To The Devs, When Are Jobs Complete? Concerns About Frequency Of Job Changes.

[Aco505]

I think that one of the main problems is the fact that these reworks, changes or tweaks often happen without any kind of previous notice. They are implemented on a specific patch and that's it. A PTR or test server would help receive player feedback more directly in order to avoid issues like the Mirage Dive change for DRG or the SAM/NIN changes. Another issue is that these changes are only reverted in scheduled patches or hotfixes, so if there's none planned for the short term, we need to wait and pray that the issue will be addressed in the next one.

I am personally concerned about the future "huge adjustments" to DRG in 6.2, especially now that the job is at its peak in smoothness and flow of play. No one ever complained about this, only animation locks and other minor things, so it's a wonder why DRG is being looked at and not other jobs in particular.

Indeed, there has to be clearer communication between the devs and the players. People often say that the developers don't read the English forums, and I wonder if that's the case. Devs don't have to do everything players ask or suggest, but player feedback should be taken into account for all aspects of the game, as we are the target audience after all, even though there can be conflicting opinions between the playerbase.

It has already been mentioned that jobs are not truly ever complete, and I agree with that. However, they should not get huge reworks in the middle of an expansion either unless a specific one is in a very broken state. I do think small reworks and tweaks are fine, either to test new things or fix specific problems, but not to fundamentally change the way a job works and especially not right when a new savage tier or ultimate is released, as players have no time to test and get used to the changes.

In regards to the direct hit/crit buffs discussion, there's been threads and posts about it (like this one https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5880390).

Buffs don't need to be homogenized to give flat % damage boosts. The solution is to change these buffs so that they behave like they do now with most attacks except those that have a 100% chance to (direct) crit, where they should provide a flat damage buff instead.

Crit buffs should provide a damage buff of half the chance. Therefore, Battle Litany and Chain Stratagem would give 5% damage to 100% crit attacks like Life Surge or Midare Setsugekka.

Direct hit buffs should provide a damage buff of a quarter of the chance. Battle Voice would then give 5% damage to a 100% direct hit attack.

If an attack has both a 100% chance to direct hit and crit, then it gets both bonuses if the relevant buffs are active.

There are a couple of outliers: Army's Paeon would have to give 1% in order to avoid having it give 0.75% damage, though this is negligible; Devilment would give 10% to automatic crits and 5% to automatic direct hits, but this makes sense due to Devilment's role as a strong single target buff.

This change would fix the weird anti-synergies between and within (DRG/DNC) jobs and benefits all jobs equally, since the damage buff would be similar to those provided by Trick Attack or Embolden, with Devilment being the main outlier. The numbers can always be tuned if needed, but this should hardly be an issue in most cases if we take into account that these buffs are only active for 15-20s every two minutes with the exception of BRD's songs.

Hopefully they will implement this instead of homogenizing all buffs, as it would make the game boring and stale as Raevus Astra has pointed out.

[cjbeagle]

We already have a plethora of flat damage buff jobs on almost every job in the game. This then leads to homogenization - every job should be equal. That's an answer, sure, but one that will cause animosity in a different way (job identity).

I doubt anyone really cares what their raid buff actually does - what's important to the job identity is that they have a raid buff at all.

As far as job identity goes in terms of raid buffs it's basically just Greedy DPS vs Normal DPS vs Support DPS - if a dancer's raid buffs and/or dance partner buff was changed to provide roughly the same benefit but was DH instead of crit or % dmg instead of whatever, I doubt they'd care - they're support dps, not "crit buff dps".

Game design can be hard, you're right, but it's a lot easier if you pick your fights and focus on what's important, and if you aren't careful it's really easy to make it a lot harder than it needs to be, which is exactly what they've done with their raid buffs.

Samurai and warriors are pariahs because of buffs that don't need to be as they are, and if they were changed, wouldn't really matter - they backed themselves into this corner and instead of making easy fixes that preserve what people actually do care about, they've opted to butcher actual job identity instead.

Dunno if you've heard this game design maxim, but it's probably the most important one I'm aware of: "Game design is 90% knowing what to cut." It's easy adding things atop systems atop mechanics - the hard part - and vital part - is knowing what to prune.

EDIT: btw, where'd you go to school, if you don't mind me asking?

[cjbeagle]

Hopefully they will implement this instead of homogenizing all buffs, as it would make the game boring and stale as Raevus Astra has pointed out.

Flat damage buffs actually feel better than small increases to stats like crit or DH, and if you think about it, it makes perfect sense why - I'll explain.

Let's say you have a 20% chance to crit and someone buffs you with +5% crit chance for a bit. Every time you crit while buffed, do you think "thanks bud, there's a 20% chance that crit only happened because of that buff you gave me" or do you basically not notice because you're used to critting roughly 20% of the time anyway?

With small crit/DH style buffs, there's no tangible connection to what you see on the screen and the buff you received - you'd need to review the log and compare it to logs that didn't have such a buff to even see a difference - and due to the natural variance you have with crit anyway, you might need several logs to see it even at that.

Conversely, if someone buffs you for +5% damage and you normally crit with an ability for 20k damage but with the buff you see that ability crit for 21k, that's immediately recognizable as a direct consequence of the buff.

I love crit as a stat because I love variance, but it's effectively invisible as a buff unless it's a big enough difference that it's super noticeable.

[VentVanitas]

While thinking about this I often consider how pointless the job action trailers seem in terms of representing the job in an expansion, seeing as the jobs are often completely reworked midway through an expansion.
While job actions added in expansions are never entirely deleted, I feel as though these trailers sometimes do a poor job of representing the job to someone who may come late into the expansion.
But for the ease of mind I will assume that these trailers are mostly just designed for hype.

I actually dread seeing big changes or job action trailers. When I watch them, I don't think "what are they gonna give us this time"- I think "oh god, what are they going to take away from us now". I think it says more about their job design when I'm fearful and not excited.

[elioaiko]

For as long as they insist that the bottom line needs to be happy (bad players who only want to play their way in an MMORPG).

Spite, typically MMO or "live-service" games will have new content every month, year and expansion.

Keeping jobs the same has done nothing but show their aging design philosophies (WHM, SCH, MNK, NIN). Devs tend to try to make QoL changes if the current design is fine but sometimes they like to make a drastic decision be it bad or good.

Even if a change is bad, at least they're doing something rather than nothing which isn't excusable mind you, but that's why feedback is important.

An example of a job that's good in most people's eyes is BLM. They've built on the foundation and for the most part have kept their mains happy.

MNK is an example of negligence with it being ignored until late ShB, same with NIN.

Tanks and healers have been ignored pretty badly for three expansions (more so healers).

It's the nature of having a class-based system where the devs need to decide which job is going have a bigger focus and which ones they'll inherently ignore (MCH in this case).

Samurai changes are mindless and don't really do anything successful. Kaiten hasn't reduced APM and autocrits doesn't make it more "satisfying" especially if it's guaranteed–which is the whole point of melding crit.

I've said this in multiple threads but the devs needs a seperate balance team. Them sitting around after making battle content and dealing with writing woes, is likely to lead to bad decisions. On top of that, not having members that actually play certain roles and having a different perspective only makes these changes easier to evoke ire from the community.

For example, as far as I know, the dev team plays dps and maybe tank when they need it. So changes made with healers or tanks will be met with anger. Because they're usually bad and people wonder why a DPS player is deciding what is better for a healer or tank when they're invested in DPS the most? Most DPS I meet barely understand any of the tank/healer skills.

[butchersblock]

That's the problem with nerfs and power rebalancing though. No one asks for them. That's not a valid argument against power nerfs/rebalancing to be done however.

In this instance, there was a problem (raidwide job synergy with samurai was too swingy and made balancing synergy jobs in other roles--especially dancer and bard--too difficult).

So, let's examine that problem, because the game's had it before.

Back in ARR, HW, and SB, you had the Disembowel/Ranged problem. Ranged damage was balanced around Disembowel. This made a dragoon required for any content you wanted to run a Bard or Machinist in, and if you didn't, your damage was awful, just awful. This made the ranged role difficult to balance. If they buffed the ranged role so it was viable without a dragoon, suddenly with a dragoon its OP. But if they don't, without a dragoon, it feels awful. There's no win/win here, there's no happy medium that exists. So the problem had to be solved by doing the thing that no one 'asked for': They removed all damage specific debuffs from the game. Dragoons no longer buffed bards or machinists, samurais and warriors no longer buffed ninjas, and so on.

Bards and Dancers were getting close to the same point with Samurai. If Dancers or Bards had a samurai, they did amazing, but if they didn't, they just did ok. So how do you balance those jobs? Do you buff Bards and Dancers so that they feel good all the time? Great, now Dancer/Bard + Samurai is required content. This is bad. Do you nerf Dancers and Bards so that their RDPS is balanced around the ubiquity of Samurai? Great, now they feel like shit whenever there isn't a Samurai.

Ultimately, the solution, the only good solution, is to remove the problem itself: Samurai's burst. Unfortunately, no Samurai asked for this, and I doubt any samurai wanted this. No Dragoon wanted thier piercing synergy removed either. No warrior wanted their slashing debuff removed. Lots of times they've done the thing that 'no one wanted' but it turned out to be better for the game in the long run.

This is one of those changes. Samurai needed to take a hit in its burst, so that Dancer and Bard could get corralled in and the ranged role itself be buffed to where it should be and feels good.

Good post. You're one of the few people who seem to understand all the reasonings for the Samurai changes. The idea was good - I recognize, as a Samurai player, that the job's burst needed to be addressed.
The problem is they went about this is one of the worst possible ways they could have.

[Grimoire-M]

Good post. You're one of the few people who seem to understand all the reasonings for the Samurai changes. The idea was good - I recognize, as a Samurai player, that the job's burst needed to be addressed.
The problem is they went about this is one of the worst possible ways they could have.

I have to disagree. The problem with piercing/Slashing is it was exclusive utility. Only certain classes could exploit those buffs at all. By contrast anyone can be a Dance Partner, and the ideal candidate is dictated by the context of that player’s performance alone. Blunt was also a strong counter example to that back in the day, since the only way anyone outside the Monk could use that buff was through rod/booksmacking and DRK provided int down as well as fitting fights better, it wasn’t something that kept Monk relevant.

Additionally the problems with Dancer/Bard still aren’t fixed, They just moved on to the next top DPS with high burst, Ninja.

Ironically, there is a better solution that actually involves Kaiten itself. Change the boost to be the auto crit/dhit effect and refund a portion of the Kenki if you would have landed the crit/dhit on that attack. This would require rebalancing the Kenki cost to 25 or 30 (so the refund would be 10 on a dhit and 15-20 on a crit) to keep the proportional gain intact but that would still reduce the number of Kaitens you get to use overall.

That kind of effect does suit a proc based job better but by using the data we know SE already calculates by default means it’s not nearly as expensive to implement as Gruntler’s suggestion. I could see a lot of auto-crit abilities getting this effect.

[butchersblock]

I have to disagree. The problem with piercing/Slashing is it was exclusive utility. Only certain classes could exploit those buffs at all. By contrast anyone can be a Dance Partner, and the ideal candidate is dictated by the context of that player’s performance alone.

It's not just player performance though. There is almost no world where a Dancer would've considered DRG over a SAM given skill parity. What they did with Samurai did not fix this issue, as you've pointed out Dancer just moved on to the next biggest burst job - Ninja. It was a step in the right direction, albeit executed very poorly. There needs to be less emphasis on cramming everything onto 2 minute cooldowns, and the DPS shouldn't almost exclusively come from those raid buff windows.

[Caduagm]

To be fair, I find it that, every time they do change jobs in each expansion, it is insulting and disrespectful regardless. They make us play a job, learn it's core mechanics and fall in love with it for two years (look at 5.0 SMN, despite its issues), so they change it altogether, because a couple ne'er-do-wells (the devs) feel a certain tipe way, which is completely disjointed from reality and from what their playerbase mindset.

[Grimoire-M]

It's not just player performance though. There is almost no world where a Dancer would've considered DRG over a SAM given skill parity. What they did with Samurai did not fix this issue, as you've pointed out Dancer just moved on to the next biggest burst job - Ninja. It was a step in the right direction, albeit executed very poorly. There needs to be less emphasis on cramming everything onto 2 minute cooldowns, and the DPS shouldn't almost exclusively come from those raid buff windows.

Jobs aren’t designed to perform similarly at parity for a reason. They would need to be even more homogeneous than they are now to reach that point. I have zero problems as a Ninja if someone else gets partnered as long as they’re actually doing better. In my static that could be my co-melee Reaper or me, depending on who handles that 2 minute window better or who has weakness from a previous mechanic. I have zero problems with that. The fact it changes mid-fight is a strength of the game, not a limitation. We just don’t see Dancers min-maxing partner uptime and there’s a good reason for that. Spot targeting sucks and generally the person getting higher DPS gets more uptime. Fixing that requires sustained DPS and burst DPS to lean into those roles MORE, not less.