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.

[DrWho2010]

well then the game crashes and burns and then we move on to something else. can look back on it later say "hmm I guess I had some fun with XIV." oh well. life goes on. there are always other things to do/see/play. Games are ephemeral. Can't expect them to stay relevant/around forever at the level of player perceived anticipation.

[ThaCa]

If they are going to homogenize the game further, at least they should stop being indecisive and figure out what they want to give everyone and then actually make the rest more unique.

For example basic stuff like Resurrection for Healers should be Role ability at level 15, there's absolutely no point of making the same button with different icons and names for some of them. Tank cooldowns? If you are going to make most 30% so similar why aren't they also a Role ability? Just figure out the bare minimun these roles need to function and make them Role abilities and use the rest of the kit to build them with clear identity. Not this wishy-washy "hey here's totally not skill X, it's skill Y". If they aren't doing this they should at least make the similar skills more different to warrant being different looking button.

DPS Jobs have the most variety (also due sheer number) as they can be wildly different as long as they chunk in the damage. Healers and Tanks are more limited and need some basic tools for their role, but there's no reason to not make the rest of the kit fun, especially if every role needs to contribute DPS.

[Faafetai]

If they are going to homogenize the game further, at least they should stop being indecisive and figure out what they want to give everyone and then actually make the rest more unique.

Like movement skills for all healers would be nice maybe sometime not at level 90. And make it so all of the tanks have there two part of their aoe at the same time and engage abilities at the same time. It drives me nuts. Also everyone having an interrupt would be nice. Some things I do wish they would homogenize for the better cause it would go a long way.

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.

I think they very well may be backlash from the jp players about this change on sam, and unsure how people feel about warrior, but if they are changing warriors aoe I think that might be the I quit moment for me. I will not give money to people who are going to ruin things further because they can not just stop touching things. I was upset about summoner because with all of the changes the pet still wiffs its spells and now I can't order it around. I don't mind new summoner, but the reasoning for the change is what worried me.

Sure I can see why tp was removed because it was kind of annoying. positionals, I can see why because I have to hit true north half of the time when a boss decides its mechanics time every five second and spins none stop I think it was solm al Tioman. Because the bosses leave for nine hours holding on to duel casts, procs on classes such as blm would fall off because the devs do not want to change the spectacle of how the bosses leave or transform, so some things were made a passive. Though I am still waiting on someone to address the issue with dragoon jumps not changing in potency and the passive is literally the same as it is before you level and after you level. Also upset drg didn't get the holmgang treatment because it would have been hilarious with the range increase. I could go on with changes that are kind of okay and could understand why, but now it is just getting worse. Summoner had some pet issue, gee lets just remove the pet entirely but not really. And dots those were just tooooooo hard to maintain. It was totally because people would call it a dot class sure, not because people couldn't figure out how dots work.

Snip

I wish to say something as well about all of this. I do not want to play cookie clicker. I want to play an mmo. I am far from hardcore, but would like to raid someday. I feel I have a decent grasp of the game and enjoy learning new things, new jobs, new mechanics. I was extremely happy being able to duo Ruby Weapon, Emerald Weapon, and Diamond Weapon at level 80 with cryptlurker sure and unsynced so no minimum ilvl, but it was very fun and enjoyable. My worry is the fact that I could duo these without issue just a tank and healer. It was pretty hard, timings had to be perfect, little bits of tricks needed to be used such as cover invuln. It took a bit of time I think we ended with 15 to 20 minutes to spare, but we needed to be perfect in execution because if we failed something once we would have to restart the whole thing because we wouldn't have enough time to complete it. I think we wiped once our final run but it was at the beginning. I do not see myself as a hardcore gamer, I mess up many times during many things, and understand not everyone is perfect. There is however a limit to how easy something really should be. If I am entering a duty to enjoy the story and people talk up how tough someone is like say Thoridan, and everyone is standing in every mechanic and nothing does literally any damage to anyone, it really kind of ruins the story for me.

I want to be able to learn new things within the game and I honestly have learned more from observing things by duo or trio ing content. I think there are alot of people who just are not great at the game, but could be better and the game itself has two modes plowing you into the floor and snooze fest. Many things do not teach job mechanics and I sure as heck never learned tanking from the story. I learned how to kill oppo oppos 9 times and light a tiki torch. I noticed today while playing just through post heavensward on ps4 I couldn't even dance partner yugiri or lyse during the fight before the big battle with omega and shinryu.

Instead of focusing on small things to help people they would rather just remove skills and dumb the game down like the few mmos I have actually played. I see where this is going, and as the other person in the thread said I will enjoy my time I have left here and move on. Things have gotten dumbed down in the past, but right now the game is somewhat stable and needs a few changes to bring it back to normal levels of okay. They can either actually fix things or make them worse. I will try to fight for this game, but if it wants to slam its head into a window on the short bus and burn all of its money its just made, I honestly can't fix insanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOT8PEz0MiE

[Equitable_Remedy]

Inb4 FF14 is dyin—

well then the game crashes and burns

Oh.

Yes, I'm sure that the sky is really falling this time. For reals.

[Chasingstars]

Please stop simplifying and homogenizing the game.

Seems a tad late for that. What with how the game has changed over its 12 years min life span if we only counted 2.0 onward.

[Lyth]

Variations in gameplay cannot come at the expense of job balance. Otherwise you end up with homogenized picks instead of homogenized jobs, which is even worse.

The real problem isn't homogenizing jobs. It's partially homogenizing them. If another job does everything else identically +1 extra thing, then you've created a mandatory pick. Either make the differences significant enough that players can't make a simple mathematical comparison, or make them identical.