Easing things for new players & Job Changes

[smallrpgfan]

I feel think that continuing to improve older content, like adding more updated Hall of Novice tutorials and better explanations can help significantly. I think that utilizing the "checkbox agreement" UI like on the first dungeon Satasha for MORE active help windows could ensure players actually read through and understand what to do.

I think adding better accessibility to the game is great, but I don't think that needs to come at the cost of nerfing Jobs and in game content. I think that learning the in game Jobs is half the fun and experience! I think it would be better suited to rework exisiting Jobs with better balancing or restore certain more complex aspects for some Jobs. Having a variety across Jobs can be fun and engaging for players.

I think that being able to balance catering content to newer players as well as your older ones is crucial. If the game just focused on mechnics soley, it could get boring over time. Both the Job gameplay + mechanics together is what makes it engaging and fun!

Please reconsider the changes to Black Mage and other Jobs overall.

[Khryseis_Astra]

I recently went back to the Hall of the Novice because I wanted a skirt for glams that I had never bothered getting. lol (Side note, all the Brand New stuff should be dyeable!)

While I was there, I went through the new Tactical ones, explaining all the markers. It would be a huge undertaking, but I really think the game in general and new players especially would benefit from having this kind of tutorial for basic job rotations. With the sheer amount of jobs we have, I don’t see that happening, but with level cap being at 100, and some new players getting story and/or job skips, it would be valuable. Especially since, after a certain point, new skills are added without the context of job quests, and to be fair, even in the later stages of job quests they really didn’t explain the use of new skills when you got them. More like, here’s a new button, here’s the tool tips which may or may not provide a good enough explanation, go google to figure out where the best place to use it is!

I level every job and I would find such a thing useful, especially for jobs I only play when leveling or ones that have been reworked since I played them last. But they would need to keep it updated for every job as new skills get added. The time and effort involved makes it unlikely, but I think it’s something that should happen.

[Carighan]

To me the need to tutorialize something as static and inherently non-interactive as the DPS rotations cycling 20+ buttons in entirely predictable orders that Autohotkey could use optimally hints at the actual problem: These rotations existing.

The issue here is not really a lack of tutorials, much as those would help. It's that something requiring all the brain complexity of 1-finger-death-punch's "combos" is artificially blows up to use dozens of buttons to make it appear deep in gameplay, when all it adds is a thin veneer of fake complexity over an entirely shallow system.

FFXIV has DPS gameplay that would very much benefit if subjected to GW2's class design where you are forced to just 2x5 damage abilities (of which two are autoattacks), 1 healing ability, 3 utilities and 1 ultimate, plus 1-4 class-unique abilities while most mirror stuff the other classes have in some way, shape or form. Not because that system is superior, but because it takes the lack of gameplay depth inherent in these designs serious and admits it and works with it, producing something that while not remarkably better, at least feels less boring to play.

Of course, even better would be adding actual depth to the combat in turn, ripping out 50%-75% of the raw skill count but making the remaining ones actually meaningful to use. That might still need a tutorial, though honestly a well-designed combat system should tutorialize itself.

[SubmarineAlt]

To me the need to tutorialize something as static and inherently non-interactive as the DPS rotations cycling 20+ buttons in entirely predictable orders that Autohotkey could use optimally hints at the actual problem: These rotations existing.

The issue here is not really a lack of tutorials, much as those would help. It's that something requiring all the brain complexity of 1-finger-death-punch's "combos" is artificially blows up to use dozens of buttons to make it appear deep in gameplay, when all it adds is a thin veneer of fake complexity over an entirely shallow system.

FFXIV has DPS gameplay that would very much benefit if subjected to GW2's class design where you are forced to just 2x5 damage abilities (of which two are autoattacks), 1 healing ability, 3 utilities and 1 ultimate, plus 1-4 class-unique abilities while most mirror stuff the other classes have in some way, shape or form. Not because that system is superior, but because it takes the lack of gameplay depth inherent in these designs serious and admits it and works with it, producing something that while not remarkably better, at least feels less boring to play.

Of course, even better would be adding actual depth to the combat in turn, ripping out 50%-75% of the raw skill count but making the remaining ones actually meaningful to use. That might still need a tutorial, though honestly a well-designed combat system should tutorialize itself.

It'll never stop being funny to me. People that drool this sort of take out never have the proven experience to back it up. How can you advocate dismantling a system you yourself can't even use properly? What makes you think you're qualified to speak on it? And you advocate for "actual depth?"

Your head would explode if the game was any deeper. No, you're just spouting whatever opinion you read on Reddit today. And it's pretty sad to see. Grow up. Think a little. And drop GW2. It's such a shit game.

[Valence]

It'll never stop being funny to me. People that drool this sort of take out never have the proven experience to back it up. How can you advocate dismantling a system you yourself can't even use properly? What makes you think you're qualified to speak on it? And you advocate for "actual depth?"

Your head would explode if the game was any deeper. No, you're just spouting whatever opinion you read on Reddit today. And it's pretty sad to see. Grow up. Think a little. And drop GW2. It's such a shit game.

What about the people that may have the experience? What is the required threshold exactly?
I'm not going to speak about that GW2 comparison because I have never played that game nor do I understand what this even means, but modern XIV rotations being static DDR pieces of braindead snoozefest? Yeah, sue me for having that take?

Not like i'm exactly the only one sharing it when it comes to the sorry state of XIV jobs today anyway...

[Azurarok]

XIV isn't an action combat game and we don't need more games to converge into that style either.

I enjoyed this game's combat for the detailed skill interactions its jobs had and the challenges content used to provide in maintaining its rotations, as much as it all may look like bloat from an action game viewpoint

[Carighan]

I enjoyed this game's combat for the detailed skill interactions its jobs had and the challenges content used to provide in maintaining its rotations, as much as it all may look like bloat from an action game viewpoint

Hrm, I don't necessarily mean action-game style combat though, even though the comparison to GW2 - which is much faster in many regards, but not always in a positive way IMO - might suggest that.

How do I best explain this... Basically if I got 5 buttons I use in a sequence that is static to achieve result X, that might be complex, but it's not exactly deep. In board gaming terms, where complexity often has a negative connotation, while depth has a positive one, and achieving the latter without increasing the former is the big goal to achieve, difficult as it is. So back into MMORPG terms, it's one thing to achieve a certain amount of depth with 20 buttons, it's much better to achieve even the same depth, and if you somehow could do it with 1, that'd be impressive.
Quite understandably, this means you need some interesting systems to surround these 1-20 buttons. And they should contain ~all the complexity, so you have as little of that as needed, to achieve maximum depth in the interaction between your - now limited - toolset but the complicating system they interact with. And that's the simplicity but also the difficulty behind good RPG-y combat systems: Use underlying non-trivial systems to edge maximum depth from the least needed complexity and least bloated setup. You can still bloat it later (usually in expansions etc), but the depth should never require it, and be independent from it.

Of course, without a sweeping re-implementation of most jobs it'd be difficult to achieve that. A simple approach is adding a certain reliance on procs/randomness into many/most jobs. Not necessarily in an "Ooops, all casino"-way, but just enough to force players to engage with a combat system without a static, pre-learned rotation. In fact 1-2 jobs can then have this exact static rotation, but only a minority, to contrast with the non-static nature of everyone else! How these non-static systems work should ideally be mechanically different for each class, but in FFXIV's case with so many classes, it'd be understandable if some systems are shared.

This does not mean however that we need action-y combat or a 0.5s GCD or something. Even though my comparison with GW2 maybe made it seem like I meant that. :')