What is your RPG playstyle?

[ty_taurus]

I've been thinking for awhile that the current FF14 is less of an "RPG" and more of a "mid-paced action game with mild RPG elements". I in no way want to put words in your mouth, but I personally wonder if that might explain why you're not finding your desired RPG playstyle here?

I mean, FFXIV is an MMORPG... "RPG" is literally in the genre name. But regardless, if the issue of me not finding my playstyle in FFXIV is because of the genre, then wouldn't my issue be that there would never have been a job that fit my style ever in FFXIV? Scholar very much did for the first 6 years of the game's lifespan.

[LilimoLimomo]

I mean, FFXIV is an MMORPG... "RPG" is literally in the genre name.

I'm right there with ya! And I think that's part of why it's taken me this long to look past the name and "genre" and really think about what activities the game asks me to do. And when I look at that, I don't see much RPG going on there, at least not in the combat.

But regardless, if the issue of me not finding my playstyle in FFXIV is because of the genre, then wouldn't my issue be that there would never have been a job that fit my style ever in FFXIV? Scholar very much did for the first 6 years of the game's lifespan.

Good question! You're the expert on you, but my guess would be that over time, FF14 has mechanically changed, and with those its gameplay — and thus its genre — have shifted as well. When I started the game in ARR, the game was much different than it is now; there were things like sub-jobs and aggro management and fire materia. Without getting distracted by the tantalizing conversation of whether these changes made the game better or worse, we can see that in the past it used to be possible to actually customize the abilities and resistances you had in combat. Those kinds of choices are something I relate to RPG's, and they're now absent from the game. I could be wrong, but I don't think it would be a controversial statement to at the very least say that the game is currently less of an RPG than it was previously. So it's possible that at some point, the amount of RPG juice the game was giving you fell below your minimum requirements.

Though broadly speaking, I'd be surprised if there weren't numerous factors at play...but this might be among them.

[ty_taurus]

Good question! You're the expert on you, but my guess would be that over time, FF14 has mechanically changed, and with those its gameplay — and thus its genre — have shifted as well. When I started the game in ARR, the game was much different than it is now; there were things like sub-jobs and aggro management and fire materia. Without getting distracted by the tantalizing conversation of whether these changes made the game better or worse, we can see that in the past it used to be possible to actually customize the abilities and resistances you had in combat. Those kinds of choices are something I relate to RPG's, and they're now absent from the game. I could be wrong, but I don't think it would be a controversial statement to at the very least say that the game is currently less of an RPG than it was previously. So it's possible that at some point, the amount of RPG juice the game was giving you fell below your minimum requirements.

A lot of the shift in FFXIV's design direction is stuff that revolves around job design more than the design of the jobs themselves. There are examples of actions that wouldn't work with modern FFXIV, like Cleric Stance, Hawk's Eye, Quelling Strikes, Goad and other TP related actions, Awareness, Sustain, etc. But the bulk of job design would still function. Like there's nothing about old Scholar that would create conflict with modern design except for Fey Light's attack speed boost which is an unwelcome buff due to how attack speed is not something most jobs want an unaccounted-for amount of. You'd probably need to add some of Scholar's newer resources to help provide it with enough resources to compete with the other healers, but if we were to bring back Miasma, Shadowflare, Miasma II, and Bane, that doesn't break Scholar.

The changes we have are not made because they must be made. They're made because someone in some seat of power wants to see the game streamlined even more than it already is.