"Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells"

[Carighan]

to me the whole thing sounds like 'we dont know how fights turn out in the future, so lets change blm as a precaution'

That future being M5S and M6S, from personal experience so far. >.>

[Owyn_Addens]

That future being M5S and M6S, from personal experience so far. >.>

7.2 Black Mage may have an easier time with these fights than 7.1 Black Mage, but 7.1 Black Mage would've had a much easier time than Red Mage or Scholar do right now. I don't think that anything this tier necessitated the changes made to Black Mage, especially when it already wasn't even the least mobile caster.

[Laerune]

If more difficult means we are gutting unique playstyles and make all classes the same, then I am fine with easier encounters.

[Sarantserel]

If more difficult means we are gutting unique playstyles and make all classes the same, then I am fine with easier encounters.

Yeah, when I like that they're trying something different with this tier, seeing that I get a full minutes of forced melee downtime as a RDM in M6S and M7S is very feelsbad. The last thing I want is for them to remove the melee restriction off of RDM's melee combo because I do like optimizing its use, but fights like these that just make it straight up impossible to get my combo out unless I or some other party members jump through hoops to let me get a few hits in feels really rough. Really wish they'd have considered they have a range who's entire burst resource spender relies on being able to hit the boss in melee range at least once every minute

[Rithy255]

If more difficult means we are gutting unique playstyles and make all classes the same, then I am fine with easier encounters.

I much rather have easier encounters then boring job design.

Job design EFFECTS all encounters, they give life to the game something of a identity even.

Encounter's while fun that fun doesn't always last and it gets outdated, with jobs those jobs reflect into all types of content even making stuff like boring dungeons more fun, but it introduces 21 different ways to play the game, currently taking a different job doesn't really offer any gameplay difference which makes encounters boring quicker and likely why people complain theirs nothing to do so fastly.

[Taranok]

If more difficult means we are gutting unique playstyles and make all classes the same, then I am fine with easier encounters.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Easier encounters allow harder classes to exist.

[Rithy255]

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Easier encounters allow harder classes to exist.

Classes should be what makes those encounters in part hard, so I agree we need to lower encounters but put that towards job design so like healers actually have to manage healing, playing DPS well is difficult but noticeable and rewarding ect.

[Taranok]

Classes should be what makes those encounters in part hard, so I agree we need to lower encounters but put that towards job design so like healers actually have to manage healing, playing DPS well is difficult but noticeable and rewarding ect.

Yes, and encounter design needs to be tailored to classes. Both with lulls to make it easy and with intentional pain points. Neo Exdeath is my go-to example for this. Vacuum Wave sucks for melee but is an interesting problem to solve. Delta Wave sucks for casters, but is an interesting problem to solve. Grand Cross Delta has interesting things for healers, tanks, and rphys to do with a minor diversion on potentially getting yourself 'killed.' The major 'Screw caster' mechanics are all full downtime. Exaflares is an inconvenience to everyone (but mostly casters,) boss jumps challenge melee, as do the meteor adds around the arena with restricting half room cleaves.

Good fight design forces the problem spots of classes into the limelight while giving them the tools to deal with it. But if every player is overpowered with infinite movement and 'easy' classes, then the only fight design possible is the godawful garbage that is literally every single fight from tier 2 shadowbringers onwards, especially EW->DT.

[HikariKurosawa]

Nah. Jobs should be fun and satisfying to execute, difficulty should come from encounters. Otherwise you have to make normal encounters an absolute joke to compensate for the regular player who is now forced into dealing with difficulty being allocated to the job.

The only way to have difficulty that scales well from regular content to ultimate is to tone down the difficulty of jobs.

That said, none of you are going to get what you want because the devs know what sells and the shareholders want the game to be a commercial success. If you want hard content, do hard content. The thing is though, most people who want difficulty from jobs don't really want to experience difficulty. They want to have a meaningful grind at the training dummy until they have it all muscle memory, then they want to shut their brain off for 90% of content while they execute the static rotation they've practiced for countless hours in gridania. Truly mindless.

[Taranok]

Nah. Jobs should be fun and satisfying to execute, difficulty should come from encounters. Otherwise you have to make normal encounters an absolute joke to compensate for the regular player who is now forced into dealing with difficulty being allocated to the job.

The only way to have difficulty that scales well from regular content to ultimate is to tone down the difficulty of jobs.

That said, none of you are going to get what you want because the devs know what sells and the shareholders want the game to be a commercial success. If you want hard content, do hard content. The thing is though, most people who want difficulty from jobs don't really want to experience difficulty. They want to have a meaningful grind at the training dummy until they have it all muscle memory, then they want to shut their brain off for 90% of content while they execute the static rotation they've practiced for countless hours in gridania. Truly mindless.

I mean, we have an example of literally both extremes. Endwalker and Dawntrail are both examples of encounters being way too difficult. Heavensward is an example of classes being too difficult. HW nearly killed the game because of its class-job balance. Stormblood literally saved the game, and was dominant on class difficulty over encounter difficulty. But did it in a way that was easy enough for any player to do most content, because they learned their lesson about skill floors.

Shadowbringers success is directly tied to the success of stormblood in reviving the gameplay of the game. Meanwhile, endwalker and dawntrail are trying to reprise Heavensward's attempts at killing the game. EW was carried by the story, mostly, but DT isn't, and the pop numbers show that something is wrong beyond, simply, the story not being that great.

So, to put it mildly, your point rings hollow. DT is definitely a marked decline over EW. And unlike with difficult jobs and easy encounters, a bad player can't brute force their way through a dungeon that is too hard for them. And as the fights get tilted more and more towards the extreme, more and more people will get kicked out of them.

Hell, I'm practically kicked out of the fight design because of internet latency. Because a ping of 80-110 with minor packet loss is enough to make fights like M5S harder than any ultimate I've ever done. Which is saying a lot. The snapshotting is getting unreal in modern FFXIV.