Request for Better Dev Communication Regarding Job Balancing and Adjustments

[Xenon_S]

In general, the FFXIV team has done a good job communicating with the community. However, when it comes to the matter of Job Balancing, the communication feels like it falls short more often than not.

The most recent liveletter 70 caused a veritable uproar between the removal of Samurai's Kaiten, and changing Ninja's Trick Attack amoung other things. While it has been made clear that the changes listed in the liveletter slides were not extensive and exhaustive, the choice of what was presented there is, somewhat dubious. The changes they list don't quite align with the players' concerns (afaik). Some examples below.

MCH has been asking for their Hypercharge to function on the stack system, no mention of it on the slides.

DRK Living Dead main concern is the 1-HP effect wearing off when the Walking Dead status is removed, the slide made no mention of this, instead instills a fear that DRK may further screw themselves over for multi-hit tank buster now that they can heal themselves too fast to remove Walking Dead. Also no mention of Blood Weapon being stacks, nor general gameplay feel adjustments.

WHM Primary concern is the Lily system being a DPS loss. Simply making Lilies DPS neutral would alleviate its MP issue. The Cure III, Assylum, and Liturgy changes are welcome QoLs but do not necessarily address WHM's core concern. There was an off hand regard for all healer MP changes, but having it on the slides would be better.

AST faces egregious Action and Button bloat issues, but no changes could be made in time for 6.1. But the decision was made to remove SAM's Kaiten, where there was little to no complaints to Samurai's general gameplay feel.

(As for SAM and NIN changes, they are my mains and I can write a full essay on why I disagree with the listed changes, but that is not the main point of the post)



Even in patch notes proper, there were many changes that made players raise their eyebrows in confusion.

Samurai's Iaijutsu range extension in 6.05 served almost no practical purpose, as a SAM main myself I have not encountered a single situation in the current Savage tier where this change was beneficial. On the other hand GNB has been drooling over this change for their Continuation skill.

Warrior's Tomahawk potency increase in 6.08 to 150 serves no practical purpose AFAIK

Monk in 6.08 got a potency increase on Phantom Rush when they already were the top DPS before that point.

Machinist's potency buffs in 6.08 were almost inconsequentially laughable when compared side by side to Dancer in the same role.



So I would like to propose a few changes, some easier to implement than others.


1. On the patch notes, for Job Adjustments, include a few lines explaining why the adjustments were made.
This should be the simplest to do, and would serve as a more integrated reference point as opposed to having to dig through old interviews or liveletters for the players to try to discern dev's intent.


2. Have a more dedicated channel for dev communication on Job Adjustments across all regions.
There are regional differences in the feedback provided to the devs on the forums. There has been a running joke in the English speaking community that the devs do not listen to the English forums. And due to the language barrier, players of the different regions are not necessarily aware of what other region are saying. If there can be a dedicated thread where the devs can let the players know which feedback for each job is being received, it would go a long way. I recognize this will require some effort in coordination and community localization to set up.


3. If schedule allows, get the job adjustment team on a liveletter.

4. This is probably impossible, but a striking dummy only beta test server could be useful.


Regardless of what your individual opinion might be on the details of the job adjustments, having better dev communication on the subject would benefit everyone.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Fully agree, I wonder where they get their job feedback from because its clearly not within their own forums considering their changes and tweaks for the last few years.

[elioaiko]

Agreed, the dev team needs to actually compile feedback and decide what they want to address. They tend to be rather closed-mouth about what they want to change and get frustrated when the playerbase reacts badly to their changes.

Compiling the issues thread for each role on the forums will do wonders in reading into player concern.

I agree that there needs to be an adjustment team that can communicate with the devs about player feedback. Sometimes I just feel that the devs are quick to jump the gun and find the easiest path to "fix" a job because they don't understand why players are complaining about it in the first place.

Example, no one asked for Kaiten to be outright removed. As someone who loves SAM deeply, I never had an issue with Kaiten and it's just one of those skills that felt natural to the job even if it's just superfluous.

To me they removed it because they see that the feedback on SAM is that it feels too crammed or unsatisfying so they jump the gun and make the job easier to play.

And we've seen this knee-jerk reaction before as they decided that AST's cards need to get dumb down because they think that's the most frustrating part of its kit. When in reality, AST has too many disconnected gimmicks that don't naturally flow into one another, feeling overwhelming as you need to keep track of everything because none of them affects the other.

There's a lot jobs that need more attention with larger issues like DRK having an identity crisis with LD potentially still being bad as the death penalty is still there.

Or BRD competing with DNC, a never-ending cycle of who's better because they have the same role as group buffer.

[KizuyaKatogami]

As much as i would love some communication, i feel for certain jobs they wouldn’t communicate whatsoever no matter what. They already showed their bias and double standard when they said they couldn’t abs wouldn’t do any drastic changes to healers because Ultimate was so close yet are doing drastic changes to dps with their logic being “we believe dps players will be able to adapt quickly to the new changes in time for Ultimate.” If they actually communicated they’d need to be prepared to acknowledge said double standard.

[Bjorn-Kobito]

It won't matter. Soon enough they'll all be the same job, just different animation/gear glams.

[kaynide]

Agreed;

I would like to see them pick a particular job as a "Gold Standard" for complexity, ideally for each role, so we can know what they expect to be average difficulty/complexity. Whatever that sweet spot is.

I would also like to see what they think the basic rotation should be.

My DPS main is Samurai...

... and I'm not really sure what the issue is with Kaiten either. Is the purpose to encourage using other Kenki actions? If so, I've never really had a problem maintaining Kenki for them. While I want to main as DRG, SAM is just easier to play so I play it.

Samurai's Kenki gauge is just not a difficult thing to juggle compared to time-limited resources like... say, keeping Eye of the Dragon up or shuffling stances on Monk. Even the Enochian "clock". Those are not bad mechanics, it's just night and day compared to a resource you can build up and pop whenever.

As for WHM, it's more of a healer issue at large..but there's so much bloat, and really weird gimmicks that don't build on previous ones.

Just IMO, they really should just cut it down to:

CORE HEALING>
1 Single Target Cure, with added effect ("Cure", but also gives Regen. No Free Cure)
1 Single Target Expensive Cure ("Cure 2", but more like PLD's Clemency)
1 Single Target, Instant Free Cure Bomb (Benediction)
1 AoE Heal, with added effect ("Medica 2")
1 AoE Expensive Heal ("Medica")
1 AoE, Instant Free Cure Bomb (Asylum)
(I would swap Medica and Medica 2's names to keep it in line with cheap+gimmick and expensive cure bomb)

GIMMICK HEALING (uses Lilies, and have Lilies generate via DPS; more DPS = more free heals to weave)
1 instant cure bomb
1 instant AoE bomb

DPS (Use DPS to generate Blood Lilies)
1 DoT (Aero)
1 Regular DPS (Stone/Glare)
1 AoE DPS (Stone...2?)
1 Heavy AoE (Holy)

--
Rather than giving Tetragrammaton AND Divine Benison AND so on, I would say just have more charges of the above related skill. Like, WHM is not supposed to be a shield-healer, so why even have Divine Benison and not a "field of regen".

A lot of WHM's extra abilities seem to revolve around conserving MP (eg Thin Air, or Free Cure). If that is their gimmick, then make THAT the gimmick. Make maintaining MP an actual thing. If not, cut all that crap and make a new healer that revolves around that.

[Duskane]

It won't matter. Soon enough they'll all be the same job, just different animation/gear glams.

comments like this help no one,
Devs have a history of listening to playerbase on multiple occasiond they just have to do better on Job adjustments and communication.

Job adjustments should have there own LL not just 3 panels in a slideshow where they only mention a few things for certain job then move on to talk about personal cards for 40 minutes ,also should have QA threads for these live letters so they can read feedback and more people can ask questions or voice concerns about jobs.

[Bjorn-Kobito]

comments like this help no one,
Devs have a history of listening to playerbase on multiple occasiond they just have to do better on Job adjustments and communication.

Job adjustments should have there own LL not just 3 panels in a slideshow where they only mention a few things for certain job then move on to talk about personal cards for 40 minutes ,also should have QA threads for these live letters so they can read feedback and more people can ask questions or voice concerns about jobs.

Hate to break it to you, but nobody's comments and threads aren't going to help at all. Ask myself or anyone else who has been a healer main since 2.x lol. Don't get your hopes up. I'm honestly surprised they even explained the few things they did behind the SAM changes.

We need better developer communication on all fronts. The community staff has been MIA on threads for months now. Pretty bad when all the crappy FPS games that get churned out every year have a more active community engagement team. I know those games have tons of other issues and fall short of what is communicated, but at least you don't feel ignored.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

I love for them to do a QA on job adjustments and allow us to voice our concerns about the jobs. More often or not I feel the devs are not fully listening to all the feedback and concerns about jobs. Take the smn rework we haven't really heard them talk about it for a bit since they first show off the rework pre-EW. Since then all they have done has been added some buffs to phoenix and allow SL to be used without having carby on the field. These are just the tip of the iceberg that is smn flaws and I would love to hear their plans and opinions on the future for the rework since most would say the rework of smn feels very rushed and unfinished. I just like to hear something about it so it shows they are listening to everyone's concerns.

[Beddict]

The kicker is that the devs actually have a Dev Blog. They occasionally post some neat articles, like this one where they talked with some artists on how they designed animations for swimming and underwater actions. That's some cool shit right there, hearing actual devs talk about what they do and the troubles they face designing stuff. Maybe, just maybe they could get some members of the Job Design team to communicate stuff there? Or maybe a Lodestone post? Something, anything, because Yoshi-P going "we don't have a lot of time this Live Letter to discuss changes" is getting real old, and as a player I feel like I don't understand what the hell his team is thinking. Yoshi-P once stated that it's important to have open and honest communication with the player base, and that no longer exists when it comes to Job design.