XIV EW Job-Gameplay is Terrible... Why?

[MitsukiKimura]

When everything feels the same it loses its flavor. Same thing year after year jobs being simplified disappoints me. Miss the days where getting good at your class felt rewarding. I feel for the healers since I legit feel like they aren't needed for most content and that's a sad feeling.

[Rekh]

Never accept mediocrity, that's how we got FFXIV 1.0. We need a step up from the faceroll dungeons we've been getting since heavensward. A realm reborn still contains some of the best mechanically impressive dungeons to date, such as wanderer's palace HM and Keeper of the lake. They also happen to have a lot of non-lineat paths, elevations, and pve mechanics such as ground floor totems or things to interact with. FFXIV devs need to play Wow again to remind themselves what pve actually means and how bosses (and regular mobs) should start attacking the ENTIRE party again in a meaningful way.

Also, it should be required that dungeons no longer copy paste the 3 mobs before boss formula; even Yoship would yawn if he still played xiv like he used to!

[Ardeth]

Alright so, Orbonne difficulty as the baseline please and thank you.

You say that, but when Orbonne was current the amount of people that would instantly leave when they got placed in it randomly showed you it was too hard for the average player or at most not worth the time. I think Orbonne would've been better if they eased people into it. It's why the next two sets of Alliance Raids have been significantly easier. There is a difficulty limit. I'm not saying Orbonne is it, but the way everything else is super easy and then BAM is bad game design. Because you alienate the people who can't hang and have no business doing it in the first place. That's my take on it anyway. Now, with power creep, it's a joke to run. But back then...

[Aravell]

Square won't increase the difficulty of certain content because it probably just will be met with backlash, which is fine. Keep most player-friendly. But there's a clear desire for players to do more on their beloved Jobs if they don't do that. And it's not to increase the Skill-Floor, but add optional Skill-Ceiling to master. Allowing players to express their Job mastery wherever they go, not just High-End... everywhere. This is what I find sorely missing in XIV out of any MMO I played. Mastering a Job or Jobs means very little. Just faceroll that keyboard. Don't like that? Go Raid then don't die and faceroll that keyboard. Yes the game is balanced, but perfect balance is near unobtainable anyways, so at what cost was it?

I think keeping MSQ dungeons and trials as near minimum difficulty is fair, people want to see the story and that's totally fine. Just make the jobs fun again. I'm not sure why the dev team doesn't see that shifting all game complexity into fights just does not work when you also have to heavily limit the difficulty of much of the game content because of high participation rates. Complex jobs and easy content is always better than easy jobs and complex content.

As for perfect balance, they can't even obtain good balance with all the similarities all the jobs have now, as evidenced by them still needing to do buffs every patch to account for things they overlooked. One thing I will say though, perfect balance is actually very easy to achieve, but it requires every job to do the exact same things with different animations, and that won't be fun for anyone in the long run.

[ty_taurus]

You say that, but when Orbonne was current the amount of people that would instantly leave when they got placed in it randomly showed you it was too hard for the average player or at most not worth the time. I think Orbonne would've been better if they eased people into it. It's why the next two sets of Alliance Raids have been significantly easier. There is a difficulty limit. I'm not saying Orbonne is it, but the way everything else is super easy and then BAM is bad game design. Because you alienate the people who can't hang and have no business doing it in the first place. That's my take on it anyway. Now, with power creep, it's a joke to run. But back then...

How can we ease players into that difficulty when we immediately backpedal at the slightest whisper of difficulty that actually pressures players to do mechanics? I was fine with most of Nier’s fights difficulty-wise, but I will never again use alliance roulette exclusively because myths of the realm are miserable to play with how boring they are.

[Mithron]

Yoship: "If you want harder content, go play Ultimate. If you want to do damage as a healer, go play SGE."

I just want FFXIV to be fun again like it used to be in HW.

[Ardeth]

How can we ease players into that difficulty when we immediately backpedal at the slightest whisper of difficulty that actually pressures players to do mechanics? I was fine with most of Nier’s fights difficulty-wise, but I will never again use alliance roulette exclusively because myths of the realm are miserable to play with how boring they are.

That's the issue, how do you? In my 20+ years of playing mmos, I've never seen a company nail difficulty. I remember the Mage Tower in Wow. It was supposed to be a harder solo challenge, but it was a casual player meat grinder. Most casual players never completed one fight, let alone the fact that there were 36 of them. Or solo Varient dungeons being boring and the bosses being mechanic city HP sponges.

I don't see this being solved anytime soon. But people always over estimate what the average player can do. I think that's why I like a game like Elden Ring. It's honestly fairly easy. The difficulty comes in how cheap the fights are. It's not that x boss is too hard. It's that x boss is exploiting something, and you have to find a way around it. Granted, how do you do that for 24 people, let alone 4 people without one of them blowing their stack? That's the issue more than spiking the difficulty. You can just do that, but don't be surprised if nobody does it. It's why hardcore content has the lowest completion rate.

[Jeeqbit]

Expert dungeons are easier than Levelling dungeons. Levelling dungeons hit much harder than Expert.

Yes... because leveling dungeons sync to almost Minimum Item Level. But aside from that if you do Expert Min IL, mechanically, they have a lot of environmental observation still.

I think the other difference with leveling dungeons is the stats are freshly diluted and reach their weakest point, whereas we have had room for the first bit of stat growth at that level range in max level dungeons.

Remember that some players will be in these dungeons Minimum IL, because they are super casual and have the minimum needed gear just to enter the dungeon with. I've had it a few times as a healer where there is this ridiculously squishy tank in an expert dungeon.

Mechanically they are all similar. There is a limit on how many times we can see in/out/spread/stack without it getting boring.

Alright well that's the game and has been for around 10 years, doubt it's gonna change.

[Colt47]

+1 You take your jobs everywhere, in all types of content, and can still play them in content lulls. You should have fun doing so. And players who don't do hard content should also have something to improve about their job's gameplay.

I got bored of the game while progging DSR, we got to P5 and I still didn't feel challenged as a healer. It was supposed to be the hardest fight in the game at that time. I know it gets more difficult later, but I couldn't go through with it anymore, doing the same boring rotation with barely any healing in every prog pull. I don't think infrequently released content can make up for the lack of job depth, especially when it can be hit or miss. (In comparison, I did like Living Liquid and BJ/CC).

If the journey becomes meaningless, so does any reward gained from the completion of the journey. That is the fundamental problem with content that is too easy or too difficult. If the difficulty is too easy, then it comes off as just handing someone a reward and it soon becomes forgotten in the junk drawer. If the content is too difficult, the person might value the fact they have the reward, but they are also going to feel that the reward was not worth the effort they put in to get it.

[ty_taurus]

How can we ease players into that difficulty when we immediately backpedal at the slightest whisper of difficulty that actually pressures players to do mechanics? I was fine with most of Nier’s fights difficulty-wise, but I will never again use alliance roulette exclusively because myths of the realm are miserable to play with how boring they are.

One thing you can do is make the punishment for failure less severe. The fight itself has something like Ozma difficulty mechanics, but rather than just killing you, you have to deal with misdirection debuffs, paralysis, petrification, being turned into a frog. There can still be damage, but it’s less likely to kill you, or perhaps is based on %current HP that way they can’t kill you.