Why do the devs hate MCH so much?

[Jeeqbit]

Every Job has an MP bar, why? Resource management hasn't been a party issue since SB.

It's still used by many jobs including healers, casters, paladins and dark knights.

Job Roles, do they need to be reexamined?

Since the game is being made to work more for casual players than it used to, allowing jobs to do eachothers roles allows them to carry eachother if one is slacking and I think they seem content with this.

But I hope they see that the job roles do seem to be overlapping. Tanks are supposed to protect the party, yet for some reason we have barrier healers who are supposed to do the same thing and DPS using Addle, Feint and other mitigation.

Job Role homogenization. The further we go the similar a lot of jobs play.

We used to have half as many jobs and I think by making 2 of each play the same, they could balance them as easily as they could in the past, so maybe this is their objective.

ARR had unique playstyles for each job but now most tanks and most healers have the same design with minor tweaks to make them feel different.

Tanks and healers always played relative similar.

Even in ARR, WAR and PLD both had tank stance, their Thrill of Battle or Inner Beast/Rampart, Vengeance/Sentinel, Holm Gang/Hallowed Ground, a 1-2-3 enmity combo, Tomhawk/Shield Lob, Beserk/Fight or Flight and a stun.

When AST released, it had a lot of the same things as WHM under a different name including Cure, Cure II, Esuna, Media, Medica II, Tetragrammaton, Stone, Aero, Holy, Raise and they cross-classed the same stuff.

The rest got more unique, but you really only needed the things that were the same and could ignore the rest and get away with it.

My personal opinion is his headspace is in designing FFXVI first and foremost and FFXIV is an afterthought, or simply left to his underlings.

Yoshi-P is the producer of FF16, which involves "planning, coordination and management around the script and writing, casting, directing, and editing as well as finances, marketing, release and distribution." In other words, he oversees a spreadsheet.

Someone else is the director, who oversees "artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision" while also "choosing the cast members, production design and all the creative aspects".

"The main difference between a producer and a director is that a producer will handle the business components", "while the director is mostly concerned with the creative aspects of the entire production". In other words, someone other than Yoshi-P is handling the day-to-day of FF16 and Yoshi-P is just doing the business side and marketing, but usually spends his time on FF14.

It does seem like the B team has been developing the game for the past expansion or two.

Team members left for FFXVI after Heavensward release, so this mythical "B team" has been working on the game since the beginning of Heavensward. If they are attacked for the last two expansions then they would also have to be for Stormblood and some of Heavensward's patch content.

I mean, extremely simple things like basic potency math for upgrade abilities have been overlooked (Aero 2 being higher potency than Dia)

It's not though.

[Deceptus]

It's not though.

My bad, they were the exact same potency in 6.1 but Dia (gained at lvl 72) had double the MP cost as Aero 2 (gained at 46)



Just shows there's not quality checks when it comes to healer stuff. It's fire and forget and damn the consequences.

Any competent WHM would have seen that glaring obvious issue. Like I said in my previous post, it's basic math.

[Shurrikhan]

[MP is] still used by many jobs including healers, casters, paladins and dark knights.

To be fair, outside of wonkily soft-capping rezzes, it'd be irrelevant on all healers and casters save for BLM if not for the button-bloat of hitting Lucid Dreaming on CD and serves no difference in function from shared Holy Spirit/Clemency or Edge/Flood charges (and CDR instead of MP on Riot Blade, Prominence, and Atonement).

[Shurrikhan]

Doesn't matter how we got here, we are here and 6.XX is a good time to step back and re-tool the Battle System and address what isn't working. Here some examples:

Every Job has an MP bar, why?

My hope is that we eventually...

• consolidate MP and TP to reduce UI bloat and allow for the DRK and PLD resource-duality in any other way (or, failing that, give casters some use for TP beyond just sprint),
  
  
• make MP more about potency and less about starvation (e.g., MP regen up to quadruples as %MP falls low, but potency can fall to a half by that time) and potentially leverage that for more granular burst vs. sustain (perhaps even replacing the fixed combo systems such that one can rush combos at equal cost via reduced total potency and increased cost, allowing for a little more flexibility),
  
  
• have MP generation scale with GCD speed (and therefore with Haste, so no stat is left unable to increase actual resource-efficiency,
  
  
• make healer MP economy matter (such as by attaching hefty MP costs to oGCD heals),
  
  
• allow some further utility for skills not typically used in single-target (ranged attacks on melee AoEs, etc.) to make them situationally useful, if costly, in single-target (in place of their having so useless of single-target potencies that they're never used anyways, even if the resource were there), and
  
  
• return at cost, non-CD-based tools to certain jobs for transferring or granting MP (allowing for greater flexibility than was the case with just CDs like Refresh, Tactician, and Mana Shift, and reduced baseline taxation for those utilities).

Job Roles, do they need to be reexamined?

They could be, but there's also little reason to do so beyond the gearing unfriendliness of melee (3 sets required to play 5 jobs, as compared to the 4 sets required to play the remaining 15 jobs). I guess it just comes down to what thematic distributions the game wants to protect across sub-roles.

Personally, I don't hugely mind being stuck with one slot each of 'any of 3', 'any of 3', 'any of 5' and 'any of 11' -- instead of just 'any of 11' four times over -- but it doesn't particularly make sense, either.

I'll save your last two questions/topics for later, as they seem more involved.

[Jeeqbit]

My bad, they were the exact same potency in 6.1 but Dia (gained at lvl 72) had double the MP cost as Aero 2 (gained at 46)

The MP cost of Aero II but not Dia was reduced in 6.1, but since it's a level 46 attack, we can speculate on the reason why. Maybe MP management was a little harder at that level without Assize and Thin Air.

The potency does look to have been an oversight, because in 6.11 it was resolved. They didn't seem to change the potency from Shadowbringers and probably overlooked it because it's a lower level version.

"An issue wherein the conjurer / white mage PvE action Aero II base potency and damage over time potency were set higher than intended."

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

What do you mean an oversight? We just have to pay more mana for an upgraded animation. /s

[Jeeqbit]

consolidate MP and TP to reduce UI bloat and allow for the DRK and PLD resource-duality in any other way (or, failing that, give casters some use for TP beyond just sprint)

TP doesn't exist though. Personally, I always found TP useless. I only noticed it as a tank if it took ages to aoe mobs down, which probably happened when healers and DPS weren't good at doing their aoe rotation or using their TP boost button. When I actually noticed that TP existed, it was just annoying and a consequence of low DPS.

Being attached to Sprint made it so that you couldn't use Sprint at all in battles unless you were prepared to sacrifice your damage and there were only a few situations that justified it for me when a boss disappeared for a mechanic, such as the proximity aoe and web placement in Weeping City.

Whereas, although MP has become easier to manage, almost to the point of only being an annoyance sometimes like TP, it's still very relevant because you eventually can't rez people anymore, even on red mages. Eventually you have to do something or other to get a bit of MP if you have been spamming Clemency. It's still more of a dynamic resource and it's a more universally-understood resource because MP is in a lot of games, whereas I don't think TP is.

It doesn't make much sense to give physical jobs MP because MP is supposed to mean Magic Points and physical jobs don't use magic, so it would need to be something a bit different to work for all of them such as Stamina.

[Shurrikhan]

TP doesn't exist though.

As a resource to actually manage (beyond just hitting your CDs on CD), neither does/has MP. It's been, at best, a way for Bard/MCH to minimize their damage loss, and that ended with Stormblood.

The point is what could/should be, not what things have been.

Being attached to Sprint made

I just said, in what you quoted, that TP should not be pigeonholed into caster-Sprint.

Whereas, although MP has become easier to manage, almost to the point of only being an annoyance sometimes like TP, it's still very relevant because you eventually can't rez people anymore, even on red mages.

Which is effectively just rez charges, not a larger resource economy.

It doesn't make much sense to give physical jobs MP because MP is supposed to mean Magic Points and physical jobs don't use magic.

The game depicts a world where every vaguely superhuman action has a component of aether usage. And those "physical jobs" are firing spirit dragons and launching wind and fire magics from their kicks and fists.

[ASkellington]

Whereas, although MP has become easier to manage, almost to the point of only being an annoyance sometimes like TP, it's still very relevant because you eventually can't rez people anymore, even on red mages.

As Shurrikhan says if MP is to be an economy to be managed can't be locked to JUST ressing. Case in point - all abilities/skills that require MP costs on a healer are on the GCD. Guess what we don't heal with? If MP is to be something to properly managed oGCDs need have mana costs.

[Jeeqbit]

As Shurrikhan says if MP is to be an economy to be managed can't be locked to JUST ressing. Case in point - all abilities/skills that require MP costs on a healer are on the GCD. Guess what we don't heal with? If MP is to be something to properly managed oGCDs need have mana costs.

Yes, I agree with this. Healing essentially all happens off the GCD and white mages are really the only exception if they use their GCD instants. I think what should especially cost MP is situational abilities like Rescue, Surecast, Swiftcast, Benediction, Divine Benison, Asylum, Afflatus actions, Excogitation, Indomitability and Whispering Dawn, because routine abilities that you use off cooldown for damage like Assize are not really adding anything to the management beyond what spamming the GCD attack and dot is.