"Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells"

[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?

[Carighan]

Maybe you guys should go and play classic WoW, i suggest to play a destruction Warlock, your entire raid evening will be standing around and spamming Shadowbolt, Shadowbolt, Shadowbolt....
True caster gameplay.

But the really old one, right? When you had zero upside to a Demonology Warlock? That was hilariously ill-designed, what with the capstone talent being a DPS loss (although melee Hunter was even worse >.> ) and the only other upside, the +5% Shadowbolt damage, being something Demonology could just offspec into.

The only MMORPG that ever had that was Classic WoW.

Now I feel old. Funnily enough when WoW released, everyone called it the "baby MMO", not only because of the cartoony visuals but also because it simplified and homogenized things so much. No more jobs explicitly able to solo and others just flat out could not, reduction from 6 roles to 3 roles (the "trinity"), etc. It was older games such as EQ1 or so that still show a lot of the really divergent class design derived from pen&paper RPGs carried into early single-player CRPGs.

[RirisuBlix]

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?

Black Mage is not the odd one out. Anyone who spent more than a bit of time in DT high end content on the job would immediately understand that 7.05/7.1 BLM had the tools to get through any encounter while still performing peak, optimal DPS.

Nothing about LHW Savage or FRU was impossible to overcome or even particularly troublesome to experienced BLM players, but the job added a critical layer of challenge for ppl who wanted a caster that actually... cast spells and had to think about managing and executing casts.

"Weakened attack power due to movement" is not even a valid justification because there was not a party comp in 7.1 with a good BLM in it that struggled with enrages other than FRU needing a PCT (and even then BLM was so strong, close enough behind PCT, it became an excellent "fake" melee).

This MMO already struggled with job homogenization and lack of options. Deleting one of the last complex job's heart of their kit is not good or acceptable design, especially in the middle of an expansion where we did not even get a single new full tier with 7.1 BLM; the only new content we got when the job was at its peak was FRU (unbalanced in favor of PCT) and Chaotic (itself a nightmare to prog and farm bc it needs 23 other decent high end players).

This discourages me so much. I spent dozens of M1S-M4S runs refining my skills to their maximum and literally 90% of what I learned was just torn out of my hands. The other casters do not even come close to the same play style. I don't want to be shoved onto PCT or forced to swap roles to get my level of desired engagement and actualization back. I want Black Mage to be the job it's been for nearly 10 years, just with the stuff over time that made it much better like Xenoglossy, Paradox, Flare Star, etc.

They didn't need to delete Enochian, especially with infinite Firestarter and shorter cast times. These alone would have made the job more comfortable for casuals to learn and execute on, deleting the timer is dropping a nuke on the entire job's core design and expecting us to play with the wreckage.

[Rithy255]

The only MMORPG that ever had that was Classic WoW.

I disagree. Casters were a great example In EW you had RDM who was picked for high utility and rezzes, BLM if you want to maximise damage output but at the cost of having to know the fight way more intense then other jobs with movement, summoner if you wanted to fall asleep.. I mean for mobility and some utility

FF14 used to have instances of jobs with strong upsides and downsides, that has slowly been going away with each expansion, Not saying it was close to classic wow levels (I never played classic wow) but you did have some of that uniqueness in the past where you job pick felt different enough.

FF14 should leave room for unique design they don't need to go full on heavensward mode but some rigidness, some downsides are needed to make jobs actually feel unique.

[Stigs]

The only MMORPG that ever had that was Classic WoW.

2.0 and 3.0 of literally this game beg to differ.

[Zzzlol94]

I'd love to have an actual challenge in doing a rotation as BLM. The last savage tier was an entire snoozefest where I could have 100% uptime in every fight without any difficulty. Give me a challenge outside of Ultimates, even though TOP was also a 100% solved fight where 100% uptime was attainable, but also necessary to even clear the last phase. The casualization and the uniforming of jobs shows that SE believes their entire playerbase, outside of the hardcorest of hardcore raiders, to be braindead morons who can't handle a single challenge given to them. BLM getting what's essentially a major rework for absolutely no reason or ANY warning in any previous live letter until the most recent, is just absolutely stupid. Square Enix has no idea what they're doing. They proved that with how they nerfed Picto. I honestly don't think anyone could've managed a worse job at "balancing" a job than SE.

SE ruined BLM for BLM mains, it's simple as that. Because I don't like playing another job doesn't mean I can demand a major rework of that job so I might enjoy it. People like different things for different reasons. Removing a job's uniqueness just turns this game even more bland than it already is. And everyone knows SE is gonna absolutely botch the next expansion's job reworks. They have no idea what they're doing.

[Carighan]

They liked the additional difficulty of casting spells, and they liked trying to manage Astral Fire in the midst of battle mechanics.

I readily sympathize, but I also feel it should be self-explanatory that unless your entire combat+class system is built around the idea of easy/medium/hard jobs and can work with the inherent issues that brings with it, you don't truly want jobs being extreme outliers, regardless of in which direction.

And yes, this of course also points a finger at Summoner+Viper (for being ridiculously too easy to play, at least Summoner doesn't deal too much damage doing it but that in turn is exactly one of the problems of a system where classes have different inherent difficulty...), and also until now at Pictomancer which was left quite OP despite being ~medium to play optimally, and way too easy to survive hectic encounters with comparing all other casters, even Summoner. But since whataboutism is a type of fallacy, that is not really an excuse to not fix Black Mage, being inherently too complicated to play for it's output and ability to influence the outcome of a fight.

Sure, if the whole game were built around the idea that you have easier and tougher jobs, sure. And I'd like that, but I don't think FFXIV wants to be that game, none of the jobs show signs that this is intentionally built into them. Consider how much easier Blakc Mage was before more and more stuff was bolted onto it, even after the changes now the job is still more involved than it used to be. Consider also how other jobs inherently become easier as you prolong their burst phase (for example Red Mage, who is mobile during all the extensions they got), while Black Mage inherently gets more difficult the more you staple onto Fire Phase. It's not inunderstandable that it'll eventually reach a tipping point where the devs want to reign it back in.

And even if the opinion of the devs were the other way around, difficulty-of-job built into the game opens a whole new can of worms. Do easier jobs have a lower maximum output at their (lower) skill ceiling? Does that mean Ultimates are balanced to only be cleared by the most complex jobs to play? Or are the jobs balanced in output regardless, hence ultimates are designed for only Viper/Picto/Summoner/Warrior/etc? (that last part is a problem the game already has, and consider that in 10x worse if it were intentionally done that way)

[Xelanar]

If battle design leads to jobs losing important parts of their identity, maybe the issue lies not in the jobs but in the battle design. Just a thought.

[RirisuBlix]

Consider how much easier Blakc Mage was before more and more stuff was bolted onto it, even after the changes now the job is still more involved than it used to be. Consider also how other jobs inherently become easier as you prolong their burst phase (for example Red Mage, who is mobile during all the extensions they got), while Black Mage inherently gets more difficult the more you staple onto Fire Phase. It\\\\\\'s not inunderstandable that it\\\\\\'ll eventually reach a tipping point where the devs want to reign it back in.

Extending AF lines and burst windows did not significantly increase the challenge for high end BLM players. If anything, the tools added in 7.05 and 7.1 made AF and burst windows less miserable than in EW where we had less instants, no ability to flexibly move around LL, and no guaranteed Firestarter to refresh in emergencies or save for TF3.

There\\\\\\'s a critical problem with the 7.2 Black Mage update: are these changes for casuals or experienced players? (I don\\\\\\'t hate casual players btw I have taken long high end breaks myself).

If they\\\\\\'re for casuals, basically nothing you described has changed. AF lines are still longer than they were with Flare Star and Manafont. Casuals don\\\\\\'t care about burst windows or CD alignments.

If they\\\\\\'re for experienced players, none of these things even crossed their minds. Anyone who did LHW Savage or FRU did not have trouble with their rotation once they worked out their timelines. Even in Ultimates with downtime, AF lines are often cut short to better place proc generation and Xenoglossies.

Experienced players did not need the rotation to be gutted. No was asking for anything but QoL— infinite Firestarter & Thunder are great for this btw, and I\\\\\\'d even accept the shorter cast times— and for AOE to be reworked but that\\\\\\'s rarely relevant in Savage/Ults.

The justification of "attack power dropped with movement" makes ZERO sense for casuals though. Casuals don\\\\\\'t do content with enrages or damage checks. Their attack power and damage output is near meaningless. The power fantasy for players who are not playing well was still there when they pressed Fire IV or Xeno in 7.1. They just got punished for dropping AF; video games need fail states to encourage learning.

Refreshing AF in standard was extremely easy with guaranteed Firestarter in 7.05 and 7.1 btw. If you disn\\\\\\'t care about doing optimal DPS with Transpose or doing complex burst windows then you didn\\\\\\'t need to hold it for TF3; you always had a backup method of refreshing AF if you had to Paradox early. We have never had this before.

Ironically, in 7.2 TF3 is even more mandatory because AF timers don\\\\\\'t exist now. You are not doing optimal DPS without transpose, period. I don\\\\\\'t think the devs thought this through at all lol

[RirisuBlix]

oops ignore the weird formatting, I'm on mobile.