DPS Simplification - Just do Ultimates!

[HikariKurosawa]

This is the hardest cope of all time.

It's a satirical post but do you really think everyone wants complex input strings in a video game? Look at how popular games like elden ring are and most people only use R1 to attack.

Believe it or not, a lot of people prefer to focus on the encounter and don't like their rotation to be extremely demanding. Look at how popular WoW is. The rotations in that game are way simpler and way more freeform than anything in FFXIV. Look at the popularity of classic WoW. Mages literally only cast one spell(frostbolt) for the majority of content.

I'm starting to think that a lot of people complaining just don't enjoy the game they play. It's weird too because you want every single job to pander to your own preferences. Do you think the experience of people who prefer more simplistic job design don't deserve consideration? Your main job is reaper and you're complaining about a lack of complexity. Why not try maining black mage? Why not play pictomancer when it comes out? Why not ninja? Why the simplest melee job in the game?

Hikari i never labeled you as Troll.
At best i called you a contrarian.
So you yourself gave you that Label.

Yes i could optimze more but that will hardly change that Dragoon lost the interlocking part of its kit or gives back Astrologians Individual Card buffs.
It also doesnt change diverse other problems of the current design, which peak is probably the current version of Summoner. Which gets a lot of hate from both sides of the globe.

"It's hard for me to think their MO is anything but trolling."

"I’d like to think the fact we have such trolls in my dumpster fire of a thread just means we’ve actually highlighted a real issue."

I'm not a contrarian though I just enjoy the current direction of the game design. I disagree with what is being posted on the forums, but that doesn't make me a contrarian.

Dragoon lost a clunky mechanic that felt bad to manage and made the dungeon experience horrible. Smn is arguably the only option available for people who want simple job design in this entire game. I think it is good for more options to open up for people who don't want complexity. If you want complexity, there are plenty of jobs and one more coming in around a week. This game has WAY more options available for people who want complex job design than it does for people who want simple job design.

[Flana]

Why not try maining black mage? Why not play pictomancer when it comes out? Why not ninja? Why the simplest melee job in the game?

Why not actually make a job to fill that niche, instead of lobotomizing one that already exists?
Also I have no idea why you think me playing Reaper is a gotcha, I like the aesthetic. That's all.

[HikariKurosawa]

Why not actually make a job to fill that niche, instead of lobotomizing one that already exists?
Also I have no idea why you think me playing Reaper is a gotcha, I like the aesthetic. That's all.

You made it clear yourself. You like the aesthetic of reaper. That's why you play it. Casuals who want a stress free job shouldn't be pigeon holed into playing smn or whatever other simple job there is if we're talking about a hypothetical where a small fraction of the jobs are made simple so the rest can be complex. People of all skill levels and dedication should feel free to play the job they want to play and they should feel like they are able to do a good job with it.

This is why I commend the dev team, because they are shifting the difficulty to content and enabling more people to enjoy more jobs at all levels of skill. The people who want difficult content should celebrate it too, because all content is made with a target overall difficulty that is in consideration of the balance between job difficulty and encounter difficulty. Easier jobs means they can make harder content while still meeting the same target overall difficulty. There is a chemistry to it, and regardless of what the most hardcore players want, the devs are going to make content at this level of difficulty because they know what they are doing. So if you really want hard content, you should want for simpler job design. This is how you get harder dungeons, harder raids, harder everything.

Think of it like budget, you have 100 dollars to spend on the content regardless, if less of that budget is spent on job difficulty, you get more difficulty from the encounters. More spent on job difficulty = less spent on encounter difficulty. Whether you like it or not, the devs know how much "budget" they want to put into the content. You're not going to get both harder content and harder jobs. They are selling a product after all and know how it works as a successful business model.

I think a big problem is, most people posting on this forum don't view the game as a business and it results in some pretty far fetched perspectives that are never going to be applicable in reality. This is what we are working with, best to keep it real with you.

[Flana]

snip

You're trying really hard to dodge the actual argument made, and its hilariously obvious. The argument about it being a business is pure nonsense, because they are already committed to adding new jobs every expansion. So I'll ask, again, why not just make new jobs to fit this so called niche of players that only want the most braindead of job design? Pictomancer could have been a 3 button snoozefest. Viper could have been a 3 button snoozefest. They did not have to lobotomize a job that already existed and utterly destroying its archetype to satisfy that niche when they are already designing new jobs.

New jobs, by the way, that still haven't filled the niche that Summoner used to fill. Want a DoT job? Get out, you're not welcome here. Want a pet job? Just wait for a limited job thats banned from doing anything relevant or evergreen. Wow what a great business decision. Truly what we should all be learning from.

[Ayalu]

Hikari i never labeled you as Troll.
At best i called you a contrarian.
So you yourself gave you that Label.

Yes i could optimze more but that will hardly change that Dragoon lost the interlocking part of its kit or gives back Astrologians Individual Card buffs.
It also doesnt change diverse other problems of the current design, which peak is probably the current version of Summoner. Which gets a lot of hate from both sides of the globe.

[Ayalu]

WoW is hardly simple as that.
And its also not streamline in itself its...less call it difficult community and heck even devs might enforce a certain meta but it has way way more freedom of choice in its skill trees.
And the Devs play arms race with third party tools and what else i could mention here. It has different problems as FF14 as it is a different game.

Well you seem mostly complain about other people Miss Kurosawa
Instead of telling us why all the people that give feedback and debate are wrong how about you share what design elements you really like and you would dislike if they would vanish.

[HikariKurosawa]

Instead of telling us why all the people that give feedback and debate are wrong how about you share what design elements you really like and you would dislike if they would vanish.

Sure, I like that they are removing stuff like eye of the dragon management, I like that they are making efforts to remove cooldown drift from the game. I like that they are shifting from job design being complex to encounter design being complex, because it enables players to operate more consistently at the level of play they engage in and they can find difficulty in the harder encounters if that's what they want. This is most clear in the latest ultimate encounters compared to the earliest ones, with TEA being a shift toward more complexity.

I like that healer dps is 2-3 buttons because it enables you to focus entirely on healing while the damage output is more or less subconscious aside from dot uptime, I like that the 2 minute meta exists because it encourages the team to line their potency up and enables more complex encounter design because of the natural tempo it creates.

Most importantly though, I just like how the game's direction is headed. I believe the game is in good hands and I think the future is better than the past and present. The game is becoming more athletic and less based on pre-requisite knowledge. Things make sense intuitively and there is less need for external resources because things flow together naturally in a sensible way. It's becoming less contrived and more fluent, it is clear that the devs know what they are doing.

[Ayalu]

hank you for taking the time to express your desires.

However, I would sadly say that encounter and dungeon design has been simplified, along with general class design. Nowadays, most dungeons basically boil down to corridors you fight through. There are puzzle dungeons, and bosses tend to involve a lot of "dodge the orange fields."
Of course, this is just the observation of a casual player, but even as a casual player, I dislike the devolution of some of my favorite classes. Not every class needs to be complicated; some should be simpler than others. Classes should be different, after all.
Having all classes be simple is as bad as all being very complicated.

Some things one could do without changing much one example would be the tank rebalancing. Changing of numeral values on some of the tank classes.
Regarding encounter design, they could use more condition mechanics that the healer can remove with Esuna, which is something only a healer can provide. This could also counter the "no healer needed/wanted" mentality that seems to be prevalent.
Hard Version of Dungeon could also make a return, which would be optional but would deliver potential harder dungeon aswell.
There are more things one could mention here.
---
At the End i will say we all want to enjoy the game and a lot of feedback over years got completly ignored which leads to frustration in a lot of people.

[velswen]

Horrible take! Even if I want to do Extreme/Savage/Ultimates exclusively, I can't! I have to run dungeons over and over to level, dungeons over and over to get tomestones to get gear, dungeons/roulettes over and over if I want to play with my friends or only have 30-45 minutes to play and not enough to form a high-end party and get much done. "Just do ultimates" only works if you ignore how people actually play this game, which requires you to engage with its other content consistently.

Additionally, Ultimates specifically are a huge time ask; much more so than Extreme or Savage, so wanting jobs to keep the latter two even more engaging is a completely normal and reasonable thing to expect.

[KageTokage]

The problem with XIV's gameplay in general in that it's not dynamic enough to remain engaging after enough repetition of content.

There is only one "optimal" way to do each job's rotation given the emphasis on the two minute meta and the overly scripted encounter design isn't doing it any favors, either.