Why is the game going down every expasion?

[Reimmi]

Something, something bait, but I partially agree. Story and Job Identity went down hill after 5.0.
But what makes you think that Warrior changed for the worse? Warrior got more things added to it than removed for the past 3 Expantions.
That you hit Fell Cleave 3 times + 2 new GCD's instead of 5 times Fell Cleave? That Upheaval doesnt scale with your current HP anymore? That the Storm Eye duration stacks up to 60s?

Storms eye used to require some brain power to keep up
your gauge used to actually matter and require some planning for inner release windows because your OGCD's could crit during it
it wasn't alot but sanding off all failure states from the game is how the game becomes boring

[zarahleo]

I’m a person who loves this game,the world and everything in between but I feel like the game has dropped in quality in story,job indentity(coming from a War main who have seen War get massacred every explosion.I still love War to death but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the obvious massacre done to it) and in my honest opinion,the localization has gotten worse and people just blindly ignore it because of reasons I don’t know.Yoshi has to wake up and realize the state of the game and whoever is giving him council to be fired.What do others think of the state of the game and what do you dislike that they have have done to it?I’m really curious of what everyone who loves this fantasy world as much as I do thinks.

Simple answer is profit. Making it easier to develop by following a set pattern or having classes dumbed down. They lose subs because of this yes, but the amount they save in money from less development is worth more than the amount they lose in subs. Nearly all questions on this forum can be answered with profit.

[Souljacker]

The OP is a Warrior too and don't Warrior's essentially make healers obsolete with their self-healing. I think Square Enix needs to restore the trinity to give all three roles a place again because having a Warrior do all 3 roles themselves is a bit depressing.

Couldn't agree more. SE leaning on everything being a DPS - it's so anti-everything FF was through the years. But I blame the players. It's honestly exhausting to read some of the discussions here by folks who are upset they only get 1 or 2 DPS buttons to press. YOU ARE A HEALER. Your job, by definition, *should* be *healing*. Look at that BLM thread where folks are complaining that BLM "Feels like a healer" now because SE dumped Enochian. I mean, I just can't even with some of this stuff.

The noise from the community is so loud that SE has no choice but to lean into what the community wants, and that's basically everyone as DPS (and not JUST a DPS, a DPS with lots of buttons and clocks and timers to manage). The encounters get tuned around healers doing x percentage of DPS, and here we are where the other jobs need to be able to compensate for the diverted attention of what used to be a required role.

[Kaurhz]

I just generally dislike that beyond a point they weren't really addressing clunky design, but just removing all form of fail states from the game, and beyond a point they weren't really addressing feedback but reducing the game into the most formulaic design humanly possible.

We have so many systems in the game which serve no purpose at all... Their prime method of feedback has been to remove or fade into obscurity, rather than actually trying to improve... This is why we have such a rigid system now.

It isn't just that jobs have no identity... I am genuinely asking myself have of the time where more fundamental identities are, e.g., gameplay features and systems having no identity, but just there to tick off a 'Y' with conditional formatting on an Excel spreadsheet.

The best way of putting it is... They aren't really designing the game around the people that consuming it, and nor are they thinking very much of the people that do consume it... They are designing the game around an Excel spreadsheet, and it shows.

Sad thing is... People do think some of these issues are new... But in fact many of the underlying problems date back as early as HW - e.g., removing systems rather than improving.

[ddwarbird]

Yes, exactly, I want to be a "HEALER", not a DPS or I would have picked it. It annoys me that healers are relegated to "back-up DPS" because Square wants to spend more time praising tanks with free self-healing abilities. Do I need to go to Square Enix, cap in hand and be like "Please sir, can I do my role?"

[Ellona_Andrivari]

Yes, exactly, I want to be a "HEALER", not a DPS or I would have picked it. It annoys me that healers are relegated to "back-up DPS" because Square wants to spend more time praising tanks with free self-healing abilities. Do I need to go to Square Enix, cap in hand and be like "Please sir, can I do my role?"

Found the kid from the WHM class story.

[hydralus]

I thought WARs have largely remained the same since Shadowbringers.

[Underscore]

the localization has gotten worse

Has it? I haven't seen Dawntrail's JP script to compare it, but the English localization has been bad since ARR. It's hard to imagine it getting much worse.

[Mirau]

Approachability and population would be the main reason for the way FFXIV is designed these days. Speaking as someone whose played since 1.0 FFXIV has never been easier to get into and play without issue. Tutorials out the butt, icons to designate what is important and what is just a quest, SUPER important unlocks being required now instead of optional (Including MSQ and other things). I don't think the game is universally going down as much as people are saying it is.

By making every job viable for Savage and Ultimates they've had to prune many things that made each one unique. They've had to consolidate the burst windows to line up with every other job. They've had to streamline every playstyle to allow movement DPS / HPS / Etc. - every single shield healer has healing burst so they aren't totally screwed. Pure healers have (ST / AoE) DMG reductions and burst shields (usually) too as to not get totally screwed as well.

Basically they've made it so everyone can do anything just fine, and while they still have strengths and weaknesses in GENERAL, they have cop-outs just in case things go south and left high and dry. This is both good and bad, of course. Good because better players can just hit the correct buttons to compensate for bad plays or mistakes. Bad, because then everything plays somewhat similar no matter how unique a job's gimmick tend to be.

Savages and Ultimates should decouple burst windows and sustained DPS / HPS / Etc. from being so 'streamlined' and let classes flourish in their respective fields and let people play fun gimmicks that each job can maintain over the years. It's really lame that jobs keep getting remade or redone just so that it's easier to play and less engaging just so you can mindlessly hit your filler and spender over and over with no variance.

[Amarande]

Job identity has been eroded in favor of "balance" and responding to players who think it's unfair that their job doesn't have something another job does. As far as I've seen, Yoshi-P hasn't even been denying that, although one of the articles that quoted him he said misrepresented what he said.

As for what others think, if you look at literally any other post on these forums you will notice they don't think positively about any of it. Because most people obviously come to the forums to complain.

Sadly this is probably unavoidable given the game's group structure, the increasing every expansion number of jobs, and loot cadence.

We already have a minimum 2:1 ratio between every slot in a group and the available jobs for it.

If the jobs were more diverse we would instead have a rash of complaints about people struggling to even get to do endgame because their job isn't meta. This is the case in virtually every team game in which there are a large number of distinct choices for a small number of team slots, too: viz. people spending whole nights trying to get just one Mythic+ group in WoW because they aren't the "chosen one" (well, more like five, but still) - it's a gamer culture issue, not a specific title one.

And with the loot cadence and endgame groups being steadily pickier over time, switching mains if your main doesn't work out during the tier is mostly not viable until late odd patch (we already see this issue with roles - complaints roll out about the shortage of healers, but when people try to swap to healer and are limited by weekly lockouts to crafted gear to start off, they can't join the PFs because they don't meet the ilvl requirement, so the problem's still not solved! There are also from time to time tales of certain jobs noticing their role slot specifically locks them out a lot in PF as well).

The saminess is probably the least evil, unfortunately.