SAM players are quitting

[cjbeagle]

I work in software development and I've had QA kick back plenty of issues that had to go all the way back to design. A good QA team is not afraid to push back on user experience issues. I've also worked in very small to very huge development teams. Huge development shops are loaded with bureaucracy. I have spent so many hours in meetings with designers and project managers and department leads discussing every little detail for every little thing. To think job design decisions by a company as large as SE with a game as popular as FF14 is done by one person and never challenged by anyone else is mind-boggling.

Same, except I've had the exact opposite experience.

From what I've seen, QA is primarily if not exclusively tasked with finding bugs, finding repros for bugs, and verifying fixes for bugs. They also participate in playtests, but to that extent their feedback carries the same weight as any artist, animator, engineer, producer, etc. that gives playtest feedback.

The idea of QA kicking back an issue to design is standard because design fixes a lot of the bugs that QA finds, but if they kick back something because they disagree with the design, that gets closed out as NAB.

Design is the designers' job - a "good QA team" shouldn't be expected to influence design any more than anyone else who provides playtest feedback.

As for design ownership and decision-making, from what I've seen there's usually only 1-3 people involved in any given decision - the owner and/or the owner's lead and/or (the design director or someone from prod) - I've never seen the type of groupthink micromanaging you're describing (thankfully - it sounds horrible).

So again, yes, it's completely plausible that a single person thought this was a good idea and got it through. Nobody said it was never challenged - Yoshida even explicitly mentioned dissent - but that doesn't mean it was passed by committee - could have just been that the challenges were ignored by the content owner.

[Nizzi]

and the changes the Devs brought to Tanks and Healers in Shadowbringers I assume was made to focus them to their roles, now do I agree with it(?), not entirely but wiping on esuna-ble Debuffs in a 24men raid had to be address (kind of like SE still didn't add B and C Spawn Points for the Atomos Part in CT)

Yeah I mean that's why they took away Selene, who had an entire AoE Esuna ability, right? That's definitely addressing wiping on esuna-able debuffs in raids, just remove something that makes it easier for players to manage and then do nothing else about that!

I'm not going to derail this thread complaining about healers, but lets not pretend that they had a grand vision in mind with what they did to healers, just as they DO NOT have a grand idea in mind with what they're doing with SAM. They want things to be easier for themselves to balance, that's it. They do not care about how jobs play, your fun with the job, or the time you put into your job. That's why they got rid of Kaiten and not the bloat they added this expac. They're chasing the white rabbit of making sure everything is easy to manage, and it's coming at the cost of making anything and everything in the game feel bland, boring and repetitive to play - except Yoshi's precious golden child BLM.

[xAFROx]

Feedback? Do you mean the forums? The forums are a cacophony. Most people just complain. The people who do give constructive feedback don't even agree. There are not even enough people here to be a proper sample of the userbase. Forums are just a funnel for people to complain who have one foot out of the door to have the illusion that the development team is actually listening to their opinions. The truth is most people won't notice or won't care about the changes. The ones that do will be over it by the time the next patch hits.

Well, if the devs specifically said to list our opinions and thoughts on the changes after trying them, in the official forums, mind you, then yeah, I and a lot of others are going to do just that.

And for the record, majority of opinions I've seen here all seem to be roughly the same few suggestions when it comes to some of the excuses we'd been given. Button Bloat can be solved by consolidating certain skills into one or vice versa, they can be retooled to alter other abilities under certain statuses. Action Bloat still exists with their change, so what did they actually fix there? Nothing. Crit variance in burst is a problem? Well, yeah, that's what rng is about. Not everything is going to be exactly the same, but SAM has always been about that heavy burst, so the solution is to flatten all damage to be equal across the kit? So our burst is pathetic and our damage comes from our general rotation now... cool, so we're just MNK with a toothpick, then. Awesome.

Feedback can be anything. We've all offered plenty of suggestions already in the first couple weeks. That is feedback. Our general thoughts and feelings on the matter are also feedback. That's getting repeated all over the place because we don't want them to think we've suddenly accepted the changes when we don't, so we keep posting.

If the forums aren't used by the devs, then why do they exist? If it serves no purpose when directly pointed to by the devs, then why is it here?

[xAFROx]

'would you rather sit on your resources in a burst phase because you are not allowed to hit that add because all your additional bursts (Senei/Guren/Shoha/Mumyo Shoha) are exclusively AoE, or would you just do your single target rotation and burst that target down? I appreciate to have these options because that's One thing that makes the Samurai Great! And at the moment that's not the case because they compromised on the Samurai's Unique Playstyle infavor of spamming Shinten disguised with the Lie of Button Bloat. On another Note, why do you want to limit the Samurai in it's Options?

at lvl70 Guren is the only Kenki Heavy Hitter, there is no option, of course do Guren at lvl70!

I might be reading something a bit wrong here, but I've gone through a lot of text already. So, just in the context of SAM as that's what I'm most familiar with, you're giving me a hypothetical about choosing between aoe or single target Guren or Senei, for an add phase in a fight right before burst hits?

I am not advocating for options to be removed. I want all the abilities to remain, but again, I'm just stating and explaining the reasoning behind some of the suggestions you seem so adamantly against when no options would actually be lost.

Guren already is a targeted aoe with falloff damage. It's literally just Senei with more flexibility. The two abilities are redundant as they do the same thing in the typical situation that Senei exists for. Same cost, same requirement of a target and (I might be wrong here) same potency at single target. Removing or combining Senei would do nothing to our options, because they share a cooldown.

Do you understand what I'm explaining at all? I'm not saying get rid of them, but in the grand scheme of 'Why are people even suggesting this' that is why. It could literally be removes and nothing would actually change about the flow, rotation, or anything. They share a cooldown, so it's not like you can choose when to use either ability at your leisure. That's what Shinten and Kyuten are for as kenki dumps.

I want them to stay. I would also suggest they do what WAR does and change our two dump abilities into the big hitters under certain statuses since that's how it's typically used anyway. Skill floor, reduced - skill ceiling, untouched.

The choice is an illusion if you try to play optimally.

[Martynek]

Guren already is a targeted aoe with falloff damage. It's literally just Senei with more flexibility. The two abilities are redundant as they do the same thing in the typical situation that Senei exists for. Same cost, same requirement of a target and (I might be wrong here) same potency at single target. Removing or combining Senei would do nothing to our options, because they share a cooldown.

Do you understand what I'm explaining at all? I'm not saying get rid of them, but in the grand scheme of 'Why are people even suggesting this' that is why. It could literally be removes and nothing would actually change about the flow, rotation, or anything. They share a cooldown, so it's not like you can choose when to use either ability at your leisure. That's what Shinten and Kyuten are for as kenki dumps.

Senei has higher single target potency. Guren does 500 to the first target and 250 to all further targets, Senei does 800 to a single target. Again, it's not a choice, it's a flowchart - Three or more enemies? Guren. Two or less? Senei.
I like the idea of Ikishoten upgrading Shinten and Kyuten into Senei and Guren. That could also work to free up hotbar space, although it would technically have an impact in the form of creating a sort of stiffness in your access to the abilities, so I'd personally consider it pretty low on the priority list.

[Quor]

Senei has higher single target potency. Guren does 500 to the first target and 250 to all further targets, Senei does 800 to a single target. Again, it's not a choice, it's a flowchart - Three or more enemies? Guren. Two or less? Senei.
I like the idea of Ikishoten upgrading Shinten and Kyuten into Senei and Guren. That could also work to free up hotbar space, although it would technically have an impact in the form of creating a sort of stiffness in your access to the abilities, so I'd personally consider it pretty low on the priority list.

The point being made with the Guren-to-Senei comparison is specifically in how damage falloff was implemented relatively recently in the life cycle of FF14. That is to say, instead of having two separate abilities that each take up a single key that you also only press once every two minutes, combine them into a single ability with falloff damage. So this newer version of Senei/Guren would be a single key that does 800 potency to one target and 250 to all other targets. Functionally you'd use it like you use Senei now, since it's a big single target hit, but since it has falloff damage you can consolidate those two keys into one, since the choice that exists between the two is very binary.

Or, in other words, if SE was really looking to reduce "button bloat" this is one of many avenues they could have taken. Another suggestion, as you've noted, is to have Ikishoten "upgrade" Shinten/Kyuten into Senei/Guren for one hit. Since Ikishoten and Senei/Guren are always paired together due to being on the same CD and Senei/Guren have the same Kenki cost as Shinten/Kyuten this would save two hotkey binds while also preserving both the animation of both Senei and Guren along with the choice, however minor said choice may be.

The primary point behind all of this is that the excuse of button bloat is just that; an excuse. Within 24 hours of the Live Letter many players had already provided numerous suggestions for how SAM could have up to five hotkeys pared down, all without removing Kaiten. Then we were told that it was an inaccurate translation and that the real meaning was "action bloat" in the sense that SAM was too busy in an actions-per-minute sense. This, too, was debunked by players in record time and we eventually got a mix of the "smoothing out damage variance" with "Kaiten was too restrictive to work around and we're also releasing the SAM changes as a part of an as-yet-unfinished job-wide rework" as the real [ACTUAL] [TRUE] reasons behind the 6.1 SAM changes.

[Ruminous]

cool, so we're just MNK with a toothpick, then. Awesome.

This is literally what I've been telling people when they ask me what I have a problem with when it comes to the 6.1 changes. EXACTLY THIS! And if we're a monk with a stick (or bokken if you want me to be literal), then why does samurai exist at all? What is its purpose if monk fills the exact same playstyle but is better for a group due to having actual group buffs? At least before 6.1, you could make the case that samurai and monk feel and flow more differently, but they more or less just feel the same now. So, why does samurai exist in its current form other than to "just be easier to balance"? Why bother with balancing at all when they can just delete it? Honest questions, you know.

My complaints with these changes and why I thought they were not very well thought out and poorly implemented was that, how is it different from a monk? Spoilers: It's not! If kaiten was such a big problem, then fine, remove it. But that means you have to rework the job in its entirety and not strip one piece out and call it a day. If you don't have something ready for the community, then don't put it out! It's very, very simple! Alas, simple is not what they like. Or maybe it is in some twisted way.

[xAFROx]

Senei has higher single target potency. Guren does 500 to the first target and 250 to all further targets, Senei does 800 to a single target. Again, it's not a choice, it's a flowchart - Three or more enemies? Guren. Two or less? Senei.
I like the idea of Ikishoten upgrading Shinten and Kyuten into Senei and Guren. That could also work to free up hotbar space, although it would technically have an impact in the form of creating a sort of stiffness in your access to the abilities, so I'd personally consider it pretty low on the priority list.

Ah, my mistake. I really haven't looked at tooltips in a long time for jobs I've learned how to play. Well, my point still stands when it comes to explaining the philosophy behind such a suggestion at least.

[Vencio]

Good!

Let those quitters dismiss themselves out! Less complaints, whining & more job appraisal!

-Sips Elezen wine-

[Martynek]

Ah, my mistake. I really haven't looked at tooltips in a long time for jobs I've learned how to play. Well, my point still stands when it comes to explaining the philosophy behind such a suggestion at least.

Yeah, I didn't post the correction to try and disprove your point, just to add to the conversation. I agree with you completely.

-Sips Elezen wine-

Uhh... bro, that ain't fine elezen cuisine and wine you're "enjoying", the developers just [redacted] on a plate and into a glass and you're just gobbling it up. You're worrying me.