FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[ty_taurus]

It\\'s nice to see some positivity for a change, but devs have a terrible history with reworks, which is why everyone is so afraid. They postponed AST and DRG reworks after insane backlash from Kaiten, which tells me that they themselves don\\'t believe that their past plans on 6.3 reworks were good enough in a first place and same thing as with 6.1 SAM would happen again. So in good scenario, they\\'ll actually put in some effort and DRG will get actually good rework in 7.0. In a bad scenario, they just delayed the release of the original 6.3 rework, just to wait for people to cooldown after SAM rework. Considering that SAM is still hollow shell of its past self a year later, I fear that radio silence and hoping that players will forget became their tactic.

I’d say it’s more cautiously optimistic. I don’t think their methods of handling jobs has been sound, but certain jobs are played by some of the design team and Yoshida himself. I don’t think if Black Mage were in that situation, that its rework would turn out poorly because Yoshida plays it. That’s more what I’m thinking. Since Dragoon is a job played by one of the designers, but the postponing is worrisome, that’s true.

[Rithy255]

I feel like I rather have a unbalanced game where jobs feel unique and interesting then a balanced game where jobs feel safe and the same.

I'm not gonna say everything has changed for the worse but a lot of making things similar really hurts the Job design and diversity, I think I'll give a example, SHB white mage I remember having long cast times but having lillies instead of OCGD's this gave the Job a sort of "BLM" feeling where you're less mobile then other healers, Which I personally found actually really fun for the Job, Obviously WMH had a lot of other places where it wasn't great but making their casts shorter for the sake of it, was a small change, but one that completely made the job feel like this safe easy job.

Another example I'll give is warrior/dark knight, Both having the same core GCD rotation with very small differences one being "busy in the 120 windows", doesn't really feel interesting, I personally rather Dark Knight feel separate enough in it's GCD's while having less weaving, Gunbreaker already fits the "weave/busy" tank and does it in a much more fun way that's tied more to the job.

120, window is something a lot of people point out, Obviously the issue is raid buffs, but removing raid buffs isn't a "great solution" I think the issue is having only rigid 120 raid buffs that you press every 120 seconds and forget about, I don't think it really adds to the job, if anything Samurai, Blm and machinist are unique for not having raid buffs nowadays.

Personally I rather Fun and uniqueness be embraced over Balance, both are important don't get me wrong but I feel like Jobs shouldn't become cool reskins of each other, What makes Jobs interesting is having unique and interesting quirks from one another, having weaknesses but also having strengths, the issue with that is obviously the more unique you make something the more hard it is to balance. But being hyper safe at this point is so uninteresting.

[ForsakenRoe]

It's up in the air really I think. Some reworks were good and well received (ie, NIN after people stopped doomposting, the change to TCJ alone (going from 1-4-2-4-3-4 to 1-2-3) did wonders for the flow of the class, and while the GCD change to Mudras lowered the speed admittedly, making it less reliant on ping, making it so we didn't have to clip our GCD horrendously for Suiton, etc, means that it was a good rework. MCH too, if we ignore the exact damage numbers, it feels like a machinist now, rather than 'guy who got given a gun'.

Then on the flip side we have 5.0 AST when they made all the cards do the same flat damage boost. Or SMN in 6.0, which, while definitely adhering more to the traditional 'summoner' archetype, is very barebones, and is a kit designed more for Stormblood era than EW. As such, we could either get a DRG rework that just touches up the pain points, or we could get a complete SMN job. And if it IS a SMN job, it could work out to be really cool, or it could be as barebones as SMN currently is. As for AST, there's very little faith to be had there. The same developers who put AST in the state it's in, are the ones who will 'fix' it, how could there be any optimism in that situation? Not to mention, they don't have a healer main on the dev team, and they have a very old and outdated way of looking at 'the role of a healer in the party', hence the whole 'good heal work' thing. So chances are it'll still have ridiculously overtuned levels of HPS and not much on the damage side of things. The only hope really is that they put more emphasis on buffing allies, as a way to get us to use less Malefics, but even that's a long shot

[ty_taurus]

I don't think I've ever been this anxious to see how the design team will respond to an expansions overall feedback than I am for EW going into 7.0. I feel like job design feedback is something that's historically been more of an underbelly issue--something that exists but is easy to ignore, but it's something that's been brought up a lot more this expansion outside of just the forum circle, so I have to believe there's going to be some sort of acknowledgement of these things. No doubt several media tour attendees are going to ask questions regarding some of these issues. I don't foresee the media tour going on an no one bringing up Kaiten, for example, or the aggressively simple Summoner.

I honestly have no idea what to expect with the AST rework and what that will look like. There's no way to know how they actually are taking in criticism since nothing will ever be said about it until those changes are revealed and finalized. The delaying of the DRG and AST reworks, feels both concerning on one hand, but also has the chance of perhaps being relieving on another. What does that mean?

Honestly, all this just makes me wish Yoshida was willing to be more transparent about their design process and how he thinks/feels. I don't understand this PR secrecy mentality and how that's supposed to benefit them or their audience. If you want to foster the positive growth of a game, you should let it breathe rather than sheltering it away from the sun. Something that's come to mind lately, though, as far as questions I'd like to see in future Q&As is asking about their process of collecting feedback in the first place. How do they go about collecting feedback from each region, and what is their process of parsing through that feedback? Has feedback changed their minds on certain design ideas in the past, and what triggered those changes of heart?

[fulminating]

I’d really like any indication that they’ve heard the complaints and/or have ideas for where to take the whole combat side of things come 7.0. This silence is just maddening.

[Sparkthor]

About future rework planned for 7.0, we will have some info on fan fest and on live letter dedicaced to 7.0, which would likely be lunched in about a year (or a bit less).

I've seen some post telling thet want many possibilities to play a job or prefer job with high variety but not balanced, but by my experience, both theses situations are horrible for player and dev :
- If jobs are many way to plays, one will be meta and others forgetted. Moreother, people would likely mess player who didn't play like the Meta because players, and it's already something i've seen in WoW.
- Having job forgotten for high-content will lock out many of them from all content. As the dev intend is to allow players to play their jobs in all content... And it's not fun when the job you like the most performed poorly in raid content, and I can just take the MCH in example here.


On the Dragoon, i always though it's kit to be disjoined : there is the combo paths and jumps paths, and they never interact each other. Moreother, i think Life of dragoon feels weak next to Enshroud, and it's probably because one appears more than 4 years before the other, when hotkey replacement wasn't a thing.

[Aravell]

The total silence in regard to job changes started some time back in Stormblood (maybe early Shadowbringers). I think it was because the devs were annoyed by people giving feedback/complaints immediately after seeing the patch notes, so they opted for total silence from then on.

[Deo14]

The total silence in regard to job changes started some time back in Stormblood (maybe early Shadowbringers). I think it was because the devs were annoyed by people giving feedback/complaints immediately after seeing the patch notes, so they opted for total silence from then on.

I started playing just in late ShB, but I keep hearing that job design was at its peak in StB and then it got worse and worse. What a coincidence.

Funnily enough, their changes lately have been so questionable, that patch notes are often enough to tell how bad they are. You really don't need to give 6.1+ SAM a try to realize that Kenki has no other use than just a Shinten spam. Their explanation for job changes didn't help them either, since they revealed that they unironically thought that PLD should have lower damage because he has range in magic phase.

[Aravell]

I started playing just in late ShB, but I keep hearing that job design was at its peak in StB and then it got worse and worse. What a coincidence.

Funnily enough, their changes lately have been so questionable, that patch notes are often enough to tell how bad they are. You really don't need to give 6.1+ SAM a try to realize that Kenki has no other use than just a Shinten spam. Their explanation for job changes didn't help them either, since they revealed that they unironically thought that PLD should have lower damage because he has range in magic phase.

So, the "try it out and give us feedback" act that the dev team has been using for Kaiten has been done before during early Shadowbringers, SAM wasn't the first victim. The dev team changed GNB sound effects in patch 5.01, this spawned a large forum thread asking why they changed the sound effects, the dev team, of course, asked us to try it out and give feedback, then they never mentioned it ever again. Exactly what's happening to SAM and Kaiten right now. It's a method they've used before, and they'll keep on using it because complaints always eventually die down.

[ty_taurus]

Over on the first page, I added some additional questions to my initial post, but I want to reiterate those questions here for anyone skipping ahead to this more recent page.

In the future, I plan on doing more feedback threads later when we get new job change information during the next media tour and again after 7.0 launches to see how people feel about the listed changes before release and compare that to after we get to try those changes out. Even though that's still a ways away, I'd like to gather some more info on what I can do better with my formatting next time around. With that in mind, I have a few extra questions I'd like to get some feedback on:

Do you think the 1 to 10 scale I used for the content satisfaction questions was good, or would it be better to run with a 1 to 5 scale? Do you think I asked the right amount of questions, or the right questions in general? Are there other questions I should think about next time around? For the "What do you want to see more/less of" sections, I already feel like I can do a much better job adding more specific options to gain more clear information, as the "other" option ended up making the responses fairly unhelpful and hard to turn those questions into graph questions. Do you agree with this? What are other "more of/less of" answers do you think I should add for each job or specific jobs?

In regards to the 1 to 10 questions and overall satisfaction question, I want to follow up with a bit more detail. Now, I do realize that the answers we've gotten on these feedback submissions is limited in some respects, so the scores we have currently on these spreadsheets should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I'd like to know, what do you think is a "good" score out of 10? And what exactly does that mean to you? At what point do you think a score indicates some amount of investigation into changes? Is a 7 out of 10 acceptable? Is a 5 out of 10 acceptable? If you feel a 1 to 5 scale is better, how would you translate those responses to a 1 to 5 scale?