Please stop alienating the playerbase with job total reworks

[LianaThorne]

I, for one, have been one of those who have been alienated with such drastic changes. I stopped playing at around the end of Heavensward because adulting but when I got my s*** together, I am now replaying the game. And going back to SMN, boy I was so shocked and immediately switched jobs at how terrible the gameplay it has now than what I remembered how it used to.

So I watched videos of SMN from Stormblood to Shadowbringers and I must say that ShB SMN was the closest to what I envisioned SMN would be. Why the hell did they make it like this? Also with SCH... A certain job is well maintained, but the pet jobs scrapped over in favor of oversimplification?

Please SE. Bring back the pet system to ACN.

I know you're newly returning so you should probably be made aware that using any healer as a comparison for a well maintained job is a choice at this stage of the game lol. We've been screaming for our jobs to change for months or years now so it's not so boring or simple to play. Hell, WAR can literally do our job for us (as I have been asked on more than one occasion to sit out of bosses so they can practice playing all 3 roles) so that might be a better example of a "well-maintained" job.

[rawker]

I was referring to BLM as the well-maintained job. Both SCH and SMN have been gutted off pet management and that's what i want and what drove me to love both jobs, in the first place.

[Valence]

I really don't want to be unpleasant and generally argue unnecessarily. But there's a lot of bad faith in one area: claiming that all the old players are asking for something complicated, which implies at the same time that all the new players are brainwashed... And pretending that many requests don't confuse "interesting" with "unnecessarily complicated".

I don't think new players are brainwashed. I struggle a lot more in current endgame raids than I did in older ones, because they're not designed exactly around the same requirements.

Reworks are necessary, else it's just adding ever more and more buttons. Eventually you just can't add any more buttons, some jobs are already at the reasonable limit. Ast comes to mind as a job that really just has too many buttons. Ninja too - I don't know how anyone can play some of these jobs on controller. I have an mmo mouse and still fill up at least three full bars with ctrl\alt\shift modifiers because there are just too many skills with so many being situational.

So, they have to. And sometimes that does mean that there are going to be some big changes to how jobs play sometimes.

It probably doesn't help that many of the jobs are amalgamations of jobs from earlier games - like AST for example having FFXI Corsair abilities, but it's a healer, and a DPS. Would be nice if SE would just get a clear vision for what they want some of these jobs to be.

It saddens me that you obviously didn't really read the OP... Or maybe I'm very bad at conveying the message I had in mind.

[Valence]

You're right that I could probably have added DRK, considering how changed it is compared to what it used to be (it's a totally different job now). It just has the peculiarity of only going through slower deletions and simplifications one after another by losing 99% of its core mechanics. The only thing it has gained in exchange is a budget inner release.

then pray tell what difference did GL uptime make for monks compared to literally every other melee class, other than being punished considerably harder than other melees during downtimes. GL uptimes was one of the main complaints prior to rework but, apparently, that didn't seem to be the case according to you.

A lot of jobs had uptimes, like DRG with Blood of the Dragon or BLM with enochian, among others. It's one of those things of the past, and I don't really care either way about it personally, so you're not wrong there. Uptimes were also directly targeted by SE when YoshiP stated that they wanted to alleviate the stress provided by a lot of jobs onto the players. It was a big buzz word back then for them during ShB.

However what GL provided was Tornado Kick non standard rotational deviations, that only became standard once the western player base understood that the advertised potency behind TK was wrong on the tooltip and that it suddenly made sense to burn all the stacks in order to use it twice during bursts like some JP players did. It was a little (but quiet) revolution in the monk milieu at the time, and made the mechanic more than just an upkeep.

Not only are older players not inherently correct. Posting an opinion under the guise that said opinion involves all older players is straight up disingenuous, when the voices that advocated for substantial changes in many of the classes that were reworked (not all of them, mind you) came precisely from older players too.

Can't speak for all players nor jobs, but I personally can safely say that everything that I used to riot about for MCH back during SB where the job had serious issues (mostly latency), has not been implemented into the game (until recently with the hypercharge stacks), and latency stayed a gigantic ugly issue until... recently. The big complaints that I (and some others) had back then was specifically targeted on the overheat tech on WF and how rapid fire made windows too tight. Meanwhile, instead of fixing latency issues and rapid recasts (1.5s), they chose to remove procs and ammo out of nowhere while keeping the same problems on top of the pile.

We advocated for substantial changes, but we certainly never advocated for THOSE changes.

[VentVanitas]

Not going to bother with this one. IF you're so illustrious, then pray tell what difference did GL uptime make for monks compared to literally every other melee class, other than being punished considerably harder than other melees during downtimes. GL uptimes was one of the main complaints prior to rework but, apparently, that didn't seem to be the case according to you.

being a punishing class in of itself isn't inherently a bad thing. what made Greased Lightning in Shadowbringers so polarizing however was SE's mishandling of it, the mechanic itself in previous expansions was perfectly fine. tacking on a fourth stack, relegating Perfect Balance to a 2 minute damage cooldown while forcing Monks to use Anatman for GL generation and putting so many fights with +1 minute long cutscenes for no reason such as E1S, Hades EX or E8S. that's what people complained about.

no actual reasonable Monk player was whining because they couldn't have 100% GL uptime for an entire fight (unless it was for things arbitrarily out of their control like the aforementioned mid fight cutscenes), they complained because they took away perfectly good tools that made the mechanic more flexible and interesting like wind tackle and 60s PB.

[SieyaM]

Any change to any job will risk alienating players from it, there is no change that is going to make all the current players happy while attracting new players to it. I don't think developers should insist on keeping a job design simply because some players may be adverse to changing it. In the case of SMN there are some very vocal players who are positively infuriated by the changes but in the end they are far far fewer than players who are playing the job and even enjoying it.

[Aravell]

Any change to any job will risk alienating players from it, there is no change that is going to make all the current players happy while attracting new players to it. I don't think developers should insist on keeping a job design simply because some players may be adverse to changing it. In the case of SMN there are some very vocal players who are positively infuriated by the changes but in the end they are far far fewer than players who are playing the job and even enjoying it.

Once again, no one is saying jobs should never be changed ever, the point is that the dev team should at least acknowledge the feedback from the current playerbase of the job instead of changing the whole thing without warning and going "Meh, they would've quit anyway".

Also, it was very much possible to give SMN the flashy summons to make them "feel like a summoner" (whatever that means) without completely deleting pet management and DoTs.

[Volkai]

I didn't like Summoner before the Endwalker changes, now I love it, so, while you may have a point about some players no longer liking it, that doesn't mean EVERYONE dislikes it. Furthermore, the identity of Summoner remains even if it's manifested in a different form than the one you were used to. Also both current and previous implementations of the Job in FFXI have failed to live up to the ideal of having a Summon that is a Controllable Pet Of Significant Power, and that's been true ever since they made pets untargetable, if not going all the way back to the job's introduction in 2.0

I'd like to see an implementation more like FFXI Online's Summoner, but that wouldn't be a good fit with how FFXIV works. But if you want to really have control over an extended-duration summon of signifcant power, FFXI is right there, letting you summon, say, Alexander. Or Odin. Or Fenrir (but the cool Fenrir.)

[rawker]

Now let's see them drastically change a job you loved so much just to appease another.

You are saying this because the current SMN fits your criteria. The main problem that bas been discussed here is that an entire playerbase, mind you who are also paying for subs, is that they are no longer represented. If the game didn't introduce pet systems from the get go, it will not attract people who like it. But the thing is, they did implement a pet system. It survived 4 expansions... then all of a sudden, they have completely removed it so abruptly just because what?

That is something lovers of current SMN will never understand.

[Gemina]

I know you're newly returning so you should probably be made aware that using any healer as a comparison for a well maintained job is a choice at this stage of the game lol. We've been screaming for our jobs to change for months or years now so it's not so boring or simple to play. Hell, WAR can literally do our job for us (as I have been asked on more than one occasion to sit out of bosses so they can practice playing all 3 roles) so that might be a better example of a "well-maintained" job.

"Maintained" is the proper word to describe healers since ShB release. In Stormblood, that role was utter chaos due to AST changes. The truest to an actual pure healer/barrier healer dynamic was back in ARR when there was a certain harmony between WHM and SCH as the two jobs had very distinct identities and roles to play in content. In late HW, AST came along and effed all that up. Now, all four healers are essentially the same with some niche differences between them. This "balance" has indeed been maintained for over four years now.

WAR has been a jack of all trades, "I can do it all" job as far back as I can remember playing this game. They've always made healers feel useless in dungeons. The only difference between now and ARR is that they no longer need skill to do it. If WAR is an example of a well-maintained job, the game needs less of it, not more.