Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[Semirhage]

bottom line is, the problem with balance is your fellow players. once someone learns a job well, they will naturally outperform people who do not. the player base screams for the mythical balance to counteract that, its an endless circle of demands that has led us to exactly what we have today.

Check the giant, visible cliff between melees+BLM and everyone else. That's not "learning a job well". That's melee favoritism.

My ice-cold take that rarely sees agreement is that FFXIV has never been particularly well balanced. Numerically, sure. Prior to Meleewalker the numbers were usually close enough. However, Square Enix tends to "balance" things in such a way that makes one job just...flat out better than the others in its role. Even if it's by 1%, there's seriously nothing better about its competition. Good balance means classes have different strengths, not that one is designated the designers' favored child and it gets the best of everything. That's been the story pretty consistently since ARR.

[Iscah]

It's still discussion between mere 2 devs, and even then, no one can say if it's sincere or another PR talk, because few sentence later, he says that it was necessary so they're not restricted by it ... just to contradict it later, by saying that it was actually for "player's enjoyment":

Last but not least, one of many "please gib feedback", even though they completely ignore it.

The things aren't mutually exclusive. They might have decided that it was both restrictive to them and negative or neutral to player enjoyment, so they decided to get rid of it, whereas they might not choose to change a restrictive but popular thing.

And listening to feedback doesn't mean they have to change it just because some people don't like it, because maybe they got positive feedback too. As a casual SAM player I can't even see the attachment to it and I don't miss it at all. It was just an extra button to press every time before using a second button, which seemed pointless, and I don't get why it's held up as some epitome of bad changes to the game.

[Ath192]

This is one and only area of CBU3 that I genuinely hope they just flat out fire everyone (job team) because they are incredibly incompetent.

Firing people isn’t the solution. They just need to change what their goals are. These sorts of comments create a lot of animosity between devs and the player base because they read these things sometimes. We are not talking in a vacuum here.

I completely dislike the state of the game and how disposable it has become but I don’t think it’s because they can’t change it, it’s because they want to do something else with it. Either way if it continues down this path I will stop playing it but I wouldn’t like to see heads rolling on the team.

I do hope they realize their 10 year road map is less about giving the MMO enthusiasts what they want and more about ignoring them and trying to get people who don’t like MMOs to play XIV. This is a slap in the face to their current customers because they are ignoring us to chase the people who haven’t wanted to play the game.

[Deo14]

The things aren't mutually exclusive. They might have decided that it was both restrictive to them and negative or neutral to player enjoyment, so they decided to get rid of it, whereas they might not choose to change a restrictive but popular thing.

And listening to feedback doesn't mean they have to change it just because some people don't like it, because maybe they got positive feedback too. As a casual SAM player I can't even see the attachment to it and I don't miss it at all. It was just an extra button to press every time before using a second button, which seemed pointless, and I don't get why it's held up as some epitome of bad changes to the game.

Which is why discussions between 2 devs are clearly not enough - if they had more points of view (maybe even from someone who actually does play SAM), they would conclude that it was bad decision. You really don't need to be parsing golds to realize why those changes are terrible even in theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIHj-1_Yn1U

You can check Celesti's thread of Kaiten feedback compilation. It really wasn't just "some people" who didn't like it, it was pretty one sided.

And no, 6.08 SAM was much better designed than current SAM, since you spend 20-22% of all your actions on Shinten. You won't convince me that is better design than using Kaiten before every Iaijutsu.

[Tsumdere]

To put it as gently as possible, you have no idea what went into that decision and have no grounds to justify that statement other than being mad. You're perfectly allowed to not like it and want it to go back - I'm still bitter about Kaiten and will probably die mad about it - but it's very likely there's telemetry data driving this decision that none of us are privy to.

Firing people isn’t the solution. They just need to change what their goals are. These sorts of comments create a lot of animosity between devs and the player base because they read these things sometimes. We are not talking in a vacuum here.

I completely dislike the state of the game and how disposable it has become but I don’t think it’s because they can’t change it, it’s because they want to do something else with it. Either way if it continues down this path I will stop playing it but I wouldn’t like to see heads rolling on the team.

I do hope they realize their 10 year road map is less about giving the MMO enthusiasts what they want and more about ignoring them and trying to get people who don’t like MMOs to play XIV. This is a slap in the face to their current customers because they are ignoring us to chase the people who haven’t wanted to play the game.

I dun care if they don't like me. And they don't read these forums anyways.

Just tired of people squawking about "buh hard to balance buh" and "you don't know what they are thinking uwu they got so much data" when we ALSO have data through FFLogs and Lucky Bancho. Players aren't stupid. We're not in the dark.

Also Kaiten change was very stupid because it didn't solve any the issues they claimed to want to change, but altered the playstyle to Shinten spam. SAM still has button bloat and still has incredibly wide damage variance. And like... every job presses buttons... before other buttons... That's how rotations work. If they wanted to get rid of "buttons we always pressed before skills" they should remove the 12 from every 123. Remove Life Surge. Remove Reassemble. Remove Requiescat. Remove Blood Weapon. ETC ETC

Truly genius.

[AwesomeJr44]

Firing people isn’t the solution.

Sometimes it is.

These sorts of comments create a lot of animosity between devs and the player base because they read these things sometimes.

Good for them.

This is a slap in the face to their current customers because they are ignoring us to chase the people who haven’t wanted to play the game.

This is why I don't care.

Remove Blood Weapon.

You can take away Blood Weapon over my dead body.

[Tsumdere]

You can take away Blood Weapon over my dead body.

They removed my Dark Arts and the rage still consumes me to this day.

[Dzian]

Good balance means classes have different strengths, not that one is designated the designers' favored child and it gets the best of everything. That's been the story pretty consistently since ARR.

Good balance revolves around good content design. XIVs problems. Is the content design is so strict and linear...

For want of an analogy you have 3 cars.

Car A has let's say 9/10 acceleration, 6/10 top speed. 4/10 handling.

Car B has 4/10 acceleration, 8/10 top speed. 8/10 handling.

Car C has 5/10 acceleration, 10,10 top speed, 4/10 handling.

In the final fantasy race course where everything is strictly linear that track is basically just a super boring long straight line... in which case Car C is massively OP and broken. There is no balance..

However if they through some corners and hills on that race course then suddenly not only do all 3 cars become a lot more balanced despite having completely different stats and abilites but that track also. becomes a lot more fun..any of those 3 cars could win the race thus balance Is achieved.

[Ath192]

Sometimes it is.

Not when the game isn't failing commercially. This would be like them saying banning negative players would be the solution. They would still get by just fine without us. Unfortunately....

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Also Kaiten change was very stupid because it didn't solve any the issues they claimed to want to change, but altered the playstyle to Shinten spam. SAM still has button bloat and still has incredibly wide damage variance. And like... every job presses buttons... before other buttons... That's how rotations work. If they wanted to get rid of "buttons we always pressed before skills" they should remove the 12 from every 123. Remove Life Surge. Remove Reassemble. Remove Requiescat. Remove Blood Weapon. ETC ETC

I don't think the buttons you listed can be compared to Kaiten that easily...


123 combos aren't transformative in the way using abilities is so that one I don't get why we compare it.
Requiescat isn't a "press before every single Holy Spirit" button, though at Lv90 it is basically the glorified spell combo opener.
Life Surge is best used on Full Thrust / Heaven's thrust, but you don't use it on every single Full Thrust / Heaven's Thrust.
Reassemble is best used on Drill / Air Anchor / Chainsaw, however you don't use it on every single Drill / Air Anchor / Chainsaw.
Blood Weapon is a glorified Infuriate since Shadowbringers and was a Haste buff + resource generation boost pre Shadowbringers, why is this listed?

The reason why Kaiten was different, which is likely why they did the change they did, is because other than pre Lv52 and pre 62 on AOE, there was never a single instance where you DIDN'T press Kaiten -> Iaijutsu, you did always and without question as any of the Iaijutsu's charged with Kaiten was a complete gain over using Shinten/Kyuten and/or using Kaiten on non-Iaijutsu combo finishers. It was so baseline you always did, which they saw as "well if you always do it, why do we even have the option to use it without?" and decided to get rid of it.

Do I like it? Personally yes and I say this as someone who lost Dark Arts and Speed Weapon, because it was a 100% mandatory button press on every Iaijutsu without question. Do I understand why people are pissed? Also yes, it essentially didn't get any Kenki spender replacement.

That said, where is my Hissatsu: Seigan counterattack? I miss that one a ton more than Hissatsu: Kaiten and just flat Kenki gain on Third Eye is boring.