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

[CelestiCer]

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.

Good question... XIV does a horrible Job at showing what the game can throw at you and how to deal with it throughout a players entire playthrough. Slidecasting / Self-Mitigation / Knockback / Cast-Bar of Enemies / Snapshots / Postionals and the list goes on. " Congrats on your new Job! Now go press some buttons ! " is the summary standard of what Square asks of players to do, making them complicit by setting no standard for most content besides don't die. This encourages players to never really improve as there is no urgency for it - until the Game throws everything at them which usually starts at Extreme/Savage.

The completely skippable Tutorial ( was it skippable? idk ) teaches nothing for how long it takes to even complete. Learned way more from Joonbob's video:" Basics of FF14 - Things the Game Doesn't Teach You " - which has the length of just six minutes. Players have a bigger desire to finish reading everything in the MSQ vs ever blinking once at their Tooltips. There's no need to understand your Job entirely, just faceroll.

Looking at Alliance Raids...

• ARR = Boring but quick Dailies amirite
• HW = VoidArk 1st boss !!
• SB = The most infamous
• SHB = Alright? but HP values in SHB are so high
• EW = A stroll through a park is more exciting

Clearly, some players will bail if its either to boring or to difficult? but will stick around if the rewards are worth it and not taking to long. Orbonne Monestary being the one I witnessed the most players leaving at any stage of its instance? when I found it the most memorable and exciting Alliance Raid. Ditto for Dead Ends for EW Dungeon.

Boring content + Amazing Jobs? is probably as bad as Amazing content with Boring Jobs, but currently? I find both boring. It's why I harp so badly on increasing optional Skill-Ceiling of Jobs without affecting the Skill-Floor to keep it all player-friendly. Cause I see no other middle-ground except that Square also tries to simplify Jobs every expansion. As a result? it makes players like me have to try so hard to care for the content is what's so sad about it and my excitement for Viper and Pictomancer is a shrug cause I'll predict it to be a copy-paste gameplay feel, even though I hope its not.

[dspguy]

All tanks play roughly the same, more or less. You can configure your hotbars to the point where you could pick one of four tank jobs and with just a minor modification, play any of them above average. There's really nothing to it. Healer is roughly the same deal as tank. Spam your only AOE or single target damage spell or your DoT. Use oGCD heals and GCD heals when necessary or when the BLM makes the healer adjust. DPS has the most variety, but it is ultimately "build gauge, spend gauge" for most of them.

The reason why it is the way it is boils down to the job balance that SE has strived a decade to address. They want your job choice to be a preference as opposed to a forced decision. As time went on, they further embraced jobs all falling into that burst window. It used to be that some of the harder to play jobs had the benefit that a well-played BLM or SAM would out-DPS the rest of the field by a large enough margin that every raid group simply demanded a BLM or SAM as well as a NIN to synergize the burst window. But to bring everyone else in line, they were pretty much forced to make every job fairly "vanilla."

This will continue as long as SE keeps the tank, healer, DPS trifecta. And they've gone down this path for so long that we can't expect that to actually change. They'd have to redo a huge swath of earlier content to introduce any sort of legitimate support job. Instead of getting "real buffs" we get watered down buffs. Crowd control is non-existent. Every job can solo open-world content (hunts aside), so there's no value in introducing an actual "solo" job.

I'm not down on the game, even if it sounds like it. I play the game for entertainment. My days of playing first generation MMOs like EQ1 are long gone. I don't have that sort of time anymore. I've accepted that FFXIV is what it is. When they come out the new DPS jobs, it'll just be a different flavor of vanilla, but still vanilla.

[DrWho2010]

make things too hard, people balk at it. (re: launch Orbonne, The Burn, etc)

people that play at ultimate level play the game too well, so they're bored.

savage is still difficult for some people not because they can't do it, it's because they can't do it correctly consistently. trying to continue to farm P12S with a slightly different setup group from my usual static has been awful because people make too many damn mistakes and then raid night is over without success from too many bad pulls.

so I think the level of gameplay is just fine. some tweaks should be made for ilvl sync in my opinion.

[Nestama]

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.

This was an issue I feel people had with Pharos Sirius in 2.1. It was a legitimately hard dungeon and all you got from it was i60 gear you already could get from Amdapor Keep (before they gave it Wanderer's Palace loot). It was a fun dungeon, but the rewards were severely lacking, especially when compared to Haukke Manor Hard (the only dungeon to give a final boss a hard enrage at 6 minutes) and Copperbell Mines Hard.

Then there's Thaleia (and even Euphrosyne). I would like to do it and get the mats to upgrade gear, but I just can't stand how boring it is. The new battle team has previous alliance raids they could use as a reference and these same raids are usually where we get brand new mechanics, but instead they just make every boss (and maybe Asura, if they also worked on her fight as well) a basic dungeon boss with 5-20 second long casts and nothing interesting going on for them at all.

[Nizzi]

people that play at ultimate level play the game too well, so they're bored.

I'm not bored because I play healer in Ultimates, I'm bored because I did what Yoshida asked me to do and it still didn't make playing healer fun. Perhaps they need to actually address the issue instead of going "uhh do harder content" and then "well of course you're bored you're doing the peak of content in the game :^)" when that content is the same terrible gameplay loop except with harder mechanics?

But what do I know, clearly the devs at SE have thought spamming 1 GCD for 80%+ of our entire GCD presses over an 18+ minute encounter is such good design that all 4 jobs in the role deserve the exact same gameplay loop. I hope DT brings this to tanks and to DPS too because it's such a winning formula that I really really want you all to have it too so we can all have the most fun possible

[Naraku_Diabolos]

A lot of people seem to forget that there are some players who just like playing 1 job due to aesthetics, gameplay style, and lore. And it’s good to have options to suit your needs. I just don’t know why people have to complain about the different options we have the ability to choose and pick.

[SilverObi]

Waiting for this to reveal itself as an elaborate "give us back Kaiten" thread again, otherwise no notes

[Niroken]

savage is still difficult for some people not because they can't do it, it's because they can't do it correctly consistently. trying to continue to farm P12S with a slightly different setup group from my usual static has been awful because people make too many damn mistakes and then raid night is over without success from too many bad pulls.

so I think the level of gameplay is just fine. some tweaks should be made for ilvl sync in my opinion.

Haven't tried Savage level content since Coil and I loved those fights. I suddenly decided I was going to start raiding again starting in P9S and suddenly there are like three different ways to do the mechanics and way more stuff to memorize. After a couple days of attempts I didn't find it fun and never went back.

[Ardeth]

Waiting for this to reveal itself as an elaborate "give us back Kaiten" thread again, otherwise no notes

Kaiten was cool, but I'm not broken up that it's gone. Now what I miss is Bow Mage...

[SilverObi]

Kaiten was cool, but I'm not broken up that it's gone. Now what I miss is Bow Mage...

there are maybe dozens of us