SE isn't hearing the community RE: Job Feedback & Simplification

[Valgor]

Like what exactly? M6S?

What about the rest?
- The UnderKeep: same snoozefest, same mechanics
- Recollection: same boss trial as ever
- M5 to M8 storymode: same boss trials as ever, I'll give bonus points for M7N that have us moving through some arenas.
- M5S, M7S, M8S, same stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I do love what they did with M6S, but what else? What has been delivered??

EX4 was a quick-paced one, like Barbariccia and the ground being an electrical circuit was used in many mechanics in quick succession, always with a different solution (avoiding to connect, sharing an AoE from the other side, making a chess-like pattern and absorbing the towers) on top of avoiding slashes by getting the order of the attacks.
M5S was about the same, many small movements made it like a tempo encounter.
M6S adds are satisfying to prog as well, as long as you're with competent players.

I haven't had enough time to test out M7S nor M8S but it seems your main complaint is that you want them to be more innovative than they can. Normal raids are harder and yet offer a large variety of mechanics so I'm not sure what more you're asking for ? It still is made for players who aren't experienced / won't have to be coordinated. For any other content, blind progging make them much more thrilling but most people are prone to reading and following a guide, then claiming things are too easy / straightforward although they never even tryed to understand the logic by themselves.

[Azurarok]

Maybe an actual reason to justify their job guttings

[ovIm]

I'm pretty sure in a later interview Yoshi P clarified this was a mistranslation and we wouldn't be seeing any shift in job design until 8.0. They even clarified I think in the live letter for 7.1 that job changes were going to be done according to the current philosophy, as the content is still being designed around simple jobs.

The reason one would huff hopium is that they promised more interesting fights, and judging from this tier and its reception, they've delivered

The mistranslation from the article was the article claiming job adjustments would be coming in 7.2 - that was corrected as far as I know, they wanted to take care of fight design first, then job design, with combat encounters starting at 7.2.

What you are saying does not make sense either. If they are prepping for the next step in combat class evolution which were to come in 8.0, then any bandaid job adjustments are done with that new encounter design in mind (see the current friendly sentence in the jobguide - "We anticipate that future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells.") What we see is what we get. If this is the future, I'll just unsub the second PVP starts to bore me.
Truth to be told, I would love to be wrong on that part, mind you. But their track record shows something else, and my goodwill is spent. There is no reason for me to believe their words, all I am judging is their actions.

And personally, I don't see anything delivered in terms of encounter design. From what I have seen, savage and ex fights seem to still be fixed timeline learn encounter by heart fast paced aoe snoozefest. In the dungeons and normal mode encounters, its business as usual. Just because some things seem flashier does not make them different mechanically.

[Rithy255]

Maybe an actual reason to justify their job guttings

Their reason is to achieve a false balance, when everyjob plays the same theirs no meta.

Black mage fell outside of that simple fomular, hence why they changed it.

Look at EVERY other job they have had similar happen in terms of skill expression being removed, SE doesn't care about skill expression in job design they want the jobs to be easy so they can focus only on the content being difficult.

8.0 will likely only further this goal, expect auto combo on all tanks/melees, expect positional being removed, expect cast times being removed, anything that "hurts encounter design" will slowly be removed so instead of focusing on your job rotation your enjoying the dance fight.

Not the direction I want the game to go in, but SE will only ever double down on this direction as it stands, they have shown no sign of changing I had hopes pre DT with false promises that they weren't going to simplify jobs anymore, but I cannot take their word for it anymore.

[Azurarok]

Their reason is to achieve a false balance, when everyjob plays the same theirs no meta.

Black mage fell outside of that simple fomular, hence why they changed it.

Look at EVERY other job they have had similar happen in terms of skill expression being removed, SE doesn't care about skill expression in job design they want the jobs to be easy so they can focus only on the content being difficult.

8.0 will likely only further this goal, expect auto combo on all tanks/melees, expect positional being removed, expect cast times being removed, anything that "hurts encounter design" will slowly be removed so instead of focusing on your job rotation your enjoying the dance fight.

Not the direction I want the game to go in, but SE will only ever double down on this direction as it stands, they have shown no sign of changing I had hopes pre DT with false promises that they weren't going to simplify jobs anymore, but I cannot take their word for it anymore.

Right and I don't find their holy fight design a justified reason to destroy the part about this game that drew me in the first place. Despite all that the game balance this expac has been all over the place anyways

[Rithy255]

Right and I don't find their holy fight design a justified reason to destroy the part about this game that drew me in the first place. Despite all that the game balance this expac has been all over the place this anyways

It's intentional that they destroy job design for the sake of fight design at this point, even the black mage states that the changes were made because of fight design.

This upsets me, a big part of the game back when I started playing was playing different jobs that felt unique starting shadowbringers that slowly changed, even then shadowbringers compared to now is so night and day how bad job design has slowly faded.

[Qyoon]

instead of making fight with different job leading to different gameplays, they are working on making 1/2 gameplay they can articulate around different fights. The issue being, the fights are still mostly the same. Are they fun, yes, but the jobs aren't so much.
Basicly whatever you play, you gotta go there in time , wait, then go there and wait again and again, while dealing damage.
I came for the RP, do pve for playing unique jobs that were very differents.
Now i discover SQE is trying to make everything the same with different VFX lol.

[Rithy255]

instead of making fight with different job leading to different gameplays, they are working on making 1/2 gameplay they can articulate around different fights. The issue being, the fights are still mostly the same. Are they fun, yes, but the jobs aren't so much.
Basicly whatever you play, you gotta go there in time , wait, then go there and wait again and again, while dealing damage.
I came for the RP, do pve for playing unique jobs that were very differents.
Now i discover SQE is trying to make everything the same with different VFX lol.

It's also largely why people run out of things to do so fast these days funnily enough it's easy if you think about it... "hey wait a minute if these jobs were different and held more replay value and had ways to master them, that would mean investing time into a job would be worth it... I can also play multiple different playstyles for different gameplay wow!"

But instead we have content that lasts until you finish it, like what's the point of mastering a fight if your job doesn't really interplay with that fight? What's the point of running different jobs for different content if they play practically the same even dps, healers, tanks largely do the same stuff these days, just with variations on how simple the rotation is.

The game NEEDS job design in order to be fun and function the fact SE outright ignored job design and said "you'll have to wait until 8.0" (which I don't trust will change anything) shows that they don't consider basic things like job design and how good job design would help solve a lot of their issues with players getting bored after the first two weeks of a expansion.

[Carighan]

Now i discover SQE is trying to make everything the same with different VFX lol.

"Now" in the homophone use of "6 years ago", yes?

The game NEEDS job design in order to be fun and function the fact SE outright ignored job design and said "you'll have to wait until 8.0" (which I don't trust will change anything) shows that they don't consider basic things like job design and how good job design would help solve a lot of their issues with players getting bored after the first two weeks of a expansion.

It's going to be incredibly difficult, even as a developer, to convince management that the big shift in class design that then happened to lead into the most successful time of the game, is somehow bad and needs to be changed. And sure, that success happened for - probably, we can't be 100% sure - unrelated reasons, but that's not how management sees products under them.

I also suspect there's some other values we can't easily see, how they need less devs despite having more classes around as the homogenization makes parallel design and encounter design easier and quicker. All things managers love, and they hate the opposite. Part of the reason MMORPGs tend to homogenize as they age is not in balance needs to combinatory increases after all, but also in how they need to work leaner and leaner, and having X classes work the same is one way of doing that.

[Valence]

EX4 was a quick-paced one, like Barbariccia and the ground being an electrical circuit was used in many mechanics in quick succession, always with a different solution (avoiding to connect, sharing an AoE from the other side, making a chess-like pattern and absorbing the towers) on top of avoiding slashes by getting the order of the attacks.
M5S was about the same, many small movements made it like a tempo encounter.
M6S adds are satisfying to prog as well, as long as you're with competent players.

I haven't had enough time to test out M7S nor M8S but it seems your main complaint is that you want them to be more innovative than they can. Normal raids are harder and yet offer a large variety of mechanics so I'm not sure what more you're asking for ? It still is made for players who aren't experienced / won't have to be coordinated. For any other content, blind progging make them much more thrilling but most people are prone to reading and following a guide, then claiming things are too easy / straightforward although they never even tryed to understand the logic by themselves.

They're all the same mechanics with the same basic spread/stack/spread/donut legos DDR with a boss in the middle of a circle. There is no novelty or variety except for M6S, which is the only highlight of this tier, and is actually not even something new because we used to have those kinds of encounters in the past.
I feel like I'm arguing with people that have their nose literally in the grass and trying to tell me how this flower is different from the next, while to me it just looks like the same piece of grass.