FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[pacificodin]

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?


For the most part it's never been worse, It's dull, Lifeless and not very engaging. Enhanced Encounter design doesn't make up for the act of pressing buttons being so poor. The Giant hitboxes, 2 minute meta, no success/fail states, classes all having the same flow, reduced positionals etc make for a lesser gameplay experience, . Its a shadow of it's earlier self, a pale imitation of sorts

Great for the new players, but over time people generally want more depth and chances for skill expression.

2. Which expansion do you think was the best for job design as a whole?

A blend of HW or SB depending on the job, balance was occasionally a bit more out of whack than what we are used to today, and tuning and encounter design had some problems but the actual mechanics of playing your class were far superior


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?

Nah i don't like it, let the people who want to give feedback do it, not lure others in who only care about rewards

[ASkellington]

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?

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?

I've only played Shb and EW so there is a bit of salt with what I have to offer.

1. It's utter garbage depending upon the class and role. Making a low bar to entry isn't a bad idea, necessarily, but the changes the devs have made certainly have made me resent "accessibility" as an answer. Job changes in the way of accessibility should be clearer tool tips, better feedback on how you are doing at your job (tank/healer/dps), removing fluff abilities (say mere potency changes or blanket dmg ups "Reassemble" comes to mind for an example) not removing any and all ways to mess up or fail at a job. Not all jobs need to have the same skill level either, there should be variances, but skill ceilings shouldn't be outright removed. That's not what accessibility is.

2. Again I've only played Shb and EW. So all I have is word of mouth and videos/old guides to go off of. Personally I think a mixture of HW, SB and Shb.

HW and SB are obvious. A lot of skills that made jobs unique from one another were lost come Shb and in some way should be returned, WITH CARE and not just slapped on saying "here ya go its what you wanted". Shb's push for accessibility, should temper the older designs however. There should be pros and cons to all classes that differ so people can pick and choose what they want to play, but the cons shouldn't be so punishing as to drive players away (think Cleric stance).

3. Only if they actually take the feedback to heart and use it and also follow up with what exactly is the problem if they can't figure it out themselves instead of blindly nerfing/buffing/changing because A) it seems out of touch and B) feels like they're skirting around the issue instead of actually addressing it.

I don't think there should be a reward tied to it at all, but if there must be one have it be purely cosmetic (glam/title), a way to gain exp faster (say earrings/bracelet) or feathers, whichever one.

[Katish]

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?

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?

1. It's bland, not bad but definitely bland. If they listened instead of ignoring players ideas, thoughts, and feedback it would be a different story or at least a different game. Unfortunately, this is the direction they choose to head, over-simplifying non-issues, which has made the job design poor...stale? Poor and stale.

2. SB...HW maybe? I at least felt there was more to do despite not, perhaps it was because aesthetically the jobs felt as they were accomplishing something within their form? The cast times made you think, you had to position, and as a healer, cleric stance also had to be on your brain on when to use it. Now the jobs are just brain dead. (It's fast paced and oversimplified now, which is...okay but how they choose to fill in the gaps is the issue with the job design now. Healers are the biggest offenders of not really having anything to fill in these gaps anymore.)

3. There should be feedback surveys, don't even need a reward of any kind. Surveys would show they have some interest in the community's thoughts on a subject matter...but I don't see this ever being a thing, as they want to brand the game to be even easier despite what feedback says. Personally, I feel they know the job state is poor but they either: don't care or are being told from the higher ups to simplify further.

This community has presented some good ideas, and I enjoy reading what I can on my downtime, but unfortunately that's all they'll really ever be given how against Square is to feedback and changing what needs to and what does not need to.

[ty_taurus]

Went ahead and just cranked out that google sheet anyway. If you didn't notice it, be sure to check it out!

[VentVanitas]

Thanks for the hard work, the results are interesting and well- not really surprising. You did a good job making it look nicely presented.

Also so many people voted EW MNK as the best iteration. Really? I'm disappointed in you all.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

1. Disliking it. I understand why SE did it. But I’m still not liking it. Accessibility imho is good until it’s not, like what happened in EW.

2. Hard to say because I’m an ShB baby. Both have done something that I liked and disliked. By going off the old videos from HW & StB, I would say I’d like to have a mix of 40% HW, 40% StB, and 20% ShB complexities PLUS ShB and EW degree of accessibilities. Sounds outlandish, but I don’t think I can find a better phrase to describe it.

3. Gods, no. Many other have describe their disagreement to this point & I’m echo’ing them.

[ForsakenRoe]

Guess I'll throw my 2 gil in, in case the devs actually read this (you never know). For the record, I started in 2.5 on a different account as a WHM, then came back in 3.2 on this one as a GLD, then SCH for ARR, NIN for post ARR, AST for HW, WHM for early SB, omni-tank for most of SB (started raiding there), GNB for SHB story, WHM for 5.1, Omni-healer (kind of) since then.

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?

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?

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?

Bad, and not good. The 2 Min Meta means that encounter damage is very 'swingy', that is, all of the party's damage is piled into one small time window per 2min. We already saw this with WAR's design in earlier expansions, where (I heard) at one point it was around 40% of it's total damage was from the IR windows only (and they were every 90s, not 60 back then). Couple that with the fact that the devs know 'we have to put complex mechanics at 2min marks to test the players' and it's just annoying and janky to try and play around. Examples like Pinax in P4S, Act 2 in Phase 2 (everyone's spread out woo), sometimes-Manifold Flames in P8S is the worst offender. Sometimes your team is spread out because the mech triggers earlier (if it's Dog first), sometimes you have time to buff everyone with PBAOE buffs like Divination because it's Snake first. If it's Dog first, I've seen times where a SCH and/or NIN blow their buff early (because it applies to the boss, so they don't need to care about how spread people are), and thus those buffs are now misaligned for the entire fight. And with such a focus on 'the 2min window', this causes massive problems for hitting the enrage.

Also, Crit variance is a massive issue, and only gets worse because we keep getting more and more 'this does 1000+ potency' hits. I started in ARR, the highest hit we had was DRG's Full Thrust and at the time it was like 360. Back at the end of HW when they announced they were changing Accuracy, my thought was that we should split Crit into 'rate' and 'strength', so some jobs would want more crit rate (BRD for procs, MNK for chakras, etc), and others who have guaranteed crits (DRG, MNK, WAR, etc) would want crit strength. Instead, we have Crit (which does both and is therefore THE BEST STAT NO QUESTION), and DHit, which is 'crit but a bit less good'. And in conjunction, these two procs together cause insane damage variances. Fully stacked, a hard hit like Hyosho can do literally twice as much damage if it DHit and Crit, compared to if it procs neither. That's not good for 'tight DPS check' such as phases in TOP, or Savage.

It's also annoying, as someone who studied at university to make games, to see them essentially 'lock out' a whole swath of design options. If everything has to 'burst at 2min' as we see now, the idea of 'what if we have a Sustained damage profile' (like SB DRK, SB SAM to an extent, BRD with it's DOTs, PLD, etc) cannot function. It's why PLD got the rework it did. It makes me less excited to see the new class for FanFest, because I'll look at it with the lens of 'oh and it'll burst at 2min like every other'.

If they continue with this current 2min design, and the class design hamfisted reworks (like PLD) to jam the round peg classes into the square peg hole of the meta, I think the game will be permanently damaged for it, even if they later revert in 8.0. It's already got so much outcry against it, doubling down on it for 7.0 will show an incredible amount of 'tone-deaf-ness' and will likely be a lot of negative PR for them.

2. Which expansion do you think was the best for job design as a whole?

I'd like to say Heavensward, but I'll admit there are some jank things that Stormblood fixed. There's some that Shadowbringers fixed too, which, if backported to Stormblood, would have made Stormblood 'by far the best'. For example, the whole 'INT down' and 'Damage Down' effects that made DRK and WAR a lock-in for tanks in HW, removing that in SB was a very good idea. Making healers damage scale off of MND and reworking Cleric Stance to be a CD that boosted damage was a good idea. However, the Piercing Resistance Down effect DRG monopolized was a bad thing for the game. I think that if that had been removed in SB too, SB would have been so much better for it. As a stopgap solution, I believe that changing MNK to be a Piercing class, and Dragon Kick applying Piercing Resistance Down, would have at least allowed it to participate more easily in the 'meta', and would have created a choice between DRG and MNK for a melee slot, as NIN and SAM were intended to be interchangeable, both bringing Slashing. Of course, raidbuff stacking and the concept of 'padding' meant that SAM got kicked to the curb in 'super high end' but that's the nature of the beast.

At the time in SB, I became a WAR main. Before the 4.2 changes, that is. I personally believe, vehemently, that 4.1 WAR (after Shake was made into a shield) was the BEST tank design in the game, bar none. Ironically, it would fit perfectly into the current game, as it's whole design was about regulating your resources so that you go into the 1min window with a 'mini-burst', and let loose with everything at the 2min window. Play perfectly and your reward was 6 FellCleaves. It took till Eden's Verse to hit a Fell Cleave harder than one I hit in Deltascape (36k). I dabbled in PLD after WAR got it's 4.2 changes, and found fun in using Cover in interesting ways (something we can no longer do as it has a gauge cost, pls at least remove that thanks). After 4.3, I became a DRK main for 4.4 and Alphascape, despite the playerbase claiming 'DRK bad'. I enjoyed the many staggered timers, the ebb and flow of the speed as you used Blood Weapon's haste effect, the frantic Dark Arts spending as you find too much MP coming in. All of this is to say, I think SE threw the baby out with the bathwater, and indeed the whole bath, when they heard feedback about SB classes. When they heard 'we press Dark Arts too much', they should have toned down how many skills use Dark Arts, or increased the MP cost to make it more impactful what to empower. Instead they completely removed it. I don't think anyone had issues with Dark Arts in HW when they were empowering Carve and Spit to hit like a truck, they had issues with it when they had to DA Syphon Strike or Plunge just to have something to spend all their MP on before they overcapped.

Anyway, as for my area of 'expertise' (or, the part I know slightly more about at the current time), healers. I've been playing healers in this game since I started (levelled as SCH), and my first 'dip' into Savage was as AST. I can fairly confidently say that, in my opinion, healers are not in a good state right now. They're not 'guaranteed doomed', but they're teetering on the edge. They can be brought back from the brink though. The issue is, again, baby and bathwater. In HW people had issues with the Cleric Stance lockout, stopping them from healing for 5seconds if they misclicked or doubletapped it, party dies, not good. SE fixed that by making Cleric a flat damage boost, and MND affecting the damage of skills. Personally, big fan of the change. I didn't see Cleric as 'skillful', cos I knew how to do it. I just saw it as 'barrier to entry for newer players'. However, the mass removal of stuff in SHB leaving every healer with one nuke, one dot, and maybe one extra thing like Assize or Energy Drain was a travesty. It should have been caught in the Media Tour and reverted before release.

We have since seen many healers, with many opinions, saying what they believe will 'fix healers'. From more healing required, to more utilities or mechanics to handle (like Esuna-able debuffs), to just reversing and going back to a time when we had a more varied rotation. My personal suggestion is the final of those options, just add back some more variety to the damage side of things. We see from this raid tier that a sudden jump in healing required (which was actually 'mitigation required' more than anything) just drives people away from wanting to participate, as more responsibility lands on the healer. More utility or mechanics to handle (Esuna???) would be interesting, but once we know what to do, it's back to the current problem. People don't look at TEA phase 1 and say 'yes, this fixes healer issues because of the Throttle debuff asking me to press Esuna 3 times'. So I suggest returning old skills to fill the damage-dealing time with more varied button presses. We have the VFX in the game still, and likely the old code for making them actually function, so this would save on some dev time as a solution. It's the more 'casual friendly' option, as a truly casual player will likely not even notice these new buttons, and depending on their skill level and how the returning buttons are balanced potencywise, continuing with the current 'mash 1 over and over' 'rotation' might still yield strong results, I'd estimate even up to 80% of it's current output? This would be completely fine for anything up to and including EX trials, it's only going to become an issue in Savage (and even then, early prog before gear). And in that situation, I think we can all agree that the healer player should be able to adapt to a new button or two in their damage kit.

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?

100%. WOW has the PTR for a reason. Partially because it helps build hype yes, but it also allows the devs to get feedback on class designs. As I write this, Ret Paladin is going through a mini rework to turn it into a mid-ranged fighter, able to use most of it's skills from up to 15y (or is it 20) away, allowing it to counter it's usual lack of mobility tools with the fact it can disengage much more easily without dropping uptime on it's damage. This can be tested on the PTR, and feedback given to the devs, such as 'Skill X is occasionally used in the rotation, but doesn't have the extended range, is this a bug or intended'. I believe that we could benefit from something like this, as the only people who get to 'test' the Expansion changes are the dev team themselves, and the people at the Media Tour (at which point the only thing that can really be done is number balancing). I am 100% convinced that if we had a PTR for Shadowbringers, one year before the release of the expansion, which showed the healer changes to people, it'd have never gone live. Far too many people would have said 'this isn't good' and it'd have gotten reverted.

We wouldn't need much either, just a standalone program that we can download from the SE site, which is the client, a built in server to connect to (localhost: port style), and just have us as the default midlander, in an empty room, with training dummies arranged in groups of one, three and five (to test single target, small AOE, and mass-AOE situations). Have a form on the SE site that you can fill out when you log into the site, and there you go, free feedback straight from the source. Maybe I'm not seeing the logistical issues with something like this, but I'm looking at it from the point of view of 'if they can make the Benchmark program, they can do this in a similar way, right?'

As for incentives, as others say, I think one of the biggest incentives would be the fact that it'll mean we're actually getting heard. The Kaiten Incident, the Living Dead Dilemma (it was unchanged since 3.0), and the Blood Weapon Fiasco/MCH Overheat Problem (both issues since 5.0) shows how little the devs are aware of the non-JP forums. If they really want to get people aware of the fact the survey system exists, they can knock up a cosmetic to give out to participants. Gil's not a good idea, we already have too much. Tomestones could be cool, eg 'Do the survey and earn 100 Astronomy Tomes!' would be a nice injection for a relic. But I think nothing motivates people more than exclusivity, and so I'd suggest something like:

BREAKING NEWS: New survey system for FFXIV is available! Come beta-test some of the upcoming changes for jobs that the new expansion will bring! Give feedback via the form linked on the Lodestone! All you need to do is:
1: Download the Beta Client from the link in the Lodestone post!
2: Play with the classes, and see how you like them!
3: Report how you feel about the changes, what you like, what you dislike, what feels weak, what feels too strong, etc!
4: Earn a reward of one (1) Fatter Hat, the Fat Cat themed fat cat fat hat. Can't say fairer than that, and that's a fat cat fact!

And then a picture of a Fat Cat on a Lalafell's head. With the King Slime jiggle effect. People'd go nuts for a fat cat hat, I guarantee it (you can have that idea free of charge SE). And after the survey period ends, they throw the cosmetic of the period onto a vendor somewhere so there's no Fear Of Missing Out. You know the guys in the main cities who resell you your starting racial sets? Throw em on a new category on there.

edit: fiddly cat refusing to line up properly

Side note

Thanks for doing this btw, even if SE doesn't ever get round to implementing anything based on it's findings, I think it's real good that someone's bothering to try and check the opinion of the playerbase. And if it does get to SE, then you'll have had a noticeable impact on the design of the game, which would be a cool talking point

[Frodnoxx]

1. My sentiment has pretty much been echoed to death in this thread. I started in ShB, so I've only heard of how things were before. But from what I've heard the devs went with the nuclear option for balancing the jobs - all out homogenization. I think it's unaccaptable the extent they have taken it especially for a tab-targeting mmorpg. The jobs have almost no semblance of identity to them in their rotation design (2 min bursts and healers/tanks), their perception from other party members (situational utility), nor how they engage with boss mechanics (defensives and movement). They did this so that jobs are not excluded in public parties, but they need to realize the no amount of balance will stop meta sheeps from sheeping.

2. I only started playing in ShB but specifically from this thread, I have heard concepts from SB that make me wish I had experienced at least a little of what it was like. I read about unique abilities like letting you give MP to healers, micromanage aggro, and mass esuna and it's so sad to realize that all three of these vectors of the game's combat (mp management, aggro management, dispels) were erased rather than expanded and tuned. It's like having a symphony but your percussion section is weak so you murder them rather than get them caught up. Yeah your symphony sounds cleaner now, but you have dead bodies on the floor and the flutists are crying and traumatized.

3. No real opinion on this. I feel like regardless of feedback, the devs have the engine going full steam down this path and it would take several expansions or another realm reborn to change course. It could even be interpreted that the financial officers saw the huge burst of new players in ShB and thought, "Ah, it's the development design choices we need more of that" rather than realize the climate of the MMO world at the time.

[Rolder50]

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?

I think the job design is rather poor and getting worse as time goes on. They focus too hard on removing any kind of pain or failure points in a rotation and thus remove any chance of skill expression. Almost every job except BLM (wonder why) has had their skill floors put into the dirt with the ceiling being only a little bit higher.

I also think they ruined healer gameplay going from SB to ShB. Just homogenized the heck out of everything.

2. Which expansion do you think was the best for job design as a whole?

Stormblood since Shadowbringers was when they really started homogenizing everything. HW was good as well but had some questionable designs like bowmage bard. I did enjoy Summoner in Shadowbringers though, before they ruined it in Endwalker.

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?

Surveys yes, rewards no. If we really want a reward, I would just do something basic like those gold or silver chocobo feathers you get from refer a friend.

[drtasteyummy]

I absolutely hate the job design and rotation system in FFXIV, and without a doubt, I wish they would burn it to the ground. They are all the same, it's a copy and paste of group buffs, positionals, damage over time, and their respective range. Nothing is unique, and everything is rigid, there's zero adaptation but on the other hand even the slightest inconvenience or mismatch breaks everything. It's just so horribly boring, both complicated and not complicated, an abomination of the worst things you could patch together in a class system. I've never witnessed such a mishmash of dead and soulless design as I have here.