The problem with Tripling Down on Shadowbringers Job Design

[Eothas]

...and the race for firsts.

You are not wrong, but world-first races shouldn't even be a consideration regarding job balance/identity, ever. That's something that 99.9% of the playerbase will forget about after 1 week of savage release. I'd say that endgame, parse-brained players are the reason we have stale design ("muh Balance card...").

[Jeeqbit]

It's not so much that they decided they were afraid of job complexity suddenly after 6+ years of gameplay with a semblance of it, it's just they decided halfway for some reason to make their game into a different game altogether while alienating half the veteran playerbase in the process.

I think it's more that ARR was a "shot in the dark" and that they took about 2 years to make changes (ie. they are made at expansion-level).

Heavensward tried to respond to the issues with that "shot in the dark" (like raids not having a story version, raids not being cleared by enough people, not having cross-world PF) and iterate on content ideas (trying out things like Diadem, Deep Dungeons, changing bosses from being WoW-like to scripted dances that involve brain-training/learning the script). Through that, they found their main content formulas that remain today.

Stormblood just cleaned up all the jank, still, from that "shot in the dark" that was ARR. Useless abilities, cross-class into role actions (arguably resulting in some homogenization), elemental stats/materia, parry/physical mit removed (resulting in most mitigation being homogenized). But this is where they made a major change in direction to stop making people track tiny status effects like in a lot of MMORPGs, and instead have a "job gauge". By this time, it had been about 4 years. Despite that job gauges arguably make things easier and things had started being homogenized, Stormblood is still seen as at least a compromise rather than reverting to Heavensward, since we're unlikely to stop having job gauges now.

Shadowbringers was the bigger change in direction, obviously, because aside from cleaning up the remaining "shot in the dark issues" that resulted in tanks stacking/melding Strength by rebalancing stats, they seemed to stop caring about job uniqueness and there were now too many jobs and too many issues to bother trying to balance damage types (piercing, slashing, etc). And they wanted to make jobs easy and intuitive to play and hard to mess up, something that has remained in progress for about 5 years now.

So what I think really happened was they just iterated on issues with their original "shot in the dark" on a 2-yearly basis, so it wasn't that they were ever fine with how it was so much, they were just slowly figuring out ways to address the perceived issues over time. Although I do think the exception is that they abandoned the concept of "job uniqueness" because all references to this just completely, noticeably vanished from their vocabulary around Shadowbringers.

(For the record, I agree they were issues, regardless of if they were solved the right way)

[Equitable_Remedy]

I started playing FF14 during ShB, and I liked it.

I kept playing through EW because I kept liking it. NIN, in ShB and EW, is one of my favorite classes in any MMO - I have a lot of fun playing it.

I like what I'm seeing for DT, but of course, I'll actually have to play it to see if I enjoy it.

Sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[MagiusNecros]

a very reasonable fear that their job design will lock jobs out of prog content and the race for firsts.

*angry Blue Mage noises*

[Rekh]

I very much doubt they're scared of complexity. Why would they be? You outlined the actual worry yourself -- a very reasonable fear that their job design will lock jobs out of prog content and the race for firsts.

Balancing jobs against fights is incredibly difficult at the extremes as shown by not just this game but other MMOs as well. The goal of making jobs feel different and jobs be balanced are at opposition. I don't envy the job designers who are having to do this.

Let's thank all the world first streams and all tha nonsense. I've been saying it for years; the reason why shadowbringers baby-mode happened was because of raiders/proggers complaining about bard, dragoon, and all these other buffs and jobs "not being allowed in PF savage/ultimates."

No one cares if you bring any job to any savage/ultimate now, they're all copy paste burst babies of the the 2 minute snooze cycle.

It's a question of do we want 1 ultimate raid per expansion or 3 with the equivalent of checkers job design.

[MagiusNecros]

Can't say World first will ever really be the same ever since the usual groups that get world first were exposed as cheaters. Which admittedly was much more interesting content then the actual fights ingame.

[Sunhwapark]

I'd say that endgame, parse-brained players are the reason we have stale design ("muh Balance card...").

Ah yes, it's the players fault that SE decided to randomly buff balance from 10% to a 20% solo card boost in 3.4 where it had such content that DPS skipping phases were most prominent.

[Supersnow845]

As much as I liked HW/SB AST it is a valid example of a job that was changed top to bottom because of how hostile balance was parse design (I’m not making a comment either way on the validity of that stance)

However I don’t remotely think that’s a reason to triple down on the extremely beige design that’s been so prominent since ShB

Jobs should still have expression and ceilings that aren’t on their floors. SGE is easily the worst designed job in the game on this front

It shouldn’t be so hard to design jobs who’s skill ceiling is more than “press buttons in the right order” yet somehow the one job that currently has this is getting it removed in DT

[Aravell]

I very much doubt they're scared of complexity. Why would they be? You outlined the actual worry yourself -- a very reasonable fear that their job design will lock jobs out of prog content and the race for firsts.

Balancing jobs against fights is incredibly difficult at the extremes as shown by not just this game but other MMOs as well. The goal of making jobs feel different and jobs be balanced are at opposition. I don't envy the job designers who are having to do this.

The question is "Should individual job balance matter so much in a game where you can change to any job at will?", if someone wants to clear week 1 and their job is off-meta, they can simply swap to the meta job of the tier.

Endlessly chasing after perfect balance means you also eventually remove all nuance out of your game, leaving a flat and bland combat system that is incapable of engaging experienced players.

I don't know about everyone else, but I personally won't raise my arms and cheer when the dev team rips out job individuality to make their job easier.

[Rozeee]

"The mindset that the solution to every problem could be patched in a future update"

"8.0 will have more job identity"

Did they forgot?