Please stop simplifying and homogenizing the game. Please.

[SargeTheSeagull]

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?

[TheMightyMollusk]

You can edit a post to get around the character limit. It's helpful considering these forums give you a limited amount of posts per day.

[Kyrj]

All I can say is just expect a lot more of this. They're happy with these changes and unless the JP forums starts kicking back, they're not going to care at all what the EN forums say.

Seriously I joked earlier about this game becoming Guild Wars 2 and all I'd have to do is press the 1 button and the Job will play itself....but that joke is looking more like a reality with every expansion.

[MisterNublet]

All I can say is just expect a lot more of this. They're happy with these changes and unless the JP forums starts kicking back, they're not going to care at all what the EN forums say.

Sad thing is, I think the only time they have ever acknowledged feedback was when the JP community was verbally assaulting the developers over Samurai(?). Which Yoshi had to beg players to be nicer and give constructive feedback.

And it looks like they're still ignoring JP feedback, we can be sure as hell they're ignoring ENG feedback as evident by the multiple +100 page Healer threads.

[Saimeren]

Sad thing is, I think the only time they have ever acknowledged feedback was when the JP community was verbally assaulting the developers over Samurai(?). Which Yoshi had to beg players to be nicer and give constructive feedback.

And it looks like they're still ignoring JP feedback, we can be sure as hell they're ignoring ENG feedback as evident by the multiple +100 page Healer threads.

That's because the forums are a place for the community to chat with one another. They're not and never have been a direct line to the Devs.

People always seem to think that posting game change requests here will get them heard by the development team. This is literally just a place for players to chat with other players about the game without having to use third party websites like reddit.

[baklava151]

That's because the forums are a place for the community to chat with one another. They're not and never have been a direct line to the Devs.

People always seem to think that posting game change requests here will get them heard by the development team. This is literally just a place for players to chat with other players about the game without having to use third party websites like reddit.

Well if this isn't the place to post feedback, where is?

[Chasingstars]

Well if this isn't the place to post feedback, where is?

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

[Haruka_R]

That's because the forums are a place for the community to chat with one another. They're not and never have been a direct line to the Devs.

People always seem to think that posting game change requests here will get them heard by the development team. This is literally just a place for players to chat with other players about the game without having to use third party websites like reddit.

Ahh. The crippling truth.