Upcoming Black Mage changes make me livid

[reflettage]

Life goes on, as it always does, but I just want to put my feelings out there. I know my words sound dramatic but I really want to convey how much I love FFXIV and Black Mage, and emphasize how pained I am that the developers keep making it harder for me, and many others, to continue doing so.

It's like the developers are afraid of ANY player experiencing ANY form of ANY negative feedback while playing ANY job at ANY time. With these Black Mage changes, we won't feel the pressure of our AF timer running low in the 2nd half of Fire phase when we still have several Fire IV's to cast, because the Enochian timer is gone. We won't feel the pain of accidentally letting Firestarter fall off RIGHT before we were about to use it to turn our AF1 into AF3, because the buff is infinite. We won't feel punished for carelessly using up all of our instants, because we're no longer rooted to the spot during Fire phase without them. I wonder if the developers realize this simultaneously removes the good emotions that stem from satisfaction over playing the job well in difficult situations?

Speaking of, the threshold for playing Black Mage "well" just got a whole lot lower and I hate it. I really, truly loathe it like I've never loathed anything else in this game; even my grief over the loss of 6.5 Black Mage doesn't compare to how much I am dreading these changes. I like how current Black Mage makes me feel. I LOVED how 6.5 Black Mage made me feel, and even though the developers took that away, 7.0 Black Mage still retained enough of what I loved about it to still be fun, albeit less fun than before.

Now, these upcoming changes are removing that, too. Why???

Developers, please stop trying to make every single job equally accessible to every single player, and please stop trying to make every single job equally capable in every single encounter. I don't want to play every job, I want to play Black Mage. And I say that with full confidence because I've tried every job, leveled them all to 90 and beyond, and Black Mage is the one I love most. Black Mage is the job that makes me, and many others, passionate about playing your game. Why are you taking that away from us? Why have you BEEN taking that away from myriad other players over the years, who have seen their beloved jobs totally hollowed out one by one, never to return? Why does it feel like the people in charge of changing our jobs don't even understand the jobs they're changing beyond the most basic fundamentals? Even worse, why are these changes planned out and implemented in secret? Why are we not asked for feedback, and instead left to shout into the void after it's too late in the vague hope it reaches the people in control (and it feels like it almost never does)?

I wonder what sort of feedback makes it onto the developers' desks for this to happen. Because it definitely hasn't been that of passionate Black Mage players, or we'd have had 6.5 BLM back ages ago.

[Carighan]

and please stop trying to make every single job equally capable in every single encounter

I fully agree, but I also think even you might not quite agree if you look at where this sentiment came from.

This part, "Everyone in the same role can do all content requiring that role", began in the first expansion pack of WoW. Before that, Warriors were for example the only tanks raid bosses were designed to be tanked by. It's not that Druids and Paladins could not tank them, but in many encounters it was way tougher (one of our guild members played a bare durid and when she got the ring in MC, someone who had spontaneously joined us quite genuinely asked our guild lead to kick her, thinking she must have ninjad it because they really could not mentally imagine someone wanting to keep gearing up a druid tank). Some it was actually easier, too. The thing was, content wasn't design for non-Warrior tanks. If you had only bear tanks, and you noticed you flat out could not do content X, the devs would probably look at you like you're stupid if you told them to fix that, you opted to be unable to do the content.

In the first expansion they gave each tank their own niche instead. They were meant to be different, but equally powerful overall. Paladins were much better at aggro generation and pickup, Bear Druids could tank magic damage and DoT damage far better than the other two could, and Warriors needed the least healing by quite a margin. This did not last very long, and at the end of that expansion they dropped this and moved tanks more towards a "We're all roughly equal"-approach when the fourth tank was added. It took a few more years to finalize this though.

Importantly, later games launched against this background. Players had gotten used to maybe being behind in raid damage a bit on damage dealer, but never being a hard reason the raid could not be done. All healers can roughly heal a raid. All tanks can more or less tank it. All damage dealers do "enough" damage.

Against a backdrop of players expecting adjustments to minor damage output differences, is it any wonder that devs then in turn also remove class design differences? After all, these would naturally preclude such balance as differently-designed classes would naturally be better or worse than each other in certain scenarios. See, the huge inherent lead of Pictos in FRU vs their relative weakness in CoD. These differences are the natural result of good, unique, class design. But I don't feel like the playerbase as a whole, much as we like to ramble about "Why are you taking my Enochian timer?", "Where are my 3 Nastrond charges?!" or "Give me back my Astro cards!", would at all be ready to re-accept imbalances in the 20%++ range to account for these mechanical differences.

[reflettage]

But I don't feel like the playerbase as a whole ... would at all be ready to re-accept imbalances in the 20%+ range to account for these mechanical differences.

What I meant was, it's okay if certain fights or certain mechanics are slightly easier or harder as certain jobs just because of how said jobs work. That doesn't automatically mean the jobs are flawed or need to change. A player's perceived difficulty of a given encounter at any given point on its timeline comes primarily from the cognitive load experienced when trying to harmonize the content's mechanics with their role+job's mechanics from moment to moment. Fights are largely scripted, which acts as a baseline for difficulty that the players have no control over. The baseline difficulty is what makes something like Savage feel inaccessible to someone who can barely get through their daily Expert Roulette, and that perceived inaccessibility is why Savage is completely optional content that gates nothing but gear + some mounts and achievements behind it. FFXIV's MSQ actively gates the rest of the game behind it, making it effectively mandatory for every single player regardless of their abilities. So how can the developers make certain parts of the game both accessible and decently rewarding for everyone? Well...they can't. A story-only casual player who plays a little bit every 6 months and a hardcore multi-legend who plays a lot every day have fundamentally different needs when it comes to deriving reward and entertainment from content. This means the devs either make multiple versions of every duty and force players to segregate themselves, OR they give players multiple ways to engage with the same duties. This is a multiplayer game, you want as many people engaging in the same content as possible. Jobs are the vehicles through which players engage with the game, so the devs need to offer a vast array of jobs that vary in playstyle, mechanical complexity, and physical requirements for execution. This enables a variety of ways to experience the game and its content, therefore making the game appeal to more people in general. Don't get me wrong, job potential should absolutely NOT scale linearly with difficulty. "Harder" is not synonymous with "superior" and a player's choice of job should be largely a matter of preference. I play BLM because I like playing BLM. Experiencing FFXIV content through a Black Mage lens is extremely enjoyable for me. On the other hand, I despise playing melee DPS. Idk why, I just don't like it. That's not something the developers can fix; they would have to turn melee jobs into tanks/healers/ranged DPS for me to possibly want to choose them over literally anything else. But I already have plenty of non-melee job options, I don't NEED to play melee jobs to engage with the game -- every single melee enthusiast, however, would have their favorite way of engaging with the game totally deleted for no reason.