Was BLM not enough?

[Aidorouge]

But those complaints asking for CT raid to be thrown out aren't asking for raids to be made more 'efficient'/faster? I'm failing to see why this deserves a mention. I personally want them out because they pop up way too much times in a space where there is little intrinsic gain to look forward. People become this overtly 'reward centric' because devs had been shaving away more and more of the intrinsic satisfaction in favor of shallow extrinsic rewards. No wonder they draw in people who 'hates' playing the game; it's just an 'obstacle' for them to get to the end goal.

It's relevant in the sense that the reason it pops so much is because its the only alliance raid people are required to unlock, and for many people its the ONLY one they unlock, sometimes on purpose to make sure they don't get dragged into doing Mhach or beyond. Same way how some people only unlock the first couple of Alexander raids to get access to its roulette and nothing more. As the saying goes, people will optimize the fun out of everything, and for some people that includes rigging the roulettes in their favor because they care more about getting done quickly, not because they care about being able to showcase "skill expression" in a piece of level 50 content.

For that matter, if job complexity became a thing, the other alliance raids past Crystal Tower would likely be "dumbed down" to its level (or hell, even lower) because Square-Enix insists on an "easy/hard" split when it comes to jobs and fights, and then we would just have people complaining about any/all the alliance raids at that point.

People asking for job complexity have to be willing to accept the possibility that there could be a cost for it, because that's just how Square-Enix works, and if they think the bulk of normal content is mind-numbing now... I don't think their job is going to provide them with enough spinning plates to make up for what gets removed in the encounters. Raising the ceiling means very little if the fights don't even come up waist-high, and that's keeping in mind that it may not be limited to JUST normal content.

Pretend for a moment that Crystal Tower remains as we know it, what possible extra buttons could one be made to press that would suddenly make it riveting content? Would even just allowing people to use their level 100 kit with drastically reduced potency across the board make it any more engaging? If one does Savage and such, what difficult parts of each fight are they willing to give up in exchange for their job getting the difficulty instead?

[Connor]

I’m an RDM / BLM dabbler at best but even with my extremely limited experience of the classes I can’t help but think ‘wtf’ at so many of the recent changes they’ve made.

Sure, it only removes the melee component during burst, but if you ask me it still sets a dangerous precedent. How many more aspects of job identity / design are they going to undermine all for the sake of ‘frictionless 120 burst’. Why even bother having anything else exist at this point? It’s like they won’t be happy until every fight just makes us auto-attack and our 120s auto-activate for burst and then back to auto-attacking. But it’s ok because you have to DDR I guess?

[Masha_Awandah]

Honestly, I would have been fine with the changes to RDM if we got a new animation in the style of PLD's magic sword combo, but no, all we got is this sloppy animation that makes no sense. It just feels like a slap in the face the way it was implemented.

[ForsakenRoe]

Pretend for a moment that Crystal Tower remains as we know it, what possible extra buttons could one be made to press that would suddenly make it riveting content? Would even just allowing people to use their level 100 kit with drastically reduced potency across the board make it any more engaging? If one does Savage and such, what difficult parts of each fight are they willing to give up in exchange for their job getting the difficulty instead?

(ignore the 'Aethertrail Attunement' line, that was for a SMN system)




None of these DOTs were 'A levels up into B'. You could apply Bio, Bio2 and Miasma to the enemy indepedent of each other, rather than the current game where Bio2 replaces Bio1. Additionally, SCH and AST could Cross-Class Aero from WHM, for another DOT if they chose. For AST, Aero was damage-neutral with their Malefic2 (200p) so it was used for mobility or opening up weave space (as Aero was an instantcast), while for SCH, it was a damage gain (Broil was 170p at one point)

And of course, can't forget:




See, the thing is, when we had 60 levels as our cap, but 30ish actions to learn to fill our bars with, it necessitated a lot more actions being learned in the 1-50 section of levelling. With the level cap being 100 now, but the same 30ish button limit, there's more focus on making the endgame feel like you're learning new things a lot (every 2 levels), which results in the early game for some jobs feeling empty. WHM, in particular, has an entire 12 level section of levelling where the only thing they learn is a trait that increases their damage by 10% passively. Look at something like RPR, or VPR, where their Enshroud/Reawaken, the core thing the Job is built around, doesn't unlock until 80/90 respectively, resulting in any gameplay below those levels feeling pretty bad by comparison. At least PCT gets to have Hammer and 2 of the 4 Mog/Madeen Muses (plus the Mog itself) at lower levels

This could be addressed somewhat by having lower level versions of actions, which later upgrade. For example, we were just given 'Plenary Indulgence now grants 10% mitigation effect' in this patch. Okay, that's cool. Why not have Protect come back at like, level 8 or 10, as a lower level version that only does the Mit, and not the bonus healing effect, which then upgrades to Plenary later whereupon it gains the bonus heal effect? Why not have Divine Seal return at level 40ish for WHM, providing a % increase to Healing Actions under its duration, which then upgrades later to Temperance, at which point it gains Mitigation in addition to the % Healing increase effect (causing Temperance to function as it now does)?

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

[...] Overall, I'mma give this a C. Has some good imo, can lead to some improvements and is now more baseline across the level sections, but the 25y range on melee skills was REALLY not necessary.

I'm giving this second thoughts in retrospect, because certain aspects of the change were NOT clear to me until I actually fidgeted around with it.

Manafication's 25y range buff is not tied to the three stacks of Swordplay it provides, it is a 30s buff that you can attach to as many melee combo hits you can fit into it. At Lv100, with enough gauge, you can perform three back-to-back Swordplay combos in a row, disregarding the viability of such for now.

I'm basing my thoughts on my own experience & enjoyment from playing Red Mage as well that of a fellow friend who has been playing the job to great success since Stormblood and found great joy in finding the right times to hit melee attacks and disengage with Displacement:

• This most certainly is a way to ensure median damage goes up by making the 2min buff window easier to successfully execute as Red Mage
• This does virtually nothing (aside from other potency changes with it) to increase the damage ceiling of Red Mage, which along with Summoner has been greatly lagging behind.
• It absolutely demolishes the fun of optimizing the job, full-stop. The only time you now actually get to do fun melee combos is the one extra you do between 2min buffs.
• While already a niche tool for uptime to begin with, this just makes Enchanted Reprise even worse and more pointless.

Had it only been ONE of the two melee combos in an Embolden window, it would have been fine - you'd have to choose the start or tail-end of your Embolden window for the extended reach.

There are other avenues they could have looked at to make potential changes to Red Mage - an unexplored area could have been intentionally overaspecting into Black or White Mana to be able to use certain abilities (condition requirement) and spend accordingly a lot of that manatype to use it, which will lead into other ways to do damage or gain resources to get to more damage.

But this? I'm gonna be honest, this is a bit heartbreaking to see. We had three Casters to pick from if we specifically wanted something we could use safely at range, the fourth was not necessary.

[Aidorouge]

See, the thing is, when we had 60 levels as our cap, but 30ish actions to learn to fill our bars with, it necessitated a lot more actions being learned in the 1-50 section of levelling. With the level cap being 100 now, but the same 30ish button limit, there's more focus on making the endgame feel like you're learning new things a lot (every 2 levels), which results in the early game for some jobs feeling empty. WHM, in particular, has an entire 12 level section of levelling where the only thing they learn is a trait that increases their damage by 10% passively. Look at something like RPR, or VPR, where their Enshroud/Reawaken, the core thing the Job is built around, doesn't unlock until 80/90 respectively, resulting in any gameplay below those levels feeling pretty bad by comparison. At least PCT gets to have Hammer and 2 of the 4 Mog/Madeen Muses (plus the Mog itself) at lower levels

This could be addressed somewhat by having lower level versions of actions, which later upgrade. For example, we were just given 'Plenary Indulgence now grants 10% mitigation effect' in this patch. Okay, that's cool. Why not have Protect come back at like, level 8 or 10, as a lower level version that only does the Mit, and not the bonus healing effect, which then upgrades to Plenary later whereupon it gains the bonus heal effect? Why not have Divine Seal return at level 40ish for WHM, providing a % increase to Healing Actions under its duration, which then upgrades later to Temperance, at which point it gains Mitigation in addition to the % Healing increase effect (causing Temperance to function as it now does)?

I assume they removed buttons because it "interfered" with combat design, and adding buttons back would mean having to revise said fights. For whatever reason, Square-Enix wants buttons presses minimized/focus on hotbars reduced for when they want people to dance around floor barf and be paying more attention to which side of their butt the boss is scratching to know where an attack is going to land.

They're unlikely to give back all those DOTs unless it comes with the caveat that the boss no longer makes you do anything that requires you to move around. In fact, that might even be WHY they changed it.

"Stacking DOTs and standing around sounds boring, let's make the player scurry and scatter instead." It's quite possibly the same logic they apply to healers in general. "Just spam your quick-healing/AOEs and let the tank help carry that load, you don't have time to cast or think, just MOVEMOVEMOVE."

Hell, nearly every job change can be zeroed down to those points: Does it interfere with mobility/take away the player's attention from the boss when they start casting? If yes, straight to the chopping block it goes. And it makes an unfortunate amount of sense because as someone else said, it's easier to balance fights around 5 roles (or 5 roles around fights rather) than 21 jobs. I'm curious if role quests dropped in the same expansion that Square-Enix started pushing jobs into those less than half a dozen boxes.

[RodericWarblade]

I almost play exclusively RDM, and well... I like the change

[Azurarok]

I'm curious if role quests dropped in the same expansion that Square-Enix started pushing jobs into those less than half a dozen boxes.

You're not wrong. Shadowbringers was when they introduced role quests over job quests. They still did make one quest for every job questline, though mostly as an epilogue.

[Daralii]

You're not wrong. Shadowbringers was when they introduced role quests over job quests. They still did make one quest for every job questline, though mostly as an epilogue.

The DRK one was cool at least. Every step would have a standard journal overview, you'd complete the objective, and that section would be replaced with "Fray" talking to you and reflecting on it.