"Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells"

[LilimoLimomo]

It's hard to describe how frustrated I am at the explanation for Black Mage's changes.

"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."

I feel like this should be self-explanatory, but the players who kept playing BLM instead of switching to another job liked this. They liked the additional difficulty of casting spells, and they liked trying to manage Astral Fire in the midst of battle mechanics. It provided them with a challenge that they found engaging. BLM players voluntarily chose to play a job that was more demanding and more punishing than others, because that experience was satisfying to them.

But you're so focused on "attack power" that you've lost sight of the fact that players play games because the moment-to-moment experience of playing makes them feel something. The damage output is just a contrivance, a carrot that players chase to give them an extrinsic motivation to engage with the fundamental game loop that is the actual source of their enjoyment. As game designers, I feel like you should know that.

And yet, instead of balancing these new mechanics around the game's existing jobs, you elected to remove multiple core aspects of BLM's game loop in a way that impacts the entire game for BLM players.

FF14 developers, for a decade you have managed to successfully design battle content that BLM players were enjoying.

What made you give up now?

I cannot understate the extent to which removing these aspects from BLM removes something valuable from the entire game. Whenever any player — BLM mains in particular — wanted to add a bit more engagement to a combat encounter, BLM was there to provide that additional layer of engagement. In that way, BLM allowed a wider variety of players to readily get access to a level of difficulty and engagement that was better suited to their needs. Now that option is gone, with nothing to replace it.

[Absurdity]

FF14 developers, for a decade you have managed to successfully design battle content that BLM players were enjoying.

What made you give up now?

As much as I agree with the rest let's be honest here, this isn't a new problem.
Sure they may have made fights fun for BLM players, but for tanks and healers they haven't been in a long long time, you only see it now that it affects BLM specifically as well.

It's been the same combination of chariot, dynamo, proteans, towers, meteors, limit cut for at least three expansions now, they just increasingly stacked more of them on top of each other for years and their "new and improved" encounter design was to just make them faster.

[LilimoLimomo]

Sure they may have made fights fun for BLM players, but for tanks and healers they haven't been in a long long time, you only see it now that it affects BLM specifically as well.

Oh, quite the opposite. I used to play plenty of other jobs, and the entire reason I no longer play them is that the game changed and they were no longer engaging. For me, BLM has been the only way to experience engaging FF14 combat for a long time.

Would I have preferred more? Absolutely. But one job was at the very least enough. I could play the game and have a good time with this one job: Black Mage.

But with these changes, that's no longer the case, and there are no other jobs to retreat to.

[Adin]

I just can't agree that the dev team's lack of imagination for encounter design needs to result in the blm rotation being as complex as a healer's dps rotation without the healing.

[Carighan]

It provided them with a challenge that they found engaging

This works well, in a single player game like Dark Souls. This is an MMORPG. A certain basic level of cohesion and balance is expected. If 25 out of 26 jobs require X amount of casting, then 26 can require a lot more, but not crazy amounts more. If the newer the job the less casting it requires, it'd be for the in-that-context oldest design (requiring the most casts) to not be next to get updated.

And as you yourself state just a few lines further on, this BLM design held the entire encounter design hostage. That's just not good game design in a game with so many jobs. Plus, let's not forget, BLM already didn't feel like a turret caster or a big badaboom caster, owing to tons of instant cast / movement options, anemic spell visuals and audio and fairly tepid damage numbers, coupled with a massively overloaded hotbar that also further reduced the felt impact of spells since each one only contributed a small portion to the overall package.

Am I annoyed at the changes? For sure. Because they don't go remotely far enough. The whole job needs scrapping, taking "Big Badaboom caster" as a concept back to the drawing board, and re-implementing it from the ground up. I mean they kinda did that already, but do it again without the paint can in the mix.

[Realfoxy]

This works well, in a single player game like Dark Souls. This is an MMORPG. A certain basic level of cohesion and balance is expected. If 25 out of 26 jobs require X amount of casting, then 26 can require a lot more, but not crazy amounts more. If the newer the job the less casting it requires, it'd be for the in-that-context oldest design (requiring the most casts) to not be next to get updated.

And as you yourself state just a few lines further on, this BLM design held the entire encounter design hostage. That's just not good game design in a game with so many jobs. Plus, let's not forget, BLM already didn't feel like a turret caster or a big badaboom caster, owing to tons of instant cast / movement options, anemic spell visuals and audio and fairly tepid damage numbers, coupled with a massively overloaded hotbar that also further reduced the felt impact of spells since each one only contributed a small portion to the overall package.

Am I annoyed at the changes? For sure. Because they don't go remotely far enough. The whole job needs scrapping, taking "Big Badaboom caster" as a concept back to the drawing board, and re-implementing it from the ground up. I mean they kinda did that already, but do it again without the paint can in the mix.

If the fight design isn't going to let casters cast, well maybe it's the fight design that's a problem.

But it's all kind of irrelevant anyway, because EW BLM and DT BLM had more than enough movement options to handle those fights, and no one can convince me that M1-M4S or FRU were unable to be handled on BLM's kit. The same goes for the normal mode raids that were just released.

The job was fine in Endwalker, and it was fine in 7.1. And before someone comes at me with "but think about the new players!!!", there were multiple ways to make the job easier for newer players or lesser skilled players to do well on while also preserving BLM's identity and depth. SE simply chose (or was unable) to make those changes and instead decided on this massive simplification.

[Carighan]

If the fight design isn't going to let casters cast, well maybe it's the fight design that's a problem.

Sure, but even 5 years ago people in other MMOs (GW2 at the time) told me you play FFXIV if you want ballet-like highly involved fights. That's the standout feature. You're not going to backpedal on your USP, as a development team.

And to stick with the comparison, that'd be like backpedalling on the everyone-is-a-DPS of Guild Wars 2. Which they did, and it broke everything and they had to do years of damage control until they finally got it stable again. The game was designed to not have healers/tanks, they tried it anyways, everyone told them it's a bad idea, well, it was a bad idea. Likewise in FFXIV, fights are constantly requiring the next ballet step, and if you were to try change that now you'd have to invest an obscene amount of work. You'd have to, among other things:

* Scrap and reimplement all jobs.
* Tweak or scrap+reimplement all raid fights, in particular the tougher ones since they can be done synced for some challenge. Since you're also redoing the jobs, you basically have to start at the drawing board with all fights as major parts of the kit changed.
* Since the jobs are being redone together with the group combat system, you probably need to send hundreds of people combing through all of the thousands of quests to find those that need tweaking or reworking.
* Once that is done, you can begin the work of balancing the new combat vs the new jobs, which usually takes 2-4 expansions in most MMORPGs if they do a major base-combat rework (not many did, but EQ1 and DAoC come to mind).
* Once that is done, we can evaluate whether the new state is better.

And don't get me wrong, I'd love quite different and hence intentionally unbalanced classes. Class-based games work better if yes, sometimes Picto is the only job balanced to be the damage caster in this fight, you will wipe if you bring somebody else. Other fights its Black Mage. And maybe neither of those two can solo quests or FATEs, but Red Mages can, that's their thing, they can solo. I love that design, it is way more evocative and I miss it from older MMORPGs. But it's utopian to think a game as old as FFXIV would go back, re-do its core design principle, then do a full 360° cleave and chop all its current design off. You're talking about an FFXVII, the third MMORPG, basically.

Plus there's another thing: 25 of 26 jobs are working fine with the combat design. One is not. Much like we all groaned at them trying to buff everyone ever since 7.0 instead of just finally nerfing Picto, hard, why would you not simply change Black Mage if they're the odd one out?

[Aysin]

I disagree wholeheartedly with the premise that the encounter designers have been holding back due to the limitations of BLM. I mentioned in another post most recent examples TOP P6, Superchain, purgation, natural alignment, Manifold flames, fourfold flames require heavy movement that BLM still managed to overcome. I would argue it's up to the players to figure out rather than force developers to tip toe a design with 1 job in mind. The reasoning for BLM changes just does not make sense to me.

What I believe to be the case is they are worried about troublesome gameplay in general, so at first they watered down encounter design to ease tension on gameplay, and the community complained about that. In order to maintain the same, low level tension, they are upping the designs on encounters a little but watering down job designs to compensate and keep things at a certain level. But this sort of mentality is the problem to me.

[Rithy255]

I'm starting to think this game isn't for me anymore. I personally enjoy classes being different with strengths and weaknesses, ff14 lacks that.

As cool as a encounter can be, nothing will be good for me unless both class and encounter design is a focus.

[Zefieee]

I don't even think the slidecast distance on Fire IV has more than doubled for me. The main problem with casting remains a fast mechanic showing up under my feet when I've just barely started, something I can't always slide out of, but I can always solve by just eating a relatively minor damage loss and doing better on the next pull. I took triplecast off my bar to do the normal raids and didn't even end up missing it because so much of the blm kit is -already- instant, so is this consideration meant to literally only be for the savage version?