The trouble with Job redesigns

[FoxCh40s]

if you read any interviews about the subject of summoner, they basically felt that they had taken "old" summoner job makeup/skill setup/bloat as far as they could go. hence the redesign for future-proofing more additions as level cap increases.

Except their future proofing never comes to anything except doing absolutely nothing to rock the boat, even to its absolute detriment.

There are also only two people on the Combat team; I wouldn't be suprised if one of them quit leaving only one guy to design all the jobs. I'm telling you, the way they design jobs is absolutely going to implode next expansion.

[CelestiCer]

Played FFXIV 8 months now? not long enough to know all the negative Job changes. Found the recent SAM changes quite disgusting...

Reading unoriginal reactions such as " oh, this your 1st time? " meme's, and technically? No, its a common experience in previous mmo's I played where the flavor of the month/season Class is hyped/changed/reworked/released... only to be nerfed/neutered/stripped of anything that made it complex/unique/engaging/fun to begin with, making room for the new to be " Sold ".

No company is innocent of this, neither is " Square ". Business is Business, no matter how much of a " Fantasy " it is. Job design isn't about how difficult you can make it, rather an appealing barrier of entry with an optional high skill ceiling for skill expression.

That " skill-expression ", no matter how insignificant it's nuances may be... is glaringly noticeable when an experienced player pilots a job or when a player masters it. And players will passionately practice hours on end purely cause they enjoyed the job. Taking this away? is akin to killing the job to those players. Making it " Soulless ".

From a " Companies PoV ", low Play-rate = problem

• To difficult to execute?
• Not appealing aesthetically?
• Accessibility barrier of entry?

Whatever the reason, good players are in a smaller percentage vs the average player making up the masses. Thus, why appeal to the top when you can appeal to the masses below? Dumb it down = playrate.

Who cares if it's alienating dedicated players? They get to play a former shallow shell or even sometimes unrecognizable version of what they fell in love with in the 1st place. Gotta appeal to the players who don't want to lift a finger or even read to master a job.

Can I even name a FFXIV job where this has happened? No. I only play SAM, I genuinely wouldn't know. However... based on what I read and what I experienced in other mmo's? I'll go on a limb and say " I am going to assume it's the same deal here ".

I don't know why I was naïve enough to think Square was different. Maybe my FF fan-ism got the best of me, or maybe the engulfing positivity that the community excrete overshadowed any valid critique as null and void. Who knows.

Designing gameplay to be simplistic is what I despised way before FFXIV, and I despise experiencing it in FFXIV now.

[Lyth]

With regards to the OP:

Job reworks are very different from building a new job from scratch because of player expectations. You essentially have to find a way to be faithful to each and every previous iteration of the job. There will always be complaints, because you'll have some players wishing that the job could just be closer to what it was in Heavensward, others Stormblood, yet others Shadowbringers. The jobs that have been through the least drastic transformations (i.e. BLM) tend to have a consistent fanbase that just seems unified and content, because there's really only one version of the job that steadily refines itself over time. Players get caught in this endless loop by wherein they want to be buffed, demand large scale changes to give their job an advantage, and then end up with a less than satisfying rework.

It's also worth noting that players by and large don't approach job 'difficulty' objectively. If a job is 'difficult', you would expect a wide variation in performance (i.e. dps) across people participating in a particular type of content. If you want to be objective about it, you would have to look at a measure of the spread of the data set, i.e. standard deviation or interquartile ratio. Most jobs in this game by no small coincidence have very similar IQRs, despite anecdotal claims that 'job X is the hardest/easiest to play' (again, BLM is the only real outlier here). Yet you also have to account for player perception as well, even when its grossly erroneous. A job that is perceived by the playerbase to be low reward for effort invested is going to have a lower usage rate. A lot of changes, most notably 4.2's infamous Unga Bunga WAR rework just get driven by player claims of difficulty even when there is no actual basis in fact. And then you get a backlash saying that the job is now too easy. Well, it wasn't all that hard before when there were complaints, so...

[shao32]

The problem i see with jobs redesings is that that the Devs follow an unhealty and an awful way to dealt with the situations wich is "oh this job have so much complains, mmm they complain about this mechanic let's just remove it entirely and add nothing in return".

This has leave jobs so hollow in order to fix the gaps they just straight copy mechanics from other jobs or just fill them with generics oGCD or mindless 1 key spam stuff that adds nothing to the gameplay experience, look how DRK once an unique job with an unique gameplay nothing alike to the other tanks have they entire GCD structure and Blood gauge being an exactly copy paste of WAR GCD structure and Rage gauge, even both jobs follow the same burst parttern, use inner Delirium and all your oGCD aviable every 60s and then long and boring downtime.

Same example with MCH wich was reworked in SHB with DRK and both jobs become so samey with even both getting the Queen and Living shadow and both being 123 until Delirium/Hypercharge being a 5 GCD spam and i don't wanna get in to healers, they just put zero effort on reworks, going as cheap as they can even an expansion later adding nothing meaningfull to distinc them from each other as they use to be, that's why those jobs feel so hollow and poorly made in general.

Is a trending i see they aren't going to change, they ignored years of complains about this and i bet it's going to be worse since they are putting hands on other jobs like SAM, they made this for they own shake not for the players who play those jobs and of course they favs get desing privileges to remain unique and fun.

[Sorzai]

It really makes me wonder if the devs are really listening to their player base when it comes to the job design/redesign/balancing or when it even comes to addressing button bloat. I find many jobs to be a hollow shell of their former self, from what was interesting to something so boring that I'd fall asleep during my duty roulettes, and don't get me started on duty roulettes/dungeons omg that's a whole different can of worms. I swear Yoshi-P should make it mandatory for the devs that are gonna rework/redesign a job to play that job in its current iteration so that they understand the job, pros/cons/identity/uniqueness/etc.

[CKNovel]

Some jobs needed to be reworked.

I'll take SB MCH as an example since it's the material I know the best:
-The heat management was non-existent on 2.50 GCD, unless you had to delay a burst.
-The job was about Wildfire phases. Outside of that, it was playing with 1 2 3 proc and Gauss round.
-Wildfire was based on total damage, no matter what you add as abilities or weaponskill, it would be cramed into the wildfire phase.
-The job was designed with casts, after the removal a lot of mechanics went redundant such as procs, rapidfire and ammos.

But it brought other problems or forgot to fix some, such as the unfriendly nature of the job with higher ping.
Or the Automaton Queen which was already a bottle neck from its introduction.

This applies to all rework.
They fix a lot of gameplay issues.
They ignore some gameplay issues.
They introduce new gameplay issues.
They reconnect the job with its identity.
But at the cost of fun elements, they create a new base for the job but don't expand further.

MCH&DRK are very good examples.
LS/AQ are still unfun press&forget, Darkside has no interaction, MCH DPS kit is poor.

These jobs are very good foundation, but that's all their are, foundations.

[LeonKeyh]

I think that there are a handful of "goals" that they have and keep in mind, some of these things have popped up more recently. I just don't think they're doing a great job at succeeding with those goals:


1. Keeping APM within a certain threshold - This is something that seemingly comes up every once in a while but holy crap have they been bad at actually successfully making changes that affect this. Kaiten is obviously the most recent change that they seem to claim was because of action bloat, but Kaiten was just replaced by Shinten at a nearly 1:1 ratio. It did absolutely nothing to lower actions per minute. Due to that, I suspect that 6.2 is going to raise the damage on Shinten (and the others) and lower Kenki generation to actually do what they seem to have wanted to do.

2. Planning for continued growth of the job - This is REALLY starting to hurt the game with how they've decided to do this. SMN is the big example of this. They work towards cutting down some of the job growth in order to prepare for further growth in the future. It's the equivalent of taking a job with a lower salary but a slightly higher pay ceiling. Sure, you have some room to improve, but some of that growth is artificial it's "growth" that you had already obtained. This is the reason why so many of the jobs that were reworked ultimately feel like they were neutered, it's because they reworked them with a plan to grow them further in later expansions. Given how they're stretching 50-60 levels worth of job growth over 90 levels though, people feel the slow growth and it's only going to get worse if they continue to do this incorrectly.

3. "Easy" to play at a reasonable level/Low performance variance - There's nothing INHERENTLY wrong with a low skill floor in SOME jobs. Hell, there's nothing wrong with a low skill floor in EVERY job; HOWEVER, you need to have jobs with a high skill ceiling or good skill expression. They have shown to not understand how to design something with a low skill floor and high skill ceiling (except maybe BLM; cue YoshiP hate). OR, maybe it's on purpose. Several recent changes could be related to reining in performance variance (e.g. autocrits on Iaijutsu). This is another place where they're half understanding the goal and are destroying other things while trying to accomplish what they think is "good" (i.e. low skill floors). This is especially done for roles that have lower player counts.

4. Getting rid of "silly" "efficiency" things - This seems to mostly be done. A lot of the work changing certain abilities to only be usable in combat seems to have been in order to stop from 60 second pull timers, also things like Doton going away whenever you hide was to get rid of "silly" little tricks that result in performance boosts. I'm sure there's something left here but they ultimately wanted to make sure that the "obvious" or perhaps "designed" game play of each job is the most efficient, so they have been closing these little loops.

[Picker]

Monk and Summoner is the first time the entire player base is like “wtf is this”, which is a little concerning as those reworks happened at the same time; every other job has slowly evolved into what we have now (for better or worse). I think they should put a hold on new jobs and refine/iterate with more creativity. With the way the raids are going with like 100% uptime for all jobs and 2 minute burst windows the job design feels trapped. And I’m someone who loves the current tier and direction of the game.

I’ve played since beta but only did current tier savage in shb, so I’m no expert.

[Raikai]

So, every time they have done a job redesign something feels off. MCH, MNK, SMN just don't have the same flavor as they did before the redesign.

The first question that must be asked is who is the job redesign for? Is it for the player base that has been playing the job? Is it for a new player base that may or may not play?

Why redesign a job in the first place? Technical issues? Design? Or just plain popularity?

The problem is with each redesign they fail to improve upon the core mechanics to that job. MNK was keeping your GCD at 1.5 and positionals. SMN was managing Pets, Aetherflow/Trance, and Spells. MCH was Ammo, Turrets, and Heat post 4.0.

This is important because they could have kept the stuff mains enjoyed and expanded into a direct the developers wanted the job to go. Instead, they chose to remove all aspects of the jobs which in turn alienates the core players of the job.

Well, the thing I know is that I enjoy post ShB Machinist way more in a visual/fantasy sense. With the tools and the robot it actually now feels like a true machinist as opposed to a gunner that occasionaly uses gadgets.

Now, on the other hand, the mechanical/gameplay aspect lacks depth, but that has nothing to do with the previous point. Afaik they could rework a job's theme into something as bland as unseasoned chicken but playing marvelously well, with an accessible skill floor and high skill ceiling.

[Hezhi]

2. Planning for continued growth of the job - This is REALLY starting to hurt the game with how they've decided to do this. SMN is the big example of this. They work towards cutting down some of the job growth in order to prepare for further growth in the future. It's the equivalent of taking a job with a lower salary but a slightly higher pay ceiling. Sure, you have some room to improve, but some of that growth is artificial it's "growth" that you had already obtained. This is the reason why so many of the jobs that were reworked ultimately feel like they were neutered, it's because they reworked them with a plan to grow them further in later expansions. Given how they're stretching 50-60 levels worth of job growth over 90 levels though, people feel the slow growth and it's only going to get worse if they continue to do this incorrectly.

And that'd be fine if they didn't demonstrate that they're incapable of providing satisfactory growth to jobs. We're being forced into lower pay labor with a lower pay ceiling! Look at the absolute state of healers since Stormblood, people assumed they'd build on the newly pruned jobs, they did nothing of the sort, we've been spamming Glare + Aero for 5 years, it's pathetic.
Also what you're saying about Shinten pisses me off because it's one of the likely changes they could be planning to make lol.