The problems with 6.X’s macro design

[SargeTheSeagull]

Let me start off my saying I want this to remain civil and constructive. I’m not a game designer by any means but I’ve played this game since 3.3 and I’ve cleared the majority of the game’s endgame content. I’d also gotten every job to 80 in 5.X and I’ve got most jobs to 90 now so I’d like to think I know what I’m taking about for the most part. There have been dozens if not hundreds of threads about why we dislike the direction of the game. Rather than pointing out specifics about certain jobs, I think its better to summarize the source of the issues here. Hopefully the devs will see this thread and have a better understanding of the source of our complaints this expansion. Anyway, I think the common sentiment right now is that jobs in Endwalker are less fun to play than in past expansions. To me, there are several reasons why:

1. 60/120 second buff cooldowns

2. No feeling of buildup in rotations for many jobs

3. Guaranteed crits

4. Simplified rotations

5. Homogeneous toolkits

6. Healers

Let’s start with 60/120 second cooldowns. On its own, this sounds like a great idea. And I can’t deny the feeling of satisfaction when you enter your burst and notice all your party buffs coming up at the same time. However, this has some major drawbacks. For one, if the devs wanted to add a crazy strong cooldown like “every party member’s spells are instant and deal 5X damage and cost no resources and every tank takes no damage” (I know this is absurd but just for instance) this could only have a one or two minute cooldown. Meaning to balance it, the duration would have to be around 5 seconds which would make it a hassle to use effectively. Another issue would be if they wanted to design a job that put out buffs fairly regularly but didn't have a burst window, it just wouldn't fit in. Think sorta kinda like old dragoon or bard.

The other big issue with 60/120 cooldowns is it removes meaningful skill expression from certain jobs. Dragoon for example. In 5.X dragoons had to delay their first life of the dragon in a fight so that lance charge would be up when you hit stardiver. This would also align things so that every other life cycle would occur during at least one of your buffs for the next few minutes. This felt amazing. Now, you don’t have to do that at all. Due to how fast all of your cooldowns are, the only time you have to do this on 6.X dragoon is like five minutes into a fight which doesn't feel as impactful as just delaying your first. Yeah, functionally it’s “better” but it’s less satisfying to pull off. It also leads into the second point.
No feeling of buildup. In the past, (almost) every job had to build up to their burst in the opener. Red mages needed to get 40/40 mana before hitting manafication. Summoners had to go through dreadwyrm trance in order to summon bahamut. Samurai (pre 6.1) had to hit kaiten before any big attack. None of these exist now. At the start of a fight a summoner can just whip out bahamut. Red mages can just hit manafication and immediately start their melee (yes, I know you have to cast a few spells first so buffs align but that’s not a requirement in terms of the jobs own functionality. RDM doesn’t suffer from this as much as other jobs but that’s merely because other jobs take a few GCD’s to hit their burst. There’s nothing preventing you from hitting manafication as soon as a pull starts). Samurai don’t have a button that feels like powering up an attack.
Yes, on a purely functional level these are better. Low skill players don’t have to worry about gaining as much knowledge and high skill players have fewer things to worry about tracking. The problem is feeling. These FEEL worse now.
In fairness, not all jobs have this problem at all. Reaper for instance. Despite its simplicity, reaper has one of the best feeling rotations in the game because you constantly feel like you’re building up to enshroud. It wouldn’t feel as good if enshroud were just on a 60 second cooldown and didn’t consume any resources like summon bahamut. Paladin too. You have to go through holy spirits and confetior before using the blade of valor combo. That said, this is an issue for many jobs in the game and I hope the devs realize this.

Guaranteed crits, the hot topic right now. These suck for three reasons. One, it removes synergy between jobs. If in your raid group you had a warrior, a samurai, a dragoon, a scholar and a dancer, congrats! None of these jobs synergize properly. Because warrior and samurai's largest attacks deal critical damage no matter what, having them in a party with other jobs that buff critical hit rate is counterintuitive. There's nothing for a warrior to gain from battle litany or chain stratagem. Two, it makes landing critical hits feel pointless. The entire point of critical hits being a thing in video games is that is a little extra damage you deal by chance. Making them a sure thing completely ruins the entire point. Third reason: materia. A bunch of jobs in this game share gear. If you want to gear a paladin and a gunbreaker, congrats. They need the same melds. If you want to gear a paladin and a warrior, too bad. Most jobs require melding as much crit as possible. Warrior and samurai no longer need any crit since their strongest attacks are crits no matter what. So if you were a monk/sam main you get to completely remeld all your gear.

4. Simplified rotations. This is pretty straightforward and many previous points play into this. Every job's rotation is much more simple now than in the past. Dancers no longer have to hit rising windmill and bladeshower during flourish, meaning they don't need to worry about whether or not they're in range for those to land. It was one more thing to think about. Dragoons no longer have to land their positionals to get raiden thrust. Dragoons no longer need to delay their first life of the dragon. Dark knights just have a 1-2-3 combo and a couple off globals. Every healer has just a DoT, a spam and the occasional other button. "Oh, but dancer has starfall dance and fan dance 4 now so you're hitting the same number of buttons in your burst!" True! However, this doesn't feel as good. I'm not saying I want things to be like they were in HW or SB because for some jobs back then, things were downright convoluted. That said, I would like Tank and DPS stances back on tanks and I would welcome the return of cleric stance with open arms. But I'll get to healers in a minute.

5. Homogenous toolkits. As of 6.1 every tank's aoe combo is just two circles. Every melee DPS has a personal damage or speed buff to keep up just by doing their combos. Every healer has a 30 second DoT to keep up. Every healer has one 1.5 second damage spell that they spam whenever they don't need to heal. Almost every tank cooldown is identical. Holy Sheltron and HoC are functionally identical. Nebula, Sentinel, and Shadow Wall are functionally identical. Not to say that some of these are inherintly negative. If they wanted, the devs could just make the tanks' 30% cooldowns a role action and, assuming they kept their unique animations, I don't think most would mind. But it's easy to see that jobs are becoming less and less unique. 14 is the game where you can play every job on one character. Making jobs so homogenous ruins the point of that. A simple solution would be to bring back blunt, piercing and slashing debuffs. Those provided some synergy with some flavor. Yeah, at the end of the day they were just damage buffs in another costume but they did their jobs. Adding a magic debuff of the same sort would be cool too. Then you'd have a reason to stack a group with as many magic jobs as possible. You'd have a reason to bring a PLD, DRK, SMN, BLM, RPR etc.
6. Healers. There are absolutely hundreds of threads about this so I won't beat the dead horse too much here. Every healer feels absolutely terrible to play. Nothing in the game outside of savage or ultimate deals any damage. All damage is scripted so we know exactly who will be hit by what, how hard, and when. Yoshi P has stated that they won't make things in normal content hit harder so please, for the sake of keeping your players subscribed, give healers actual damage rotations. 21111111111112 ad nauseam is not fun. The only reason I touch sage as much as I do is because it's braindead. Give scholar miasma 2 and 3, shadow flare and fester. Give WHM a thundercloud-esque proc. Give Sage more things to spend addersting on (and more ways to generate it for that matter), give astro its old card system back. Don't be afraid to make healing in 14 difficult. It's a healer in a video game. Everyone knows it'll be hard or stressful, that's why they want to play healer.

All I've mentioned here will inevitably be met with "What about the casual players?" My response: What about them? Nothing i've mentioned here will create a barrier to entry. I got hooked on the game in 3.3. This was my first MMO and I got addicted back when you needed a degree in finance and military strategy to do anything aside from dungeons. I didn't know what a rotation was until I started savage content in 5.1. Complexity doesn't discourage new players at all, it interests them. 14's normal content is easy enough that increasing job complexity won't make everyone under 90 run away screaming.
All this will do is make high end and vet players happy, make new players more curious about how much you can optimize things (which is exactly what got me interested in savage) and ultimately give the devs more creative freedom. When they aren't shackled by making every healer braindead, or making sure every buff falls on a 1 or 2 minute timer, when they don't have to worry about adjusting potencies in a kit bc of guaranteed crits, and when they let jobs feel unique their jobs will be more interesting and the players will be happier. I hope this post allows other players to explain exactly what they dislike about 6.X's design and will allow the dev team to better understand, on a large scale, what they can do to fix it.*