The future of job design

[Kazuke_Miso]

Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells, so we have shortened the cast time for a variety of actions. Furthermore, the effect expiration of Astral Fire and Umbral Ice has been largely detrimental to attack power in situations where players must interrupt casting to address battle mechanics. For this reason, these statuses will no longer expire.

In Patch 7.1, Ley Lines became a charge-based action, which has resulted in movement restriction lasting longer than intended, so we have reduced its duration.

In light of all these changes, we have generally amplified black mage's firepower by increasing attack potency and adjusting the trait Enochian.

We have made adjustments to a variety of actions after reviewing the offensive capabilities of melee and ranged DPS roles, as well as the balance within all roles. Due to the unique nature of future battle design, we anticipate situations in which close-ranged attacks may be difficult to execute, so we have generally increased the attack potency of melee DPS roles.

In the wake of Patch 7.0, pictomancer's offensive capabilities have been unexpectedly high, so we have increased the attack power of other jobs to achieve a better balance. However, considering pictomancer's strength even after these adjustments, and their continued efficiency in various duties, we have decided to temper pictomancer in Patch 7.2. We appreciate your understanding.

Finally, adjustments to the reduction of potency for multiple targets in certain area of effect actions were made mainly in order to achieve a better balance within Ultimate raids.

[Kazuke_Miso]

You WILL do DDR raids until your death with braindead jobs and you WILL like it!!

[Arohk]

If you don't like "DDR" mechanics , what better and more fun alternative do you suggest?

keep in mind that the FFXIV engine is probably not capable of doing anything else than that.

The game has no i-frame or active block mechanics, jumping over obstacles also doesnt seem to be a thing, most jobs dont even have mobility skills like a dash or a stun/interrupt.

[ovIm]

If you don't like "DDR" mechanics , what better and more fun alternative do you suggest?

keep in mind that the FFXIV engine is probably not capable of doing anything else than that.

Shorter mechanics that are not on a fixed timer would be a good start.
Classes that offer optimization potential and depth would be a good start.
Literally anything that is not "memorize this static unchanging list of things that details what happens in the next 12 minutes to the second to know where to stand when." is what I read a lot in this forum. Not completely random, but also not fully static.

The game has no i-frame or active block mechanics, jumping over obstacles also doesnt seem to be a thing, most jobs dont even have mobility skills like a dash or a stun/interrupt.

Enemies used to have skills that could be interrupted. Stunning the first boss in Sastasha Hard at the right time could give your healer an easier time cleansing the slime debuffs.
The devs throw away things the second they don't work out the first time instead of working on, reiterating and improving them. Coil T5 had an issue with the Twintania Divebombs because of a difference in altitude at specific parts of the arena. Instead of fixing that, or using that, now all we have is flat, boring, uninteresting circular/square arenas.

[Jeeqbit]

If you don't like "DDR" mechanics , what better and more fun alternative do you suggest?

keep in mind that the FFXIV engine is probably not capable of doing anything else than that.

I thought that, but I had a think about it in another post:

• Hullbreaker and Vanaspati have fights that involve jumping into a bubble.
  
• Hullbreaker has a fight that involves clicking a tree to drop a banana so the gorilla gets it instead of becoming more powerful and angry.
  
• Fractal involves clicking a container to produce some bait to distract them from a powerful attack.
  
• A2 and O6 involve getting into a robot to push things and A5 involves becoming a gorilla to do that.
  
• O6 involves clicking paint brushes and buttons. A5 you stand in purple to become a bird for a certain mechanic.
  
• A4, A7 and A12 have adds that specific people go to kill in special areas and in A7 you help people escape a prison.
  
• O3 and Tender Valley have the maze mechanic.
  
• O2 has mechanics involving gravity and knockbacks and looking at eyes.
  
• O4 had the ice (move around), fire (stop moving), lightning (run out) mechanics. They are elsewhere in the game too and sort of DDR but also a bit different since one of them does involve not moving.
  
• O5 has you guide lights to ghosts, and run atop a train to attack the top of it, and fight ghosts in an add room.
  
• O7 has you stand in bombs correctly.
  
• E5 and Ramuh involve grabbing orbs.
  
• Syrcus Tower involves dragging orbs to beams, freezing people with ice, and unfreezing them with fire. It involves hiding behind a rock and preventing the rocks being destroyed.
  
• Gubal HM involves choosing a puddle to ground you, elevate you or turn you into a Mandragora. Gubal Normal involves dragging an orb to the boss. It also involves walking on pads together as the party and dropping orbs.
  
• Antitower involves becoming dolls and free eachother and healing the AoE damage. Dzemale involves killing Crystals.
  
• Copperbell HM involves dragging boss further across the wood to avoid the fire. At the end you have to bait the sandworm regularly while you fight the boss so it doesn't consume you and do massive damage.
  
• Haukke HM has a boss that consumes an add and does a really powerful attack if you don't focus it before it does. It usually wipes parties due to too much DPS.
  
• Lost City has a mechanic that eats a player and you free them.
  
• Hullbreaker HM also has a mech that involves sliding on ice.
  
• Sohm Al and Amdapor you drag a tether to a rock to save yourself. Amdapor HM has you drop a sword thingy and you need to move out of it (many don't) or free people trapped in adds.
  
• Neverreap you pickup what spawns and move it out of the AoE area or they tether to the boss and make them invulnerable.
  
• WoD has you enter the belly of Cerberus and handle chains.
  
• Labyrinth you stand on pads while others kill adds. Void Ark has a boss involving being on platforms sometimes, not being where certain players were so you don't get turned into a plant. Weeping City has moments you need to stop moving, handle adds that can get overwhelming, keep away from the tank in a tight space, place webs to later stand on to avoid quicksand and place adds that drop as meteors wiping the party if placed wrong, stand in something that you normally avoid, interrupts.
  
• Dun Scaith has you running out of a Doom area, getting knocked back into the ice to save yourself, choosing to enter a mirror area, and introduced the gaze stack that you stack in while looking away.
  
• The Stormblood Alliance raids gave us the maths boss and standing in one part of the arena to avoid being caught in a hurricane. Orbonne had you exchanging tethers (the sort of mechanic exclusive to Extreme or higher now), getting enough players to stand on pads, turning a certain way to avoid being sniped, calculating the safe spot.
  
• E7 had us calculate the safe spots for light and dark while they were going through portals - which still gets some players to this day (destroyed 2 parties today even).

As you can see, this design kinda became mostly in, out, stack, spread or otherwise "move to safe spot" by Shadowbringers. I didn't really notice, personally, but thinking about it that's about where it changed.

A few other examples would be A10S had us contending with passing prey, while keeping away from a Steamroller. Lost City had you remember which doors were linked so you could survive the attack (we can ignore it now, but still).

They always had stack, spread, in, out even in the Heavensward raids but they had a lot of other stuff too, especially of the "rely on another player" variety. Another thing I've noticed is everyone doing the same mechanics more often. By that I mean, if you knew the fight on one role, you didn't know it on others, but now you sort of do (aside from having heal rotation worked out, or a plan for working your rotation around the mechs, which is easier now than it used to be obviously).

[Illianaro]

I just don't know what to think at this point. When I think about "the future of job design," I can't think about it without also thinking about the future of encounter design, and about the past of job/encounter design. I recognize that HW/SB era job design had some major issues, but if I had to choose a "pinnacle" for this game, it would have to be the design around those times.

But at the end of the day, I get there's no going back; there's only forward. I hope the future will hold something better. I hope that 7.x will turn out to be a blip on the radar of this game's history, and 8.0 and beyond will present a reset of sorts for FFXIV. That hope is dim, and fading, though. If the current encounter design is all we have to look forward to in the future, then I don't think we'll see much improvement in the way of job design.

I don't know. SE just seems stuck, like a record needle that's skipping back and playing the same notes again and again. There's such a sense of disconnect from them, not just with the community, but with their own game. I think they could find inspiration if they just went back and looked at some of their older content - if they reviewed the notes about their job design from 3.x and 4.x. They don't even have to look to other games (although it would help, IMO) for opportunities to innovate. They can literally look back at their own game's history because they themselves have done better in the past.

I'm not saying "go back to 3.x/4.x," but rather that they need to reevaluate the lessons they took away from that era of the game, because I feel like they learned the wrong lessons from that time period.

[ovIm]

snip

Thats a good comprehensive list of mechanics that we don't see anymore these days, good work on compiling that.
To add to that list, there is also a plethora of things in Pharos Sirius pre-nerf that was interesting, from a boss that punished you from doing too much DPS, to a boss where killing too many add spawners would result in a super powerful boss, or the staircase bit where you have to stop mobspawners while AoE's are created beneath you.
Or in Tam Tara hard, where you had to avoid killing adds on one boss, or soak other attacks to protect an NPC. Or spawning an add that temporary stuns the person spawning it.
Saint Mociannes had breakable walls where a team had to consider if their DPS was strong enough to break through and skip adds before spawning bees would final sting the tank to death.

Pre Stormblood, there was a lot of creativity and variance in the dungeons themselves already. Paired with the added depth of classes, there was a lot of joy just running dungeons with different jobs too.

[Xapapetsu]

If you don't like "DDR" mechanics , what better and more fun alternative do you suggest?

keep in mind that the FFXIV engine is probably not capable of doing anything else than that.

The game has no i-frame or active block mechanics, jumping over obstacles also doesnt seem to be a thing, most jobs dont even have mobility skills like a dash or a stun/interrupt.

It's not so much not liking the ddr mechanics, it's more so learning the fights so well that ddr mechanics don't matter. There's also issues with that in terms of new and dynamic boss design. So I can see issues on both ends.

[Exmo]

Bait thread

[Illianaro]

sneep sneep

See, this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say that I feel like SE is out of touch with their own game and that they could derive inspiration just by looking into FFXIV's own history to find unique mechanics. Well found! I love it! I'd also add that the Coils had some of my favorite mechanics that I've seen in this game, between neuralink, divebombs, twisters in T5, to... pretty much everything about T9, for me.

I remember T9 being so hard that my group had to give up the first couple times we tried. I started to dread trying it. But I also wanted to finish the raid series because the story was incredible and... tbh I don't like giving up. Eventually, a funny thing happened: I started to have FUN with the challenge. As we gradually learned the mechanics and the telegraphs of what was coming, I started to genuinely love the fight. By the time my group and I beat it, it had become one of my favorite fights in the game.

My point isn't "make everything T9," but more to further highlight that there is so much opportunity for SE to branch out if they just look for it.