What does FFXIV lack?

[ReynTime]

XIV has an identity. Well, it had more of a unique identity before Shadowbringers... But it's current identity is simply being a "PlayStation Home" with a story. But replace PlayStation with Square Enix.
The game does have original lore in it, but by and large it exists to advertise Square Enix's other products. It's literally Square Enix virtual Disneyland.

[CapaxInfiniti]

This game lacks a dev team that's willing to do something that hasn't already been done before.

The content cycle is so "safe" at this point, that you can predict how the entire expansion is going to play out just by the very first few weeks.

You already know the kind of content each patch is going to bring. You know when you'll do trials/dungeons/etc. You know how the zones are going to look and feel. You know how the quests are going to feel.

You know how each job is going to play. You know exactly how the same tired, boring, dull 2 minute meta is going to feel.

There's nothing to look forward to that's going to be new and unique and exciting. There's no risks that are going to be taken.

It's going to be the exact same excuses over, and over, and over, and over. Every single time. Telling you how they can't do this, can't do that, can't provide this.
Can't fix housing, can't change the meta, can't add stuff, or job balance, etc mid-expansion. Endlessly.

The game is so stale at this point that it's no longer "stale". It's petrified.

[LeCorbeaux]

Good tutorials for how to play your job.

Fully agreed. And if you think PvE is badly tutorialised, look at the state of in-game PvP tutorials and weep.

There's a lot which should be improved here.

[AlliciaCapulet]

Good tutorials for how to play your job.

I agree with you, and that’s why I keep saying the following:

1 – Skill distribution at lower levels needs to be reconsidered. It currently takes far too long to get a meaningful toolkit, especially in synced dungeons. With every expansion, skills are removed, merged, or shifted to higher levels. As a result, lower-level gameplay has become overly simplified. A level 50 job in ARR felt more complete than a level 50 job does today. Now, those brackets feel stripped down and lacking depth.

2 – Dungeons and trials should gradually return to a reasonable level of challenge. You don’t truly learn your job without some degree of struggle. I understand that difficulty was reduced so players wouldn’t get stuck in the MSQ or fall behind, but in reality, you improve by facing mechanics that require proper execution. I’m not suggesting everything should be tuned to Extreme level, but there should be consequences for poor play. Even in a dungeon, there should be a DPS checks on bosses. Tanks should need to mitigate properly or die. Healers should have to actually heal, more than just healing on the trash mob pulls. If roles are not played correctly, wipes should be possible. Dungeons also need more variety than the standard “two trash pulls, one boss” repeated three times.

3 – Leveling should be slower, especially at lower levels, and experience shouldn’t be awarded to jobs you didn’t actually play. For example, Frontline roulette allows you to queue as one job, swap, and level something you never actively used. You learn a job by playing it.

Wanting more challenge isn’t elitism. Right now, the difficulty curve is so flat that it’s no surprise many casual players struggle when they first encounter mid-tier content like Extreme trials. If you’ve never had to worry about DPS checks or proper rotation before, of course it becomes overwhelming later.

Developers shouldn’t lower the difficulty of group content to accommodate weaker players. If necessary, they could offer a dedicated “story mode” version for players who want to experience the narrative with NPCs on an easier setting. But when you queue with other players, the difficulty should be high enough that you’re expected to understand your role and perform it correctly.

[Voidmage]

snip

I don't want to sound rude or dismissive and genuinely want everyone to have fun with the game.

But no one gets walled in the MSQ.
You either have trusts which now even have a "retry" at bosses, get help clearing by others like an MMO is supposed to or you can set the difficulty for solo missions to easy.
Taking a second try or a third with trusts isn't a shame. Even raiders sometimes die to dungeon mechanics but the ability to actually do fail is part of the fun a video game brings.

At the end of the day this is still a video game, players are already level 100 and at one point a game should ask for the basics.
DT dungeons aren't really harder than Stb ones back in the day. Faster yes but at the same time far more forgiving regarding the needed job execution.
No one in their right mind bats an eye if you make a mistake in a dungeon or trial (outside the WoL QTE or not using tank LB there).

That said though, I am of the opinion, like I said before, that we have a bit too much focus on hard content right now while normal content is thrown in like the unwanted child.
I simply don't agree with the notion that the normal content is in any way too hard.
I played too many video games in my life to think that.

[Valence]

This was only on Raw Intuition, which guaranteed parries to the front and crits received from behind (and originally also heals from behind because... XIV and sensible coding have never gone together, apparently). All enemy autos could, at the time, critically strike (and crits couldn't, again because of bizarre coding decisions making them mutually exclusive to RNG mit categories, be blocked or parried), with that chance increasingly mostly just with level disparity, iirc. What was significant was just that you couldn't block or parry attacks from behind altogether.

Yes, thank you, I was trying to recall the exact details. It was parry/block that stopped working when struck behind. I liked this a lot. It asked tanks and parties to be mindful of positioning and orientation.

True, but this was frankly a pretty awful mechanic except when treated as a party-wide consideration. Unless optimized for, it was 6 buttons of bloat for tanks and 1-2 more for all other roles for, at best, a game of The Price is Right based upon the combination of your DPSs' output and --especially once in Stormblood-- their refusal to use their party tools (among which Diversion was decently important). In early ARR, the choice offered different approaches to small-but-threatening pulls, but... nothing else. Large pulls and very small pulls (so, some 80% of ARR and HW leveling dungeon pulls and then 99% of everything else) offered no real choice and therefore no strategic variance.

I disagree, I liked having to adjust my aggro <-> damage output balance depending on the situation. It promoted skill play for those who wanted it. And it left people that didn't care or didn't know about it just use tank stance with full aggro combos and be done with it. That is, for single target, because AoE was... a mess. It had little meaning with WAR/DRK, and PLD was just a disaster before Total Eclipse in SB. But Total Eclipse having no aggro modifier was actually nice, and I wished back then all tanks had one like this, and another like Flash or something in the vein.

The only "balance" it struck was in very rarely preferring Cure over Cure II (and the SCH/AST equivalents of each), since the first healed for 60% as much for just 40% the MP [or effectively 25% for Cure if including Freecure averaged RNG]) and made Regen far more valuable. You still spent no time idling unless oomed by necessary rezzes, and that cost would still be more favorably taken up by the Bard, whose raid buff song at the time only affected elemental magic and whose MP song was a smaller penalty to their own damage than a damage benefit to even just one healer. Apart from that, they simply each further penalized Spell Speed and Skill Speed, since they alone did not increase output-per-resources-spent and meant that a pull could be lost within its first 25s or so even if it took 70s or so to die, simply because lackluster physical DPS meant that they could run out of the ability to hit any weaponskills except every third GCD or so before the mobs died, extending the fight into so late a time that the tank and healer run out of CDs and are inevitably overwhelmed.

On which note, unless it's used as a way to skip ahead on combos and make the GCD more flexible (e.g., by having a GCD of 2s but only being able to sustain an average of 2.25s) AND we start to see reasons to want to stay in or get out as deliberate choices with melee being rewarded commensurately to that increased risk (while casters/rangers get their own due added complexity and variable reward in turn), I really do not at all care to see TP reintroduced. As for MP, I have zero attachment to it, either, and would almost prefer it be used primarily as a shared resource system for special actions (the rest being mostly negligible) instead, akin to HW Ruin III or being used mostly be abilities if we wanted to reduce the frequency of their use without reducing their in-a-given-moment's availability.

/shrug

I'm not speaking about Cure I / Cure II and freecure or whatever. I did enjoy the resource scarcity in single target and bosses though. Most classes had to manage it. Dying literally drained this, overhealing drained healer and party resources, and a lot of the time when parties crashed back then especially in casual content, it was because of people running on fumes and unable to properly recover, and not just enough people failing to dodge a mechanic.

I'm also talking about healer dungeon experience once you got AoE tools, and this has been taken away entirely from the game — and also what made me abandon healing completely after. That was the whole point, like tanks could balance damage and aggro, healers also had to balance damage and healing in accordance to their finite resources, and this meant adjusting to a lot of variables, like the tank's own skill, their gear, but also your DPS gear and skill at burning down mob packs as you described it. The less efficient it was, the more it drained into resources, and I really, really enjoyed this. I didn't exactly enjoy being left unable to do anything once out of TP for DPS classes though, which was one of the bad parts of the design.

That's why I have felt so alienated by the game's direction since ShB, because it literally changed the whole paradigm of everything and that's not what I signed for nor what I liked about the game. People constantly telling me the game has always been the same are full of s*** (not aimed at you there, no offense intended).

[Shouko]

This game lacks a lot of focus, it's like the ADHD of games, implement something, don't finish it, implement another thing and don't finish it or just do it poorly in general.

[NegativeS]

Devs who play their own game. Based on the abysmal state of balance and how supposed 'evergreen' features are regularly abandoned, I wouldn't be surprised if nobody at SE plays FFXIV outside of testing new content

[Grizzlpaw]

On the last bit about Healers feeling unecessary. You feel this most in dungeons.

We desperately need hard mode dungeons. Actual hard mode dungeons. With mobs that make you think twice about wall to wall pulling, bosses that actually hurt outside of tank busters, and bonus mechanics that put unavoidable spread damage on the party. The design of tanks is that they have very good burst sustain cooldowns, but rely on healers to pick up the slack once they've burned through them.

That doesn't work when bosses are designed to only deal burst damage that conveniently lines up with a tank's sustain CDs. Even in low level dungeons where tanks don't have their sustain tools yet, it's kinda laughable how non-threatening everything is outside of big pulls. Why is it that I can burn all of my mits on trash and not feel even slightly stressed about the upcoming boss fight? You can chug through for so long with just your 123 sustain.

Healers will never feel important in dungeons so long as SE is afraid to make dungeons hard enough to fail.

[Shurrikhan]

Yes, thank you, I was trying to recall the exact details. It was parry/block that stopped working when struck behind. I liked this a lot. It asked tanks and parties to be mindful of positioning and orientation.

Same. (Aside, but... it was also far more caster-friendly, as tanks were then forced to stop spreading out mob groups by placing themselves in the center, haha.)

I disagree, I liked having to adjust my aggro <-> damage output balance depending on the situation.

Fair, and in that regard, I agree. I just think it was executed upon pretty horribly, to the point that 90% of the minutial optimizations were actually traps while only the overarching 10% to remain were actually indicative of good play in any situation not born of someone griefing, ignoring their kit, or ****ing up terribly.

Even accounting for those screw-ups, though, it's strategic depth was still just dropping into tank stance, say, after Goring Blade has been used and swapping back out just before the next or next-next one, give-or-take a Royal Authority actually being used as such instead of replaced with a redundant (Strength Down already applied) Rage of Halone to exploit the multiplicative Enmity modifiers based on how much you think your Dragoon will refuse to use Elusive, your StB Samurai Diversion, your BLM Lucid Dreaming, etc. and whether your co-tank overused their defensives and therefore one of your might die over a 20% difference in DR or adds were about to spawn (though then you'd be looking at Flash anyways, so... then it's more a matter of Goring drift, though the stances each cost a GCD themselves so a single Flash actually realigned rotation /shrug).

It had little meaning with WAR/DRK

I mean, it had meaning on DRK, in that it cost MP atop a GCD and that MP was much more relevant for DRK than for PLD (for whom it was only used for Clemency, itself often cancelled just to guarantee that Shelltron was consumed by the tankbuster instead of an auto-attack going off just before it).

I'm not speaking about Cure I / Cure II and freecure or whatever.

Okay, but then... nothing else came from resource scarcity. You just had a lower portion of incoming damage counterable by oGCDs, so that healing spells were a frequent part of casts (instead of just at-offensive-cost backup actions all sharing a common pseudo-CD, MP). (Yes, Flash cost a bit of MP, too, but you rarely wanted to rely on RNG misses for boss-fights, and it was your only AoE Enmity source, so... that was mostly just rote outside per the basic type of pull.)

That resource scarcity in turn gave varied priority to things like Cure I / Cure II because you could use Cure II to get enough healing out immediately to then reapply your DoTs on time (with, due to Cleric Stance, every offensive cast, at the time, requiring 2 GCDs if fed off of a heal [2s] or instant-cast, or just barely more if fed off a filler attack [2.5s] without Swiftcast), but in itself it merely made viable losing some offensive throughput now (or, in the next few GCDs) in favor of uptime later (by not going oom) by using a Cure I and maintaining Regen, etc., where they wouldn't interfere or force panic-heals out of your cohealer.

All else was just a matter of damage intake relative to "free" healing output. If you gave a boss an Amnesia aura, locking us out of our abilities, or just increased the number of damage events beyond what we could safely deal with via abilities alone, and you'd see the same results minus the ability for Bards to sacrifice their own damage to bail out healers' bad decisions or excessive rezzes (that instead indirectly falling to Paladins).

Most classes had to manage it.

That management was (A) avoid Skill/Spell Speed (a bit more SkS permissible if receiving Goad), (B) hit your Invigorate/Shroud/Luminous/Aetherflow on CD, and (C) bring a Bard and/or caster for Manashift. Out of that, only Manashift, Goad, and... hitting the CD on CD... were remotely "gameplay", especially once we reached Stormblood (wherein Bard/MCH just hit their MP/TP songs on CD in order to maintain raidbuffs and avoid pulling off the tank).

Dying literally drained this

It still does, and via job gauge elements, in a far more variably punishing manner.

a lot of the time when parties crashed back then especially in casual content, it was because of people running on fumes and unable to properly recover, and not just enough people failing to dodge a mechanic.

A party can still run itself out of the ability to rez just as much now as then, at least in terms of resources.

The difference is simply that we basically don't use healing spells anymore outside of the rare cast in Savage, and therefore rezzes are the only real MP costs beyond the net-positive churn of DoTs and filler attack spam. Granted, we also now don't have any real Mage's Ballad, Promoted Bishop Turret, Ewer, or Mana Shift to make up for party mistakes (all atop vuln stacks going from almost never seen to a part of virtually every mechanic, all to better ensure death and prevent healers from compensating significantly via ST healing spells instead of just rezzes).

The less efficient it was, the more it drained into resources, and I really, really enjoyed this.

...Again, though, this was only a thing at a party level.

Like, if you used a NIN, WHM, PLD, +1, and the Paladin took Ultimatum as one of their Role Actions, they could run into Bartam first pull with Shield Oath, Total Eclipse as not to burn Blind duration early, and then drop stance for extra damage as they have the WHM Swiftcast Holy, pop a Cure II and Benison via the Lily generated, prep another Holy timed to stun just as the previous one's elapses, then Ultimatum, Smokescreen, and Shadewalker together to let the Paladin hold threat as it Hallowed Grounds through 10s more, then cycle defensives (including Flash itself, worth a little over 20% DR against attacks capable of missing) and reapply Shield Oath if necessary to maintain threat until the end or a GCD or two away from it.

But even in that, while all the extra damage at the onset allowed the party not to run out of resources, it was still an optimal strategy regardless just for kill speed. You'd still do the exact same thing even if TP or MP hadn't existed simply because of how huge the relative value of CDs (damage multipliers, %DRs, and things like Divine Seal) were, favoring throughput right now over later sustain.

That's my issue with it. Whenever you played well, the other parts of the game made resources irrelevant anyways. It felt either vestigial or just a strange and very dull Speed-punishing tax... from inception.

I'm also talking about healer dungeon experience once you got AoE tools, and this has been taken away entirely from the game — and also what made me abandon healing completely after.

...I'm confused. Healers got their first AoE heal at level 10 (WHM/AST) or 35 (SCH), and their first AoE attacks at 50 (WHM), 52 (AST) or 30/35 (SCH). And what's been taken away among them? That, before level 30/50/52, a healer 'dealt AoE damage' (in a manner of speaking) only through increased healing onto a tank forgoing tank stance while having access to an AoE attack (i.e., until Stormblood, only if one had a non-PLD)? That sort of 'you and me and I am you' instinctive party coordination, since watered down by everyone having basically the same direct tools anyways?

That was the whole point, like tanks could balance damage and aggro

Again, because of the way tank stances worked (having tremendous cost to and very few viable transfer point for swapping until 4.1 Warrior), not really a tight balance there.

After level 40, a tank ideally opened in tank stance, swapped out early on, and never looked back. And in ARR, Paladins had no reason to leave Shield Oath in AoE, being better off instead just tab-targeting Rage of Halone itself (since only the potency, not the Enmity modifier, required combo progress) or the combo (whoever got Rage before gets Fast next) between Flashes as able to still keep up with AoE threat (as not to waste Blind duration and its mitigation).

Until HW, PLD effectively didn't even have any non-aggro skills [as, lacking Goring or Royal, Riot Blade was just a refill for Flash].

healers also had to balance damage and healing in accordance to their finite resources

Almost never according to finite resources unless they sacrificed the stat and LB bonus of bringing a Ranger or there were a lot of rezzes required. Outside of proximity to DoT replacement, priorities were stable; you just sometimes didn't have the MP to filler-attack and instead just idled.

People constantly telling me the game has always been the same are full of s***

It's definitely different now, aye... but a lot of what we had before ended up having an illusion of impact while actually changing the game not at all relative to what you'd optimally do even if those systems hadn't existed, outside of the aforementioned idling.

Now, if we could replace those pretenses with depth and make the kinds of coordination-requiring optimizations (beyond just "hit your 'Helps Party' button whenever it's available, cus that is just bloat) that early gameplay seemingly wanted us to leverage more prominent and noticeable to players, I'd be all for that. I'm just pointing out what all actually had impact.