Disappointed With XIV Direction

[IDontPetLalas]

Not exactly, it had a bit more room for player skill expression. But ultimately, I am really doubting that this is what would make people "click" better with the game.
I agree with you all that job design should improve though, that's undeniable.
I am just very much doubting that this would change the early game experience much.
I think the fights design is much more linked to that experience than the job design.

Imagine if a game had a scale between 1-10 for both job design and fight design. Now, I will stick, for the moment to just normal and mid-core content - so , up to extreme, for PVE, also including PvP design .

I would give FFXIV a 3, maybe a 4 if I'm feeling particularly generous, on a given day, for job design. I would give fight design a 4.

Well, this may not relate exactly with your comment, but I'll try to explain what I like, I why DT is now less enjoyable for me:


For jobs: there is no/little skill expression- there is one *right* way to play each job, with no choice whatsoever, and that one way is supposed to fit all encounter difficulties and all content types/party sizes, party compositions. If you don't like that way- too bad. If the dev team makes a poor design choice- too bad- wait --- way too long

For fight design: do you like to dodge? would you like to dodge more and more stuff? yes, this is the peak of fight design! forget unique dungeon designs, or roles.. or puzzles. I never thought the day would come when I would miss the math boss, but it has come.

So in very early game experience - I would be looking at the job design more than the fight design, personally, however I would , as I progress expect more of the fight design to creep in and impact the player experience. Personally I would prefer more complexity in the jobs even if that means less complexity in the encounters, there are probably other people who would completely disagree.

[EdwinChucklenuts]

Bro said there isn't plenty to do then discredited a bunch of things that are in the game available for him to do. It's just not shit you wanna do, which is fair, but come on now. There's more than I will ever be able to do in this game, and I'm cool with that.

[AnnRam]

99% of the content its PVE and yet Square somehow decided to make jobs the most boring/generic ones.

[Zakuyia]

Bro if you been playing since 2014 and still don’t have literally every item in the game given Gil is meaningless just give up at this point

To be fair I been playing for 8 years I don't have everything XD

[Zakuyia]

Hate to be that guy but - not really, Yoshi-P has confirmed that the Viper change was not because of player feedback, but because of internal feedback. And checking the english DPS forums, more and more people protest the constant simplifications. Hells, even Yoshi-P himself stated that they went to far in terms of simplification (which hasn't deterred them from continuing this path, but that's a different topic really).

I HATE TO BE THE GUY AND CORRECT YOU. You but its true why you think we dont have clarince stance, or how tanks use to beable to switch from offensive to defensive stance, scholar use to have 2 dots to manage, summoner use to be harder, so on an so on. You know what happened p complained that they couldn't handle entire thing. Ppl complained about drk knights blackest knight caling it too over powered it got nerfed. You act like the forum is innocent from all of this. Hate to break it futher to you had the forum not broke out in all war against Dawn trail difficulty they may have nuettered it as well. You may like your job but the minority will always compain. Why u think dancer is no where near as strong as it was in ShadowBringer there were ppl made it was so powerful. I have seen ppl demanding nerfs for pictomancer.....so yeah please stop defending a player base who complains. The player base is just as in fault as the devs are.

Thats all.

[ovIm]

so yeah please stop defending a player base who complains. The player base is just as in fault as the devs are.

My point was purely about Viper feedback in this regard - everything else you said is rather correct. Yes, a lot of the shit we have now is because of people complaining about having to actually play the game. I've been with this game since 2.0, and I've seen how people asked to make jobs less frictional more and more.
Both the devs and the players are at fault here.

[GrizzlyTank]

Storywise this trajectory started with Zenos and him being used to gut the political in the stry.

Gameplay-wise it's cause the devs seems to prefer playing safe, a tad too safe.

[CNitsah]

I said it many times, the removal of exploratory zone hurt the game very badly. Despite the "go play other games" team pretending FFXIV is not designed to be a game where you sink hours, an engagement content build to last has always been part of the game. The relicks in ARR, the relics and Diadem 1.0 in HW, Eureka in SB, Bozja Zadnor in ShB. There always was content for people that wanted to sink a lot of time in the game, engough to keep you occupied with the game if you didn't want to go play other game. You could argue on the quality of the content and it could be improved, but it was there, and filled the role of "keeping the middle 15-80 percentile wanting to even come back".

With that gone, the game has basically been in crisis since the release of 6.3, and SE still decided to go the "business as usual" route. Disappointing, but not really surprising from SE.

Job design and balancing might be problems, but I feel people overestimate their importance. Even if those were perfect, we would still be bored because there would be nothing to do with those perfect jobs.

[Commander_Justitia]

its true why you think we dont have clarince stance, or how tanks use to beable to switch from offensive to defensive stance, scholar use to have 2 dots to manage, summoner use to be harder, so on an so on. You know what happened p complained that they couldn't handle entire thing

You saw that development of removing debuff and dots across the board since after stormblood expansion. If it is Paladin Goringblade, Darkknights Delirium, Reprisal, Dark Passenger or Scourge, Warriors Fracture, WhiteMages Aero3, Scholars Eye for an Eye, Miasma,Shadowflare, Astros whole fun aspect of giving players buffed extended cards...And you could go on with every other job. Now there is 1 dot mostly per job. Less cc effects. Less support skills.
Some say they did it because in encounters with a huge number of players, like in Eureka where 50 people hit the same target, the boss will have a dot/debuff limit - the same happened to me in Void Arc at times with just 24 people as Blackmage. You can't apply e.g. a Thundercloud proc on the target, because the scholars dotted it to the max, so the target would resist the additional dot, while you lose your proc. And SE smart way to fix it, is to limit the effects, rather than fix their engine and code to allow it. For some reason they also got rid of all the "finisher" skills that can be only pressed once a target is below a certain HP% threshold, like Mercy Stroke (which was a cross skill for melees), Samurais Ageha, and Bards Misery End. They are afraid of button bloat I guess, so they removed them. We get the minimal required skills for raiding, niche skills that could be used for skill expression are removed.