The problem with Tripling Down on Shadowbringers Job Design

[OgruMogru]

However all this said going back to your original question what is job identity? It boils down to what does each job do that makes it unique from every other job. And in PVE it's mostly aesthetics. There is very little deviation.

In PvP however there is a LOT of deviation. Down to defensives that grant damage shields and boost defense, AoE stuns, draw-ins/knockback, HP sacrificing attacks, GNB draw changing skills in your kit based on what role you used draw on, polymorph, AoE invulns, attacks that render you invulnerable to damage, true stealth and Death Link, Counter Attacks, delayed damage, fear effects, aoe buffs, crowd control, charm, stance swapping among others. Not to mention personal Limit Breaks that gives every player their own moment of glory and satisfaction. Which all serves to give these classes the identity players are looking for.

What's sad is we used to have elements of these variables in PvE content. All jobs used to have some form of crowd control or utility, primarily stuns and slows, and old raids did require them to solve mechanics. A lot of these abilities have been removed which means those kinds of mechanics can no longer be used until we are given the tools we need back, which is why I'm sceptical of how far the encounter only approach to DT can take us. Getting to choose which pushback to mitigate or gap to close every minute or so doesn't really cut it by comparison. Not to mention things like Goad, Manashift, hell even aggro management being flushed down the toilet. They aren't even tied to individual job identity or complexity. I wish those things had been iterated on instead of outright deleted.

[Mikey_R]

What's sad is we used to have elements of these variables in PvE content. All jobs used to have some form of crowd control or utility, primarily stuns and slows, and old raids did require them to solve mechanics. A lot of these abilities have been removed which means those kinds of mechanics can no longer be used until we are given the tools we need back,

There are still elements of crowd control around, you just have to look for it. All healers have access to Repose, which puts a single target to sleep, all casters have access to Sleep, which is an AoE repose. The problem is, as soon as you hit it, it wakes up. So it is useless. Plus, using a GCD to sleep a target is nowhere near as good as just killing it quicker. But, to go onto other things; Stuns, all tanks and melee DPS have stuns, Slows, All tanks and Melee DPS have access to slow, though it is only really used by tanks. Unless you mean Heavy (movement speed debuff as opposed to attack speed debuff), which all Phys Ranged have access to.

These things are still in the game, even silence, now renamed interrupt, is on all tanks and Phys Ranged. The problem is, nothing requires you to use them. But this is an encounter design issue and not a job issue.

As an edit, forgot to mention Phys ranged also have access to a bind.

[MagiusNecros]

What's sad is we used to have elements of these variables in PvE content. All jobs used to have some form of crowd control or utility, primarily stuns and slows, and old raids did require them to solve mechanics. A lot of these abilities have been removed which means those kinds of mechanics can no longer be used until we are given the tools we need back, which is why I'm sceptical of how far the encounter only approach to DT can take us. Getting to choose which pushback to mitigate or gap to close every minute or so doesn't really cut it by comparison. Not to mention things like Goad, Manashift, hell even aggro management being flushed down the toilet. They aren't even tied to individual job identity or complexity. I wish those things had been iterated on instead of outright deleted.

It's been eroded away for streamlining. Crowd Control and debuffs has been relegated to PvP or Blue Mage. Maybe Beastmaster in future. DoTs have also slowly been removed. Very few classes have DoTs anymore and if they do only like 1 at best.

Ironically Blue Mage has the most DoTs out of any class now. Usually 3 but can go up to 4-7 depending on spell slots.

Hydro Pull + Ram's Voice is hype just about anywhere.

And we can go waaaaaaaaaaaay back when PLD could stunlock enemies with repeated Shield Bashes until they added Stun resist(internal 1 min cooldown per level of resist) or later on with them removing Dark Dance and Dark Passenger for the Parry + Blind Dodge Tank stuff on DRK. Risky but rewarding to pull off for good MP management.

Or the sheer joy of setting up all your DoTs and spreading them with Bane and Festering to just melt mobs and bosses alike.

It'll be interesting where DT takes us or if it's Meleewalker 2.0.

[Rekh]

A better idea is for Carbuncle to be a filler summon.. to pay respect to its ACN roots.

Then, using Ifrit as example, you call out the egi version of the primal, order it around like Carbuncle all while you amass aether. When you have the needed amount of aether, Enkindle lights up, ifrit egi dissipates, then ifrit shows up, does his signature move, and leaves. Then summoning egis go on cooldown and are forced to summon carbuncle.(filler summon). Do filler stuff with it rhen when summoning egis are available again, call whatever egi you like. Rinse and repeat.

Now how will Phoenix and Bahamut fit into this? They will not have egi forms but instead, you will have fit the requirements of its summoning while doing your normal rotations. To spice it up, the rituals change from time ro time... think of combining BRD songs and DNC steps. Doing the right ritutals will fill the gauge faster. Once full, Enkindle Bahamut and Enkindle Phoenix lights up and you are given the choice what to summon. Once any of them are out, Carbuncle or the other egs will withdraw and you are now ordering Bahamut and Phoenix, when their timer expires or ordered to, they will cast their signature spell then leave, like MCH

Great ideas overall, really like the core principles of carbuncle and the rituals for the demis. Something like this is 100 times better than ridiculous summoning of primals every minute. In a 40 minute alliance raid you literally summoned a primal around 30 time. I don't know what it is with square enix, but nuance and and not going to the extremes is a foreign concept to them from what I've seen. Our ciriticism of smn might just push them to removing all summons but bahamut if we're not careful. Their reasoning "you wanted less summoning per 2 minutes."

[Aravell]

Monk plays nothing like Paladin, which automatically invalidates what you said. Different roles? Ok, Monk plays differently to Dragoon.

While jobs don't play exactly the same, there are an increasing amount of similarities that you can't deny.

Jobs with 0 to 100 gauge that increases with 1-2-3 and has a button to increase it by 50: WAR, SAM, NIN, MCH, RPR

Jobs that have very similar damage profiles: NIN and MNK

Jobs that press an ability and then spam the same button multiple times: WAR (Inner Release), PLD (Requiescat), DRK (Delirium), MCH (Hypercharge)

Jobs that predominantly mash only 1 or 2 buttons throughout the encounter: WHM, SCH, AST, SGE, SMN

All these similarities blur the lines and make each job feel more and more like the same. MNK and NIN may play differently if you really focus on what you're doing and what buttons you're pressing, but the feeling of gameplay and the damage profiles are undeniably similar (Fast attacking brawler with button input minigame for a big hit).

Now lets look at the DT changes, more jobs got a new attack that's unlocked by pressing 2 minute button that you use in buffs, previously it was SAM'S thing (Ikishoten > Ogi Namikiri), that's going to blur the lines even further during burst windows.

[Striker44]

They oversimplify the gameplay to draw in new players. The old guard is just the elephant in the room at this point. Shame they continually forget or disregard how they got this far.

Things like this (from the end of Page 1) tend to amuse me. They think the graphic that goes with it shows how SE has "lost their way", without realizing it actually just proves SE right.

Step 1 to Failure - An unhealthy obsession with graphic quality

We're up to 7.0 and the dev team is finally doing its first significant graphics upgrade. Definitely no such obsession there.

Lesson 1 - Never forget the fans / Lesson 2 - Fun comes first

Again, exactly what SE is doing. The game continues to have fan-service galore, and they recognize that their primary audience is casual players who don't want overly complicated systems, but rather something engaging that they can still just have fun with and not feel the need to be perfect or making the game their "job". (See Destiny 2 for a good example of what happens when a dev team listens to the loudest voices rather than the bulk of their playerbase.)

Lesson 4 - Don't forget your roots

FFXIV remains first and foremost an FF game. Meaning a primary focus on storytelling. What good is the story if only a select portion of the playerbase gets to actually experience all of it? The emphasis remains on storytelling rather than complex systems, borrowed power, endless grinds. Note: Not forgetting your roots != never changing anything about your game. If you don't evolve with the times, you get stuck in the past, and that will render you irrelevant quite quickly. Groups of any sort survive by staying true to their core, while simultaneously keeping up with changing times and constantly seeking new members.

[ty_taurus]

Again, exactly what SE is doing. The game continues to have fan-service galore, and they recognize that their primary audience is casual players who don't want overly complicated systems, but rather something engaging that they can still just have fun with and not feel the need to be perfect or making the game their "job". (See Destiny 2 for a good example of what happens when a dev team listens to the loudest voices rather than the bulk of their playerbase.)

Except no one has necessarily been asking for more simplification, nor are we suffering from an epidemic of casual players being walled by normal content because of job design. I see no reason to believe that the game would be any less loved by casual players if the level of complexity did not change from even Heavensward, which for the record is not what most people unhappy with job design are asking for anyway. Stormblood is. They never needed to be perfect or make this game their "job" to enjoy 95% of the game, and the 5% where they do, they still need to be good enough to clear anyway. What problem has this aggressive simplification solved? Were people leaving because the combat system was too complicated? Were players expressing disinterest in trying FFXIV because of the job design complexity of a past expansion specifically?

Show me receipts that this simplification has either prevented loss or generated gain--either of which must be entirely because of the simplification and not because of any other factor. You can't say "Endwalker has more players" because that is not why more people joined FFXIV, unless you can provide evidence to suggest otherwise.

Meanwhile the threshold of simplicity the players invested in this game's combat system are willing to accept has been crossed for a lot of people, and we have receipts of people over the years who have stopped playing FFXIV because of this simplification. This will only continue to bleed players as the simplification intensifies, and while that may not be a significant enough hemorrhage of players to actually hurt FFXIV, what value is it bringing to the game otherwise? Satisfying players who were already satisfied? Why is a happy medium too much to ask for?

[Rithy255]

Hard disagree. Monk plays nothing like Paladin, which automatically invalidates what you said. Different roles? Ok, Monk plays differently to Dragoon. Again, instantly invalidates the point.

machinist plays differently to Bard which plays differently to Dancer, Summoner plays differently to Black mage who plays differently to Red Mage.

I could go on, you need to be more specific.

When you look at Tank & Healers, they do "play" the same as one another, Tanks generally don't have "interesting rotations" enough to vastly be different a example being DRK Vs PLD, Drk's main differences are that it has high APM (which mind you DRK's being slown down pretty heavily in DT), While PLD has more spam gcd's in general (that you get from your 1, 2, 3), Both aren't very interesting enough in variety while technically being different in reality both are very bland, the argument could be said they're "both tanks!" but that doesn't really matter with FF14 design because tanking is designed to be as bare bones as it can be, anything "unique" about being a tank has been pretty much removed from the game. Personally I think tanks should have way more rotational variety.

I don't really need to debate healers do I? I hope not.

For DPS, I actually agree with you Jobs like Monk vs Dragoon don't play the same, for the most part DPS are fine, Reaper & Summoner I dislike but I'm happy that theirs jobs for beginners (Although with summoner they need more casts per minute), "2 Minute meta" can effect this as we generally have jobs designed around bursts, I do think 2 minute meta hurts variety a bit but doesn't completely remove variety but it does sort of hinder it. I feel as if Melee are pretty "bland" as in theirs no sort of melee that deviates from the standard structure of rotation based jobs, such as having a melee with a lot of proc based gameplay ect. I'll add that I think 2 minute meta is a big reason why jobs feel the same as most jobs work towards that big burst, then cycle on a basic rotation until that big burst, hence why even if a job feels different theirs a lot of similarities to even the most "different" of jobs.

When people mention Job variety (aka jobs are samey, in the sense they don't bring anything unique on the table) I think some people want certain jobs to offer more then just rotation variety, which is another topic for another day, But I feel as the main issue comes in tank and healer design where both roles in general are suffering from having jobs mesh, all being builder spenders or in healers case just being press one button, Cooldowns/support on those jobs are pretty much the same, with small room for differences.

[Aravell]

Show me receipts that this simplification has either prevented loss or generated gain--either of which must be entirely because of the simplification and not because of any other factor. You can't say "Endwalker has more players" because that is not why more people joined FFXIV, unless you can provide evidence to suggest otherwise.

They can't show you any receipts because there are none. Population growth cannot be directly attributed to one thing and one thing only. That's why when asked this question, people can only reply with "Shadowbringers and Endwalker has more players than Stormblood" and refuse to elaborate further.

Surely it has to be the simplified jobs that bring in the players, right? Surely it can't be that Shadowbringers has the most hyped story after the expansion that many regards as having the weakest story. Surely it can't be that Endwalker is the climax of a multi-year long epic saga that many want to see to the end. Surely Dawntrail won't do well because of the graphical update and other major QoL stuff. No, it has to be entirely the simplified jobs!

[ty_taurus]

They can't show you any receipts because there are none. Population growth cannot be directly attributed to one thing and one thing only. That's why when asked this question, people can only reply with "Shadowbringers and Endwalker has more players than Stormblood" and refuse to elaborate further.

Surely it has to be the simplified jobs that bring in the players, right? Surely it can't be that Shadowbringers has the most hyped story after the expansion that many regards as having the weakest story. Surely it can't be that Endwalker is the climax of a multi-year long epic saga that many want to see to the end. Surely Dawntrail won't do well because of the graphical update and other major QoL stuff. No, it has to be entirely the simplified jobs!

If we could somehow get metrics on what type of effect job simplification has on the population of players, that would be a different story, but it's impossible to do this because each expansion is not just a change in jobs, but dozens of different attributes of the game. Even simply the time that an expansion comes out can have an effect on someone's interest in the game, so we don't really have a way to isolate this metric to gauge its exact impact in a vacuum.

But we can see what people say and how people react to the game. I would be shocked if someone could name a single person who's approach to an expansion like Shadowbringers or Endwalker would look something like this: "You know, FFXIV has always been too complicated, but since I read they're streamlining job design, I think I want to play it now." Because as you said, it's the story that has driven players to try FFXIV (and the increase in the game's marketing budget). You can find dozens of examples of people talking about hearing how good the story is, and total radio silence on people talking about how people hype up the job design. The most I could imagine would be hyping up the job system in the sense that you can play different jobs on a single character, which has nothing to do with the design of the jobs themselves.