FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[AnotherPerson]

The healing kits are bloated, the dps anaemic. No other role punishes you for improving and why should they? Healing requirements in casual content cannot be increased because little hypothetical Timmy already relies on the warrior doing the bulk of the work, so it falls to consolidating the superfluous healing actions and fleshing out the downtime side. SE of all people should know just how much of the fights are incoming damage, every encounter ticks along like clockwork after all.

It's sad to know that this is true... I had the run where a healer basically was dced from the start of the duty. When it was clear they weren't coming back by the time we killed the second boss, they got kicked. By the time a healer did join, we were halfway into the final boss fight, which meant they could only cheer us from the sidelines. 1 Warrior + 2 DPS did the entire Lapis Manalis without a healer needing to exist. Nevermind the healer that struggles with healing their team well, we didn't need a separate healing role at all... the tank took both roles simultaneously. They could at least make the healer role feel more rewarding on the downtime side if healing is going to be this easy that mastering your primary role is actually just a superfluous activity...

[CelestiCer]

Square's direction
Simplify/hollow-out/homogenize Jobs for ease of Balancing at the cost of lost gameplay. Players who desire lost depth due to changes to their Jobs? Yoshi P told players to " Just go play Ultimate ". Flawed argument, as good Job design should make Jobs fun everywhere, not just at high end content that majority doesn't do with or without discount Job designs... making everything below Savage extremely dull...

Keep Jobs Fun? and the content is likely more Fun to do
Simple. Increase Skill-ceiling as optional, without lifting the skill-floor. No argument nor evidence to be had that we can't have both depth in gameplay of our Jobs and Mechanics either.

Simplified Job designs encourages players to be lazy
No incentive to improve. Every content becomes to difficult. Reading tooltips are a burden to heavy, when their dead bodies get dragged through the finish lines as it is to complete content. Ironic, as the EW story tells players to do the opposite... So much for that " striving ". Complaining at the slightest sight of any ounce of difficulty, desires to make the already pillow filled content easier? as Square eventually obliges to the point our Jobs are turned into former shells of what they used to be. Then when passionate players who love their Jobs want a ounce back? they are labeled as Elitists.

There's no optimism left for me
Least not with Square's direction of our Jobs. At best? they are streamlining everything to give something back at some point in 10 years. But another 10 years? of " This? " making our Jobs dumber / hollower / easier / more braindead / more stupid / easier and easier and... I don't know about that...

[Sparkthor]

I thought I'd drop this here as well. This is a video of Xenosys Vex talking about the lack of change going from Shadowbringers to Endwalker. I'm not always a fan of how he talks about certain topics, but I think there's a lot of truth in the way he talked about the problems that EW has, also noting that EW isn't entirely bad, but the lack of risk-taking has made the expansion feel stale, and this was 10 months ago.

It's a little long, but a good watch. And I agree with the main point that there should be more risk-taking with job design in an expansion. EW was an opportunity to try something different, but that opportunity wasn't taken. I think the pressure for 7.0 to do the same will be greater this time around.

I think the best quote of this video is "The game was a lot of trash that would never has been there".

However i cannot agree on from AR to HW all jobs became harder :
- some went, like DRG, BLM and SUM, and some others hardly changes.
-MNK technically got a single new OGCD, as Tornado kick wasn't used while others was chakra or an opener/downtime utility.
-The game changer of the NIN was armor crush which let us save mudra for more raiton/fumaa, but it's just a combo finisher. Others were just burst ogcd or aggro management
-Tank got defensive ability in top of the huge miss of ARR : PLD didn't had DPS combo and WAR didn't have DPS stance

I can get why people are bored by "the lack" of EW changes, however it also show the game has gain a lot of maturity. Also we should remind him every extension since SB got an huge PvP rework but it's only the EW which really hit the spot, i think it's mostly due to the drop of PvE roots and the new gameplay mode easier to understand and play.

[CKNovel]

1. How do you feel about the general state of job design in Endwalker in contrast to past expansions? Do you think this direction is good or bad for the game long term?
2. Which expansion do you think was the best for job design as a whole?

It's complicated. Every expansions had strengths and weaknesses.
For example, MCH in Stormblood had a very satisfying Wildfire combo to pull off, but you had to deal with Flamethrower and were just doing your 1 2 3 basic combo outside of that burst.
In exchange, MCH in ShB/EW has a more interesting filler phase but its burst phase is now a snoozefest.

There was also balancing issues, see in HW DRK permanent 10% INT debuff or AST balance. The design team made a choice between balancing+QoL and uniqueness.

Looking at PLD rework, I'm hopefull. We traded the dot for Divine Might and a 60s GCD. Divine might is, in my opinion, much better than the dot. Keep Divine might for mobility or use it in your burst, I feel it's better than a dot you must apply every odd combo.

On the other hand, I'm worried when it comes to MCH and SMN. MCH was reworked and very basic to be a "base to expand upon" but nothing was expanded.

3. Other live service games generally release official surveys fairly regularly. For example, Genshin Impact usually has a new survey near the end of each patch. These games also reward players who take these surveys with in-game items or resources. Should FFXIV be doing this too? What kind of rewards would incentivize you to give feedback on new content or job changes?

Yes, I think they need to add survey but without rewards.
If they did it much earlier, Living Dead would've been reworked earlier as well.
QoL such as stacks on Hypercharge and Blood weapon would have happened earlier as well.

[Nizzi]

7.0 presents the biggest challenge facing the game at the moment since we'll be getting the expansion in 2024. If they triple down on ShB job design, that is 5+ years of homogenized, boring design. Imagine 7.0 coming out and all of the healers are still 1 DoT, 1 Nuke spammers. Just wait until 8.0 at that point? Should people really be waiting 7+ years to maybe have a chance that maybe a single job in an entire role can be fun again?

I appreciate what SE tried to do - remove disparity between jobs and ensure that if you want to play a specific job, you won't be locked out of content because it performs so much worse than other jobs, as was evident in past expansions; but the current design direction is not the way. They have made jobs sterile and boring, and there's nothing to look forward to in regards to them anymore. Healers will get more bloated heals, RDM will get another upgrade added to its finisher, BLM won't be touched because it's Yoshida's child and the only job allowed to have any sort of depth, etcetera. You can already guess how 95% of the jobs will play in 7.0 that aren't DRG/AST - it will be exactly the same except with a button added on that doesn't change how the job plays at all.

Yoshida is creating a world where Shadowbringers lasts forever. I'm not excited for 5.0 v3 - I mean, 7.0 - because of it.

[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.