Please stop alienating the playerbase with job total reworks

[Mecia]

SMN and MCH are sadly wildly popular reworks. MNK had and still has less players to complain about, personally i think MNK got summoned.

[MikkoAkure]

Gonna have to respectfully disagree.

SMN was fun and I loved spreading DoTs, but that’s not what a FF summoner is about and it lost its identity over time. Plus Yoshi-P had already said that he doesn’t like balancing pet jobs and with pets being diminished every expansion for all jobs with a pet, it was only a matter of time. By time before the rework, the rotation felt bloated and maybe I was a bad SMN but I remember it not feeling really smooth to throw in pet actions in the middle of the rotation.

That said, the rework feels like it needs a lot of work on its own to be more fun, but I think they’re much more on the right path for job fantasy and it feels a lot more like a real FF summoner than it did before. Egis just aren’t it.


As for MCH, I had been trying to be a MCH fan ever since HW because I had been wanting to play MSK since 1.0 beta only to be told by Tanaka to “wait until release” and then “it’s coming eventually”. I wasn’t a fan of HW MCH because of 1-1-1-1 rotation if you have bad luck and outside of wildfire it was boring. SB tacked on a whole new mechanic without addressing the issues I felt I had with the core gameplay and I dropped it after capping it.

I enjoyed the remake of MCH in ShB and it felt more like a whole class. They brought in abilities from the FFVI MCH so it feels like an actual machinist and not just a gunner. I still think it needs retooling around to give it more of an identity while sitting with BRD and DNC but I think it’s still a step in a better direction.

[Larirawiel]

Yes, changes are really bad.

But "no changes" is also really bad:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...nother-2-years...





Cheers

[Aravell]

Yes, changes are really bad.

But "no changes" is also really bad:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...nother-2-years...





Cheers

The point of the OP isn't "change is bad", it's that radical change risks alienating the current playerbase of that job and that the dev team should be mindful of that.

[Lyth]

...

I think the statement was intended to be ironic.

The linked thread claimed that the PAX east panel said that there would be no job changes whatsoever, which seems rather bizarre when you consider that DRG and AST are scheduled for reworks in 7.0. The OP of that thread still hasn't come back to substantiate their claim. I think this thread makes valid points in isolation; it's just interesting to see the same people express their frustrations around both thread topics simultaneously without raising any eyebrows. I think its more a reflection of the culture of this place than it is about the state of gameplay.

That being said, it's a known fact that reworks in MMOs are always controversial, because you have to please fans of every iteration of that job. This predates FFXIV. This also naturally becomes more challenging the more times that a job has been reworked, simply because there are more sets of mutually exclusive expectations.

[Bun_Vivant]

The point of the OP isn't "change is bad", it's that radical change risks alienating the current playerbase of that job and that the dev team should be mindful of that.

Radical change also risks thrilling the current playerbase of the job. The dev team should be mindful of that, too.
And at least with a radical change (as opposed to zero change, i.e.: neglect) we can be confident the devs care about the job.

tldr; "Please don't do anything some players might not like."

Yoshi-P:

"You can't please all of the people all of the time." -- John Lydgate.

[VentVanitas]

I'm probably going to make monk enemies out of saying this, and I do agree that not everything was cool, but I think it could be safely argued that it didn't face riots as much as summoner, and for a reason.

when you're the least overall played job for two whole expansions, it's kind of hard to start an uproar when no one plays it lol. you're not gonna make enemies of any MNK mains when there are none

if you had to ask from my own perspective as someone that's been deep in Monk discussion ever since Shadowbringers and has mained the job since 2018, the job already faced SMN-level riots all throughout 5.X to the point where it became a joke about how the DPS board was just a Monk main board and was pretty much the only DPS other than Summoner to get +100 page threads complaining about them at the time.

EW MNK, regardless of my personal feelings, is simply not as bad as its ShB iterations. anyone that felt burnout or ennui from how SE handles the job would have already moved on or accepted by now that they do not care about it. after all, prior to Endwalker, MNK's biggest claim to fame was about how hilariously mishandled it has been.

after +2 years, I'm not convinced that Blitz isn't a fluke, and any and all nuance the mechanic happens to have has a very good chance of being obliterated come 7.0 considering the amount of people I see crying because they can't use Phantom Rush in their opener.

[Sebazy]

I'd take a full healer rework and the risks associated with that without hesitation TBH. I don't care how bad it could potentially be, at least it (Hopefully!) wouldn't be as monotonous as pressing the same button 100+ times in a duty.

[TheMightyMollusk]

A lot of job changes feel like they were trying to respond to player requests, but took it too far. Summoner, for example, had a very long and involved rotation, which felt pretty punishing if something happened and you got interrupted. It also didn't really feel like summoning much until Demi-Bahamut and Phoenix. So they streamlined it, and now it's one of the simplest jobs in the game (and also obnoxiously flashy, but that's more a visual design complaint rather than a mechanical one). The carbuncles now doing nothing but standing there being cute also makes them feel like a leftover with no purpose. They could've at least kept an auto attack so they'd look like they were doing something. Right now it feels like the framework for a job rather than an entire job. Like, this is what it should've been twenty levels ago, not at current level cap.

I liked HW machinist, aside from Gauss Barrel. When mobility is a job's biggest strength, giving it a cast time feels counterproductive. Otherwise, though, I liked the utility aspects, and the ammo system gave it a little bit of resource management. Then Stormblood turned into a ping-dependent mess, which to me was just too annoying to play. I guess it was supposed to be some kind of risk-reward system with the heat management, but when the entire risk factor is out of my control, it felt like I was being punished for my ISP screwing around rather than anything I actually did. Shadowbringers dialed that back, but also stripped out a bunch of utility (RIP mana turret). So machinist was apparently supposed to become the "selfish" ranged damage job, but it's never measured up to the other selfish jobs. It can't even claim uptime benefits over the melee jobs anymore, since boss hit boxes keep getting bigger and bigger.

[ThaCa]

Considering how much baggage and clunkyness a lot of the jobs have, I'd rather see them start fresh and just nuke most of them.