DT Job Reworks - Unconfident Developers and Poor Communication

[W00by]

I mean, the job has no job direction or identity. That's its biggest flaw, there is no reason it should exist. Naturally any design of it - no matter who does it - is going to be a lot of faffing about as there's no goal to reach, you can just randomly toss ideas at it and keep some random ones.

This isn't a thread entirely about Viper or changes to Viper, though, so regardless of your feelings about Viper, I think we can confidently say that Samurai, Black Mage, Monk, and Dragoon have both Job identities and design directions that have existed in the past. Why are those jobs getting reworked, unreworked, reworks announced but not actually implemented, and hotly protested changes? If it was just Viper, I could chalk it up to "new jobs are hard at this point," but they're clearly struggling in the design of several jobs, not just Viper. I mean, speaking from just here on the forums, I've even seen complaints about the new abilities on jobs like Dancer and Ninja which received relatively minimal changes. Oh, and they accidentally made Reaper even more gauge negative, which a lot of people are really unhappy with, too. And Machinist is mechanically really weak, which was a problem they tried to solve in 6.3, but now they've got that problem again? Even when they've solved it deliberately in the past? There's clearly something going on here, right?

And, moving back to the subject of Viper for a minute, I don't think it has absolutely no direction or identity. It's clearly supposed to be the rogue/ranger hybrid of the game, with appeals in the "skillful and stylish" department. But many of the changes they've proposed or implemented, like the removal of positionals or Noxious Gash, hurt the skillful rogue/hunter fantasy a lot, so it's inconsistent. I know some people thought of Noxious Gash like a "Hunter's Mark" from other threads, and rogues sometimes have positional mechanics in other MMOs, so the fact that they want to discard these things hurts a fantasy that, like you say, some people already struggle to notice or buy into.

Also, in terms of design direction, it certainly seemed like they had a goal for the job. It was supposed to be the high APM job. To quote the FanFest where it was announced, Viper was described as a "fast paced, technical-yet-stylish" job. If we interpret this bit of advertising as a sort of mission statement, we can reasonably deduce they wanted to make it fast paced, technical, and stylish. Which is why I'm so baffled and surprised by how unconfident they are in their fast-paced job. They obviously deliberately wanted Viper to be high APM, or it wouldn't have the highest APM in the game -- but then, after they ship the highest APM job that they designed that way on purpose, they're terrified that it'll be "too busy"? Like, dev team, you made the job! If you thought a high APM job was going to be too busy, then why the heck did you even create one to begin with? Why did they ship something they weren't confident in? Especially if they were working on it "until the last minute," you'd think they'd've found a solution.

I obviously don't think Viper as a high APM job is a problem even if it makes it unappealing to certain players, but they clearly thought it would be disliked even before launch. And it doesn't speak well of their internal design direction or decision making ability when they made something that they didn't think was going to succeed, on purpose, intentionally, and then changed it afterwards when it had already succeeded. Like, read that again. It just sounds bad.

There is something going on internally, and I don't like it.

[Carighan]

This isn't a thread entirely about Viper or changes to Viper, though, so regardless of your feelings about Viper, I think we can confidently say that Samurai, Black Mage, Monk, and Dragoon have both Job identities and design directions that have existed in the past.

Errr... no?

I mean, Black Mage kinda, yes, don't lump them in with the others tbh. Yeah their identity is IMO really really bad, but at least they have a somewhat unique one with their ebb&flow gameplay that actually has a relevant effect on your decisions and moment-to-moment play.

The others? In particular the melee jobs? They all lack design direction, it's just that Viper also lacks a design concept, they're just a demo job for how superior autocombos are (which they are, but that's not the point and doesn't make a dent in job identity either way). Melee jobs are utterly generic, with the exact same concept applied to every one of them, and gameplay so similar that like tanks you can find "equivalent" keyboard layouts when swapping between them as many abilities have correspondent abilities in other jobs that while sometimes different in effect are used in the exact same way as far as moment-to-moment game flow goes.

That's in fact the big thing here: There was no point adding a sixth melee DPS when the existing 5 ones have only enough ideas for maaaaybe 2 jobs. Where is the random proc chance based melee? Where is the melee without positionals? The one with all positionals? The melee with an extended ranged phase? The pet-job melee like the old EQ1 beastmaster? The melee healer? Nothing. They're all just "have a side and a rear positional and maybe a raid buff, and a strict rotation because we hate people having to think during combat". 6 melee jobs should all have utterly different designs, but as it stands, they have the thinnest different color veneer over the same brittle drywall.

[W00by]

Errr... no?

snip

You need to note the distinct wording of my comment. I did not say "right now, all of the melees are not homogenous with great design directions!" As a matter of fact, a solid chunk of this thread and my comments is about how the recent design directions for Samurai, Black Mage, Monk, and Dragoon are weak. But I said they had Job identities and design directions that existed in the past, not right now. And I still believe in that.

Monk was the melee with all positionals. It had 6 positionals, one on each step of the combo, with each form having both a side and rear positional. In exchange for this, it had no raid buff and was less based around burst timing and more based around optimal GCD upkeep with the Greased Lightning and Twin Snakes buff. This was a design direction.

Samurai was a highly resource-management based job. In the past, Hagakure was a 40s cooldown that was DPS optimal to use at 3 Sen, even when compared to a Kaiten'd Midare Setsugekka. Balancing your Sen and Kenki to be able to Hagakure on cooldown, keep Higanbana up, Kaiten every Iaijutsu, and hit all your positionals (which gave you your Kenki in the past, not potency) was a unique resource-based job design that was clear and determinate.

Dragoon has of course changed a lot over time, but once upon a time Gierskogul spent Life of the Dragoon and Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrusts returned 15 seconds to you so that you could Gierskogul more often. It had continuous upkeep, which they eventually transitioned to the Blood of the Dragon style design in Stormblood with eye phases that happened every 90s and kept buff phases variable. With Blood on a 90s timer, Litany on a 180s timer, and your personal buff on a 60s timer, Dragoon had incredibly varied, nuanced, and diverse buff phases.

These are design directions that existed, again, in the past. So why do they not exist anymore? That's what I'm getting at here. We don't disagree, you just misunderstood what I said. As for whether or not the jobs have IDENTITIES, these are all Final Fantasy kingpins that are consistently represented across lots of the games. They definitely have those, and they have had design directions in the past, so I fail to see why it's impossible they couldn't in the future.

If you don't mind my asking, when did you start playing? I don't ask from a gatekeepy perspective--I'm actually really curious, because I think it influences people's perception of the history of these jobs.

[Carighan]

If you don't mind my asking, when did you start playing? I don't ask from a gatekeepy perspective--I'm actually really curious, because I think it influences people's perception of the history of these jobs.

Beginning of Shadowbringers. I had the game since mid-Stormblood, but never got into it at the time because I was still playing GW2 back then. Then when my guild there went mostly inactive I picked up FFXIV again which had just released ShB anyways. And yeah you're right, from all I can read this was much more unique in the past, like most MMORPGs the devs eventually homogenize based on the player-desire to play whatever they want in high-end content which requires tight balancing which naturally erodes class identities.

I should note that I've ... seen some designs. I started MMO gaming back in 1999 with some M59, and since then have always had an MMO as my filler game of choice, EQ1 then DAoC then WoW then GW2 and now FFXIV. FFXIV unique does very little with its jobs, however it's not the most homogenized game I have played (that'd be GW2, for entirely different mechanical reasons than here though). And in itself it's not a bad thing, but it requires a careful balance if identity of gameplay feel to pull of mechanical homogenization and lack of gameplay identity but still giving lore identity and making moment-to-moment play feel unique. GW2 kinda could do this at first, it did however fall apart later on. WoW struggled hard with this at some point around late WotLK and early Cataclysm, and later overcame it somewhat.

If I had to guess, FFXIV already has a very strong visual identity, so ideally they'd lean heavily into animations and visuals to promote a different feel while keeping the underlying mechanics to be mostly similar.

[Alex1337]

The SAM change is hilarious because it actually made the job interesting again, albeit for a short period of time.

I firmly believe the SAM change was accidentally "good", they had to get one right... right?