FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[Frodnoxx]

So much of this thread is echoing what I think to myself all the time about how this games pve could improve. It makes me sad that the devs will more than likely ignore all of it.

I still vivid remember YoshiP in the 6.0 live letter combat changes section saying "I know many of you wanted things from previous expansions but we are going to continue what we did in ShB" I didn't realize how much of a "you think you do but you don't" moment that was. It's really ironic considering that wow players left because the devs weren't listening to them and making the same tone deaf decisions over and over. And now here we are again except this time they don't even respond or pretend to pay attention to feedback.

[ForsakenRoe]

I still vivid remember YoshiP in the 6.0 live letter combat changes section saying "I know many of you wanted things from previous expansions but we are going to continue what we did in ShB" I didn't realize how much of a "you think you do but you don't" moment that was.

I never realized how accurate that is until I read it just now, we asked 'can we have class design with skill ceilings like 3.0' and got told 'you think you want it but you don't'. I want to know, who is this SHB/EW choice FOR? It's not the hardcore players, because they're the ones complaining about how stale it is. It's not the casuals, because they wouldn't even notice a higher skill ceiling, being as they don't do the content that asks them to strive for that ceiling. I can only assume the design is being done for the devs, to make balancing easier. But the balance is still a mess, as ever, because some jobs are better than others. So what, we remove even more gameplay differences, to make it easier to balance stuff again? And we end up in the same place again next time, stuff still can't be balanced even with a lobotomized class design? Healers are already bordering on having one button to press for damage, and they're still not balanced because Yoshi and co seem to have completely missed the memo, that you cannot attain perfect balance when you compare 'class with raidbuffs' vs 'class without raidbuffs'.

Blizzard said 'you think you want it, but you don't', because people kept asking them for Vanilla WOW servers. Turns out, they did indeed want it, and the Classic servers were a massive financial success. So, when's Yoshi going to realize that actually, yes, we do want design to lean more towards previous expansions? Personally I don't necessarily even want 3.0, HW had some jank that I'd rather not have back, like INT Down, the Storms Path 10% damage reduction debuff, the Slash/Piercing/Blunt resistances. If anything, I'd argue that 'yes, you ruled out 3.0, fine whatever, but you (Yoshi and SE) didn't rule out 4.0, so lets do that'. A lot of the classes would say SB was the best time for the class designs, so going back to something like that would be the compromise with the devs. If they screw up the balance as bad as Abyssos, with this 'much easier to balance' class design, why should we go along with their plans when they say 'trust us we'll keep doing it this way and it'll work out'? It HASN'T worked out and we have the evidence to prove it. Stop doubling down on mistakes, and change course before the damage becomes too much to salvage

[Amenara]

I never realized how accurate that is until I read it just now, we asked 'can we have class design with skill ceilings like 3.0' and got told 'you think you want it but you don't'. I want to know, who is this SHB/EW choice FOR? It's not the hardcore players, because they're the ones complaining about how stale it is. It's not the casuals, because they wouldn't even notice a higher skill ceiling, being as they don't do the content that asks them to strive for that ceiling. I can only assume the design is being done for the devs, to make balancing easier. But the balance is still a mess, as ever, because some jobs are better than others. So what, we remove even more gameplay differences, to make it easier to balance stuff again? And we end up in the same place again next time, stuff still can't be balanced even with a lobotomized class design? Healers are already bordering on having one button to press for damage, and they're still not balanced because Yoshi and co seem to have completely missed the memo, that you cannot attain perfect blaance when you compare 'class with raidbuffs' vs 'class without raidbuffs'.

Blizzard said 'you think you want it, but you don't', because people kept asking them for Vanilla WOW servers. Turns out, they did indeed want it, and the Classic servers were a massive financial success. So, when's Yoshi going to realize that actually, yes, we do want design to lean more towards previous expansions? Personally I don't necessarily even want 3.0, HW had some jank that I'd rather not have back, like INT Down, the Storms Path 10% damage reduction debuff, the Slash/Piercing/Blunt resistances. If anything, I'd argue that 'yes, you ruled out 3.0, fine whatever, but you (Yoshi and SE) didn't rule out 4.0, so lets do that'. A lot of the classes would say SB was the best time for the class designs, so going back to something like that would be the compromise with the devs. If they screw up the balance as bad as Abyssos, with this 'much easier to balance' class design, why should we go along with their plans when they say 'trust us we'll keep doing it this way and it'll work out'? It HASN'T worked out and we have the evidence to prove it. Stop doubling down on mistakes, and change course before the damage becomes too much to salvage

I think it's 100% for the job design team to make it easier to balance and design towards. Last we knew there were only 4 dedicated devs credited for battle design and I can only imagine if they didn't hire more it will only get harder as they try and balance and design all the current jobs plus have more jobs put on their plate with every expansion. With everything on a two minute rotation it makes it a lot easier to come up with new jobs as the central basis behind their rotation is already set and now they just need to figure out a way to accomplish it or a theme to work towards with the job. Honestly, I want them to do a complete revamp of jobs but I don't think they have the personnel to do it, so I imagine we will get the same as we got with EW and ShB.

[VentVanitas]

So much of this thread is echoing what I think to myself all the time about how this games pve could improve. It makes me sad that the devs will more than likely ignore all of it.

I still vivid remember YoshiP in the 6.0 live letter combat changes section saying "I know many of you wanted things from previous expansions but we are going to continue what we did in ShB" I didn't realize how much of a "you think you do but you don't" moment that was. It's really ironic considering that wow players left because the devs weren't listening to them and making the same tone deaf decisions over and over. And now here we are again except this time they don't even respond or pretend to pay attention to feedback.

I still think about the DrakGamestein interview with Yoshi P and how he brought up the issues of MNK's Chakra to the man himself to which he understood it as a problem and even thought of how he could hypothetically solve it. Did it actually amount to anything? Nope. Chakra remained exactly how it was in the media tour build of EW.

I get it, Yoshi P is a very busy man and it's very well possible that he may have simply forgot or the suggestion was lost in a long chain of other problems he and his team had to prioritize. However, the whole point of these media tour interviews was to get feedback, so it doesn't really fill me with confidence if suggestions can simply be lost/forgotten or dropped entirely with no warning.

[Semirhage]

I never realized how accurate that is until I read it just now, we asked 'can we have class design with skill ceilings like 3.0' and got told 'you think you want it but you don't'. I want to know, who is this SHB/EW choice FOR? It's not the hardcore players, because they're the ones complaining about how stale it is. It's not the casuals, because they wouldn't even notice a higher skill ceiling, being as they don't do the content that asks them to strive for that ceiling. I can only assume the design is being done for the devs, to make balancing easier. But the balance is still a mess, as ever, because some jobs are better than others. So what, we remove even more gameplay differences, to make it easier to balance stuff again? And we end up in the same place again next time, stuff still can't be balanced even with a lobotomized class design? Healers are already bordering on having one button to press for damage, and they're still not balanced because Yoshi and co seem to have completely missed the memo, that you cannot attain perfect blaance when you compare 'class with raidbuffs' vs 'class without raidbuffs'.

Blizzard said 'you think you want it, but you don't', because people kept asking them for Vanilla WOW servers. Turns out, they did indeed want it, and the Classic servers were a massive financial success. So, when's Yoshi going to realize that actually, yes, we do want design to lean more towards previous expansions? Personally I don't necessarily even want 3.0, HW had some jank that I'd rather not have back, like INT Down, the Storms Path 10% damage reduction debuff, the Slash/Piercing/Blunt resistances. If anything, I'd argue that 'yes, you ruled out 3.0, fine whatever, but you (Yoshi and SE) didn't rule out 4.0, so lets do that'. A lot of the classes would say SB was the best time for the class designs, so going back to something like that would be the compromise with the devs. If they screw up the balance as bad as Abyssos, with this 'much easier to balance' class design, why should we go along with their plans when they say 'trust us we'll keep doing it this way and it'll work out'? It HASN'T worked out and we have the evidence to prove it. Stop doubling down on mistakes, and change course before the damage becomes too much to salvage

Please no. WHM was the worst it's ever been in 4.0.

[ty_taurus]

Please no. WHM was the worst it's ever been in 4.0.

I think Roe, as well as many of us who frequent healer discussions, mutually understand that when discussing the high points of SB design in regards to healers, that we're referring to the overall feeling of Scholar and Astrologian while White Mage is more of a black sheep in this regard. Not every job was holistically superior in SB, but on a grand scale, more jobs had a much greater sense of identity and gameplay feel than those that didn't, and it's a quiet acknowledgement that we wouldn't want to return to White Mage, or perhaps a few other examples like Ninja. Rather, White Mage should take what it's gained from EW and expand on it moving toward the general feel of SB as a whole.

I understand that this may not be clear to the casual lurker, however, so it's worth clarifying.

I think the reason why SB is brought up is because, while it wasn't perfect, it seems like a good bargaining point--a midpoint between the more punishing elements of HW and the sterilization of ShB. "If you aren't willing to look at HW as a guide-point for the general feel of job design moving forward, than how about the less extreme SB that was more user-friendly without being completely railroaded?" And I think that talking about past expansions as a point of reference doesn't necessarily mean anyone is advocating to quite literally return to how those systems function or what tools the jobs had at that time, but rather, using that as a reference for where to gauge future changes on how much job complexity, flavor actions, and decision-making aspects to shoot for. And if that choice were to come out and be praised by the general player base, that could in turn lead the game down a much healthier design path.

[kaynide]

One of the joys of FFXI and older MMOs was the variety of jobs and what they were capable of both alone and in combination with certain other jobs. Certain jobs simp,y were better or worse and X.

The problem of allowing all jobs to do all things is not easy to fix, but in a game where every player can be every job it seems very odd to make them so homogeneous. There is only so much you can do until it feels like Smash Bros with everyone having near-same move sets.

This is ultimately the result of a game that puts too much emphasis on instanced content (dungeons/trials) and not enough on open world/exploration/niche content.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think Roe, as well as many of us who frequent healer discussions, mutually understand that when discussing the high points of SB design in regards to healers, that we're referring to the overall feeling of Scholar and Astrologian while White Mage is more of a black sheep in this regard. Not every job was holistically superior in SB, but on a grand scale, more jobs had a much greater sense of identity and gameplay feel than those that didn't, and it's a quiet acknowledgement that we wouldn't want to return to White Mage, or perhaps a few other examples like Ninja. Rather, White Mage should take what it's gained from EW and expand on it moving toward the general feel of SB as a whole.

I understand that this may not be clear to the casual lurker, however, so it's worth clarifying.

Yep, basically everything Ty said (thank you for clarifying). I said 'a lot of classes would say SB was the best', not 'all' because there are some odd ones out like WHM. Thanks to the obsession with parsing, and RDPS not really being as big a thing at the time, the effects of stacking 'raidbuff classes' and feeding every buff into one person to 'pad' them was also out of control in those days, leading to much wilder looking numbers. SB class design, with RDPS as the main metric, might have had some bizarre damage variances still, admittedly, but it'd be a better baseline to start balancing from than 'this is how much damage a BLM does. And this is how much a BLM does, if they have Trick, Litany, Dragonsight, Battle Voice, Chain Strat and every Balance card the AST draws (with singletarget royalroading, for good measure)'. And as Ty says, my aim wouldn't be to just rewind the clock and go back to exactly SB as it was in 4.5, rather, to take the parts that did work and expand on them.

So back to healers, the idea isn't to just go back to a 1:1 copy of SB as that screws WHM. Instead, we should take the parts that worked (converting damage spells to use MND instead of INT, changing Cleric Stance to be 'not a noob trap'), and build on that, and excise the parts that did not work (for example, we don't need to go back to the original Lily system). Also consider, thanks to certain other 'decisions' which you may or may not agree with, other jobs felt more useful. NIN was always in demand due to Trick yes, but it also had aggro management tools that were very nice to have. Not 'necessary', but 'nice to have'. Phys ranged are suffering atm, having a tax on their damage because of the 'utility' they bring, but not bringing utility enough to justify that tax. Back in SB, they had Refresh and Tactician, being the 'resource battery' of the party and being extremely crucial to the raid's success as a result. Now we have all the MP using classes being MP positive, or for healers, able to function at base Piety, so that 'utility' is no longer required.

Ironically, at the end of HW, I had an idea for SMN to have it's three summons be OGCDs, and Enkindle to have a 20 second CD that generated Aethertrail Attunement, the resource you needed 3 of to get into Dreadwyrm Trance. Basically, the current rotation, but fitting into the systems that existed in HW/SB times (Aethertrail and such). Current SMN would have fit well in SB, and been a good base to build from going into SHB and onwards. For comparison, look at how RDM was back in SB, barebones as heck. I find it ironic that we got a design for SMN that could have fit SB, 4 years too late to be in SB. If we had gotten it back then, we'd have had 2 expansions of additional kit to add to it, and it'd feel more 'complete' now.

The problem of allowing all jobs to do all things is not easy to fix, but in a game where every player can be every job it seems very odd to make them so homogeneous. There is only so much you can do until it feels like Smash Bros with everyone having near-same move sets.

I keep hearing that at the time, one of the main complaints people had about MOP (the expansion of WOW that this game took inspiration from when the rebuild happened) was that everyone could do everything. Feels like there's almost 'too much MOP' in this game now in that regard. The writing was kinda on the wall even as early as Stormblood, when they gave WAR Onslaught after they saw DRK had Plunge and got mad that they didn't have a gapcloser too. Now every tank has a gapcloser.

[MistyMew]

jobs are boring
all jobs feel weak in current and even old content which is bizarre.

blm original was the best
smn now is a complete joke
the rest are just copies of each other, different ability names but all basically the same.
nothing original or interesting tbh.

the game as a whole is very boring now. (sorry but it is imo)
i wish it wasnt but.....

[Striker44]

jobs are boring
all jobs feel weak in current and even old content which is bizarre.

blm original was the best
smn now is a complete joke
the rest are just copies of each other, different ability names but all basically the same.
nothing original or interesting tbh.

the game as a whole is very boring now. (sorry but it is imo)
i wish it wasnt but.....

For you. In all seriousness, that might signal it's time for you to take a break. For me? The game as a whole is still a ton of fun and very exciting. I like the current feel of the classes, and the trend towards homogeneity while still retaining a few distinct flairs for each class gives someone like me with limited time to play the ability to try out a bunch of different classes without feeling completely overwhelmed whenever I'd like to try something new. And if they were all the same and bland, then I wouldn't have clear preferences for some over others based on their abilities (BLM and RDM play quite differently, for example).