Please stop simplifying and homogenizing the game. Please.

[Lunalepsy]

So i've been playing since 3.3. 14 was my first MMO. I had such a bad understanding of the game when I started that when I got to Baelsar's Wall my item level was too low. I had to ask my FC what an item level was. I (a warrior) didn't know that pulling wall to wall was normal until the healer in that group told me to. I didn't know that Alexander was a raid, I just thought it was a cool set piece in the hinterlands. I didn't know I could do Alexander each week for gear. The first extreme I did was Byakko in 4.1 and I absolutely sandbagged. I didn't use any cooldowns on the TB since I thought I was just supposed to get shielded for it.
Since then, I've cleared every savage tier since Eden's Verse on content. I've gotten every job to 80 and a little over half to 90. I'm currently progging UCOB to prepare for DSR. All this to say that though i'm somewhat hardcore now, I wasn't. I know what it's like to be totally lost in an MMO. I WAS the skill floor for a long time. I, like literally all players, got better. I learned. I had fun doing it. I know i'm not the best player in the world, nor am I a game designer. But, given what we were told in PLL 70 and the Famitsu interview from last week, i'm seriously worried about the game's design going forward. Specifically, it seems as though the devs are more and more designing the game for the lowest common denominator in terms of skill.

The job changes first.

Ninja: Making mug a two minute give a target a vuln up and turning trick attack into a personal one minute buff is the most mind boggling change i've seen. Again, who wanted this? Trick is one of the few cooldowns left that's on a one minute CD. There's a ninja in my static rn, and I, a RDM, hold my melee combo for 15 sec to better align with trick during certain points in a fight. This doesn't make ninja any simpler, this just makes it more homogenous. It's boring. That's one less thing for anyone in a party with a NIN to think about. It won't make two minute windows feel any better bc everyone's bursting there anyway.

Samurai: To reduce button bloat you're removing kaiten. Kaiten? Why? If you need to reduce button bloat (which is a problem on most jobs) you have so many better options. Ikishoten becomes Ogi Namikiri would work. Merging Shoha and Shoha 2 would work. I won't say that Kaiten is a cornerstone of the job or anything like that. Yeah, you only used it on a few skills, but that's still a bit of skill expression being lost. Plus it's one of only two or three skills you ever really spend kenki on. Oh, and guaranteed crits. No. Just no. This means that there's less synergy between Sam's, Drg's and Sch's and that's just bad. Yeah, there's a wide variance depending on what crits and what doesn't. That's the entire point of critical hits being a thing.

Warrior's AOE being simplified probably means turning overpower from a cone to a circle. This is terrible for about a dozen reasons. Number 1 being that it teaches tanks how to position in the way a basic circle wouldn't. Two is job identity. Three is, well, who on earth wanted this of all things changed?? If it isn't broke, don't fix it.

SMN: Searing light being cast by the character is a good change. Unfortunately, this means the only thing carbuncle does now is the shield. And presumably, I still can't cast the shield during a summon. So what's the point of even having carbuncle? Just for looks? Summoner needed way more help than fixing the clunkiness of searing light but there are already massive threads dedicated to that.
The rest of the changes are pretty good and i'm sure there are changed they wanted to make but held off until 6.2 because of ultimate.

Moreover, 14 is the MMO where you can play every job on one character. In other words, the barrier to entry to playing another job is literally nonexistent. Just level it up. Ergo, making every job in a role work the exact same way (every healer having lots of OGCD regens/barriers, every tank's aoe rotation being two circle aoes, every tank's cooldowns being almost identical, every melee having a personal damage/speed buff applied by a combo, every healer just spam 21111111111112 as their rotation) is pretty counterintuitive. Obsessing over job balance would make sense in a game where you're locked into one job per character. In 14, if the balance of a job is off, yeah, its less than ideal, but at least you can just switch at will. I'd more than happily trade balance for uniqueness at this point. Job balance is obviously super important and nobody likes it when their main is considered too weak to play with. I'm not saying they should intentionally imbalance things. I am saying that they shouldn't shrink away from being creative with job kits because job A might deal 3% more DPS than job B.

On to Yoshi P's comments in the interview. Specifically, when talking about testing dungeons. He said (i'm paraphrasing) the dungeon testers are himself (an orange parsing BLM), the tank is a casual player, the other DPS is a project manager and the healer has done extreme content. The healer recently left because they got too good.
Seriously, the healer, who had only done extreme content, got so good at healing that dungeons were boring them and they requested a replacement. Don't the devs think this might be a bit of an indication that healing, in general, is really messed up in 14? Just go to the healer forums on here for a peek into what healer mains think. This says to me that they're tuning the game's easiest content around the absolute lowest tier players. Not only that, when their own testing team got too good and started getting bored with it, instead of thinking "hmm, maybe that means our players aren't finding this fun either" or "hmm, maybe the players skill level is also increasing at the same rate" they just replaced them.
That's almost beyond parody. Nothing in this game under extreme content is remotely challenging. I couldn't tell you the last time I wiped in a dungeon or normal trial. I'm not asking for FFXIV to become "anal bleeding the game", I'm just asking for the devs to assume the average player's skill level increases after 300 hours of game time. Every other FF game has difficulty spikes in its main story, why shouldn't 14?

This x100000 times. I'm so glad someone is finally telling it like it is.

[Ivtrix]

Ahh. The crippling truth.

The only way for change to get done is to get the JP community upset enough

[baklava151]

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...6-Classes-Jobs

Healers can tell you that posting there has not been working unfortunately

[SpiralMask]

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...6-Classes-Jobs

if you'dve at least linked the JP forums you might have gotten more than a chuckle out of me

[IdowhatIwant]

And yet the director of the game flat out stated that he doesn't mind if people don't play all the time. He wants people to play multiple games.

That's not really healthy for a MMO when it relies on active players for people to complete content.

[Jkap_Goat]

I agree with OP, FFXIV was my first MMO but it's been so dumb down and homogenized that it's no longer fun for me, I was searching for a another MMO that fit my needs and that is FFXI<3

I love the hybrid and support job system the game has more diverse jobs (support jobs like Red Mage, Corsair and Dancer, flexible hybrid like Blue Mage and Puppermaster), not just a simple holy trinity (tank, healer, damage dealer) system.

which makes combat very interesting, I'm A Dancer/Warrior main

I can't see myself playing this homogenized dumbed down game much longer

[TheMightyMollusk]

Sounds a lot like the wow forums in BFA

If you go by the Blizzard forums, WoW has died at least once a week since it first launched.

[whitemoonflower]

If the removal of Kaiten is the direction they're taking, soul crystals might as well be changed to blank, dull rocks.

[Whalaqee]

I always do wonder what the game would be like if they stuck to the ARR method of cross-job skills. Such as how if you wanted Swiftcast, you would level a Thaumaturge to level 26 at least.

Some existing examples are

Blood for Blood: For 20s, you deal 15% more damage and take 10% more damage. 80s cd. Requires leveling Lancer to 30.
Internal Release: For 15s, your criticial hit rate is increased by 30%. 60s cd. Requires leveling Pugilist to level 10.
Raging Strikes: For 20s, you deal 15% more damage. 120s cd. Requires leveling Archer to 4.
Eye for an Eye: Target a member or pet. For 20s, whenever that target is struck, there is a 20% chance the striker will deal 10% less damage for 10s. 180s cd. Requires leveling Arcanist to 34.

Then just apply Dark Knight, Astrologian, Machinist, Samurai, Red Mage, Gunbreaker, Dancer, Sage, and Reaper for what spells and abilities they have that could be cross-job with other jobs.

[Absurdity]

I always do wonder what the game would be like if they stuck to the ARR method of cross-job skills. Such as how if you wanted Swiftcast, you would level a Thaumaturge to level 26 at least.

Some existing examples are

Blood for Blood: For 20s, you deal 15% more damage and take 10% more damage. 80s cd. Requires leveling Lancer to 30.
Internal Release: For 15s, your criticial hit rate is increased by 30%. 60s cd. Requires leveling Pugilist to level 10.
Raging Strikes: For 20s, you deal 15% more damage. 120s cd. Requires leveling Archer to 4.
Eye for an Eye: Target a member or pet. For 20s, whenever that target is struck, there is a 20% chance the striker will deal 10% less damage for 10s. 180s cd. Requires leveling Arcanist to 34.

Then just apply Dark Knight, Astrologian, Machinist, Samurai, Red Mage, Gunbreaker, Dancer, Sage, and Reaper for what spells and abilities they have that could be cross-job with other jobs.

In ARR it was a bit of a chore but with how fast you go through those levels to unlock said crossclass skills nowadays you could finish it in an afternoon.