decently is ok, but not so much that you cannot tell the difference between a great player and a bad one.

Oh and monk is alright. Plenty of room for error there.

[Darksoul9669]

Well you’re absolutely wrong if you think NIN is somehow simpler with the new change. They’re changing it because of how you get drift with all other party-wides. Nin is getting more needlessly complicated in that regard because now it will have its own personal buff that drifts just the same anyway. The NIN change is just a very sloppy way to try to tackle a legitimate issue they have. Getting to suiton to be able to TA is not the issue and not why its being changed to make it “simpler.” The fact that you included this part just makes it clear you haven’t actually played NIN enough to understand the change or the issues with it.

[ArianeEwah]

The next thing that happens is the pvp combo system being moved to pve, at this point 1-2-3 becomes 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1.

Considering that most jobs still have other buttons beside their combo, this would still be better than your average healer rotation ;_;

Honestly, before EW I myself believed that merging combo buttons would help evolving jobs, SE certainly doesn't have the urge to do so... neither merging combo nor evolving job design. Since EW launch, I am pretty much against it. SE would just f* it up.

At the very least, non-combo'ed combo should be greyed out (similar to MNK). I am sick of people in dungeons who only press their combo finisher which deals less damage than just spamming your combo starter.

SE (or YoshiP in this case) rambles about button bloat and damage fluctuation, their result is turning SAM from a decent raider job into a full casual job. Their next step would probably taking its charge and disengage action off the Kenki gauge, and making their Medare skills guarateed direct hit, too. Welcome to Warrior town!

ShB and EW, as well as the recent LL, made it clear that SE has no interest in creating interessting job designs anymore; even worse, lowering the skill floor and ceiling for existing jobs. DRK has become the "busy warrior/oGCD-warrior/warrior with magic shenanigans (etc)" (call it however you want), EW SMN is a joke of job re-design, healers in general are bland af and uninspired, and SAM will soon follow that trend. There is no flavor, no room for improvement, and I would even go as far as saying that duty design (dungeons, raids, even ultimates) will not be enough to mask over that fact.

I love this game, I really do, and that's why I voice my criticism. But SE seriously makes it very hard for me to support this game any further.