Evolved Skills Feedback

[Aviatorhead]

Maybe time will change my take, but the idea of fixing healers this way makes me scream on the inside. Please. I just want healing to be how it was before every tank was made to not need a healer. Why is that so hard.

[Mikey_R]

Maybe time will change my take, but the idea of fixing healers this way makes me scream on the inside. Please. I just want healing to be how it was before every tank was made to not need a healer. Why is that so hard.

But you might need to heal more, you don't know how much damage things are going to do to you in the new content. Even just looking at the dev panel, the tank buster from that mob shaved off ~25%-30% of the Paladin's HP, bear in mind they were level 110 and likely had the EW AF gear equipped. However, do note that Holy Sheltron did not have a regen attached to it and the resulting counter did not heal either. So I do suspect tank self healing is going to be reduced or at the very least, not as impactful.

With tanks taking more damage, you will then have a reason to use your healing GCDs, which then feeds into your damage rotation.

Now, it really is too early to make a proper judgement on things, especially healers and tanks as they have a reliance on the bosses actions and the incoming damage in order to properly evaluate their kit. However, I do not see a reason to go straight to thinking that it isn't going to work based on the limited info we have right now. Plus, it is all still in development, it could change.

[Garruss]

The whole admitting the Evolved mode does more damage than Reborn mode is a clear sign they want people to use it more than Reborn mode. I need to see more jobs in this new mode. Right now, I am not sold on this new mode. I would like the ability on it to have our 1-2-3 combo to be on separate buttons as an option

[AnotherPerson]

Really, it's all a wait-and-see before being able to make more harder judgements on whether evolved mode is good or not, because there's a lot of conditions they need to fulfill to make Evolved skillset work well in PvE compared to existing Reborn Mode.

How will they replace the build up of resources, coordination and buff optimization from Reborn Mode with Evolved Mode without making it really seem like "Easy Mode"? Are new encounters going to be executing mechanics and applying debuffs/positional limitations/varying damage to the point having less buttons are more impactful in what they do at every step of the fight? The reason why PvP's less button gameplay works without being considered an "Easy Mode" is exactly because the skillset is optimized to have varying stress levels chaotically and extremely quickly to the point where skill expression is mastering your skillset and leveraging the buttons at various ideal moments with a team (scripted encounters can be very hard to display this with so many various jobs and having too much homogenization of same effects reduces the individuality of the jobs' action themselves). Even so, PvP manages a level of buff optimization and coordination well in addition to these situations while dividing various roles between players with unique job skillsets that debilitates the enemies in an impactful way, and there's also a secondary MP resource gauge to manage for self healing. Every skill has a purpose, with multi-faceted functions beyond just damage (not every action is guaranteed to be used perfectly due to these multi-faceted actions, but the cooldown is low enough to make plenty of considerable choices to tackle an encounter). Afflicting various status effects is not something Reborn Mode does very well. Reborn mode methodology is reacting to damage, positioning to safe spots, and build to buff & burst with more skills to leverage pacing. Aggro works very differently with players compared to PvE encounters.

There needs to be a level of depth within the toolkit beyond one or two combos and a level of stress created by encounters to leverage the skills better even with reduced action choices in Evolved mode, or it might really become "easy mode". Pacing of the skillset and pacing of the fight will matter in the long run when encounters take a long time. How does the evolved skillset intend to tackle these situations while offering a level of depth without making it look like Easy Mode?

I have some hope they do make encounters and the toolkit applicable enough, given DRG's Sky High (PvP LB invuln state) and BRD's new movement skill and cast time (?) being a thing. PLD's cover to ally and counter seems to be a lynchpin of aggro redirection, which can imply more varied aggro control or varied targeting?

At the same time, WHM's showcase does not seem as compelling as the other jobs, precisely because PvE Healers with the Reborn skillset has a lot more conditional things to consider due to gated cooldowns (MP and pacing with skill cds and cast times), and Evolved mode seems to reduce even that decision-making more without giving anything else to consider in its playstyle (at least from what we have seen so far). Healers require decision making to function as a healer (regardless of PvE or PvP), and reducing DPS cast times drastically remove any decision making for the DPS side (positioning no longer really a factor), so healing has to be huge to compensate... Developers are walking a huge tightrope here without giving something more to healers and the toolkit will feel very empty.... Especially once there's nothing to heal... The monotony of casting Glare is really not much different even if you put a different animation if nothing in the gameplay changes now that Glare and High Glare are both instant GCDs. It's similar to pressing a DPS's 1-2 combo action... it's not enough on its own to do anything. Players were already feeling it and complaining about it with Reborn mode after all...

But all of this might be a pessimistic outlook. There is far too much limited information, so they could have thought about all these points and more. Everything is in development, so there could still be huge changes. It's still a very much wait-and-see on whether they can execute that satisfying gameplay. I'm still hopeful as long as their upper limit for job design remains very high.

[emecsek]

i really hope we will be able to seperate some of the merged skills. i don't want to bother changing targets if i want to heal myself as tank when i'm already used to doing it while still targeting the boss. i'll admit it's not the biggest problem, but with years of muscle memory it's going to be annoying. i also don't mind the extra button or two, more customization is always good.

[Kohashi]

Pandemonium is not precisely the good example youi think it is. Nothing there justified things like the oversimplified healer kits and the people who cried were a minority at best, people did mechanics just fine like in every other tier before and after it. if harder fights like DSR already received complaints because the kits were bland what makes you think an entire tier easier than that justifies things like the WHM changes?

I can't actually believe you played all this time, and as long as you did, you still fail to understand what FF14 is about. Rather comical but anyway... It was NEVER about the class kits since they started reworking in HW when they dropped the clunky, stupidly and poorly designed choices. It was always about the fights. Classes had enough complexity to add to the fights overall, and hyper optimizations were still not for the average ppl.

XIV is not other games, XIV is XIV and if you want to reduce the button count you need to compensate with interactions elsewhere and they dont seem to be doing that, it seems like another batch of oversimplification.

They don't seem to.. that's pretty much you jumping to a conclusion BEFORE even seeing the final product. I do doubt they will make the classes super difficult + even more difficult encounters because, as it stands now, the vast majority of people are still struggling as things are.

Guess what those other games dont have? A precarious online structure with outdated netcode and very low refresh rate, XIV may want to be faster but its structure wont ever be the one of an action game and with already 5 expansions is already too late to make the shift smoothly

That is true, but it might also signal that they will most likely update the net code. As far as I know, they have been slowly working on the back end of it. One thing is clear to me, is that if they go towards action-based, they WILL have to redo their code. Does that mean we will be seeing the assets imported in the new iteration of their game engine? We shall see, but it was clearly possible for the mobile game, which was using their engine but customized for mobile.

[OliverQ]

The whole admitting the Evolved mode does more damage than Reborn is a clear sign they want people to use it more than Reborn mode clearly. I need to see more jobs in this new mode. Right now, I am not sold on this new mode, I wouls like the ability on it to have our 1-2-3 combo to be on separate buttons as an option

The bigger sign they want Evolved to be used more is because all new jobs going forward will not have a Reborn mode.

[WaxSw]

I can't actually believe you played all this time, and as long as you did, you still fail to understand what FF14 is about. Rather comical but anyway... It was NEVER about the class kits since they started reworking in HW when they dropped the clunky, stupidly and poorly designed choices. It was always about the fights. Classes had enough complexity to add to the fights overall, and hyper optimizations were still not for the average ppl.

Jobs get their own trailer, is one of the selling points of the game and per expansion by own admission of yoshi-p. JOBS are one of the focus of the game, every other mmo has fights, good fights, but XIV selling point along its msq has always been its jobs and diverse playstyles.

About the HW comments... I think you should try to understand how those jobs worked instead of watching hearsay from a random video on youtube. Its very clear you don't know about how the classes were in the pre Shb era if you think the current ones are enough.

They don't seem to.. that's pretty much you jumping to a conclusion BEFORE even seeing the final product. I do doubt they will make the classes super difficult + even more difficult encounters because, as it stands now, the vast majority of people are still struggling as things are.

I am not jumping into conclussions, I'm expressing my doubts on what has been shown and everyone here knows that is bound to change, but if we want a decent change and not a Whm that spams glare 18 times per minute if Holy Sanctuary is a gain, we must speak now that they have time to do the changes.

That is true, but it might also signal that they will most likely update the net code. As far as I know, they have been slowly working on the back end of it. One thing is clear to me, is that if they go towards action-based, they WILL have to redo their code. Does that mean we will be seeing the assets imported in the new iteration of their game engine? We shall see, but it was clearly possible for the mobile game, which was using their engine but customized for mobile.

You tell me that I'm jumping into conclussions and then you have the gall to throw this fanfic about what SE wants and will do ignoring things like resource allocation, return of investment and oportunity costs?

[Vrankyl]

It's actually funny WoW has been brought up here because thinking about WoW's system because it generally has smaller button rotations made me realize what I didn't like about the Evolved skills. Unlike other games with smaller rotations we have a 2.5 second GCD. Right now at lvl 100 it doesn't always feel like that because we're constantly weaving and double weaving OGCDs. But based on what we saw... a lot if not most of those are going away. So we're left with Push button 1 for rotation once ever 2.5 seconds and clap hands.

WoW gets away with it because yeah WW monk might have a 5-6 button rotation, but once you're geared you're GCD is also down to about 0.8 seconds or so which is practice is blindingly faster than FF14s. So I look at the Evolved Skills and I see a return to ARR where combat in FF14 was the worst thing because it was so darn slow and long.

[Raim]

I want Evolved Mode going forward. However, I would like the 'option' to decouple the combo buttons for people who want it to remain a possibility for those who like it.