Why is the game going down every expasion?

[TheDustyOne]

I respectfully disagree - because we can clearly see the end result of your argument. We have ended up with roles who all are expected to do DPS, and since there is no longer any meaningful separation of tank\healer\dps\support, jobs now get so so much self-healing or damage\debuffs we might as well just replace all the dungeons with one-mans and call it day. What's even the point of having a party with different "roles"?

This is largely down to fight design than job design. Not enough incoming damage means that both tanks and healers aren't able to perform their role, so why bring the extra defence and healing when there's nothing to defend against and heal? Healers had more healing to do back in HW and SB when we had more damage buttons than they do now, and because we have less healing to do now, what do we fill that time with? More DPS. If you want healers to feel more like healers, it doesn't matter if they have 2 or 20 DPS skills, enough incoming damage will make them heal, whether they have 2 healing buttons or 20. Likewise with tanks and tanking; the loss of aggro management, even if good parties largely made circle-shirking easy to do, is what made tanks into blue DPS.

Fights like Barbariccia I think are something of a gold standard we could look towards for this; small streams of constant incoming damage (even if the fight itself doesn't actually do a lot of damage) gives a constant sense of danger that just doing a large raidwide doesn't achieve. Square may be insistent on DDR fights, but they shouldn't forget mandatory damage moments like heal checks, mitigation checks, etc. Those are just as much part of the dance of combat as moving out of the orange circles. Unfortunately most of their heal checks are really just mitigation checks, so I'm not even sure if they know how to consistently design them.

I don't know when this attitude shifted, but it was pretty recently, because I don't remember ever hearing complaints in FFXI that jobs like White Mage didn't do enough damage in enough interesting ways. It certainly wasn't expected - if it happened it was a bonus. Loads of complaints over there, but killing the uniqueness of each role was never an actual player request.

Different games have different expectations. FFXI has subjobing, so a WHM could very well just use Black Magic if they wanted. Not to mention a larger amount of buffs to upkeep, debuffs to think about, and party composition as a whole is more important in XI than here. The principle however remains the same; when your primary job is done, you need to fill that time with something, and in this game, that typically means DPS. I wouldn't mind if Square decided on buff upkeep, crowd control, etc. but it has to be something that is always available when the primary role is fulfilled.

Part of the problem is limiting party size to 4 - to this day I have no idea why they made this design decision. It means you HAVE to limit the party to 1 tank 1 healer and 2 DPS instead of tank, healer, mix of DPS and support as we liked when we had 6 man parties in XI.

I can take it or leave it when it comes to party size; more than 4 would be nice, but that's what full party content is for anyway.

The other part is an aversion to the hard work of balancing. Teams are getting so squeezed and talent is getting shed left and right - it's no wonder so many of these tasks seem out of reach for the team that's left... So we get systems that are a shadow of what they were in this game's predecessor.

That I can kinda agree with, but even the smaller team of HW and SB were able to achieve great things. I think it has more to do with their current design philosophy rather than team size, but I can agree that Square should bring in some extra talent, not only to ease workloads, but also to provide fresh outside perspectives.

[Fhaerron]

Was very clunky back in ARR, HW & SB but was more interesting overall.

While ShB is on of my most fav time in the game it also started the downhill of how the jobs feel.

[Kaurhz]

Was very clunky back in ARR, HW & SB but was more interesting overall.

While ShB is on of my most fav time in the game it also started the downhill of how the jobs feel.

Sometimes clunk is a good thing provided it isn't overly egregious levels of clunk, as it can add a unique and oft' unintended aspect to how you interact with the game.

This is where the whole "They have QoL'd the soul out of the game" aspect comes into play IMO..

[Oizen]

Feels to me that the devs are not passionate about this game and they're just going through the motions, and will take any and every opportunity that makes development easier for them and decisions like this have compounded over the years into making them pretty complacent with just about anything.

Furthermore their need to justify systems like Trusts, and their decision to permanently eliminate the Trial Series as content have consequences on the writing, thinking back to HW/SB we had varying party sizes, characters could easily come and go, hell we had a Scion quit the Scions.
Can't do that now.

Every patch, the MSQ MUST account for:
-4-8 Characters for the Trust system
-1 Dungeon
-1 Trial

This is how we get terrible writing like the EW post story, or how a literally who like Zelenia comes out of no where to exist as the trial and will never be relevant again. Hell in Zelenia's case we were literally teleported away from the plot in order for that event to happen.
This is how you get dungeons like Aetherfont where before it happens, Thancred shows up out of no where and looks at the camera as if to say "The Trust system needs a tank"

[LilithGardenia]

That was a thing until what ... 4.1? 8 Years ago? The majority of the playerbase doesnt even know that IR used to have a 10s duration instead of stacks. I doubt the OP plays this game for this long.

Meant to reply to you but I think I did something wrong.I played since 2013 so I’ve seen Every change to everything

[LilithGardenia]

Changing the gapcloser from "costs 20 Gauge, 10s CD" to "3 stacks, 30s CD per stack" was also a mistake that made the job worse, and this is a hill I am willing to die on.

WAR had a lot more things going on in HW/early SB, reducing the class to Fell Cleaves does it a major disservice.


Overall though, I agree with the OP. The devs keep sanding down the ($job) gameplay with each patch and expansion.

I talk to my friend and I told him that I’m concern of the changes in 8.0

[ForsakenRoe]

Not only was it a utility skill, it was also important for gauge and more importantly GCD manipulation in Stormblood

Quick doublecheck with the WaybackMachine tells us that, post 4.2 rework, Onslaught was 100p for 20 Gauge, and Fell Cleave was 520 for 50 Gauge (or 104p for 10 Gauge). So, by simply reducing the Gauge cost on Onslaught to 10 instead of 20, it'd make the comparison '104p per 10 Gauge spent on FC, versus 100p per 10 Gauge spent on Onslaught'. A single autoattack would be more than 10x more damage than 'the amount lost because you used Onslaught instead of FellCleave'. Instead, we now press the gapcloser, ideally, 3 times in quick succession in the burst window, and not for 'actually closing a gap' if we can help it

SE loves to introduce solutions that just make more problems, don't they

[ovIm]

Not only was it a utility skill, it was also important for gauge and more importantly GCD manipulation in Stormblood.

Right, I completely forgot about that aspect as well. Damn, Stormblood really has been quite a while ago...
Thank you though, you are absolutely right - gauge management used to be kinda important for a WAR back then.

Quick doublecheck with the WaybackMachine tells us that, post 4.2 rework, Onslaught was 100p for 20 Gauge, and Fell Cleave was 520 for 50 Gauge (or 104p for 10 Gauge). So, by simply reducing the Gauge cost on Onslaught to 10 instead of 20, it'd make the comparison '104p per 10 Gauge spent on FC, versus 100p per 10 Gauge spent on Onslaught'.

Onslaught is an oGCD though. 100 potency oGCD is worth more than 100 potency GCD.
Generally, constantly pushing Onslaught on cooldown did hurt your damage iirc, so you wanted to be smart with its usage.

[Absurdity]

Onslaught is an oGCD though. 100 potency oGCD is worth more than 100 potency GCD.
Generally, constantly pushing Onslaught on cooldown did hurt your damage iirc, so you wanted to be smart with its usage.

I probably should've touched on that but yes, this.
It was an oGCD so you had to include the GCD you gained from Onslaught into the calculation, since you wouldn't have had that GCD if you pressed Fell Cleave instead.
Now this could be as low as an extra Heavy Swing in which case it probably wouldn't be worth it... or it could be as high as a Storm's Path and the extra 20 gauge from it.

This obviously made it a lot harder to pick the "correct" choice compared to "I have 50 gauge I press Fell Cleave" but it also made your choices more interesting.

[LilithGardenia]

i can't think of 1 live service game that kept growing as time goes on, they all at some point cater to the new audiance, which frustrates the old audiance, making things easy to get into as much as possible is a trend ALL games are obsessing over in recent years

I would never understand why they go that route while driving all fans who build them up just for new faces.There has to be a way to introduce new people without treating your current customers like a joke