Please Reconsider Splitting Main and Off-Tank Roles Based on Job

[IhzaMhaskova]

And that'd be ideal because it would also mean it's absolutely identical to how it is now where some tank classes prefer MT or OT.

And it would also be terminally boooooring as it means that once again tanks have no unique upsides or downsides. Yes those ought to ideally be per-class not per-subrole, but I take my wins where I can get them. Hopefully.

I'm hoping that EU Fan Fest gets a lot more information on the combat changes, MT/OT differentiations, and what "seasons" will be in a comprehensive way.

As it currently stands I wish they had left the info out of NA Fan Fest and not said anything until they had something of substance to show because the limited info we did get does a lot to cause potential concern and little to cause excitement.

[Mikey_R]

As it currently stands I wish they had left the info out of NA Fan Fest and not said anything until they had something of substance to show because the limited info we did get does a lot to cause potential concern and little to cause excitement.

This is a difficult one as I understand the frustration, we have snippets of things with a lot of 'we are still ironing out exactly how it is going to work, look forward to it', however I suspect they also wanted to show us, look, we are listening, we have massive changes coming to the game and we want everyone to be aware of it. This is not going to be DT2.0, but something different. This is also why they wanted to show some job gameplay far ahead of where we normally see it, we hear you wanting to get away from the battle cycle, so this is what we are working with.

If you were to choose between a fan fest that didn't show anything new and seemed just like the others, or, one where they showed they want to make massive changes, which one would you chose?

[Carighan]

If you were to choose between a fan fest that didn't show anything new and seemed just like the others, or, one where they showed they want to make massive changes, which one would you chose?

Not the person you quoted, but I think I kinda agree with them. And then to answer your question, I'd have not shown specific classes during the first fan fest until I'm ready to at least show 50%+ basically, importantly at least one of each role, some comparative examples (at least one pair of DPS and healer and tank from the same sub-role so I can show how they differentiate) and varied specific examples of combat not just the target dummy. It's okay if a fair few classes are still in the oven, but enough for players to get a more specific idea maybe.

And then before that - like this fanfest - I'd have talked in generics. With lots of "why" and info about the design process more. Show individual abilities if need be (like the Dragoon separated side positionals) but not whole jobs and not specific examples.

Although to be fair I don't see it as as big issue either. MMORPG communities enjoy doomchanting, hence any information at all would have had this effect of endless OMG THE SKY IS FALLING threads. But it'd be smarter from a communication perspective to go generics -> specifics -> whole classes over the three fanfests, IMO.

[Mikey_R]

Although to be fair I don't see it as as big issue either. MMORPG communities enjoy doomchanting, hence any information at all would have had this effect of endless OMG THE SKY IS FALLING threads. But it'd be smarter from a communication perspective to go generics -> specifics -> whole classes over the three fanfests, IMO.

I don't necessarily agree. By giving too little info to start with, you open up the door for more questions than answers, which only fuels the doomposting. You've seen what we have already with only half of the tank sub roles shown, how would that be if they showed neither of them? Even if they went into some detail that Paladin will have a counter off of Holy Shield which gets stronger if timed right, and an OT has this specific mechanic, it still doesn't really tell you about the jobs themselves. Even talking about Dragoon side positionals, if that is all that is mentioned, are people going to assume nothing has changed much about the rotation, it's still going to be fairly rigid with fixed places the positionals come up? Considering we know that isn't the case, would false assumptions be made about other jobs that turn out to not be true?

Then we get to showing them, if you want to have 2 jobs from each sub role, you are looking at 10 jobs in total, they took about 10 minutes per job in the dev panel, so you are looking at close to 2 hours just for that, then you want to add in fight examples as well? Pretty sure they don't want something to last that long, especially since Fan Fest is not just about the panels they put on, so they likely don't want to take up too much time.

And while yes, we are left with many questions now, I do still think this is the better way to go about things with everything considered. However, either way, the community as a whole is going to be ravenous for information and no matter how it was delivered, it probably wasn't going to be right or they didn't divulge enough for us. I should just think ourselves lucky we even got as much as we did.