The future of job design

[Kazuke_Miso]

Honestly? Look at stormblood fight design, do that. It's still DDR, but at a fun pace with mechanics that specifically target individuals by role instead of everyone having to do everything. The fact that I have to point out things like neo exdeath having multiple mechanics that challenge individual roles instead of everyone should really tell you how bad mechanics design has gotten.

For example, vacuum wave? Challenging to all melee. Delta Attack? Challenging to all casters. Exaflares? Minor challenge to casters. Grand Cross Delta (iirc)? Unique stuff for healers and rphys to do.

What is everyone else doing during mechanics that's not challenging to them? Melee are running a path and otherwise don't care. Casters/ranged are standing out and don't care. Grand Cross Delta is mostly standing north and not caring.

It's phenomenal that the devs have completely and utterly forgotten the concept of fight pacing and allowing players downtime. Stormblood is the expansion that actually resurrected FFXIV, and allowed ShB to shine as brightly as it did.

As a bonus, if you look at stormblood's overall design, even though I don't think we should go back to SB class design in entirety, easier fights allow for harder classes to exist. Sure, BLM doesn't need timers to come back in my opinion, but being a full caster with only 1 triplecast a minute and 1 swiftcast a minute, not even instant xenos? It had enough movement to handle most fights, and fights like god kefka presented challenges that were hard but not insurmountable to solve for its movement sections. Which meant for sections that weren't that, I could prepare in advance and sit still and cast. Leveraging the best feature of caster gameplay, fight predictability and memorization to be where you need to be before it's a problem.

The DDR isn't going away, but literally every fight in stormblood is a vastly better experience. Especially because, and I will iterate myself, easier fights allow for harder classes to exist. That's not to say every class needs to be hard. You should always have a summoner alongside a black mage. It allows players to self-select into the difficulty they want. It is a vastly better system than the garbage path fight design has taken since tier 3 shadowbringers.

Let's not forget that fights like A6S and O8S literally showed mechanics that weren't DDRs at all. Using CCs, engaging heal checks, etc.

[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.

[Exmo]

Bait thread

[Kandraxx]

Why not just turn the game into a real 90s space shooter? No need to play a pretend game.

It's pretty clear that the garbage engine this game was built on can't support anything other than kindergarten and ''know where to stand in 3..2...1..." mechanics. Which in turn has the negative side effect that they feel the need to make the jobs max bloated with complete shit like 123 dial combos, resources that feed into resources that feed into resources and idiotic cooldown X turns into AoE X garbage to at least create the illusion of compelling gameplay.

Ideally the jobs should function just like their PvP counterparts, where every skill has AN ACTUAL IMPACT on its own, give and take something here and there. Y'know, just how like actually good games like WoW work. But they can't do that or this will enter like Game Boy-level gameplay territory due to the aforementioned lack of game mechanics. This is what your lord Yoshida is very well aware of but can't admit and there's also no way to fix it.

They already gave the answer anyway. Why are the jobs not the same in both PvE and PvP? Answer: because in PvP the focus should be on the game, not on pressing button sequences and combos. That means the PvE has no actual focus outside of pressing your buttons right.

[Rithy255]

Black mage interacted with the "DDR" in a unique way, now its on the same level as every other job.

[Bekuta]

What's even the point of having different jobs beyond the aesthetic of the weapon you're carrying if every fight is just "memorize the exact spots to stand and when" while doing a braindead rinse-and-repeat rotation to get your 2-minute damage burst? They should just turn the fights into a slow-consecutive drain of the boss' health, that way they can implement all the DDR mechanics they want.

[Luca_]

Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells ...

I just don't understand why jobs keep getting dumbed down for this possible future content. Why do jobs need to feel worse and less skillful in everything that exists now for the sake of something that doesn't exist yet? Even when/if that stuff is added, the job will still feel bland in 99% of the content ingame just because it's had every bit of skill expression sandblasted away in order to be easier in these very specific instances. I don't get this design philosophy at all.

[brinn12]

SE has already hinted that "improved encounter design" means a complete lobotomization of jobs to compensate for the difficulty. This aligns with Yoshi-P telling bored healer mains to play Ultimate.

If SE were promising to deliver either of these two (improved job system or better encounter design), I would consider trusting them. Giving the community both? In just 3 even patches? You’d have better chances of winning the lottery.

[Luca_]

SE has already hinted that "improved encounter design" means a complete lobotomization of jobs to compensate for the difficulty. This aligns with Yoshi-P telling bored healer mains to play Ultimate.

If SE were promising to deliver either of these two (improved job system or better encounter design), I would consider trusting them. Giving the community both? In just 3 even patches? You’d have better chances of winning the lottery.

Even if it were to happen, I have absolutely no faith in any kind of job redesign after the changes they've made in the past couple years. SMN reduced to eating legos, VPR having its debuff removed almost immediately, everything they're doing to BLM, DRK and GNB having their gapclosers replaced, GNB cartridge management being nullified, AST being further lobotomized. There is absolutely no reason to think they'll finally get it together if we give them more time. It seems like every "rework" will just be removing core elements until swapping jobs is effectively just a cosmetic change to your hotbars and glam.

[Rithy255]

SE has already hinted that "improved encounter design" means a complete lobotomization of jobs to compensate for the difficulty. This aligns with Yoshi-P telling bored healer mains to play Ultimate.

If SE were promising to deliver either of these two (improved job system or better encounter design), I would consider trusting them. Giving the community both? In just 3 even patches? You’d have better chances of winning the lottery.

Do we actually think they're gonna do improved encounter design? I mean normal content was decent but a far from a big improvement, ext/savage to me was fun but not really a improvement, I do know 7.2 is meant to be this turning point of sorts but I can only imagine them doing so much with the encounters that is interesting.

It's a shame because a good job system works very well with good encounters but only have one leads to a very half baked feeling hence why this game is basically a DDR game, as if it was the reverse it would be a striking dummy simulator.

I really do think at the end of the day it's such a odd and counterproductive choice to only focus on one aspect of the PVE battle design but ignore or outright make a already boring system even worse, which impacts how much replay value and how fun that encounter design is still.