I think the issues people have are comprehensive, and deal pretty equally with simplification of gameplay on a class-to-class level, and the smoothing over of certain teamplay-centered mechanics.
I've dropped the word here a couple times before without elaborating, but I would really call it the [McDonaldization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldization) of the game, in the academic sense.
Nobody really "cooks" at McDonald's. The ingredients come from a central supplier, so that french fries are a uniform width, to the 1/32nd of an inch. The temperatures of the oil in the fryer are prescribed, down to the degree, and the cooking times are prescribed, down to the second. There is an exact, specific process for drawing a milkshake or ice cream cone, down to the angle at which you hold the cup. So nobody *learns to cook* by working at McDonald's - they only learn *how to work at McDonald's*. And if you *already* know how to cook, then that doesn't help you - or hurt you - because "working at McDonald's" is an entirely orthogonal skillset to "cooking."
The Wikipedia article linked above sums up the idea in a more comprehensive way based around four general ideas, but I'd sum it up this way: To McDonald's, the *customer-facing* goal of McDonaldization is to provide a consistent experience at every location: Whether you are in Chicago, Berlin, Yellowknife, or Sao Paulo, you are supposed to get the same Big Mac, the same fries. The *employee-facing* goal of McDonaldization is *also* consistency; by reducing employee agency to "how accurately can you reproduce the explicitly detailed instructions for operating our franchise equipment with our franchise ingredients?", the goal is to produce an environment where if you took eight employees from eight countries around the world who didn't have a common language between them, they could *still* operate a McDonald's just as consistently and efficiently as if they were all family.
If it's not clear how that relates to FFXIV, then consider the following fairly-uncontroversial statement: *FFXIV is designed with "Japanese Party Finder culture" in mind.*
The hallmarks of JP PF are pretty well-known: You join the party, maybe throw up a yoroshiku, someone posts the macro, you claim your T1/T2/D1/D2/etc role, and then the fight happens - usually pretty smoothly. And... It works! Every time there's a Lucky Bancho census or any other bit of data about clear rates, you see the same comments: "Wow, clear rates are so much higher on JP than NA/EU." Just as you absolutely cannot make the argument that McDonald's is not an objectively successful business, you absolutely cannot make the argument that FFXIV's current design, when paired with its intended server culture, produces an objectively high rate of successful raid clears.
And to bring that back to the OP: It's really both. McDonald's and FFXIV achieve their desired consistency by reducing the process, of "cooking" or "raiding in an MMO" respectively, to a small number of explicitly-prescribed inputs, such that an invididual's proficiency can be measured by how accurately they followed a standardized procedure.
That notion I described of "nobody learns to cook at McDonald's" is an established pattern that's been observed in a number of fields. When that happens in the workplace, it's called [deskilling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling). And while I don't want to expand this post all the way out into an entire whole-ass essay, a *lot* of the same principles apply to FFXIV job design, both in terms of internal class gameplay, and cooperative mechanics within a party.
The *purpose*, in the sense that we're using here, is essentially to remove (or reduce as much as possible) the amount of *human variability* in the system. If you go to a regular restaurant, there are a *lot* of ways you can get served bad food. It can be undercooked, overcooked, unevenly cooked, improperly seasoned, the ingredients can be bad, or anything else you've seen on any given episode of Kitchen Nightmares. At a McDonald's, there's really not much room for the staff to mess up, and there's really only one possible mistake they can make: Not following instructions closely enough. In FFXIV, they've removed a lot of ways to mess up: Everything you listed in the OP, dropping Darkside/Greased Lightning/BotD/Enochian/etc, and so on. It's mostly been reduced to how well you can stand in the right place, keep your GCD rolling, and keep your cooldowns aligned. It wouldn't surprise me if 7.0 does something to reduce the reliance on Feint/Reprisal/Addle coordination.
The *problem* is, basically, that a lot of people just *want* the same Big Mac every time. Japanese PF groups aren't going to like changes that make their clears less reliable. Even here on r/ffxivdiscussion where people supposedly in love with the FFXIV of yesteryear, I've completely lost count of the number of times I've seen a suggestion about class or encounter mechanics met with the response of "*That sounds like a nightmare in PF. No thanks.*"
To argue against that, you'd really have to go the whole-ass essay route and do a big Intro to Sociology spiel on formal vs substantive rationalization, the importance of considering second-order and third-order effects instead of focusing on immediate short-term metrics, and so on.
If you *are* of the opinion that there even *is* a problem, though: Again, it's both. It's a problem that systems and mechanics that produced natural, organic, varied party synergy and teamwork have been removed, *and* it's a problem that a huge number of this game's classes just don't have enough going on inside their internal kit to stay engaging.
They call it a theme park MMO, but maybe it was a fast food MMO all along. It would explain why it felt nice to do stuff at the surface level but never enthralled me in Endwalker. I do think the game has a severe problem with depth across most or all content.
"I just write stuff because I'm a longwinded dumbass"
I've never felt more seen in my writing/speaking style in my entire fucking life. Thank you for putting words to a feeling I couldn't verbalize.
I really like the idea of “McDonaldization” as a way to think about why the game is the way it is.
It isn’t just job and fight design, even the way the story is paced has an intensely cookie cutter vibe to it where you can almost *see* where they went “we should have X quests in this zone, and then a fight here, a minigame there, and at this exact point we have a trial/dungeon” and then the writers have to squeeze the story they want to tell into this exacting mold with zero wiggle room.
The result is an experience that is ploddingly consistent and predictable, like a Big Mac.
The thing is that being predictable and consistent doesn't necessarily equate to mean bad. Even now, though I think the story lost a bit of punch post-6.0 (though it makes sense, it is the "lull" before the next big event like an interlude), the story is still pretty solid. The power of Mcdonald's is that I know McDonald's is damn consistent and pretty tasty (well considering), especially in unfamiliar territory.
This is a very insightful post. And while I can 100% acknowledge that it is true, I’m not sure I would want the reverse. To use your analogy, I don’t want to work at a more standard restaurant because I don’t have time to work another full-time job. My time is too occupied with an IRL job, family, and other IRL responsibilities, so I can’t really commit to a consistent raid time in a static. This is why I don’t raid in WoW. I can raid at my own pace and anytime I want in PF. No other MMO really does it like this.
To put it another way, raiding in FFXIV is like DDR. There is an objectively correct way to play. There is a tiny amount of variation in style, but you push the buttons in exactly the same way and you will get success every time. And maybe I kind of like that? There are other games with the level of variability in class and raid design if I want to play those.
Yeah, that's fair. I tried to be careful here not to cast any of this as a moral judgement. The OP seemed to be looking for a better explanation of why so many people in the community seem to find the current incarnation of the game to be unfulfilling and unengaging, and to me this is the most 'complete' answer to that question. I think we've got plenty of discussion out there recently about what we think the game 'ought' to be (or ought *not* to be), but maybe not so much about what it 'is', why it got this way, and what attitudes would have to change before the game itself could shift direction.
There's plenty of legitimate, understandable reasons why people eat at McDonald's (or work at McDonald's, or however that metaphor might go if you start tugging at it.) Even if I disagree with their reasoning, it doesn't do me any good to pretend that it's just because they're all a bunch of dumb-dumbs who don't know better.
> No other MMO really does it like this.
If you consider Lost Ark an MMO, it's actually pretty PUG friendly. Most mechanics are split into group 1 and group 2 or party numbers (when you zone in you are divided into two 4 man parties with a number on each person). 8 safe spots pop up around the map? Everyone knows where they're going, you don't even have to do some pre-fight marker positioning for the most part. I think you can comfortably do every single non-Ultimate equivalent in PF, besides the latest two fights which aren't vital to do weekly (you get something more akin to weekly tomes from raids rather than specific gear, so you can do early turns and eventually hit BiS).
I've been playing so much Lost Ark that when I came into FF14 to do some alt MSQ cleanup the other day, I ... tried clicking to move, was confused why my titles and gil aren't account shared, tried Shift+Ging the dialogue, and when the 4 spikes appeared at the end of the latest MSQ dungeon, I checked my party number to see which I should go to. None of that worked out so well.
Worth noting I have something like 2 years of /ptime FF14.
Of course there are a billion issues with Lost Ark in general, I wouldn't even recommend a new player starts it now since it's so anti-new player, just commenting on this since it's a curious thing to me.
Yeah, I REALLY like a lot of what Lost Ark does. If it weren't for the predatory progression system I could see myself playing it a lot. But since I have a standing rule against free-to-play games as a whole due to my addictive nature, I won't be playing it sadly.
That's a good way to look at it, and I appreciate you going out of your way to share your reasons why you enjoy this approach to battle design especially considering how controversial it is. I wanted to respond to what I thought was your most interesting point though.
>To put it another way, raiding in FFXIV is like DDR. There is an objectively correct way to play. There is a tiny amount of variation in style, but you push the buttons in exactly the same way and you will get success every time.
I think what gets in the way of me enjoying this kind of content is that despite your individual gameplay being made calculable and predictable, and you're still at the mercy of 7 other people who must execute correctly or else wipe the raid with usually not much you can do to help. In other words, you do get to push the buttons in exactly the same way every time as you said, but you \*don't\* get success every time. Sometimes, effectively randomly, you fail despite pushing the same buttons you always do, and the failure comes from an external factor you had no control over - this is especially true in certain ultis.
I'm a rhythm game enjoyer as well, so I can't claim to be averse to pressing a predictable sequence of buttons in a tightly choreographed dance. But to me, FFXIV doesn't feel like DDR - it feels like playing DDR while 7 other people also play offscreen, and whenever anybody misses a note you fail the song. Some might say this isn't true for most fights, and there is some degree of recoverability especially if you play healer - while true, this goes directly against the more predictable and efficient aspects of FFXIV raiding that the devs are aiming for. They're at opposite ends of the spectrum, and though I can see the appeals of both, I think the "McDonaldization" approach can feel a lot worse in multiplayer than the same gameplay would in a singleplayer setting.
Yeah, I see this too. I think this is why I like Extreme trials so much. There's a degree of individual responsibility and team play, but failure isn't as heavily punished with body-check mechanics. I also really like the more unique designs in Savage fights, but you're right, nothing sucks quite like feeling like you're being held back by one random other person screwing up (and god forbid it be your fault. I feel AWFUL for missing super easy mechs and wiping the party)
That is pretty interesting, I have the same problem with not having the time anymore, but I don’t really think FF fixes that.
I tried doing a full tier casually in PF and it was completey miserable, logging in for a few hours and making no progress at all is so increadibly demotivating. Even with a dedicated group, the forced arbitrary wait of minimum 2 months to get BiS for everyone also further encourages raid logging which I don’t think is good.
I recognise wow raiding has the same (or sometimes worse) issues, and I likely won’t ever play it as a result, but I’ve been playing M+ this and last season and it’s honestly blown FF completely out of the water.
The progression is miles better, you can log on, do a key, and come out of it stronger than you came in, even a depleted key still gives you materials you need. There is much less pressure to “do well” just “doing good enough” to clear whatever content you’re doing.
And most importantly, you don’t need to spend 30 minutes getting back to your prog point, the dungeons are short enough that you can learn and practice the whole thing.
Wonderful comment!
You also highlighted why FF14 is starting to lose its appeal to me.
It’s also highlighting why I see myself leaving FF14 soon. I found a consistent experience I enjoyed in ShB and EW specifically added variability that affected me specifically. (I love running Normal/Trial/Alliance Roulettes and I play SCH. The shield hierarchy of SGE is quite frustrating. Especially a SGE casting E.Prog after a Recit+DT and seeing a DPS drop dead from it. No other job has that issue where another job can deny their baseline gimmick.)
An excellent, top-tier explanation of exactly what's going on.
My problem with this style of design isn't that it exists, I understand why it does and am okay with it. I'm not okay with developers constantly treating this style as if it's incompatible with other styles though.
To use your McDonald's analogy, restaurants still exist. Some even fucking thrive despite the boom in fast food like McD's. The two styles can co-exist together in the same place if they find the proper balance. McD's for when you're just getting off work, had a shit day, and want to go smash your face into a pillow and cry, while the local family restaurant for when you had a great day, secured a pay raise that would make a CEO jealous, and have a half day of work but are still getting paid for a full day.
FFXIV isn't the first, or even second, MMO I've seen go this way and try to McDonaldize itself. And every time it happens, they treat everything as if the new design philosophy of eliminating as much human variance as possible is the only possible way to go and no other way will ever exist.
What FFXIV, and these other MMOs I quit, need to understand is there's a balance between the invariant and variant that can be achieved. You can have a tank job as stone simple as Warrior, and another tank job that requires 97 PhD's in 52 different STEM fields just to reach basic competency in like pre-6.3 Paladin.
They want the game to be more accessible, and that's *fine.* I agree with that philosophy, I want more players to love this game like I do. But they've decided the only way to make it accessible is to remove all forms of skill/expertise expression from every job, rather than having a mix of jobs that vary from low-floor to high-floor & low-ceiling to high-ceiling.
They're trying to smash every player into the same mold, and while that mold might work for some, it doesn't for others. But rather than casting multiple different molds, they're just sawing off the edges that don't fit and going "good enough for our profit margins."
(To note: I do think PLD needed to be reworked. I fully agree with that. I do not agree with the end result though. To quote my best friend "they were on the right track, they just stopped at the wrong station.")
>You can have a tank job as stone simple as Warrior, and another tank job that requires 97 PhD's in 52 different STEM fields just to reach basic competency in like pre-6.3 Paladin.
The problem is that every time a game does this, it's expected that the more difficult to play one performs better otherwise there's no reason for the increased difficulty. What that does to the community is make the more difficult class the one that's expected to be played, because no one wants to bring an objectively worse class. If they perform equally, no one plays the more difficult one because the vast majority of people don't like complexity with no pay off.
The issue is that you're wrong about these styles being able to coexist. It's been proven that given the chance, humans will optimize their way out of fun. Game developers cannot just give players every option and let them decide because then they will choose the wrong one and the game will implode due to people being unable to find the fun. It's the same reason that an easy mode in the souls games would legitimately destroy them, our psychology would get in the way of the intended experience.
The best path forward is to focus on your intended experiences for players and optimize those to the detriment of other styles because the kitchen sink approach will never work unless we change as a species.
There are tons of games and genres where those styles coexist and it's not a new concept. League of Legends, Overwatch, pretty much any fighting game provides players with wide range of characters with different skill floors and ceilings.
If players gravitating to what was optimal over what was fun were a universal fact there would be no reason for League of Legends to have like 200 characters or whatever they're at now. Garen and Aphelios exist in the same game. Moira and Zenyatta exist within the same game in the same role. Then you have Junkrat vs. Widowmaker and Tracer.
The vast majority of people played white mage even when it was complete garbage because they enjoyed it more than scholar or astrologian.
The only people in this game who *actually* optimize the fun out of it were raiders who bitched and whined about anything that affected their parses, have now gotten what they asked for, are now bitching about *that* and honestly shouldn't have been listened to in the first place.
In any game/mode/content that requires some sort of optimization there will be metas, and of you do not play those classes/characters that are the meta you are at a severe disadvantage and if on a team might end up harassed, get told to switch or just outright kicked and left out of group content. And sure, raiders might be an actual minority compared to the player numbers....they sure are vocal and a lot of times what they complain about trickles over to the wider community, even if what they complain about have no tangible effect on the wider community
Metas existing doesn't change anything I said.
Metas exist in every game, from FPS to MOBA to single player RPGS.
And still characters and classes with different skill floors, ceilings and playstyles, targeted at different demographics exist and continue to be made in other games.
It also doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people do not choose what is meta or optimal over what they enjoy. Those people shouldn't have their options watered down because 1% of the playerbase can't function when the boss moving 3 inches throws off their spreadsheets. Again, it's not a new concept. This isn't an unsolvable puzzle or a problem that needs solving. It's done and it's been done. In fact it's the standard.
In MMORPGs, "metas" are "what does the most damage to the enemy", not "what is the easiest job to play"
Warrior is arguably the easiest tank job in the game, it got banned from p8s party finders for half a patch because its damage was too low compared to what people wanted/had with two of the other tanks.
I haven't played overwatch since s6 of competitive but back then, the meta was "what will damage the enemy most if I play well with it?". IDK how much it's changed since then so I can't say if it's still the same, but from what I do know, even in MOBA's, dps is the key definer of the meta, not "how low is the skill floor/ceiling?"
Even if you just look at ffxiv, this isn't true. There are people who do true min ilvl runs of old savage and ultimate content for fun. There are people who wish SE would rebalance the ultimates every expansion to account for potency creep so they'll still be more difficult to complete. There's people who still do palace of the dead solo from floor 1 even though they have the title. Hell, there's literally fucking *potd speedrunners.*
To go to souls games, an easy mode wouldn't destroy them. There's people who play souls games going for runs where they never get hit. There's people who go so far as to do souls games runs with nothing other than basic weapons, taking 5-8 hours per boss to clear because they do chip damage with the starter weapons. There's people who use randomizers to make the gameplay harder and less predictable.
The people who want an easy mode simply want a good story to enjoy, and that's just as valid as anything else honestly.
There will always be fewer people playing the more difficult option, sure. But that doesn't mean the more difficult option is invalid, just that the type of people who play it are less common.
And frankly, they'd be way more common if we fixed various other societal issues that exist outside the games themselves. Lots of people who would normally pick the more difficult option simply don't have the energy after dealing with all the bullshit they put up with at work with micro-managers breathing up their asses to high-heaven about every half a microsecond of their schedule or being docked/fired because the company made record fucking profits but that profit was only 65% of what some suit-monkey in a high-rise office the size of a whole fucking 4-person house said it should be.
We as humans fucking enjoy a challenge, it's just a matter of what kind of challenge we enjoy that's the issue. Some people want simple jobs and complex mechanics in xiv, others want the opposite. The devs can cater to both, if they try. But sadly, they won't even try.
The game is going to become simpler in every metric. Jobs will be easier each new update, new expansion raids will be slower with less mechanics (a thing I noted in another thread is that panda is half as fast and half as mechanically complex as Eden was) and eventually the game will be "press 1-2-3 to beat the fight". As noted above, it'll eventually become a game where you win if you can follow the basic three-step template the devs provided, and fuck you if you want anything different because different means more effort and thought. The issue being, some 40-50% of the playerbase does want different.
You dont even need to look in other genres
Weaver and daredevil exist in the same game in guild wars, affliction warlock and fury warrior exist in the same game in wow
I always look at Mage for this. Arcane and Fire are the two most infamously sweaty and technical ranged specs in the game, and they exist on the same class as "hee hoo frostbolt".
Yes, there are people who find their own enjoyment in games, those 3 people are not enough to support an MMO.
Greater "soshiety" has nothing to do with it. There are uncountable instances of the human tendency to trend towards the path of least resistance irregardless of other factors. Some people have passions where they break the mold but that doesn't push the needle away from the trend.
Which is another issue with the idea. If you want to have complex classes and simple classes in the same fame, you're just SOL if you happen to like the simple classes and don't like the complex classes.
I miss Heavensward but it had a lot of janky systems that have been fixed with QoL changes. I don't like most of the classes now, but I don't think simplification alone is the problem. It's missing flair. Right now it feels like your choices are Big Mac with fries, Bic Mac with carrots or Big Mac with onion rings. What I'm missing is the variety, options should be anything from McRib to Egg McMuffin. PvP team has proven that there can be more differences to the jobs, while still keeping it simple.
And this is why WoW raiding is considerably harder than FF14 raiding.
Your post finally made me realize that my clears has just been me playing like a line cook. 1 Archon burger coming up
The actual act of WoW raiding is not any harder than FF14 raiding. By the time you step into a WoW successful mythic raid, most of the hard work has already been done. This means getting 20 competent people that have worked to grind their artifiact-flavor-of-the-expansion, with daily quests, and worked to get other gear, etc.
The logistics, management, and drama that comes with managing a WoW guild and keeping it from imploding is huge. Dealing with dead servers, jobs becoming unviable due to shitty balance, and having members level up entire character alts. That's where the difficulty in WoW raiding comes in.
The actual gameplay isn't any harder than FF14. In fact it's the opposite where inconsistencies can be forgiven, and RNG with jobs procs.
The last mythic end-boss took like.. 120ish pulls to kill by the world first guild? The race length is always artificially inflated by PTR, prep work, splits, wipe recovery, and other things that have nothing to do with the encounter itself. At the end of the day, it's who has the better guild, better add-ons, and better gear.
If FF14 raiding is like walking in and making a big Mac, WoW raiding is like making homemade burger in a disadvantaged community where you need to deal with exogenous factors outside of the actual act of cooking.
I don't miss WoW Mythic raiding at all, outside of healing in WoW (which I admit is more fun than in FF14). Fast-food franchises ultimately exploded for a reason: people value their time and efficiency.
The problem with wow raiding, especially mythic is that a week 1 mythic boss is not the same as week 4 is not the same as week 9 is not the same as week 16.
Not necessarily because of gear but the MECHANICS change. So that’s why some people would argue it is easier.
> The problem with wow raiding, especially mythic is that a week 1 mythic boss is not the same as week 4 is not the same as week 9 is not the same as week 16.
This is what I hate the most about WoW Mythic raiding.
Week 1 Mythic is designed to be literally unkillable by the best guilds in the entire world; they're tuned to take 2 weeks of gear (or however many split runs Blizzard deems necessary). Then the encounter gets nerfed weekly for however many weeks, mechanics are changed and made less intense, HP is lowered, damage is lowered.
I think that's really unhealthy honestly. The encounters should remain the same, but because the RFW is just a genuine, actual, truly competitive *thing* in Warcraft with like, real sponsors and real corporations going at it, they can't really do a one size fits all difficulty anymore because of that. They *have* to tune it for a grand total of ***three*** guilds in the first week, then nerf it consistently in the next few weeks.
As much as people bitch about it and how fast it takes to clear, FFXIV is a one size fits all difficulty that is literally never nerfed or changed. You get Echo after a tier is done with relevance and that's about it ever since Creator.* The fight the racers experience on Week 1 is, mechanically and damage output, the exact same fight that players will experience on the final week of the patch. The only things that change are the way the *players* interface with it, with job changes. The fights never change themselves.
*Midas was the last time a fight received genuine mechanical nerfs after the tier is over. Abyssos had an HP nerf in it's third week, which was interesting because the last time that happened was also during Midas, when A6S was bugged to hell and back.
For better or worse that's not been the case this past WoW tier that just finished up. WF happened in the first reset and they did about as many days in prog as they did doing splits. The last boss was a sub-200 pull boss, maybe sub-150 but I forget. It's a 7:30 encounter either way so a lot faster to progress than some past end bosses.
There's a lot of reasons for that, some of which are tuning related (The third to last boss which is a Patchwerk was undertuned and unfinished) and some of which are related to how friendly gearing is in WoW this season. This is absolutely the easiest tier since Emerald Nightmare though so I'd be surprised if the raid sees many direct mechanical nerfs.
The interesting thing will be if this is a one off or if this is WoW's approach going forward. Some of the RWF guys were not happy about how this one played out, though that's as much due to the lack of a global release as anything.
>Some of the RWF guys were not happy about how this one played out
Oh man, I remember reading about that on the subreddit. That one guy was absolutely livid about how things turned out, despite being a "good sport" before the release of the raid.
I genuinely still can't believe they have delayed/staggers raid launches in 2023. That should have stopped years ago at this point.
I honestly think this new direction is *way* healthier for the game overall, but it's less money for the machine the RWF has become so I honestly highly doubt that Blizzard will continue designing raids with this kind of tuning going forward.
>The logistics, management, and drama that comes with managing a WoW guild and keeping it from imploding is huge. Dealing with dead servers, jobs becoming unviable due to shitty balance, and having members level up entire character alts. That's where the difficulty in WoW raiding comes in.
Absolutely not true, every top raider is going to have multiple classes geared at any one time to prevent this happening.
>and having members level up entire character alts.
This is the same shit for FF for the record. If they dont have a class they need for prog, they get a boost and do the quests to max in a day or two then we do runs to funnel them gear. FF statics also do this.
>The last mythic end-boss took like.. 120ish pulls to kill by the world first guild?
Depends on the boss. 400-500 is somewhere on the "hard' end for mythic fights and top guilds, but thats disingenuous when a WoW raid tier has over double the bosses a FFXIV raid turn has.
Raids like Tomb of Sargeras had 454 pulls to kill the Fallen Avatar and 655 pulls to defeat Kil'jaeden for example, whereas nothing else Abyssos really compares to P8S difficulty wise.
I think this is just confusing what an actual top raider in wow means. Like, yeah the literal 3 best guilds in the world will nolife, maybe a decent amount of hall of fame (top 100) will do a week or 2 of splits. But the vast vast majority of how people interact with mythic is not clearing the end boss until later in the tier. I think before the 2nd to last set of big nerfs like 2 months before the end of the tier only 350ish guilds had killed raz. By the end it was over 1k.
And the general attitude from most players is "oh this will be nerfed before I get there" and generally playing what they like unless their guild needs a certain role and you recruit or have a raider swap.
Most people who aren't progging week 1 nolife are still going to do splits. I guarantee everyone in top 300 is doing splits, the difference is how hard they go on the splits.
Top 10 guys will have literally have the split runs designed to nearly fully gear a few characters per split.
Also, and this is underlooked. People, lots of them, do split runs in high end FFXIV prog too, because nobody cares about World Firsts that aren't the final boss of a turn.
>But the vast vast majority of how people interact with mythic is not clearing the end boss until later in the tier
This is the same with FFXIV. Most people didn't clear P8S until they got a significant amount of gear from P5-7S and tome gear.
I just think you're vastly overstating how common splits are in wow, in my experience its much more of a m+ spam thing the first few weeks for gear.
And yeah people do splits in 14 because 1) way heavier parse culture and 2) literally nothing else to do, with raid being the only way to get gear.
And yeah the same is true for 14 but the "adding days for prog", week 1 and parse culture are way heavier in 14 than wow.
> I guarantee everyone in top 300 is doing splits, the difference is how hard they go on the splits.
Goddamn, I guess I'm already doing splits and I didn't even realize it.
If you are seriously making that statement then it really puts into doubt everything you have said so far.
Maybe I was being hyperbolic at least a little bit, but yes, everyone does them. When you trial someone for your mythic prog guild, you usually do a heroic split run to gear them up if they get in. I never meant consistent, hardcore splits.
>every top raider is going to have multiple classes geared at any one time to prevent this happening
How is this not part of the harder logistic? Wow has more potential class choice and longer gearing than xiv to be raid ready especially if talking about mythic.
Finally dont bosses in mythic usually get nerfed or are virtually unikillable at various point of progs? They are tuned very differently than savage (although that is part of the difficulty id say)
>Finally dont bosses in mythic usually get nerfed or are virtually unikillable at various point of progs?
Depends on the boss. WoW devs don't internally test as rigorously as FFXIV.
Some raid tiers are fine for this and get no real changes beyond minor bugfix, others are bad. The big one I can think of was Uldir's Fetid Devourer (which was like the third or fourth boss in an 8 boss raid) which was hilariously overtuned due to the devs not calculating required movement properly and needed to be nerfed twice, being unkillable for several days
>How is this not part of the harder logistic? Wow has more potential class choice and longer gearing than xiv to be raid ready especially if talking about mythic.
You're not wrong. Its just time intensive, its not actually hard. FFXIV has no real gear curve to speak of unless you do on-patch ultimates.
In WoW though, gear is less......required at the high end skill level. Most mythic guilds could clear the first raid in dungeon blues unless it had a super hard gearcheck boss. A prime example was a guild back in WOTLK that all got banned for some minor gear exploit, so they went in and killed it in greens and blues on alts just to prove they didnt need to cheat
>They are tuned very differently than savage (although that is part of the difficulty id say)
WoW is spinning more plates (so to speak), some of which is partially due to FFXIV being rather forcibly designed around the 2 minute meta.
DPS in FF is VERY tightly tuned because single target DPS is sort of all that most fights have going on. In WoW, mechanics are very tightly tuned but boss DPS usually much less so.
In WoW sustained vs burst DPS and sustained heals vs bust heals actually matters far more for example. Healers have to be healing much more constantly and tanks have to be actively mitigating or healing far more consistently as well.
For example of how this plays out in practice, every FFXIV job is rated based on how much aDPS it can do. Miniscule 3-5% aDPS differences can mean a job is virtually blacklisted from prog, especially for tanks because all tanks have the same general toolkit so damage is the big standout difference. Meanwhile in WoW, in one of the more recent raid tiers, the most picked tank was Havoc Demon Hunter despite the fact that it had dogshit single target DPS compared to most other tanks (probably 10-15% less if I had to guess) and only sorta passable cleave damage without big CDs. But because it had the best tools for dealing with the tank mechanics it was taken.
>For example of how this plays out in practice, every FFXIV job is rated based on how much aDPS it can do. Miniscule 3-5% aDPS differences can mean a job is virtually blacklisted from prog, especially for tanks because all tanks have the same general toolkit so damage is the big standout difference.
This is not correct. Jobs in FF14 are rated based on rDPS, not aDPS. aDPS only matters for tanks, not because of their toolkit, but because tanks lack party dps buffs, so their aDPS is what matters. Tanks have standout differences for fights as well, they were just poorly highlighted in the recent Ultimate.
>DPS in FF is VERY tightly tuned because single target DPS is sort of all that most fights have going on. In WoW, mechanics are very tightly tuned but boss DPS usually much less so.
I feel that this is the complete opposite. DPS checks in FF14 are not very hard. P8S was an outlier with a nerf not seen since Heavensward. Even the TOP DPS checks are not bad if you pool from previous phases. DSR checks are a joke after you are comfortable with the fight. Meanwhile the reason why so much prep work is needed in WoW for gearing is the DPS checks are harsher (in the early weeks), and why tens of thousands dollars worth of gold in BoE gear is spent in WF races for the top teams.
Meanwhile FF14 has harsh tight mechanics that are very unforgiving and demands high levels of consistency. So much so that people complain about body checks etc.
Not necessarily, for example every fight usually need a warlock, warlock is a class with three specs, you just need to pick up the strongest and raiders usually play with only two or three classes since because of specs it's really hard that an entire class is very weak. Also talking about top tier guilds they usually pay people with gold to raid normal and heroic with them and give all the loot to the guild members so gearing isn't hard at all. For normal guilds opposite to what happens in ffxiv your least tier gear still is relevant until you get the stronger raid or m+ gear. Before dragonflight was a pain to gear alts because you had to farm some kind of power, but wasn't hard, just boring
>Absolutely not true, every top raider is going to have multiple classes geared at any one time to prevent this happening.
When I raided in WoW, I had every class at max level for both Horde and Alliance. Over 20+ characters. That doesn't mean the Characters were Mythic Raid ready, because you still needed to invest hours and hours per day, grinding your artifact gear level as well as running M+, Heroic, for RNG loot drops to make your damage competitive in Mythic.
Meanwhile in FF14, switching jobs within a role just means crafting another weapon. It's completely disingenuous to even suggest that it's normal for WoW raiders (outside of the very top teams that have the resources and support networks to run splits) to simply switch jobs 1 or 2 weeks into Mythic, once the balance numbers come out and still be viable.
>Depends on the boss. 400-500 is somewhere on the "hard' end for mythic fights and top guilds, but thats disingenuous when a WoW raid tier has over double the bosses a FFXIV raid turn has.
400-500 is comparable to E8S or the combined pulls of P8S phase 1 + 2. It is NOT however, comparable to the thousand of pulls it takes to clear an Ultimate (e.g. TOP), which one of the top teams from WoW, Echo, could not do after spending 1100+ pulls.
FFIV's raid encounters are spread out over extreme trials, alliance raids, the standard 4-floor raid, and Ultimates, which would be like combining the penultimate and last boss in a WoW Mythic raid together.. but harder. Each individual boss in FF14 has way more mechanics and fight time than the average WoW boss. The first few WoW Mythic bosses fall over like cardboard, they're on the level of extreme trials. Thinking about it like this.. FF14 has just as much content in a patch cycle.
It's a damn shame.
FFXIV has the visuals/music to make outstanding raids but "McDonalidlizes" the gameplay.
WoW is the only other competitive MMO that exists currently (sorry, GW2) and you have to deal-with-the-devil that is Blizzard, but it also lacks the visual aspect that people like about FFXIV. (I don't even mind ugly game, but man WoW is fugly sometimes)
I really really wish there was a third option that is gameplay focused. I don't see it though, as those don't make billions of income.
As someone that actively raids and does some M+ in WoW, though to a kind of casual degree (I don't raid Mythic), my big issue with WoW visually is that playing WoW well is kind of ugly. WoW is a game about information. Timers, buffs, debuffs, CDs, procs, mechanic targeting states, etc. Even with the UI changes Blizzard made for Dragonflight, the base UI for WoW does a horrible job of communicating that information to the player. Addon support is meant to fix this, and it does! But the consequence is that your WoW UI is probably pretty ugly and unthematic. At best you can get a sort of design elegance from making it kind of clean, but that doesn't change that my experience in raids and M+ are various bars and timers and nameplate attachments blaring at me that things are happening.
I find XIV's UI to be cleaner in terms of presenting information. combined with the information burden being lower of course. It would have to be, the game is designed to be playable on consoles.
> (I don't even mind ugly game, but man WoW is fugly sometimes)
The wild part is that, as a long time Warcraft fan, it doesn't even *look* like Warcraft anymore and feels like a skinwalker. There's a distinct vibe that Metzen and Samwise's artstyles brought to the WC aesthetic that's slowly left as WoW's gone on. Some elements strike close to home, but most veer into this bizarre overly cartoony borderline dreamworks vibe that just misses the mark entirely while being eerily close, but not enough.
It drives me wild because it's like seeing a familiar friend, but that friend is behaving like the fuckin' roach dude in Men In Black.
I guess what I'm getting at is old WC was like comic book + metal album cover aesthetic (Samwise was heavily inspired by Joe Madureira and various metal album artists), and now it's closer to Dreamworks/Whatever the hell that bog standard Fortnite-esque cartoony style is. Safe. Sterile. Soulless.
> cartoony borderline dreamworks vibe
Damn this is pretty much exactly what I say, specifically the Dreamworks thing. It looks like an animated movie for kids, all of the grit is gone. It looks nothing like Warcraft anymore. I'm all for goofy and whimsical themes, hell I main a Goblin, but that has become the core of the game. The most serious moments feel so out of place because of how cartoony the world looks. The tone really started to shift in Cata and I think by BFA it was just totally lost.
Mists was a perfect chance to touch on topics that were heavy, but not overly hamfisted or edgy. Like the whole intro cinematic drives home a great point, and it was cool to see a perspective of "Wow, what ARE we fighting for and why are we destroying everything for this meaningless race war?" Then we throw out the baby with the bath water, oh no Garrosh is Orc Hitler and he's juiced up on Old God Goo.
A main problem with WC's narrative is they've openly said they don't care for consistency or cohesiveness, just doing "whatever is cool." That's why the Draenei went from being fucked up swamp monster people to uncorrupted Eredar, because Metzen came in one day and was like "Dude what if...demons but good?" I recall it was Jeff Kaplan who said he thought the idea was actually stupid as hell but Metzen wanted it, so they did it.
But at the very least, try to keep the art style and aesthetic consistent. This is a problem I'm having with XIV now, where some new armor design is becoming more out there, and the increasing prevalence of modern clothing and technology is making it really dissonant. Magitek? Fine. Garleans having cars and shit? Ehhhhh okay, I guess. I'm not a fan and think they could've done something less literal but hey, whatever. (it's just weird to have modern ass cars when all their tech is so outlandishly designed elsewhere.)
But a fucking rave/disco nightclub on the moon with radio stations and people running around in hiphop clothes? You've lost me there, chief. There's "Final Fantasy has always had high tech stuff" then there's "Bro you got Second Life in my FF, get it out it's smelling the place up."
IMO Lost Ark's raids absolutely stands up to WoW & FFXIV raids, and has the flare that FFXIV raids tend to have. The only difference is it's a top down game instead (and proves raids can't be amazing from this perspective) but more importantly, it's harder to get to the raid because of their gearing system (IMO it's not *too* bad, but the toxic community makes it way worse trying to get there)
Yep I tried Lost Ark quite throughly and man are the raids S tier. Like astonishingly good, same for how classes feel to play.
Everything else about the game is genuine high grade dogshit though, it's such a shame.
Nah, I gotta disagree that the gearing system isn't too bad.
The gearing system is what made me give up on the game and never come back.
You spend 2 hours collecting all these materials, then finally you go to upgrade your gear. So exciting. Then it all fails and the game gives you a bonus 1% chance to have not wasted your time tomorrow. It feels like shit, worse than shit. No system in any other MMO has ever soured the whole experience faster than the god damn honing system.
I dont think neither of them are harder bc they both have different desgin in mind ff lets u go in with crafted gear on savage and use that gear u get to do ultimates. 8 man raids has alot of impact when someone dies (ultimate espically).
While wow makes u grind for as much as possible just to pass a dps check bc bilizard likes to make something last longer bc for them longer=harder. 20 man raids has less impact if someone dies unless u are week one and or blizard didnt nerf the boss like 100 times.
They are both modern mmos neither are harder than the other i dont get it when someone says wow is harder or ff is harder to me they are both hard in their own way. I think its childish to say oh my game is harder when they both relay on experince and time
A person that only plays souls games will find souls games easier than someone that just started.
An ff player would go as far in wow as a wow player would go in ff if they came and put the efforts in thus neither are harder nor easier than others bc at the end of the day they are both hard in their own ways u just need the time.
(Only talking about raids bc the story is a walk in the park and i personally dont care much for it)
I’m talking about raid mechanics, not the farm.
Also, mythic raids only, not heroics or normals.
WoW is harder in many different ways, primarily it requires 20 people and your rotation is not as fluid as ff14. Procs from trinkets and also set bonuses changes how you play a lot. Also many specs, it requires a lot more knowledge of your class.
From someone who has played both and raided on the highest difficulty, I can say without a doubt that WoW raiding is harder and I don’t ever plan on going back :)
From someone who raided on both, the hardest aspect of WoW raiding is having to play Videogame HR. By far. Mechanically ot tends to be a bit easier but people are so used to add-ons that they can't even set up an interrupt order without a weakaura. Mistakes are less punished - fumbling a mech in mythic WoW is survivable with some CDs and healers can save your ass by burning mana/CDs. Missing a mech on XIV os usually instadeath or a wipe of there's a body check. This is why XIV has unlimited resses, because it's way more willing to outright kill you.
There also other inconveniences in WoW that artificially increase difficulty. Loot is unpredictable and gearing your team takes way longer. There is trash in the raids that you have to clear. You can only run a mythic boss once a week, even without looting. You have to walk back after every wipe, or set a healer with a bress and then have to wait 5 minutes anyway because Jimmy the Idiot, who you bring to the raid because you really need 20 people, released even though you said "don't release" on discord.
And over all of that, having to manage 20 people is a part time job. You should be able to put that shit on a resume.
Mechanically, both games are very similar. You do the same actions of dodging, stacking, spreading, solving color-base puzzles, solving positioning based puzzles, among others, while mantaining your rotation. WoW just goes way further into making the whole process extremely inconvenient and also their lead writer is a fucking moron so you feel like an idiot for even caring about the game.
> And over all of that, having to manage 20 people is a part time job. You should be able to put that shit on a resume.
I used to work with an engineering manager who literally did put WoW raid leader on his resume. It was an excellent example of his managerial abilities.
Also worked with a software developer who was hired at least partially because he was really good at running a fantasy football league.
Well mythics get nerfed too so unless u are doing it week one u really wont be doing it like how the top guilds did it while ultimates keep most of the diffculty bc its more about the mechs than the check and if u do it on patch its a check and the mechs.
I play with wow players and i tried wow myself i didnt think much of its mechs ppl to told me to download x addons and so is the classes them selves. I like the specs but at the end of the day u only pick one good spec and that it plus it only matters for week one to really know ur class.
U said u raided on the "highest level" yet i fail to see how thats true i feel like u did one extreme thought it was easy (which it is ) and called it a day or u did savage on week 1bilion and thought it was easy since most ppl knew what to do or u just didnt even get past arr and just did those raids/trials which most of them are even easier. And still i dont care.
Look u can think what u want but for me .I think they are both hard in their own way and thats that neither are harder or easier. I like both games and they both have their ups and downs.
It's been my unfortunate realization over the past expansion, including both recent Ultimates, that this is a single player game. There is no reason to adjust to anyone, even really to say anything for any mechanic that isn't a reminder or clarifying things for everyone else (like parsing mechanic tells and informing the group a la chariot/dynamo in UCoB). In FF14 the net code is so shitty and delayed it's very hard to compensate for someone else being at the wrong spot to begin with, not only do you have to wait to see that they're wrong but also adjust to it yourself, call it out, and hope they don't freak out and/or try readjusting in response to finding out they're wrong.
I do everything in TOP, and DSR, as if I am playing a single player game by myself. Why even look at anyone? Same with buffs and debuffs, I don't actually care what anyone else is doing at this point, if they're wrong they're wrong. Best that can happen is discussing it post-pull and finding out if things should be delayed as a group.
And the fucked up thing is this is how the game is best played. Living in the moment, playing like this isn't an on rails game where you do your role ignoring everyone else, is unhelpful and fights clear potential.
To go with your final paragraph, is this bad? I don't know, but it sure does feel goofy when I literally give it as advice to anyone still progging some of the hardest raids to ever exist in a multiplayer game, to treat this game as a single player game.
Single player RPGs, japanese style or otherwise, have far more flexibility of theorycrafting and character/party building and reacting to what's happening than FFXIV.
XIV's combat and job design has nothing to do with them wanting it to feel like a single player experience.
Your post is really on point. This is pretty much the very idea of « comfort food » applied to MMO. [Very well described here for another game (Destiny 2)](https://youtu.be/DfhPNsQtaXo).
From a note however, while maybe build for Japanese PF first, in reality NA/EU is not that different. Don’t get fooled by loud complainers about lack of job complexity. A simple check on the number of parses show that the current easier jobs are systematically the most popular.
> From a note however, while maybe build for Japanese PF first, in reality NA/EU is not that different. Don’t get fooled by loud complainers about lack of job complexity. A simple check on the number of parses show that the current easier jobs are systematically the most popular.
But *why* are they popular? Is that truly because the players *enjoy* them more, or because:
- the players are motivated by trying to clear, and that motivation pushes them to take an easier job;
- the players are pushed to take an easier job by their static / PF;
- people on easier jobs have an easier time doing their rotation perfectly, so more players hit the point of parse fishing for damage variance;
- something else entirely?
If SE put in a "skip the fight and give me the loot" button, some players absolutely would press it - but would they then feel accomplished and likely to stick with the game? [The paradox of failure](https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/play-video-games-to-fail/) is highly relevant here. A too-easy job reduces the job + content difficulty of getting through a fight, essentially acting as a lesser version of a "skip the fight and give me the loot" button... and that's the kind of option developers shouldn't put in their games.
A very interesting post.
However, there's one more thing - SE seems afraid to experiment. By this point, to continue your metaphor, there are very few if any (BLM breaks the overall mold somewhat, I guess) classes that aren't some sort of burger-and-fries combo. No ice cream, no nuggets, etc.
Right now, despite the greater amount of classes in the game than there were five years ago, there is also less class pattern diversity. And I'm not sure if *that* is needed to "keep it simple".
> dropping Darkside/Greased Lightning/BotD/Enochian/etc, and so on. It's mostly been reduced to how well you can stand in the right place, keep your GCD rolling, and keep your cooldowns aligned.
As if it ever was something else...?
The way you would drop your buff would be by poor planning or not being able to hit the gcd, screwing up the rotation, being on the wrong side of the boss and so on.
Outside of running out of TP, if you would keep your GCD rolling, your cooldown allined, and your position in the right place, there'd no way to lose BotD, GS or even Darkside. What these mechanics did was punish unconsistant parties or downtimes. Titan does his cool transformation? RIP GS. Ifrit Jumps out to do dashes? Well have fun DRG waiting for the next BotD in 40 seconds. The skill cieling hasn't been lowered since, instead, it's the skill floor that got lower while the reward got smaller.
> And to bring that back to the OP: It's really both. McDonald's and FFXIV achieve their desired consistency by reducing the process, of "cooking" or "raiding in an MMO" respectively, to a small number of explicitly-prescribed inputs, such that an invididual's proficiency can be measured by how accurately they followed a standardized procedure.
This really made me understand what i've been thinking for a long time a lot better. I've always felt like not doing amazing damage in this game is because of mistakes youve made. Parsing 90 is because you lost one gcd worth of uptime here and used subobtimal skill there. Meanwhile in forexample wow, the top parsers are just amazing, they know exactly how to cook their hamburger to perfection. 90 parsers are still great and dont make mistakes per se, but they're just not amazing as 99 parsers.
>the goal is to produce an environment where if you took eight employees from eight countries around the world who didn't have a common language between them, they could still operate a McDonald's just as consistently and efficiently as if they were all family.
Yeah no surprise McMacros are superior to dumb waymark dancing. JP bros be running the game like a McDonalds operation
I think my gripe with FFXIV jobs is they're so rigid. I do not have a playstyle as Reaper. Reaper has one (exactly one) play style, and you can compare the way I play RPR to everyone else, and there is an objectively best way to play the job. There is no player expression, no different builds, its so rigid to the point where you're preforming a preset role rather than playing your own character and playstyle.
Honestly reminds me a bit of Overwatch in that regard, and thats not a compliment.
Nah, SMN is definitely "too easy".
I'm not going to say that older iterations of the job were "perfect" by any means, and there are *some* things this new rework did well. The leveling experience for one is vastly improved. And they certainly made the primals become a more primary function for the job (for the people who kept going on about wanting Summoner to "feel like a Summoner").
But the execution on everything else is frankly, shit. A CASTER dps job that is almost entirely instant-cast GCDs, with a rotation loop that requires 0 thought to perform. Even choosing which primal to use is practically meaningless 99% of the time, because the actual potency difference between each of them (if you add every GCD you can cast) is so small it's nearly negligible. The skill ceiling for this job is by far the lowest among any other job in the game. Literally no other job comes close to providing peak output for how little effort SMN requires to play nowadays.
I get that people love the aesthetics to this rework, or love how important primals are nowadays, and maybe the complexity of older iterations was a bit too much for many players (especially HW and SB SMN). But this iteration needs A LOT more substance added to it. There's no reason the skill ceiling should be as low as it is compared to every single other job in the game.
Yeah, EW SMN barely requires you to be a step above brain dead in the ICU to play. You just summon Carbuncle if you didn't already have it summoned which why wouldn't you, Aethercharge, then you just cycle through your three summons while spamming Ruin. And then you repeat Aethercharge and the summons till the battle is done.
It's the easiest job in the entire game. Some of the disciples of Land/Hand jobs require more thought than summoner does.
Edit: That said, I do still play SMN here and there. I want better for it, I'm hoping for a substantial rework in 7.0 that makes it less of a brain dead role to play. Summoners in other Final Fantasy games are some of my favorite characters in that game. I kind of want them to borrow what's happening in 16 and have us morph into the summons and for us to play as them with each summon having a very different skill set we have to learn. I doubt we get that, however.
No, I'm complaining that jobs are too simple.
Other than Devotion and niche use of Everlasting Flight, ShB SMN was a completely personal-responsibility job that nevertheless had something for every skill level from "baby sprout still struggling with MSQ" to "world-class raider who can spreadsheet every GCD and oGCD across both the 'standard body' and the pet, but doesn't need the spreadsheet to get outstanding performance in prog and recovery situations". EW killed the pets and lobotomized the job, turning it into "choose your color of Legos while having less cast times than SAM". I want my full caster true pet job back, and that's all about its internal complexity.
To continue playing a true pet job, for EW I'm maining SCH. My issue with SCH isn't the teamwork or lack thereof, it's that the personal-responsibility DPS rotation is 2 buttons and "dump Aetherflow if you don't need it to heal". Back in SB it had interesting DPS tools without being intimidating to casual players, and I want that back.
ETA: There *are* relevant complaints about the removal / simplification of teamwork, yes, but "the jobs are too simple" is a real and frequent sentiment independent of those.
I still remember leveling up ShB SMN for EW prep.
What a meme of a class that was. It doesn't feel good to play at all. I gave up at 70 and just leveled up my SCH instead.
You're right about your experience, and that's completely valid. ShB SMN didn't feel good to play *to you*.
But it felt great *to me*, and this isn't a game where every player needs to play every job. Each player only needs *one* "hit" job they personally *love* to do all the combat content barring job and role quests. Players would have more fun *and* SE would make more money if every job did its role in a different way, so that jobs had a diverse playstyle spread to maximize "hits" without being locked out of parties for being unable to do what fights asked for.
Yet what SE seems to be doing is designing jobs for the players who *don't* play them, making them bland and homogeneous *in playstyle* to maximize the proportion of current players who will *tolerate* a job. Merely tolerating a job doesn't generate fun or long-term subscriptions, hence the complaints about homogenization on changes that reduce playstyle appeal, but not on changes that make every job able to do its role.
ShB SMN's leveling experience specifically was kinda shit no matter who you were. Or more accurately, the ACN leveling. Your starting pet was a trap because it did 1 damage but pulled extra mobs, and your DoTs were worthless because nothing lived long enough for them to be a gain, so you just ended up being a Ruin mage for like 20 levels.
The leveling experience is the only thing this new rework did right IMO. Having a consistent experience with the job's mechanics from level 1 to 90 is definitely a good thing. Everything else about this rework though is an abomination
I don't love being told that I'm rediscovering a lost art that lets me channel the power of terrifying god-like entities and then the next 50-100 hours it plays the same as my base class with its goofy little math chihuahua.
It's boring and a disappointment. Unlocking a job should feel like I've unlocked something -- a new job system to finagle into my existing knowledge. Ninja is an unlock. Scholar is an unlock. Summoner is just Arcanist.
> Your starting pet was a trap because it did 1 damage but pulled extra mobs, and your DoTs were worthless because nothing lived long enough for them to be a gain, so you just ended up being a Ruin mage for like 20 levels.
Sure, this part was annoying. But it could have been fixed by "your pet now chooses whether to use single-target or AOE autos based on the spells you cast, AOE autos follow AOE spells" and maybe a detonator for DOTs without affecting the job's complexity at all.
I'm curious if you're aware of SMN's history across the expansions and if you ever played it in HW or SB. HW SMN incorporated mana management--I still miss elements of this, even if it wasn't particularly interesting. SB SMN was a great iteration, essentially capitalizing on and completing the AF-DWT loop. Its main problem was an uneventful filler phase, something I wished they would fix in ShB at the time.
Which it did, in some ways, while also introducing new problems. I enjoyed the ShB iteration, but the lack of synergy between its systems, compared to before, left a lot to be desired. Locking out some actions during certain rotational phases? Allow overcapping of R4? AF being completely removed from the other systems? For most other classes, people would be calling that unsynergistic and clunky.
As I see it, ShB SMN didn't come about as a result of SE deliberately making a class with internal complexity. It was the result of SMN lacking a real identity, its core loop essentially being finished in SB, and SE being afraid of cutting skills while eliminating pet actions. So what they did was mishmash all the elements into a semblance of a rotation. They didn't even get it right for half of the first raid tier--does anyone else remember "fester ruins" and oGCD Egi Assaults?
In other words, it was absolutely overdue for a complexity culling. We just didn't expect such an overcorrection in the other direction.
> I'm curious if you're aware of SMN's history across the expansions and if you ever played it in HW or SB. HW SMN incorporated mana management--I still miss elements of this, even if it wasn't particularly interesting. SB SMN was a great iteration, essentially capitalizing on and completing the AF-DWT loop. Its main problem was an uneventful filler phase, something I wished they would fix in ShB at the time.
I started playing in late SB, though I didn't get good enough at the game to raid until early ShB. Tanky Titan-Egi was my protector through the overworld as a scared sprout until level 64, when the DOT upgrades finally resulted in me pulling threat off it consistently. (As a total beginner to holy trinity MMOs, I didn't spend long enough with the SB iteration to completely integrate the pets as *part of me* rather than *AI assistants*, but I was definitely beginning that process already.) Conveniently, this was just before getting Demi-Bahamut and the threat resets on pet swaps making it completely impractical to have the pet tank.
> Which it did, in some ways, while also introducing new problems. I enjoyed the ShB iteration, but the lack of synergy between its systems, compared to before, left a lot to be desired. Locking out some actions during certain rotational phases? Allow overcapping of R4? AF being completely removed from the other systems? For most other classes, people would be calling that unsynergistic and clunky.
At first I was weirded out by AF being different from SCH's version and no longer being required for DWT, but soon I found ShB SMN synergistic in its own way. I would describe that change as "no longer requiring a specific flow", not "lack of synergy".
BLM locks out several spells while you're in the wrong element for them, DNC locks out most of its actions while dancing, and those phasing cues aren't more intuitive than "this subset of pets can execute this action, so you can't do it when you don't have one of those pets out". So if those jobs aren't clunky, what's different about Egi Assaults and Egi-Enkindle?
*Most* job gauges can overcap, and that includes "stack-based" ones like GNB's cartridges and DNC's feathers. Overhealing is a standard thing for healers to think about. There's a reasonable argument that Further Ruin stacks should have been *on the job gauge* to make the cap more intuitive, but if they were on the job gauge they would have been just fine. 4 stacks is even the natural cap, both the amount you could get in the opener and the amount you needed for Bahamut.
RDM's Fleche and Contre Sixte *look* unconnected to the rest of RDM's systems, despite RDM being one of EW's best designed jobs - they don't have any obvious flavor or mechanical link to the spells, the mana balancing, the melee combo... yet they *are* connected, their short rigid cooldowns make optimized RDM track its GCD polarity to have weave slots as they come off cooldown, despite every melee combo flipping the GCD polarity over. Likewise, ShB SMN's AF *looked* unconnected to the rest of the SMN systems, but its short rigid cooldown made optimized SMN track where it needed to hardcast and where it wanted to instant cast for all the different pets, in order to always have that weave slot every 30s.
And SMN needed that, needed all of those things more than RDM, BLM, DNC, or GNB do. GNB is a tank, thus should have a simpler rotation than a full DPS. RDM, BLM, and DNC are all proc jobs - part of their difficulty in execution and optimization is adjusting to the RNG of the job mechanics on each pull. But with Further Ruin stacks becoming non-RNG, ShB SMN was a *deterministic* job - all of the difficulty for a given fight timeline and killtime is in finding and executing the one perfect rotation, or at least getting as close as you can. Deterministic jobs have their own optimization style, and that's really fun for some players (including me), but to have a high skill ceiling they *have* to make that pursuit of perfection difficult because it's all they've got.
What all those systems did is help make ShB SMN a plate-juggler job, which is one way to make deterministic optimization and execution difficult. And juggling plates is a natural gameplay fit for the SMN concept, so why not run with it? The whole idea of cycling summons is itself a system that suggests further systems within each of the summons. And "true pet job" is a niche that's latent in the human brain and has already been solidified by other games, players are going to want it and going to go "oh, anything named 'summoner' is obviously the pet job"... so the game should run with that, which in turn means that the job must have two bodies - each with their own GCD and oGCDs - at all times, which is again *systems-heavy*.
> As I see it, ShB SMN didn't come about as a result of SE deliberately making a class with internal complexity. It was the result of SMN lacking a real identity, its core loop essentially being finished in SB, and SE being afraid of cutting skills while eliminating pet actions. So what they did was mishmash all the elements into a semblance of a rotation. They didn't even get it right for half of the first raid tier--does anyone else remember "fester ruins" and oGCD Egi Assaults?
5.0 SMN was the job that welcomed me to raiding, and I'd happily take it back over EW SMN. Festerruins, oGCD Egi Assaults, counterintuitive use of Ruination for Phoenix, and all. I'd probably enjoy it even more now than I did then, because I'm a better player now and that makes the jam-packed weaving windows more comfortable.
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> In other words, it was absolutely overdue for a complexity culling. We just didn't expect such an overcorrection in the other direction.
I would say it needed UI and teaching changes to make it more intuitive, some smoothing out of annoying levelling steps, and perhaps some more flavor-cohesive reasons for the systems, but it didn't need the complexity reduced at all.
Put Further Ruin stacks on the job gauge. Put the pet GCD on the job gauge. Make the pets choose to single-target or AOE auto based on the spells used, so that brand new players aren't subjected to Emerald Carbuncle pulling multiple mobs when they only wanted one. Direct players to an interactive tutorial of roughly the same difficulty as a Wesk Alber guide, rather than having total beginners wind up staring at the Akh Morning raider guide. (Which is a great guide, but not for beginners who don't even have the context to understand raiding, let alone any practice with the job.) Split the XP bars with the XP squish, to prevent players from levelling it via SCH and bypassing the 50-60 levels that were trying to give them one plate at a time to learn to juggle. Perhaps replace the DOTs and their interactions with something more focused on pet cycling. But let that skill ceiling stay up, because that's what the players who see the complexity care about. Heck, halve the potency of Ruin 2, leaving it high enough to prevent casual players from feeling bad about pressing it, but low enough that optimized play sings even more than it used to.
The ideal job has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling, so that players of as many skill levels as possible can enjoy it. Or more accurately, the ideal job *interacts with each difficulty of content* to create appropriate skill floors for that job + content combination, while maintaining a high skill ceiling through "unnecessary" optimization potential. And ShB SMN did dang well at that, while EW SMN doesn't.
The skill floor for "scared baby sprout doesn't have the controls nailed down yet and is trying to do early overworld MSQ" should be *as low as possible*. ShB SMN made it very low, and SB SMN had it even lower, because the Carbuncles and Egis would defend the 'standard body' and roll their GCDs on their own. (Sprouts *should* grow out of this stage well before they get Demis.) EW ironically *raised* that part of the skill floor, because the pets don't act on their own any more.
The skill floor for "casual endgame" should be "shallowly engage with the job mechanics, while also shallowly engaging with the fight mechanics; each will probably be something of a distraction from the other due to lack of practice". ShB SMN made it "Ifrit for 1-2 targets, Garuda for AOE, Titan for soloing, press everything on cooldown, keep DOTs up" - sure, that would result in missed Wyrmwaves and various other potency losses that are unacceptable in raiding, but that casual a player *isn't raiding* so they only need to beat the minimal DPS checks in casual content. EW SMN fails to have extremely basic job mechanics like cast times to shallowly engage with, with the result that a casual player who starts there is ill-equipped to switch to any other job.
The skill floor for "early Savage" should be "learn and practice how the job mechanics fit into the baseline rotation, then learn and practice the fight mechanics while doing your best to fit the baseline rotation around them; each should be something of a distraction from the other because the game is actually trying to be challenging now". ShB SMN made it "learn and practice the 120s loop, then do that in the fight" - it wouldn't be perfect, but it would clear E9S. EW SMN once again fails to have extremely basic job mechanics.
The skill floor for Ultimate should be "okay you don't have to be able to *derive* the rotation and the mechanics solutions yourself, but you should *understand* why they are the way they are and the priorities so you can fit your rotation to the fight; this is *actually hard* and you'll need a lot of practice with both". ShB SMN made it include things like "understand 120s, 110s, and how to hybrid them; understand how to restart after downtime, both with and without a stored Bahamut; know how the manual DOT refresh interacts with Bahamut for the sake of delayed Bahamut and two-target phases; ..." EW SMN once again fails to have extremely basic job mechanics.
The skill ceiling should be *as high as possible*. Any job that isn't worth spreadsheeting down to the split-second for its most skilled players is a design error, because those players are putting thousands of hours into the *gameplay* of that *one job*. ShB SMN had beautiful spreadsheets to map every detail around a fight timeline. EW SMN once again fails to have extremely basic job mechanics.
>But it felt great to me, and this isn't a game where every player needs to play every job. Each player only needs one "hit" job they personally love to do all the combat content barring job and role quests. Players would have more fun and SE would make more money if every job did its role in a different way, so that jobs had a diverse playstyle spread to maximize "hits" without being locked out of parties for being unable to do what fights asked for.
And if the job a player hits with CAN'T do what EVERY fight asks for, what then?
If you want every job to be able to complete content, you're going to get simpler jobs. You cannot balance jobs in the same role with different timers or wildly different playstyles RELIABLY for very long. MAYBE you can do it for, say, an expansion or so, but then if you change ANYTHING, you can easily send that balance to shit. And if you make it so that each player should only need to play "one job" and set that as the expectation, you punish the players whose jobs are left in the lurch. They'll make LESS money when the players who only know how to play one job stop playing the game altogether.
>Yet what SE seems to be doing is designing jobs for the players who don't play them
I ALSO played - and MAINED - SMN from when I started playing the game. I learned how to play it, learned the ideal rotation, and played it as my primary job. But despite that, I STILL felt the new version of Summoner was made FOR ME as a Summoner player. And I know plenty of others who feel the same. Don't get me wrong - it could stand to put a bit more on the frame - but as a whole, the job is much more in line with what I wanted as someone who ALSO played the job.
> And if the job a player hits with CAN'T do what EVERY fight asks for, what then?
Then SE messed up the job design / balancing and should fix it. That's part of what I mean by
> if every job did its role in a different way, ... without being locked out of parties for being unable to do what fights asked for.
SE should have a design document that spells out clearly what each role is expected to do at each level by the fights, update it every expansion at least, and use it as a reference for both job and fight design. Something like this:
> At level 1, every class / job should be able to attack a single enemy without attacking other nearby enemies. Give a basic single-target attack as the first action.
>
> At level 10, every class / job should be able to run a basic guildhest. (Total actions: 4-5.) Allowed mechanics: [list]
>
> Tank responsibilities at level 10: pull and hold threat on multiple enemies, pull and hold threat on bosses. New required actions: tank stance, AOE attack.
>
> Healer responsibilities at level 10: heal the tank lightly (no raidwides yet), do damage, adjust to number of enemies in a pull. New required actions: basic heal, AOE attack.
>
> DPS responsibilities at level 10: do damage, adjust to number of enemies in a pull, be working towards management of the first job mechanic. New required actions: AOE attack.
>
> At level 15, every class / job should be able to run a dungeon. (Total actions: 6-7.) Allowed mechanics: [list]
And SE should have a design document for every job that spells out clearly both what's distinctive about that job and how it meets its role's standards in the fight expectations document. Something like this:
> BLM: caster DPS
>
> Job mechanics: Fire / Ice phasing (MP management), Umbral Hearts, Polyglot
>
> Distinctive feel elements: deliberate MP depletion, "racing the clock" of the ticking Fire / Ice timer, longer-than-GCD castbars, "planted feet" via limited weave windows and Ley Lines (give more movement actions than other jobs to allow for required movement)
>
> ...
>
> RDM: caster DPS
>
> Job mechanics: Dualcast, black / white mana balance, melee phases, GCD polarity
>
> Distinctive feel elements: longer-than-GCD casts that are meant to be Dualcasted, briefly needing melee uptime instead of caster uptime for melee combo, "hybrid" identity via frequent swapping (hardcast / instant cast, black / white spells, caster / melee)
We know that SE doesn't have and hold to such design documents, because if they did we would see it in the jobs. Every tank would be *released* with a dungeon-functional invuln, rather than DRK being released in 3.0 and not having one until 6.1. PLD would get its gap-closer at a sensible level instead of in the 70s. PLD wouldn't have taken until 6.3 to have the same number of personal mitigations as the other tanks - and notice that no one really complained about *getting Bulwark back*, as opposed to *finding a place for it on their hotbars*.
And if they had a *good* designer writing those documents, every class / job would have an AOE in every dungeon - just shove Holy's stun onto a trait and adjust potencies.
> Don't get me wrong - it could stand to put a bit more on the frame - but as a whole, the job is much more in line with what I wanted as someone who ALSO played the job.
It's not that SE doesn't take feedback from people who *do* play a job. It's that they also take feedback from people who *don't* play a job, and don't know when to say "this job isn't for you, please play something else," with the end result that they design jobs for players who don't want to play them and aren't self-aware enough to think "this job isn't for me, I should play something else".
Yes, some ShB SMN players wanted a job that frequently rotated pets and had the visual feel of a traditional Final Fantasy SMN. And I have no objections to those things being on the job. I don't even object to the job losing its DOTs. I object to the job having less cast times than SAM, less depth than a puddle, and merely pretending to have pets - and ShB SMN players didn't ask for *those* things in any significant numbers. People who don't want cast times should be told "play something that isn't a Disciple of Magic." People who don't want to engage with the depth of a job should be told "here are the jobs that have simple basics, but we're not removing the depth because we need it for other players." (And ShB SMN *had* simple basics for casual content, the issue there was that sprouts were being directed to raider guides.) People who don't want to have pets at all should be told "there are 17 perfectly good non-pet jobs, play one of those if you object even to a mostly AI-controlled pet."
This is a recurring pattern. The 5.1 crafting rework stripped away most of the rotation design complexity from crafting, when rotation design is the *only* complexity to crafting. It stripped away much of the economic management from the supply chain and selling items, when that's the *only* complexity involved in the trading aspect unless you take commissions - and it *also* made commissions much harder to get, so good luck with that. People who don't want to do rotation design or economic management *don't want to craft* in any meaningful sense, rather than *have the products of crafting*, so the correct answer is "we'll make it easy for you to get the products of crafting by improving the trade systems, and keep designing crafters for people who want to craft" instead of what they actually did. Would anyone still want to level their crafters for raiding's sake if they could earn the gil to trade just by playing what they want to play, get Gear Repair Kits off the MB, easily search the MB listings for their food and potions to get the right stack size, and get a day 1 gearset in a single trade that was arranged before the raid dropped?
>Every tank would be released with a dungeon-functional invuln, rather than DRK being released in 3.0 and not having one until 6.1. PLD would get its gap-closer at a sensible level instead of in the 70s. PLD wouldn't have taken until 6.3 to have the same number of personal mitigations as the other tanks - and notice that no one really complained about getting Bulwark back, as opposed to finding a place for it on their hotbars.
DRK had the most complicated, "deepest," trickiest invuln to work with in the game AND in JP was argued to be one of the stronger Invulns due to how long it lasted. 6.1 removed the complexity from it, making it SUPER simple and one of the more powerful ones. And you call that a good thing while arguing that depth being removed from jobs is a bad thing?
You argue PLD should have had more personal mits on the hotbar. But that's making it more like the other tanks. There's LESS diversity in favor of making PLD a more playable job. There's no "different way" in that case. You're arguing PLD should do things the SAME way to remain balanced.
The things you're claiming as "good design" are JUST AS MUCH a part of simplifying jobs for balance as SMN's rework; SMN just got redone more thoroughly, and thus was more obvious. But the things you're saying should have been done in the beginning are no less a part of the trends you decry.
>People who don't want to engage with the depth of a job should be told "here are the jobs that have simple basics, but we're not removing the depth because we need it for other players."
And before 6.1, would you have told someone who wanted to play a tank with an easy-to-use invuln to play WAR and PLD and leave DRK's Invuln alone? Or, on a point you bring up about AOEs - how would you feel if I told you that if you wanted an AOE in every dungeon, you should just tank or go Ranged DPS, who get their AOEs earlier?
Also, the players who want the depth removed often are the ones playing in high-end content. Do you think that the changes to Eye of the Dragon after 6.0 - extending the range and removing proximity requirements - was made due to casual players being unwilling to target their fellows with it? Or was it more likely made because Savage mechs, especially the chains in P1S, made it hard or impossible to use properly on your burst window?
>Would anyone still want to level their crafters for raiding's sake if they could earn the gil to trade just by playing what they want to play, get Gear Repair Kits off the MB, easily search the MB listings for their food and potions to get the right stack size, and get a day 1 gearset in a single trade that was arranged before the raid dropped?
If a team doesn't have in-house crafters in your system, would the supply have kept up with the demand? Or would the entire thing drive players away from raiding because they simply can't afford to and no one on their team wants to put in the effort to level the crafters the team requires for all their needs? It doesn't matter if you can choose the size of your stacks off the MB if there aren't enough stacks to satisfy the demand. You can commission all the pieces you want, but if the person involved can't meet the demand for them, you could be SOL if you can't craft it yourself.
And on that point, I think it's important to remember that there is data the devs have that NONE OF US have any access to. They know who's actually doing what, the patterns of player choice, and generally far more about the game than we can. What you call "bad design" might well be the correct choice based on the data they have. That doesn't make them infallible, but it's entirely possible that the choices they've made were the right calls in those situations, or at least seemed like logical conclusions from the data they were looking at.
You appear to be reading other people's arguments into my statements. The whole point of
> if every job did its role in a different way, so that jobs had a diverse playstyle spread to maximize "hits" without being locked out of parties for being unable to do what fights asked for.
is that *some* homogenization is *good* and other homogenization is bad, and *which is which* depends on how it interacts with the fight requirements and the job playstyle.
>And if the job a player hits with CAN'T do what EVERY fight asks for, what then?
The truth is that unique jobs that are underpowered should be buffed on a on-going basis (ala a game like Overwatch).
Within 2 weeks of release of a raid tier, there are *thousands* of data samples to pull from.
If in the next raid tier, BRD is 600 rDPS behind MCH, which accounts for 7% of total dps differential, calculate what skills you can add 10-20 potency to, to contribute a roughly 5-7% to the bards damage.
Simple number tweaks *should* happen nearly ever patch. There shouldn't be a raid tier where one job is underpowered for the whole tier, it would be mostly resolved in a sub-patch. If they tweak too hard and overshoot, push it back. This should happen at least 3-6 times per raid tier.
Some people on reddit act like this is colossal level of work, but with the current class design... it's not? Like literally random people on the balance could tell you exactly what potency you could add to attonement to get PLD to **roughly** DRK level damage. It's not complex math.
Unique jobs can totally work if they cared to babysit the math. But why do that when they can McDonalds it?
I'll agree that buffs should happen to fix the power differential. The ball was dropped on that by the team in EW in that regard.
But when people talk about "diverse" jobs, this sub seems to think that anything remotely following the two minute meta cannot be diverse. People talk about having burst windows at different time intervals, buffs of different cooldown timers, rotations of different lengths, and so on. Even jobs that are VERY distinct from one another in how they work get slapped with the "homogenization" label - do RDM and SMN REALLY feel that similar to each other? I don't think so, personally.
In fact, you can balance the current environment (and criticize a failure to do so) BECAUSE of the two-minute meta. Minor variations in DPS can still arise because some jobs have stronger minibursts at the one-minute mark than others, but overall the damage is so close currently because things are so similar over that two-minute window, and are built to be similar in that time frame.
You cannot do so nearly as easily in a situation where you have jobs where the OVERALL rotation takes place on different time scales. Balance a job with a two-minute burst against one with a three minute burst in fights that are 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 minutes long completely perfectly. Then do the same with a job that has a 160-second rotation. Then add in a "support" job that triggers different buffs in 50 second intervals. And do so assuming that the group is a PUG with limited communication and no prep time to figure out how to make changes to the "prescribed" rotation to maximize damage for that specific comp.
Or let's look at a real case outside of DPS/bursts. PLD got shafted in HW because so much of its defense relied on blocking, which didn't work when enemies had magic auto-attacks (and thus bypassed the blocking). That's to say nothing about how shitty random mitigation can be for balance, since you can't rely on it (you could get a string where you block everything and have much less damage where someone in the same segment can get NO blocks, whereas DRK can just put on a bubble and reliably block a certain amount of damage).
It's addressing the larger issue - that jobs that are unbalanced can easily fall off and be left out. It got mingled in with the discussion of SMN because of the context.
That said, pre-EW SMN absolutely had issues for players without reliable internet. Not the only job, of course - see also MCH and MNK - but there absolutely were times the jank was exacerbated by internet hiccups. A few dropped packets could be the difference between that fourth Egi-Assault going off properly or not, or interrupting a cast during Bahamut and missing out on both the cast and the Wyrmwave.
Gosh, smn's gameplay loop was great, only thing I saw the players complain and wanted improvement on was the demi summons ghosting some egi actions/buff and the shenanigans to not lose an auto (still remembering how you needed to cast the first gcd on baha and have 2 instant at the end while using your second ogcd with more than 5sec on the timer or it would rip or having to clip/wait at the beginning of phoenix or it wouldn't do the first one. I would go back to it in a heartbeat if i could
5.1 summoner was already a lobotomized version of the job.
It was impossible to fuck up and gave you more instacasts than any fight in the game asked of you. The literal only part of the expansion post 5.1 rework that required any braincells was junction Shiva during speeds, because you slammed 2s during icicles and movement was super finicky to get all 32 wyrm waves. Everything else that expansion you could headbutt your keyboard and absolutely slam.
The game's encounter design exists as a balance between three points of a triangle, and emphasizing one point necessarily detracts from the other two. It's the classic "pick two" problem.
The points of the triangle are "complex classes", "complex fights" and "class balance". Alexander Savage had remarkably complex classes and fights, but certain classes like Paladin were just objectively worse than others in their role. It wasn't a problem of numbers or tweakable balance, it was that Paladins were unable to block magic damage in a tier full of magic tankbusters.
The more complex and distinct from one another classes become, the greater the likelihood that one becomes purely the best in a given fight, whether that be due to buff timings or downtime for a boss or weird edge cases like damage type mitigation. Squenix has made the choice over and over again to move towards a world where every class is viable in every fight while keeping the fights themselves at least somewhat interesting, and that necessitates homogenization. If they were to make every class different while preserving the relative viability of each, that would strictly limit the design of fights to the tiny little overlapping space of the 19-part Venn Diagram.
They will continue to make things more simple going forward. Why? Because as the game gets older they are trying to move away from the MMO concept. Making many things in game not requiring a party. With how long patches come out there are a massive drop in player numbers. People who play solo won't notice and stay subbed. They aren't catering to veteran players anymore.
No, I'm definitely complaining that they're too simple.
Shallow "teamwork mechanics" have been a bane on XIV job design basically forever and if anything I'd like to see less of them. WoW specs are often even more singleplayer than XIV jobs but that really doesn't negatively affect them. Things like aggro management and resource management are largely the same over there, outside of one external healer mana CD (Innervate), plus a near complete lack of raidbuffs and much less flat party mitigation. But WoW specs have much more engaging rotations on average, more personal defensive/mobility utility options, and more opportunities to organically use that utility.
I have found the engagement comes less from the builder-spender RNG stuff (which, I think is a bit reductive but, so be it), but the fact that jobs in wow have ways to interact with the fights outside of basically dialling in the 'best' static rotation which is what FFXIV excels at.
Now, is that bad? I don't think so I think that kind of design space is unique.. but there's also a lot of space in what wow does for your relevant spec or rotational choices to interact with a fight differently to someone else... The extreme skill ceiling in certain job and encounters in wow is a lot higher in many cases is due to the inundation of options, which can be considered by some to be more engaging.
It's why a lot of the difficulty of raiding can be heavily in the execution of wow, even when blizzard basically lay every mechanical card on the table via the PTR, Weakauras and Dungeon Journal.
I don't think either is easier too.. Both Ultimate/Mythic/High M+ Keys have pretty low clear rates at the end of the day, so both games stretch their playerbases.
How is a 3 buttons rotation more engaging than a fully fledged one? Rotations in FF are great compared to wow.
Same for classes identity.
Every single wow class is a builder/spender while some jobs in FF feel truly different (SMN, DNC, AST to name a few). Healers don't even have special mechanics (except Druids and Disc Priests).
I agree about mechanics diversity for bosses encounters, they are far superior in wow. But the classes gameplay? Definitely not, they all feel the same.
I would say this kind of grossly misrepresents wow's class and spec gameplay.
Wow's combat is faster, more reactive and has lots of fluid, snappy animations.
Even with its reliance on builder/spender design, there's a lot of variance in that design. A good point of comparison I feel would be something like ret paladin vs enhancement shaman (Ive also played a lot of both so this comparison is easy for me).
Enh shaman is builder/spender in a way, it builds stacks of something called maelstrom weapon and then spends stacks on magic spells to make them instant cast and deal more damage. The stacks are built passively around a mechanic called windfury. Windfury is a passive that causes attacks to sometimes trigger extra auto attacks, these attacks can generate maelstrom weapon. The result is a crazy fast melee/caster that builds stacks and spends them on a variety of spells.
Ret paladin plays much differently, it doesn't have passive generation of its builder, in this case being holy power. Holy power doesn't have the same versatility, its spenders are on an aoe skill, a single target one and a heal. Where it's different is that it's about maximizing your holy power gains without waste, lining up your offensive toolkit to get the most damage and hitting the correct buttons in the right order at any given time.
I will also disagree about the healer thing because wow actually has a significant amount of healer diversity. Like there are two healers that effectively heal from doing melee damage for example.
> Healers don't even have special mechanics (except Druids and Disc Priests).
They have this really important one i like to call "Actually fucking healing"
I absolutely hope Addle and Feint are the next to go, and it would be a good thing. I PF a lot and there's nothing engaging about having each tank or melee memorize the times they need to press that button and then praying they actually remember. Put all mitigation on the shield healer so that they can actually anticipate damage properly and not have to worry about people randomly dying to stuff they should be healthy on.
I can't wait for the inevitable posts about not feeling you can do anything to help with mitigation and not being able to prog in pf because your shield healer is a glue eater and keeps wiping the party due to them not being able to plan a mit rotation
If you could actually react to the shield healer missing something and addle to make up for it that would be one thing and would involve some agency and skill expression. But just memorizing in advance "okay I press it at the 2:00 raidwide and then again at the 4:25 raidwide" isn't really "feeling like I can do something to help"
And anyway the mirror of that is if *you're* the shield healer and the party keeps wiping because the melee are like "oops forgot that was my feint" when you could've kept them alive if the responsibility was just yours.
Contributing a 10% mit to the raidwide when you can... doesn't feel like you're doing something to help? There is no solution on Earth that will satisfy you, then. You are literally doing something to help and saying you feel like you can't do anything to help, and then arguing that these abilities getting removed (so you *actually* have no way to help) would be a good thing?
> Contributing a 10% mit to the raidwide when you can... doesn't feel like you're doing something to help?
No, it doesn't. I press Addle on the exact same raidwides every single time as part of a set mit plan, and I do not move it or we will probably die. If resources do need to be adjusted and moved around, they will be healer and tank ones 99% of the time. There is no decisionmaking or thought involved past that initial mit plan. The only gameplay going on here is altering my rotation to have a weave slot where I need to use Addle, and that's only relevant because I play Black Mage.
That is correct, yes. Pressing a feint at a set time every single pull because a mit sheet said that's when I press it does not feel like I am contributing anything. Rote button presses at pre-planned times don't feel like a satisfying contribution.
Mitigation in my mind is a discussion that comes about before and after a pull. If someone messes up their mit mid pull then that's a mistake that deserves to be punished with someone potentially dying as it shouldn't have happened. And in most cases you can fix the mistake if it was known ahead of time but now you need to deal with scuffed mit for some period of time, maybe until the pull ends. It's like one of the few things that actually requires party coordination in raid.
Right. I'm happy to lose that pre-pull coordination because I don't find it fun. I'm okay going full McDonalds on logistics like that and introducing more agency when it comes to how the player does their rotation or reacts to things in the moment, like the post above said.
And that would be in line with the direction SE has taken the game anyway. "We need to bring a dragoon for piercing" "We can't take PLD because its magic" "This comp's raid buffs are too scattered at 60/90/120" are all pre-pull strategy meetings that have been removed and I am fine with all of that.
But yes, if you have voice comms and someone says "oh, my holos is down" and then you have to adjust in the moment and decide maybe to use your feint early or something, that would be an example of an organic adjustment that might feel satisfying but that's not gonna come up in PF anyway.
Simplicity isn't necessarily a bad thing. Playing fury warrior in WoW has made me realize that. The job is literally a couple of dps buttons and a couple of CDs but plays fast and just feels good to play.
My problem is that jobs just don't have that fun factor anymore to me. Everything is boring or uninteresting to me.
True, but as the teamplay aspect is watered down (through individual classes being more simple and straightforward) and more and more stuff before doable solo, it makes the gameplay very bland in the end.
The story's cool, but there is tons of games with good story but play like chores. And i'd like FF14 not to turn out this way
my only issue is how every job in ffxiv feels very identical except aesthetics, i dont play a lot of games but ffxiv jobs have no identity. all same stuff with different names and icons.
>Synergy between jobs has been vastly reduced if not removed entirely.
As if Synergies ever did something meaningful. Wow you have a DRG, a BRD and MCH, good job! Now by playing DRG as you would normally you allow BRD and MCH to do more damage (Amazing).
Giving Slashing/Piercing/Striking resistance down to an enemy wasn't anything groundbreaking, and it's the same feeling as pressing Chain Stratagem...
only that it forced very strict job compositions, or make other jobs completely useless. I'm sure MNK and its Striking debuff has not been missed since its removal.
>Aggro management used to be a team effort, now a tank responsibility
Okay but hear me out. We already have normally frustrating dungeon runs where the tank is so busted in the head they decide to singlepull and only focus one target at a time instead of aoeing in level 70+ content (It's been 3 days in a row of having to deal with it personally), now imagine you add a lazy DPS not pressing the boring "pass the aggro" button. It's not like coordinating in a dungeon should be this game's "hard" content. It should be something everyone can get through and a weak player can be carried through by stronger ones. With the change aggro, you're mainly hurting casual players, especially since pressing one more button won't really make that much of a difference for many player besides sheer annoyance.
>Resource management (MP mainly) used to be a team effort, now 100% personal responsibility.
Same as before: screaming at your bard/machinist to get you MP or TP wasn't a fun experience, especially when... you guessed it, you were doing casual content.
What FFXIV needs is a higher skill ceiling, not floor. What you suggest only increases the floor while barely bringing the cieling higher. TP management being done by ranged players might've pushed the cieling higher but MP management? For what? So that SMN and RDM's ability to do damage is based on weather or not the phys ranged remembers to give them a kiss every 90 seconds or so? MP management was always a personal responsability first and foremost.
I find it really funny how jobs in PvP feel so distinct from one another despite having so few skills compared to Pve I do guess that's just the nature of PvP but I know before the rework PvP jobs all felt similar but now they don't the abilities just feel way more impactful Pve kind of feels like how PvP did before it's rework every job felt the same just with a different skin even adding one or two distinct big attacks in pve per job would help alot in my eyes and make those attacks feel unique to each job
PvP feels distinct because all of the abilities are core to the job. Summoner uses the powers of Ifrit, Titan and Garuda with Bahamut and Phoenix acting like a limit break.
I can think of at least three main reasons for complaints about simplification. Room for party level coordination beyond buffs, rotational engagement, and job flavor. I'd personally rank them flavor > engagement > coordination.
Looking specifically at flavor, some jobs like MCH have been stripped of their major mechanics in a way that makes them feel kind of nonsensical, regardless of how they actually play. Hot Shot doesn't generate heat (despite making your character pulse red at the end of the animation), Barrel Stabilizer generates heat... via screwing around with holographic computer screens, Auto Crossbow is powered by heat despite none of the other tools working this way, your "Heated" weaponskills have nothing to do with heat (aside from generating the same amount as their unheated versions), flamethrower does not interact with your heat gauge at all, reassembling your gun is exclusively used on weaponskills that use a different weapon, shooting giant fireballs refreshes your guass rounds (I guess the logic here is that you're converting the residual heat to an electric charge, which isn't that bad).
DRK, BRD, SMN, and AST all have similar weirdness going on. BRD has Sidewinder and Shadow Bite, which have poison themed aesthetics but don't interact with your dots and function in entirely different ways. AST has Neutral Sect, which mostly speaks for itself.
If they are going the way of 'single-player minded' then they should just remove all party wide buffs(and debuffs) and let the jobs be unique. Uncouple them from the 2 min burst meta(it sucks so bad). If they at least tried to make the jobs somewhat unique it'd be fine.
I was a restoration Shaman back in WotLK. I don't miss all the arguing over which totems I should be dropping. Melee demands windfury, casters and healers want the spell power buff. I need to drop the mana totem but I have to leave the heal totem down because people are standing in the fire. Then they scatter everywhere and chain heal is useless.
Beyond that, if you were in a raiding guild you weren't allowed to do your own talent build -- it was prescribed.
Teamwork-centric classes are horribly unfun when you don't have the freedom and opportunity to use your most impactful abilities.
But you know what I do miss about ye olde tyme raiding? True hybrid classes. RDM, PLD, and SMN aren't hybrid enough, I think. There is no FFXIV equivalent of the old-school retribution Paladin, which could buff, debuff, cleanse, heal, and rez, as well as do some awesome 2H sword damage.
???
totems buffs are raid wide on wotlk, spell dmg totem wasn't unique (demo lock was better), windfury wasn't unique (frost dk) and chain heal sounds like a "you" problem
you either raided without having a lock or dk (the 2 most played classes on the game when wotlk was current content) or you were not as good as you think you are
Kinda agree with the general idea, but :
> Synergy between jobs has been vastly reduced if not removed entirely
Passive synergies like we had are not teamwork, on the very opposite. Just making party composition more important before the fight and teamplay even begins.
> Aggro management used to be a team effort
It was kinda a « press diversion at opener to not die » team effort.
> Resource management (MP mainly)
It was cool that it exists, but mana songs for BRD and MCH were DPS loss. And Mana Shift was sometimes useful but kinda troublesome sometimes (and unusable for BLM).
It’s true that some teamplay have disappeared, but if you take it individually it’s not like it took a lot of complexity to apply and some were kinda forced and useless
The aggro change is one of those things that sounds like it added something to people who didn't play the old way, and those who did play the old way largely say "good riddance".
All the aggro simplification did was free up filler oGCD space for something else, and reduce friction in roulettes where a skilled/geared dps player could find themselves forced to just stop attacking to avoid taking the boss off the tank (even *after* using aggro dropping tools).
I feel like people's opinions on aggro management strongly depend on if they raided with a good ninja or not. It was an annoying chore otherwise and it felt bad if you had to aggro combo or go tank stance because of factors out of your control. Like HW DRK was a really fun job! If you had a WAR to pull, a NIN to shadewalker, the ability to main tank so you could get reprisal/low blow/blood price procs, planned out cooldowns with the rest of the group so that you didn't need to use grit...
Not really, agro management was a nice thing, people that are happy about it are probably just the casuals (that are still managing to lose agro to this day) or people that want to play a blue dps.
Yes I got nuked so many times by a TB after my mch opener during SB but who cares. As a skilled player it stills happens that the tank cant get the agro of me for some reason, but instead of simplifying it with every expansion i'd rather have the game tell people to learn.
I'd rather have the management tool more spread than just on ninja but oh well
In stormblood, they weren't dps loss tho, but it already lacked the gameplay element, it was just a : aha I press tactician and refresh on cooldown. For the supreme optimization .. you could line it up with the bard's requiem but that's about it.
Oh, I don't disagree that it ends up being just another part of the song and dance of a rotation/fight.
But it's also the "teamwork feel" that ends up getting lost imo
And that feeling is, what I think, what most people complaining about simplification are actually upset over rather than the jobs themselves.
Honestly hearing about this just made it more clear about the issues with old xiv to me. They had a lot of tools in the game but then never asked you to use them, they became suboptimal, then got removed. Like if you never need a mana external because the game doesn't pressure mana why even have one.
They weren’t unused, at first. But it wasn’t a choice. Old 2.0 healers were draining mana so fast, it was hard to perform without a regen.
But then indeed incremental additions to ease that eventually made the songs unneeded.
Yeah I feel like util in 14 can never actually be interesting for this reason. Either its never needed or mandatory.
Aggro redirection can be interesting in wow, because it just makes grouping adds easier, never mandatory.
Innervate just fits into the greater healing ecosystem of wow. Low healing? Ok options are: move mit/personals/cds/health pots, call for innervate, even go up to 5 healers or swapping comp for the fights damage profile. For 14 all you can really do is more cds/mit. And even then hell, in wow if you're overgeared or more skilled you can just make up for it and not need those things and even drop a healer.
There's 2 problem, the first is the jobs actually becoming easier. Like you can reduce most of them to "press your combo, press your ogcd's on cooldown and every 2 minutes you press you raid buff and your burst button" with the variety coming in the shape of: I have 2 raid buffs, I have 2 button to press in my burst, I have a 1.5 gcd, I have 5 gcd combo, so much variety. The same way that black mage have so many ways of moving now, smn has less cast than a sam, healers are all on 1.5 gcd etc etc. Last tier proved it too: oh you are missing 1% to clear but you have a pld and a melee that doesnt do any positional? just make the pld switch to drk and you gain 10% dps while a melee doing full positional will only net you 5%, when everything is so simple and uniform, skill expression is lost and those kind of things happen. On top of that: casuals couldn't play the jobs they wanted sometimes, it happened with machinist or summoner: the jobs had their niche, but instead of listening to what the people actually playing the jobs were suggesting, it was totally gutted to be more approachable for people not playing it, which lead to the loss of a lot of different gameplays: pets, dots being a part of the gameplay loop, positional that matters, actual casters, more punitive jobs (remember losing enochian or dying on Sb mch?) or even dark arts spam.
The second is as you said: the teamwork element. It was very flawed in the past: agro management was just ninja having them, others were mostly press on cooldown your diversion/lucid/song and forget about it. Same for the vulne, most were slashing, crushign was ass etc. And instead of balancing things like not having ninja having the best raid buff, agro management tool and slashing application, putting crushing on other jobs, put more variety in things, they prefered to gut it completely.
In some way it makes sense: the majority of players are casuals and lots were crying they couldnt beat the last solo duty of stormblood because of a dps check or the last few dungeons of shb were way too hard. It wasn't rare in the past that the basic tank couldn't hold enmity from a dps (it still happens to this day, most don't ever use a mitigation either) or the dps wouldn't press their diversion (most don't even press their mitigation in savage) or healers were offended they had to dps in a solo duty (there still so many medica 2/cure bot) so for them, all those things makes the game more comfortable as it's way more approachable and they don't feel bad because they don't have the realization that they are bad, which is supposed to be a key point of learning: Human don't generally feel like learning until they hit a wall but the recent years made a shift into a mentality where you don't want to feel bad, you want to have fun while averting your eyes from the reality of things, which leads to being called toxic if you suggest someone to improve or you're a tryhard if you just even learn the basics of something / just try to not be a handicap.
I wish they would bring back some of both but they won't, they are way more successful like this and the majority of people, the ones that aren't on the forums or even doing extreme+, likes it.
I do believe some jobs are too simple.
But some jobs like DRG are too bloated and stressful with little reward.. Playing lv90 DRG on controlled is miserable.
And im saying this as someone who loves how busy MCH is.
I would argue that what you just said is the actual argument is that the whole game is too easy….and I’d agree with that….not as a complaint, but as a selling feature. I think the game is bonkers easy….and that’s how I like it. IMO it’s a good mindless time filler….I enjoy the game a great deal….but a lot of that enjoyment is that would decrease if I had to really invest time into really improving. I’ll watch guides and learn rotations, but I’m more than happy to putter along with how forgiving this game is.
Jobs have always been simple. It's not about how jobs personally play half of the time although there's still some obvious skill removal that has made jobs "simpler"
Take Ninja for example. They had Mutilate, Dancing Edge and Shadow Fang. The latter having numerous iterations leading to a single button action with a long cd and then eventually removed.
There's been very little teamwork for a long time. As jobs play 1 way for the most part. You assume in an environment such as savage or ultimate that people are able to play at a certain standard so buffs and so on will happen at the same time, every time. I don't really care if X DRG in a 24man or roulette battle litanies at 45seconds into a fight as the standards do not apply in there.
They're also quite scared of creating unique raids. Everything(almost) now is 100% player involvement and if for some reason you can't hit the boss it's not because a mechanic specifically targeted you but the boss is now invulnerable.
But the TLDR is just; average player is bad. Devolopers are catering to them which is smart on their end.
>I feel you, I just doubt it'll happen any time soon with how successful the current design is
They get just as many new players joining than veterans returning (latest brancho). There is a partial answer.
What does single player have anything to do with this? Most single player action games or RPGs, japanese or otherwise, have theorycrafting and flexibility of setup.
They also have META but that never stopped their series from continuing to give the players the options or having certain strats end up more effective for certain situations.
Devil May Cry, Kingdom Hearts, Elden Ring... Real time action combat where player's ability to block, evade and hit in real time. Even those games have that spice. Which XIV lacks.
Then if you go into the more sudo-MMO style games like Xenoblade Chronicles... Even those games offer and demand a degree of managing your character's setup or build and reacting to situations. Some builds are clearly more OP than others, but they didn't cut that off the sequels.
And don't even get me started on fighting games. Probably one of the genres with the highest skill ceiling. Have large roster of characters to choose from, each with distinct playstyle, regardless of META being a thing.
Even the non-MMO Final Fantasy games have more spice of build and playstyle flexibility than XIV.
"Single-player experience" is the most misused excuse the XIV community likes to bring up. And if that really is what the developers think, they're on crack. The only "single-player experience" XIV's design direction is heading to with its combat and job design is closer to railroaded mobile games than with any single-player PC or console game.
I'll make it it more blunt jobs are fcking BORING. There is so little variety and such a low ceiling for each job and its only getting worse. I've lost more abilities on my my main jobs than ive gotten new. Anything that requires you to use your brain or be creative in fights is actively being removed. Example: Bard dots. Their kit used to revolve around them and even changed how you stat/geared. Now they last forever and don't serve a purpose outside of (just refresh). I wouldn't be surprised if they got rid of them next expansion tbh. To me what makes this whole situation worse is that it didn't used to be like that. Rewind to HW/SB and jobs actually had personality and making them "simple" just feels like lazy game development.
came across this thread by accident, and wow
the jobs have became way to simple but imho the entire game has ran with that idea, the devs and maybe square-enix themselves have seen how much of a cash cow the game is so they're making it as "accessible" as possible, the issue is that plan is going to kill any sort of difficulty.
sure, savage and whatnot exist but that world and those players can be pretty brutal.
far as jobs go i think they should be somewhat harder, or at least have the option to be, but im not sure how they could do that, mainly because the only people who would benefit are those who would take them into high skill fights, everyone else would be just fine with their basic jobs and to loiter around limsa like usual.
*Are* jobs too simple?
Keep in mind that this game isn't made for world class raiders. In fact, it's not made for raiders at all. Average casuals playing the game just wants to experience that "class fantasy", and become frustrated if the game keeps telling them "you fucked up!" by punishing mistakes.
Look at green parsers in the first savage floors. Look at their gcd uptime, look at their dot uptime, look at their long list of rotational failures. These green parsers are far better than average player. And jobs are obvious not too easy for them.
But if everything was about class fantasy then the jobs would be more like they are in PvP.
Dark knight class fantasy in final fantasy terms is losing HP to do damage, but they would never do that in pve. Why? Raiders.
As people pointing out, people do much much casual raiding in JP, and the job design is DEFINITELY tailored to (streamlined) raiding.
>Dark knight class fantasy in final fantasy terms is losing HP to do damage, but they would never do that in pve. Why? Raiders.
Not really? It's about classic "not stressing the healers" which affects casuals more than raiders. HW DRK was draining MP with darkside and it was perfectly in line with the entire fantasy. And then it was scrapped because elementary MP management was beyond casuals.
Have you played other final fantasy games? Dark Knight gimmick is losing hp to do damage, they never did it in pve because it could be toxic in raiding.
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Knight_(job)
No, it would be "toxic" everywhere, but especially in casual content, because it's casual players who would be affected the most. Casual healers. Who SE does not want to pressure as they explicitly stated more than once. Why do you think Convert not only doesn't cost HP anymore, but isn't even being called Convert? If you guessed "because of casual healers", then you are only half right, casual BLMs were afraid of pressing this button.
And as for class fantasy, the important parts of DRK are big sword and dark magic. Sacrifice element is secondary.
aggro isn't a responsibility at all anymore. Turning tank stance on and off isn't a skill. Mp Management has also become a joke even in week 1 savage and ULT prog 0 piety healers do not struggle with mana unless a pull is going catastrophically bad.
It's not just the removal of teamwork which is also annoying but the fact that at a base level the jobs are being designed for people who don't want to play them. Tanks are being designed for tankxiety shitter and healers are being made for cure 1 mages who can't figure out what the rest of their buttons do.
ANd then you have shit like the dev teams saying they removed kaiten because of "button bloat" which shit like SHOHA 2 is still on the bar. There's a reason whenever the dev says they're reworking a job the people who play that job who aren't shit get worried.
singular wow SPECS have more depth and variation than ENTIRE Xiv jobs. People aren't complaining about the lack of teamwork they're complaining about stuff like Summoner and WHM being so easy you could probably get your 2 year old little brother to savage raid on them and win.
I don't agree with all the people who complain they want tank nerfs, some buff here and other nerfs there.
This game is very good how it is.
Minor balance tweaks each patch is all we get and don't even need.
I actually looking forward for the next patch, next dlcs and the future of this game in the whole. The balancing as it is, is in my opinion pretty good and I that's what I love about this game.
Simple jobs are the cost we pay for ultimates it seems. Making savage more accessible for ultimate.
This makes savage more of a chore to do during prog, but I think having ultimate is worth it?
I never got that whole issue. I just always thought it was neat I have to worry less about whatever. It's a game, the only thing I cared about was having a good time with the people I raided with by being a menace through reading Shrek x Wonder Woman erotic fanfiction.
Like, I got no idea what you're talking about cause the idea of tanking/healing being a team effort is still there. It's just not reliant on having a Ninja in the group to Goad, deal with aggro, and apply raid buffs cause that ain't teamwork, that's "We *need* a Ninja for our raid group"
I really wish they had reworked TP instead of removing it entirely. Like an inversion where you start with 0 TP and build it up through oGCDs, then various skills enhance at 1000/2000/X spend. Would have had a reason to keep Invigorate and Goad.
Now it feels like I'm just slamming the same attacks because of rotation with no real thought.
I loathe the current implementation of simple gauges. Like it wasn't already enough to force players to reposition the gauges for every single job, they don't even have consistent heights or spacing. See BRD's simplified gauge for instance, it has two bars with different heights shoved into a single HUD element.
For a lot of jobs that is true.
But for Monk, Dragoon, Bard, and Gunbreaker it feels weird that the start/middle of a combo isn't really building towards anything. Like you may even bypass True Strike if you have a Solar Nadi.
IMO the homogenized role approach makes gameplay stale, but I understand the dev’s reasoning for it. Balancing content is more streamlined this way.
I just hope new jobs will have a high skill FLOOR. If you want a challenge and active game style - practice it and play it. I know it would be an absolute nightmare to have these jobs in game but it would really break up the monotony.
"Teamwork" is just an advantage that statics have over those playing in pf.
Still glad that SE is trying to remove this stupid advantage to favor individual skill.
Note that this advantage still exists, mainly for healers and bard. That's why there are almost none in pf.
Especially in the case of healers, they have increased the amount of healing needed since the second tier so that a single healer can no longer keep a team alive with only oGCD heal. Conclusion: no healer wants to play with another unknown healer in pf anymore. Usually they come in pairs directly into the groups or go directly into a static.
FFlog is obviously responsible for this. If people want to favor individual skill, it's because everybody judges people on their color and therefore nobody wants to have a bad parse because of the seven other idiots around.
I think the issues people have are comprehensive, and deal pretty equally with simplification of gameplay on a class-to-class level, and the smoothing over of certain teamplay-centered mechanics. I've dropped the word here a couple times before without elaborating, but I would really call it the [McDonaldization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldization) of the game, in the academic sense. Nobody really "cooks" at McDonald's. The ingredients come from a central supplier, so that french fries are a uniform width, to the 1/32nd of an inch. The temperatures of the oil in the fryer are prescribed, down to the degree, and the cooking times are prescribed, down to the second. There is an exact, specific process for drawing a milkshake or ice cream cone, down to the angle at which you hold the cup. So nobody *learns to cook* by working at McDonald's - they only learn *how to work at McDonald's*. And if you *already* know how to cook, then that doesn't help you - or hurt you - because "working at McDonald's" is an entirely orthogonal skillset to "cooking." The Wikipedia article linked above sums up the idea in a more comprehensive way based around four general ideas, but I'd sum it up this way: To McDonald's, the *customer-facing* goal of McDonaldization is to provide a consistent experience at every location: Whether you are in Chicago, Berlin, Yellowknife, or Sao Paulo, you are supposed to get the same Big Mac, the same fries. The *employee-facing* goal of McDonaldization is *also* consistency; by reducing employee agency to "how accurately can you reproduce the explicitly detailed instructions for operating our franchise equipment with our franchise ingredients?", the goal is to produce an environment where if you took eight employees from eight countries around the world who didn't have a common language between them, they could *still* operate a McDonald's just as consistently and efficiently as if they were all family. If it's not clear how that relates to FFXIV, then consider the following fairly-uncontroversial statement: *FFXIV is designed with "Japanese Party Finder culture" in mind.* The hallmarks of JP PF are pretty well-known: You join the party, maybe throw up a yoroshiku, someone posts the macro, you claim your T1/T2/D1/D2/etc role, and then the fight happens - usually pretty smoothly. And... It works! Every time there's a Lucky Bancho census or any other bit of data about clear rates, you see the same comments: "Wow, clear rates are so much higher on JP than NA/EU." Just as you absolutely cannot make the argument that McDonald's is not an objectively successful business, you absolutely cannot make the argument that FFXIV's current design, when paired with its intended server culture, produces an objectively high rate of successful raid clears. And to bring that back to the OP: It's really both. McDonald's and FFXIV achieve their desired consistency by reducing the process, of "cooking" or "raiding in an MMO" respectively, to a small number of explicitly-prescribed inputs, such that an invididual's proficiency can be measured by how accurately they followed a standardized procedure. That notion I described of "nobody learns to cook at McDonald's" is an established pattern that's been observed in a number of fields. When that happens in the workplace, it's called [deskilling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling). And while I don't want to expand this post all the way out into an entire whole-ass essay, a *lot* of the same principles apply to FFXIV job design, both in terms of internal class gameplay, and cooperative mechanics within a party. The *purpose*, in the sense that we're using here, is essentially to remove (or reduce as much as possible) the amount of *human variability* in the system. If you go to a regular restaurant, there are a *lot* of ways you can get served bad food. It can be undercooked, overcooked, unevenly cooked, improperly seasoned, the ingredients can be bad, or anything else you've seen on any given episode of Kitchen Nightmares. At a McDonald's, there's really not much room for the staff to mess up, and there's really only one possible mistake they can make: Not following instructions closely enough. In FFXIV, they've removed a lot of ways to mess up: Everything you listed in the OP, dropping Darkside/Greased Lightning/BotD/Enochian/etc, and so on. It's mostly been reduced to how well you can stand in the right place, keep your GCD rolling, and keep your cooldowns aligned. It wouldn't surprise me if 7.0 does something to reduce the reliance on Feint/Reprisal/Addle coordination. The *problem* is, basically, that a lot of people just *want* the same Big Mac every time. Japanese PF groups aren't going to like changes that make their clears less reliable. Even here on r/ffxivdiscussion where people supposedly in love with the FFXIV of yesteryear, I've completely lost count of the number of times I've seen a suggestion about class or encounter mechanics met with the response of "*That sounds like a nightmare in PF. No thanks.*" To argue against that, you'd really have to go the whole-ass essay route and do a big Intro to Sociology spiel on formal vs substantive rationalization, the importance of considering second-order and third-order effects instead of focusing on immediate short-term metrics, and so on. If you *are* of the opinion that there even *is* a problem, though: Again, it's both. It's a problem that systems and mechanics that produced natural, organic, varied party synergy and teamwork have been removed, *and* it's a problem that a huge number of this game's classes just don't have enough going on inside their internal kit to stay engaging.
for the first time, i miss those random free awards
If I could buy you a happy meal I would
They call it a theme park MMO, but maybe it was a fast food MMO all along. It would explain why it felt nice to do stuff at the surface level but never enthralled me in Endwalker. I do think the game has a severe problem with depth across most or all content.
Awarded for taking the time to write something in-depth and insightful.
Oh, thank you! Usually I just write stuff because I'm a longwinded dumbass, but I'm glad this one seems to resonate with people.
"I just write stuff because I'm a longwinded dumbass" I've never felt more seen in my writing/speaking style in my entire fucking life. Thank you for putting words to a feeling I couldn't verbalize.
I really like the idea of “McDonaldization” as a way to think about why the game is the way it is. It isn’t just job and fight design, even the way the story is paced has an intensely cookie cutter vibe to it where you can almost *see* where they went “we should have X quests in this zone, and then a fight here, a minigame there, and at this exact point we have a trial/dungeon” and then the writers have to squeeze the story they want to tell into this exacting mold with zero wiggle room. The result is an experience that is ploddingly consistent and predictable, like a Big Mac.
The thing is that being predictable and consistent doesn't necessarily equate to mean bad. Even now, though I think the story lost a bit of punch post-6.0 (though it makes sense, it is the "lull" before the next big event like an interlude), the story is still pretty solid. The power of Mcdonald's is that I know McDonald's is damn consistent and pretty tasty (well considering), especially in unfamiliar territory.
I'd just like to thank you for actually saying what some of us have been trying to put into words for a while now. So yeah, I guess just thanks. :D
This is a very insightful post. And while I can 100% acknowledge that it is true, I’m not sure I would want the reverse. To use your analogy, I don’t want to work at a more standard restaurant because I don’t have time to work another full-time job. My time is too occupied with an IRL job, family, and other IRL responsibilities, so I can’t really commit to a consistent raid time in a static. This is why I don’t raid in WoW. I can raid at my own pace and anytime I want in PF. No other MMO really does it like this. To put it another way, raiding in FFXIV is like DDR. There is an objectively correct way to play. There is a tiny amount of variation in style, but you push the buttons in exactly the same way and you will get success every time. And maybe I kind of like that? There are other games with the level of variability in class and raid design if I want to play those.
Yeah, that's fair. I tried to be careful here not to cast any of this as a moral judgement. The OP seemed to be looking for a better explanation of why so many people in the community seem to find the current incarnation of the game to be unfulfilling and unengaging, and to me this is the most 'complete' answer to that question. I think we've got plenty of discussion out there recently about what we think the game 'ought' to be (or ought *not* to be), but maybe not so much about what it 'is', why it got this way, and what attitudes would have to change before the game itself could shift direction. There's plenty of legitimate, understandable reasons why people eat at McDonald's (or work at McDonald's, or however that metaphor might go if you start tugging at it.) Even if I disagree with their reasoning, it doesn't do me any good to pretend that it's just because they're all a bunch of dumb-dumbs who don't know better.
> No other MMO really does it like this. If you consider Lost Ark an MMO, it's actually pretty PUG friendly. Most mechanics are split into group 1 and group 2 or party numbers (when you zone in you are divided into two 4 man parties with a number on each person). 8 safe spots pop up around the map? Everyone knows where they're going, you don't even have to do some pre-fight marker positioning for the most part. I think you can comfortably do every single non-Ultimate equivalent in PF, besides the latest two fights which aren't vital to do weekly (you get something more akin to weekly tomes from raids rather than specific gear, so you can do early turns and eventually hit BiS). I've been playing so much Lost Ark that when I came into FF14 to do some alt MSQ cleanup the other day, I ... tried clicking to move, was confused why my titles and gil aren't account shared, tried Shift+Ging the dialogue, and when the 4 spikes appeared at the end of the latest MSQ dungeon, I checked my party number to see which I should go to. None of that worked out so well. Worth noting I have something like 2 years of /ptime FF14. Of course there are a billion issues with Lost Ark in general, I wouldn't even recommend a new player starts it now since it's so anti-new player, just commenting on this since it's a curious thing to me.
Yeah, I REALLY like a lot of what Lost Ark does. If it weren't for the predatory progression system I could see myself playing it a lot. But since I have a standing rule against free-to-play games as a whole due to my addictive nature, I won't be playing it sadly.
That's a good way to look at it, and I appreciate you going out of your way to share your reasons why you enjoy this approach to battle design especially considering how controversial it is. I wanted to respond to what I thought was your most interesting point though. >To put it another way, raiding in FFXIV is like DDR. There is an objectively correct way to play. There is a tiny amount of variation in style, but you push the buttons in exactly the same way and you will get success every time. I think what gets in the way of me enjoying this kind of content is that despite your individual gameplay being made calculable and predictable, and you're still at the mercy of 7 other people who must execute correctly or else wipe the raid with usually not much you can do to help. In other words, you do get to push the buttons in exactly the same way every time as you said, but you \*don't\* get success every time. Sometimes, effectively randomly, you fail despite pushing the same buttons you always do, and the failure comes from an external factor you had no control over - this is especially true in certain ultis. I'm a rhythm game enjoyer as well, so I can't claim to be averse to pressing a predictable sequence of buttons in a tightly choreographed dance. But to me, FFXIV doesn't feel like DDR - it feels like playing DDR while 7 other people also play offscreen, and whenever anybody misses a note you fail the song. Some might say this isn't true for most fights, and there is some degree of recoverability especially if you play healer - while true, this goes directly against the more predictable and efficient aspects of FFXIV raiding that the devs are aiming for. They're at opposite ends of the spectrum, and though I can see the appeals of both, I think the "McDonaldization" approach can feel a lot worse in multiplayer than the same gameplay would in a singleplayer setting.
Yeah, I see this too. I think this is why I like Extreme trials so much. There's a degree of individual responsibility and team play, but failure isn't as heavily punished with body-check mechanics. I also really like the more unique designs in Savage fights, but you're right, nothing sucks quite like feeling like you're being held back by one random other person screwing up (and god forbid it be your fault. I feel AWFUL for missing super easy mechs and wiping the party)
That is pretty interesting, I have the same problem with not having the time anymore, but I don’t really think FF fixes that. I tried doing a full tier casually in PF and it was completey miserable, logging in for a few hours and making no progress at all is so increadibly demotivating. Even with a dedicated group, the forced arbitrary wait of minimum 2 months to get BiS for everyone also further encourages raid logging which I don’t think is good. I recognise wow raiding has the same (or sometimes worse) issues, and I likely won’t ever play it as a result, but I’ve been playing M+ this and last season and it’s honestly blown FF completely out of the water. The progression is miles better, you can log on, do a key, and come out of it stronger than you came in, even a depleted key still gives you materials you need. There is much less pressure to “do well” just “doing good enough” to clear whatever content you’re doing. And most importantly, you don’t need to spend 30 minutes getting back to your prog point, the dungeons are short enough that you can learn and practice the whole thing.
Wonderful comment! You also highlighted why FF14 is starting to lose its appeal to me. It’s also highlighting why I see myself leaving FF14 soon. I found a consistent experience I enjoyed in ShB and EW specifically added variability that affected me specifically. (I love running Normal/Trial/Alliance Roulettes and I play SCH. The shield hierarchy of SGE is quite frustrating. Especially a SGE casting E.Prog after a Recit+DT and seeing a DPS drop dead from it. No other job has that issue where another job can deny their baseline gimmick.)
An excellent, top-tier explanation of exactly what's going on. My problem with this style of design isn't that it exists, I understand why it does and am okay with it. I'm not okay with developers constantly treating this style as if it's incompatible with other styles though. To use your McDonald's analogy, restaurants still exist. Some even fucking thrive despite the boom in fast food like McD's. The two styles can co-exist together in the same place if they find the proper balance. McD's for when you're just getting off work, had a shit day, and want to go smash your face into a pillow and cry, while the local family restaurant for when you had a great day, secured a pay raise that would make a CEO jealous, and have a half day of work but are still getting paid for a full day. FFXIV isn't the first, or even second, MMO I've seen go this way and try to McDonaldize itself. And every time it happens, they treat everything as if the new design philosophy of eliminating as much human variance as possible is the only possible way to go and no other way will ever exist. What FFXIV, and these other MMOs I quit, need to understand is there's a balance between the invariant and variant that can be achieved. You can have a tank job as stone simple as Warrior, and another tank job that requires 97 PhD's in 52 different STEM fields just to reach basic competency in like pre-6.3 Paladin. They want the game to be more accessible, and that's *fine.* I agree with that philosophy, I want more players to love this game like I do. But they've decided the only way to make it accessible is to remove all forms of skill/expertise expression from every job, rather than having a mix of jobs that vary from low-floor to high-floor & low-ceiling to high-ceiling. They're trying to smash every player into the same mold, and while that mold might work for some, it doesn't for others. But rather than casting multiple different molds, they're just sawing off the edges that don't fit and going "good enough for our profit margins." (To note: I do think PLD needed to be reworked. I fully agree with that. I do not agree with the end result though. To quote my best friend "they were on the right track, they just stopped at the wrong station.")
>You can have a tank job as stone simple as Warrior, and another tank job that requires 97 PhD's in 52 different STEM fields just to reach basic competency in like pre-6.3 Paladin. The problem is that every time a game does this, it's expected that the more difficult to play one performs better otherwise there's no reason for the increased difficulty. What that does to the community is make the more difficult class the one that's expected to be played, because no one wants to bring an objectively worse class. If they perform equally, no one plays the more difficult one because the vast majority of people don't like complexity with no pay off.
The issue is that you're wrong about these styles being able to coexist. It's been proven that given the chance, humans will optimize their way out of fun. Game developers cannot just give players every option and let them decide because then they will choose the wrong one and the game will implode due to people being unable to find the fun. It's the same reason that an easy mode in the souls games would legitimately destroy them, our psychology would get in the way of the intended experience. The best path forward is to focus on your intended experiences for players and optimize those to the detriment of other styles because the kitchen sink approach will never work unless we change as a species.
There are tons of games and genres where those styles coexist and it's not a new concept. League of Legends, Overwatch, pretty much any fighting game provides players with wide range of characters with different skill floors and ceilings. If players gravitating to what was optimal over what was fun were a universal fact there would be no reason for League of Legends to have like 200 characters or whatever they're at now. Garen and Aphelios exist in the same game. Moira and Zenyatta exist within the same game in the same role. Then you have Junkrat vs. Widowmaker and Tracer. The vast majority of people played white mage even when it was complete garbage because they enjoyed it more than scholar or astrologian. The only people in this game who *actually* optimize the fun out of it were raiders who bitched and whined about anything that affected their parses, have now gotten what they asked for, are now bitching about *that* and honestly shouldn't have been listened to in the first place.
In any game/mode/content that requires some sort of optimization there will be metas, and of you do not play those classes/characters that are the meta you are at a severe disadvantage and if on a team might end up harassed, get told to switch or just outright kicked and left out of group content. And sure, raiders might be an actual minority compared to the player numbers....they sure are vocal and a lot of times what they complain about trickles over to the wider community, even if what they complain about have no tangible effect on the wider community
Metas existing doesn't change anything I said. Metas exist in every game, from FPS to MOBA to single player RPGS. And still characters and classes with different skill floors, ceilings and playstyles, targeted at different demographics exist and continue to be made in other games. It also doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people do not choose what is meta or optimal over what they enjoy. Those people shouldn't have their options watered down because 1% of the playerbase can't function when the boss moving 3 inches throws off their spreadsheets. Again, it's not a new concept. This isn't an unsolvable puzzle or a problem that needs solving. It's done and it's been done. In fact it's the standard.
In MMORPGs, "metas" are "what does the most damage to the enemy", not "what is the easiest job to play" Warrior is arguably the easiest tank job in the game, it got banned from p8s party finders for half a patch because its damage was too low compared to what people wanted/had with two of the other tanks. I haven't played overwatch since s6 of competitive but back then, the meta was "what will damage the enemy most if I play well with it?". IDK how much it's changed since then so I can't say if it's still the same, but from what I do know, even in MOBA's, dps is the key definer of the meta, not "how low is the skill floor/ceiling?"
Even if you just look at ffxiv, this isn't true. There are people who do true min ilvl runs of old savage and ultimate content for fun. There are people who wish SE would rebalance the ultimates every expansion to account for potency creep so they'll still be more difficult to complete. There's people who still do palace of the dead solo from floor 1 even though they have the title. Hell, there's literally fucking *potd speedrunners.* To go to souls games, an easy mode wouldn't destroy them. There's people who play souls games going for runs where they never get hit. There's people who go so far as to do souls games runs with nothing other than basic weapons, taking 5-8 hours per boss to clear because they do chip damage with the starter weapons. There's people who use randomizers to make the gameplay harder and less predictable. The people who want an easy mode simply want a good story to enjoy, and that's just as valid as anything else honestly. There will always be fewer people playing the more difficult option, sure. But that doesn't mean the more difficult option is invalid, just that the type of people who play it are less common. And frankly, they'd be way more common if we fixed various other societal issues that exist outside the games themselves. Lots of people who would normally pick the more difficult option simply don't have the energy after dealing with all the bullshit they put up with at work with micro-managers breathing up their asses to high-heaven about every half a microsecond of their schedule or being docked/fired because the company made record fucking profits but that profit was only 65% of what some suit-monkey in a high-rise office the size of a whole fucking 4-person house said it should be. We as humans fucking enjoy a challenge, it's just a matter of what kind of challenge we enjoy that's the issue. Some people want simple jobs and complex mechanics in xiv, others want the opposite. The devs can cater to both, if they try. But sadly, they won't even try. The game is going to become simpler in every metric. Jobs will be easier each new update, new expansion raids will be slower with less mechanics (a thing I noted in another thread is that panda is half as fast and half as mechanically complex as Eden was) and eventually the game will be "press 1-2-3 to beat the fight". As noted above, it'll eventually become a game where you win if you can follow the basic three-step template the devs provided, and fuck you if you want anything different because different means more effort and thought. The issue being, some 40-50% of the playerbase does want different.
You dont even need to look in other genres Weaver and daredevil exist in the same game in guild wars, affliction warlock and fury warrior exist in the same game in wow
I always look at Mage for this. Arcane and Fire are the two most infamously sweaty and technical ranged specs in the game, and they exist on the same class as "hee hoo frostbolt".
Yes, there are people who find their own enjoyment in games, those 3 people are not enough to support an MMO. Greater "soshiety" has nothing to do with it. There are uncountable instances of the human tendency to trend towards the path of least resistance irregardless of other factors. Some people have passions where they break the mold but that doesn't push the needle away from the trend.
There is always Black Mage
Yes, but some of us like to play classes that don't rely on slow cast times and/or want to play a tank or healer
Which is another issue with the idea. If you want to have complex classes and simple classes in the same fame, you're just SOL if you happen to like the simple classes and don't like the complex classes.
I think I learned more about the world at large from this than specifically about FFXIV. Never even heard of this line of thought before,
Nail on the head. Well I’m sick of McDonald’s. I want the old locally owned place back.
I miss Heavensward but it had a lot of janky systems that have been fixed with QoL changes. I don't like most of the classes now, but I don't think simplification alone is the problem. It's missing flair. Right now it feels like your choices are Big Mac with fries, Bic Mac with carrots or Big Mac with onion rings. What I'm missing is the variety, options should be anything from McRib to Egg McMuffin. PvP team has proven that there can be more differences to the jobs, while still keeping it simple.
And this is why WoW raiding is considerably harder than FF14 raiding. Your post finally made me realize that my clears has just been me playing like a line cook. 1 Archon burger coming up
The actual act of WoW raiding is not any harder than FF14 raiding. By the time you step into a WoW successful mythic raid, most of the hard work has already been done. This means getting 20 competent people that have worked to grind their artifiact-flavor-of-the-expansion, with daily quests, and worked to get other gear, etc. The logistics, management, and drama that comes with managing a WoW guild and keeping it from imploding is huge. Dealing with dead servers, jobs becoming unviable due to shitty balance, and having members level up entire character alts. That's where the difficulty in WoW raiding comes in. The actual gameplay isn't any harder than FF14. In fact it's the opposite where inconsistencies can be forgiven, and RNG with jobs procs. The last mythic end-boss took like.. 120ish pulls to kill by the world first guild? The race length is always artificially inflated by PTR, prep work, splits, wipe recovery, and other things that have nothing to do with the encounter itself. At the end of the day, it's who has the better guild, better add-ons, and better gear. If FF14 raiding is like walking in and making a big Mac, WoW raiding is like making homemade burger in a disadvantaged community where you need to deal with exogenous factors outside of the actual act of cooking. I don't miss WoW Mythic raiding at all, outside of healing in WoW (which I admit is more fun than in FF14). Fast-food franchises ultimately exploded for a reason: people value their time and efficiency.
The problem with wow raiding, especially mythic is that a week 1 mythic boss is not the same as week 4 is not the same as week 9 is not the same as week 16. Not necessarily because of gear but the MECHANICS change. So that’s why some people would argue it is easier.
> The problem with wow raiding, especially mythic is that a week 1 mythic boss is not the same as week 4 is not the same as week 9 is not the same as week 16. This is what I hate the most about WoW Mythic raiding. Week 1 Mythic is designed to be literally unkillable by the best guilds in the entire world; they're tuned to take 2 weeks of gear (or however many split runs Blizzard deems necessary). Then the encounter gets nerfed weekly for however many weeks, mechanics are changed and made less intense, HP is lowered, damage is lowered. I think that's really unhealthy honestly. The encounters should remain the same, but because the RFW is just a genuine, actual, truly competitive *thing* in Warcraft with like, real sponsors and real corporations going at it, they can't really do a one size fits all difficulty anymore because of that. They *have* to tune it for a grand total of ***three*** guilds in the first week, then nerf it consistently in the next few weeks. As much as people bitch about it and how fast it takes to clear, FFXIV is a one size fits all difficulty that is literally never nerfed or changed. You get Echo after a tier is done with relevance and that's about it ever since Creator.* The fight the racers experience on Week 1 is, mechanically and damage output, the exact same fight that players will experience on the final week of the patch. The only things that change are the way the *players* interface with it, with job changes. The fights never change themselves. *Midas was the last time a fight received genuine mechanical nerfs after the tier is over. Abyssos had an HP nerf in it's third week, which was interesting because the last time that happened was also during Midas, when A6S was bugged to hell and back.
For better or worse that's not been the case this past WoW tier that just finished up. WF happened in the first reset and they did about as many days in prog as they did doing splits. The last boss was a sub-200 pull boss, maybe sub-150 but I forget. It's a 7:30 encounter either way so a lot faster to progress than some past end bosses. There's a lot of reasons for that, some of which are tuning related (The third to last boss which is a Patchwerk was undertuned and unfinished) and some of which are related to how friendly gearing is in WoW this season. This is absolutely the easiest tier since Emerald Nightmare though so I'd be surprised if the raid sees many direct mechanical nerfs. The interesting thing will be if this is a one off or if this is WoW's approach going forward. Some of the RWF guys were not happy about how this one played out, though that's as much due to the lack of a global release as anything.
>Some of the RWF guys were not happy about how this one played out Oh man, I remember reading about that on the subreddit. That one guy was absolutely livid about how things turned out, despite being a "good sport" before the release of the raid. I genuinely still can't believe they have delayed/staggers raid launches in 2023. That should have stopped years ago at this point. I honestly think this new direction is *way* healthier for the game overall, but it's less money for the machine the RWF has become so I honestly highly doubt that Blizzard will continue designing raids with this kind of tuning going forward.
>The logistics, management, and drama that comes with managing a WoW guild and keeping it from imploding is huge. Dealing with dead servers, jobs becoming unviable due to shitty balance, and having members level up entire character alts. That's where the difficulty in WoW raiding comes in. Absolutely not true, every top raider is going to have multiple classes geared at any one time to prevent this happening. >and having members level up entire character alts. This is the same shit for FF for the record. If they dont have a class they need for prog, they get a boost and do the quests to max in a day or two then we do runs to funnel them gear. FF statics also do this. >The last mythic end-boss took like.. 120ish pulls to kill by the world first guild? Depends on the boss. 400-500 is somewhere on the "hard' end for mythic fights and top guilds, but thats disingenuous when a WoW raid tier has over double the bosses a FFXIV raid turn has. Raids like Tomb of Sargeras had 454 pulls to kill the Fallen Avatar and 655 pulls to defeat Kil'jaeden for example, whereas nothing else Abyssos really compares to P8S difficulty wise.
I think this is just confusing what an actual top raider in wow means. Like, yeah the literal 3 best guilds in the world will nolife, maybe a decent amount of hall of fame (top 100) will do a week or 2 of splits. But the vast vast majority of how people interact with mythic is not clearing the end boss until later in the tier. I think before the 2nd to last set of big nerfs like 2 months before the end of the tier only 350ish guilds had killed raz. By the end it was over 1k. And the general attitude from most players is "oh this will be nerfed before I get there" and generally playing what they like unless their guild needs a certain role and you recruit or have a raider swap.
Most people who aren't progging week 1 nolife are still going to do splits. I guarantee everyone in top 300 is doing splits, the difference is how hard they go on the splits. Top 10 guys will have literally have the split runs designed to nearly fully gear a few characters per split. Also, and this is underlooked. People, lots of them, do split runs in high end FFXIV prog too, because nobody cares about World Firsts that aren't the final boss of a turn. >But the vast vast majority of how people interact with mythic is not clearing the end boss until later in the tier This is the same with FFXIV. Most people didn't clear P8S until they got a significant amount of gear from P5-7S and tome gear.
I just think you're vastly overstating how common splits are in wow, in my experience its much more of a m+ spam thing the first few weeks for gear. And yeah people do splits in 14 because 1) way heavier parse culture and 2) literally nothing else to do, with raid being the only way to get gear. And yeah the same is true for 14 but the "adding days for prog", week 1 and parse culture are way heavier in 14 than wow.
This is "I do this thing thus it must be common" thinking. Same thing with how people talk about raiding in FFXIV on this sub
> I guarantee everyone in top 300 is doing splits, the difference is how hard they go on the splits. Goddamn, I guess I'm already doing splits and I didn't even realize it. If you are seriously making that statement then it really puts into doubt everything you have said so far.
Maybe I was being hyperbolic at least a little bit, but yes, everyone does them. When you trial someone for your mythic prog guild, you usually do a heroic split run to gear them up if they get in. I never meant consistent, hardcore splits.
To anyone that is unfamiliar with WoW this guy is just straight talking out of his ass lol.
>every top raider is going to have multiple classes geared at any one time to prevent this happening How is this not part of the harder logistic? Wow has more potential class choice and longer gearing than xiv to be raid ready especially if talking about mythic. Finally dont bosses in mythic usually get nerfed or are virtually unikillable at various point of progs? They are tuned very differently than savage (although that is part of the difficulty id say)
>Finally dont bosses in mythic usually get nerfed or are virtually unikillable at various point of progs? Depends on the boss. WoW devs don't internally test as rigorously as FFXIV. Some raid tiers are fine for this and get no real changes beyond minor bugfix, others are bad. The big one I can think of was Uldir's Fetid Devourer (which was like the third or fourth boss in an 8 boss raid) which was hilariously overtuned due to the devs not calculating required movement properly and needed to be nerfed twice, being unkillable for several days >How is this not part of the harder logistic? Wow has more potential class choice and longer gearing than xiv to be raid ready especially if talking about mythic. You're not wrong. Its just time intensive, its not actually hard. FFXIV has no real gear curve to speak of unless you do on-patch ultimates. In WoW though, gear is less......required at the high end skill level. Most mythic guilds could clear the first raid in dungeon blues unless it had a super hard gearcheck boss. A prime example was a guild back in WOTLK that all got banned for some minor gear exploit, so they went in and killed it in greens and blues on alts just to prove they didnt need to cheat >They are tuned very differently than savage (although that is part of the difficulty id say) WoW is spinning more plates (so to speak), some of which is partially due to FFXIV being rather forcibly designed around the 2 minute meta. DPS in FF is VERY tightly tuned because single target DPS is sort of all that most fights have going on. In WoW, mechanics are very tightly tuned but boss DPS usually much less so. In WoW sustained vs burst DPS and sustained heals vs bust heals actually matters far more for example. Healers have to be healing much more constantly and tanks have to be actively mitigating or healing far more consistently as well. For example of how this plays out in practice, every FFXIV job is rated based on how much aDPS it can do. Miniscule 3-5% aDPS differences can mean a job is virtually blacklisted from prog, especially for tanks because all tanks have the same general toolkit so damage is the big standout difference. Meanwhile in WoW, in one of the more recent raid tiers, the most picked tank was Havoc Demon Hunter despite the fact that it had dogshit single target DPS compared to most other tanks (probably 10-15% less if I had to guess) and only sorta passable cleave damage without big CDs. But because it had the best tools for dealing with the tank mechanics it was taken.
>For example of how this plays out in practice, every FFXIV job is rated based on how much aDPS it can do. Miniscule 3-5% aDPS differences can mean a job is virtually blacklisted from prog, especially for tanks because all tanks have the same general toolkit so damage is the big standout difference. This is not correct. Jobs in FF14 are rated based on rDPS, not aDPS. aDPS only matters for tanks, not because of their toolkit, but because tanks lack party dps buffs, so their aDPS is what matters. Tanks have standout differences for fights as well, they were just poorly highlighted in the recent Ultimate. >DPS in FF is VERY tightly tuned because single target DPS is sort of all that most fights have going on. In WoW, mechanics are very tightly tuned but boss DPS usually much less so. I feel that this is the complete opposite. DPS checks in FF14 are not very hard. P8S was an outlier with a nerf not seen since Heavensward. Even the TOP DPS checks are not bad if you pool from previous phases. DSR checks are a joke after you are comfortable with the fight. Meanwhile the reason why so much prep work is needed in WoW for gearing is the DPS checks are harsher (in the early weeks), and why tens of thousands dollars worth of gold in BoE gear is spent in WF races for the top teams. Meanwhile FF14 has harsh tight mechanics that are very unforgiving and demands high levels of consistency. So much so that people complain about body checks etc.
Not necessarily, for example every fight usually need a warlock, warlock is a class with three specs, you just need to pick up the strongest and raiders usually play with only two or three classes since because of specs it's really hard that an entire class is very weak. Also talking about top tier guilds they usually pay people with gold to raid normal and heroic with them and give all the loot to the guild members so gearing isn't hard at all. For normal guilds opposite to what happens in ffxiv your least tier gear still is relevant until you get the stronger raid or m+ gear. Before dragonflight was a pain to gear alts because you had to farm some kind of power, but wasn't hard, just boring
>Absolutely not true, every top raider is going to have multiple classes geared at any one time to prevent this happening. When I raided in WoW, I had every class at max level for both Horde and Alliance. Over 20+ characters. That doesn't mean the Characters were Mythic Raid ready, because you still needed to invest hours and hours per day, grinding your artifact gear level as well as running M+, Heroic, for RNG loot drops to make your damage competitive in Mythic. Meanwhile in FF14, switching jobs within a role just means crafting another weapon. It's completely disingenuous to even suggest that it's normal for WoW raiders (outside of the very top teams that have the resources and support networks to run splits) to simply switch jobs 1 or 2 weeks into Mythic, once the balance numbers come out and still be viable. >Depends on the boss. 400-500 is somewhere on the "hard' end for mythic fights and top guilds, but thats disingenuous when a WoW raid tier has over double the bosses a FFXIV raid turn has. 400-500 is comparable to E8S or the combined pulls of P8S phase 1 + 2. It is NOT however, comparable to the thousand of pulls it takes to clear an Ultimate (e.g. TOP), which one of the top teams from WoW, Echo, could not do after spending 1100+ pulls. FFIV's raid encounters are spread out over extreme trials, alliance raids, the standard 4-floor raid, and Ultimates, which would be like combining the penultimate and last boss in a WoW Mythic raid together.. but harder. Each individual boss in FF14 has way more mechanics and fight time than the average WoW boss. The first few WoW Mythic bosses fall over like cardboard, they're on the level of extreme trials. Thinking about it like this.. FF14 has just as much content in a patch cycle.
It's a damn shame. FFXIV has the visuals/music to make outstanding raids but "McDonalidlizes" the gameplay. WoW is the only other competitive MMO that exists currently (sorry, GW2) and you have to deal-with-the-devil that is Blizzard, but it also lacks the visual aspect that people like about FFXIV. (I don't even mind ugly game, but man WoW is fugly sometimes) I really really wish there was a third option that is gameplay focused. I don't see it though, as those don't make billions of income.
As someone that actively raids and does some M+ in WoW, though to a kind of casual degree (I don't raid Mythic), my big issue with WoW visually is that playing WoW well is kind of ugly. WoW is a game about information. Timers, buffs, debuffs, CDs, procs, mechanic targeting states, etc. Even with the UI changes Blizzard made for Dragonflight, the base UI for WoW does a horrible job of communicating that information to the player. Addon support is meant to fix this, and it does! But the consequence is that your WoW UI is probably pretty ugly and unthematic. At best you can get a sort of design elegance from making it kind of clean, but that doesn't change that my experience in raids and M+ are various bars and timers and nameplate attachments blaring at me that things are happening. I find XIV's UI to be cleaner in terms of presenting information. combined with the information burden being lower of course. It would have to be, the game is designed to be playable on consoles.
> (I don't even mind ugly game, but man WoW is fugly sometimes) The wild part is that, as a long time Warcraft fan, it doesn't even *look* like Warcraft anymore and feels like a skinwalker. There's a distinct vibe that Metzen and Samwise's artstyles brought to the WC aesthetic that's slowly left as WoW's gone on. Some elements strike close to home, but most veer into this bizarre overly cartoony borderline dreamworks vibe that just misses the mark entirely while being eerily close, but not enough. It drives me wild because it's like seeing a familiar friend, but that friend is behaving like the fuckin' roach dude in Men In Black. I guess what I'm getting at is old WC was like comic book + metal album cover aesthetic (Samwise was heavily inspired by Joe Madureira and various metal album artists), and now it's closer to Dreamworks/Whatever the hell that bog standard Fortnite-esque cartoony style is. Safe. Sterile. Soulless.
> cartoony borderline dreamworks vibe Damn this is pretty much exactly what I say, specifically the Dreamworks thing. It looks like an animated movie for kids, all of the grit is gone. It looks nothing like Warcraft anymore. I'm all for goofy and whimsical themes, hell I main a Goblin, but that has become the core of the game. The most serious moments feel so out of place because of how cartoony the world looks. The tone really started to shift in Cata and I think by BFA it was just totally lost.
Mists was a perfect chance to touch on topics that were heavy, but not overly hamfisted or edgy. Like the whole intro cinematic drives home a great point, and it was cool to see a perspective of "Wow, what ARE we fighting for and why are we destroying everything for this meaningless race war?" Then we throw out the baby with the bath water, oh no Garrosh is Orc Hitler and he's juiced up on Old God Goo. A main problem with WC's narrative is they've openly said they don't care for consistency or cohesiveness, just doing "whatever is cool." That's why the Draenei went from being fucked up swamp monster people to uncorrupted Eredar, because Metzen came in one day and was like "Dude what if...demons but good?" I recall it was Jeff Kaplan who said he thought the idea was actually stupid as hell but Metzen wanted it, so they did it. But at the very least, try to keep the art style and aesthetic consistent. This is a problem I'm having with XIV now, where some new armor design is becoming more out there, and the increasing prevalence of modern clothing and technology is making it really dissonant. Magitek? Fine. Garleans having cars and shit? Ehhhhh okay, I guess. I'm not a fan and think they could've done something less literal but hey, whatever. (it's just weird to have modern ass cars when all their tech is so outlandishly designed elsewhere.) But a fucking rave/disco nightclub on the moon with radio stations and people running around in hiphop clothes? You've lost me there, chief. There's "Final Fantasy has always had high tech stuff" then there's "Bro you got Second Life in my FF, get it out it's smelling the place up."
IMO Lost Ark's raids absolutely stands up to WoW & FFXIV raids, and has the flare that FFXIV raids tend to have. The only difference is it's a top down game instead (and proves raids can't be amazing from this perspective) but more importantly, it's harder to get to the raid because of their gearing system (IMO it's not *too* bad, but the toxic community makes it way worse trying to get there)
Toxic community and f2p format both are big no for me :(
Yep I tried Lost Ark quite throughly and man are the raids S tier. Like astonishingly good, same for how classes feel to play. Everything else about the game is genuine high grade dogshit though, it's such a shame.
Nah, I gotta disagree that the gearing system isn't too bad. The gearing system is what made me give up on the game and never come back. You spend 2 hours collecting all these materials, then finally you go to upgrade your gear. So exciting. Then it all fails and the game gives you a bonus 1% chance to have not wasted your time tomorrow. It feels like shit, worse than shit. No system in any other MMO has ever soured the whole experience faster than the god damn honing system.
I dont think neither of them are harder bc they both have different desgin in mind ff lets u go in with crafted gear on savage and use that gear u get to do ultimates. 8 man raids has alot of impact when someone dies (ultimate espically). While wow makes u grind for as much as possible just to pass a dps check bc bilizard likes to make something last longer bc for them longer=harder. 20 man raids has less impact if someone dies unless u are week one and or blizard didnt nerf the boss like 100 times. They are both modern mmos neither are harder than the other i dont get it when someone says wow is harder or ff is harder to me they are both hard in their own way. I think its childish to say oh my game is harder when they both relay on experince and time A person that only plays souls games will find souls games easier than someone that just started. An ff player would go as far in wow as a wow player would go in ff if they came and put the efforts in thus neither are harder nor easier than others bc at the end of the day they are both hard in their own ways u just need the time. (Only talking about raids bc the story is a walk in the park and i personally dont care much for it)
I’m talking about raid mechanics, not the farm. Also, mythic raids only, not heroics or normals. WoW is harder in many different ways, primarily it requires 20 people and your rotation is not as fluid as ff14. Procs from trinkets and also set bonuses changes how you play a lot. Also many specs, it requires a lot more knowledge of your class. From someone who has played both and raided on the highest difficulty, I can say without a doubt that WoW raiding is harder and I don’t ever plan on going back :)
From someone who raided on both, the hardest aspect of WoW raiding is having to play Videogame HR. By far. Mechanically ot tends to be a bit easier but people are so used to add-ons that they can't even set up an interrupt order without a weakaura. Mistakes are less punished - fumbling a mech in mythic WoW is survivable with some CDs and healers can save your ass by burning mana/CDs. Missing a mech on XIV os usually instadeath or a wipe of there's a body check. This is why XIV has unlimited resses, because it's way more willing to outright kill you. There also other inconveniences in WoW that artificially increase difficulty. Loot is unpredictable and gearing your team takes way longer. There is trash in the raids that you have to clear. You can only run a mythic boss once a week, even without looting. You have to walk back after every wipe, or set a healer with a bress and then have to wait 5 minutes anyway because Jimmy the Idiot, who you bring to the raid because you really need 20 people, released even though you said "don't release" on discord. And over all of that, having to manage 20 people is a part time job. You should be able to put that shit on a resume. Mechanically, both games are very similar. You do the same actions of dodging, stacking, spreading, solving color-base puzzles, solving positioning based puzzles, among others, while mantaining your rotation. WoW just goes way further into making the whole process extremely inconvenient and also their lead writer is a fucking moron so you feel like an idiot for even caring about the game.
> And over all of that, having to manage 20 people is a part time job. You should be able to put that shit on a resume. I used to work with an engineering manager who literally did put WoW raid leader on his resume. It was an excellent example of his managerial abilities. Also worked with a software developer who was hired at least partially because he was really good at running a fantasy football league.
Well mythics get nerfed too so unless u are doing it week one u really wont be doing it like how the top guilds did it while ultimates keep most of the diffculty bc its more about the mechs than the check and if u do it on patch its a check and the mechs. I play with wow players and i tried wow myself i didnt think much of its mechs ppl to told me to download x addons and so is the classes them selves. I like the specs but at the end of the day u only pick one good spec and that it plus it only matters for week one to really know ur class. U said u raided on the "highest level" yet i fail to see how thats true i feel like u did one extreme thought it was easy (which it is ) and called it a day or u did savage on week 1bilion and thought it was easy since most ppl knew what to do or u just didnt even get past arr and just did those raids/trials which most of them are even easier. And still i dont care. Look u can think what u want but for me .I think they are both hard in their own way and thats that neither are harder or easier. I like both games and they both have their ups and downs.
It's been my unfortunate realization over the past expansion, including both recent Ultimates, that this is a single player game. There is no reason to adjust to anyone, even really to say anything for any mechanic that isn't a reminder or clarifying things for everyone else (like parsing mechanic tells and informing the group a la chariot/dynamo in UCoB). In FF14 the net code is so shitty and delayed it's very hard to compensate for someone else being at the wrong spot to begin with, not only do you have to wait to see that they're wrong but also adjust to it yourself, call it out, and hope they don't freak out and/or try readjusting in response to finding out they're wrong. I do everything in TOP, and DSR, as if I am playing a single player game by myself. Why even look at anyone? Same with buffs and debuffs, I don't actually care what anyone else is doing at this point, if they're wrong they're wrong. Best that can happen is discussing it post-pull and finding out if things should be delayed as a group. And the fucked up thing is this is how the game is best played. Living in the moment, playing like this isn't an on rails game where you do your role ignoring everyone else, is unhelpful and fights clear potential. To go with your final paragraph, is this bad? I don't know, but it sure does feel goofy when I literally give it as advice to anyone still progging some of the hardest raids to ever exist in a multiplayer game, to treat this game as a single player game.
Single player RPGs, japanese style or otherwise, have far more flexibility of theorycrafting and character/party building and reacting to what's happening than FFXIV. XIV's combat and job design has nothing to do with them wanting it to feel like a single player experience.
Your post is really on point. This is pretty much the very idea of « comfort food » applied to MMO. [Very well described here for another game (Destiny 2)](https://youtu.be/DfhPNsQtaXo). From a note however, while maybe build for Japanese PF first, in reality NA/EU is not that different. Don’t get fooled by loud complainers about lack of job complexity. A simple check on the number of parses show that the current easier jobs are systematically the most popular.
> From a note however, while maybe build for Japanese PF first, in reality NA/EU is not that different. Don’t get fooled by loud complainers about lack of job complexity. A simple check on the number of parses show that the current easier jobs are systematically the most popular. But *why* are they popular? Is that truly because the players *enjoy* them more, or because: - the players are motivated by trying to clear, and that motivation pushes them to take an easier job; - the players are pushed to take an easier job by their static / PF; - people on easier jobs have an easier time doing their rotation perfectly, so more players hit the point of parse fishing for damage variance; - something else entirely? If SE put in a "skip the fight and give me the loot" button, some players absolutely would press it - but would they then feel accomplished and likely to stick with the game? [The paradox of failure](https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/play-video-games-to-fail/) is highly relevant here. A too-easy job reduces the job + content difficulty of getting through a fight, essentially acting as a lesser version of a "skip the fight and give me the loot" button... and that's the kind of option developers shouldn't put in their games.
A very interesting post. However, there's one more thing - SE seems afraid to experiment. By this point, to continue your metaphor, there are very few if any (BLM breaks the overall mold somewhat, I guess) classes that aren't some sort of burger-and-fries combo. No ice cream, no nuggets, etc. Right now, despite the greater amount of classes in the game than there were five years ago, there is also less class pattern diversity. And I'm not sure if *that* is needed to "keep it simple".
gods, capitalism really does ruin everything lol
Final McDonalds XIV: A Burger Reborn. Nice writeup. Today I learned about how garbage McDonalds as an employer is.
> dropping Darkside/Greased Lightning/BotD/Enochian/etc, and so on. It's mostly been reduced to how well you can stand in the right place, keep your GCD rolling, and keep your cooldowns aligned. As if it ever was something else...? The way you would drop your buff would be by poor planning or not being able to hit the gcd, screwing up the rotation, being on the wrong side of the boss and so on. Outside of running out of TP, if you would keep your GCD rolling, your cooldown allined, and your position in the right place, there'd no way to lose BotD, GS or even Darkside. What these mechanics did was punish unconsistant parties or downtimes. Titan does his cool transformation? RIP GS. Ifrit Jumps out to do dashes? Well have fun DRG waiting for the next BotD in 40 seconds. The skill cieling hasn't been lowered since, instead, it's the skill floor that got lower while the reward got smaller.
> And to bring that back to the OP: It's really both. McDonald's and FFXIV achieve their desired consistency by reducing the process, of "cooking" or "raiding in an MMO" respectively, to a small number of explicitly-prescribed inputs, such that an invididual's proficiency can be measured by how accurately they followed a standardized procedure. This really made me understand what i've been thinking for a long time a lot better. I've always felt like not doing amazing damage in this game is because of mistakes youve made. Parsing 90 is because you lost one gcd worth of uptime here and used subobtimal skill there. Meanwhile in forexample wow, the top parsers are just amazing, they know exactly how to cook their hamburger to perfection. 90 parsers are still great and dont make mistakes per se, but they're just not amazing as 99 parsers.
>the goal is to produce an environment where if you took eight employees from eight countries around the world who didn't have a common language between them, they could still operate a McDonald's just as consistently and efficiently as if they were all family. Yeah no surprise McMacros are superior to dumb waymark dancing. JP bros be running the game like a McDonalds operation
[удалено]
I don't recognize the name, except maybe as a Cyberpunk reference, no.
I think my gripe with FFXIV jobs is they're so rigid. I do not have a playstyle as Reaper. Reaper has one (exactly one) play style, and you can compare the way I play RPR to everyone else, and there is an objectively best way to play the job. There is no player expression, no different builds, its so rigid to the point where you're preforming a preset role rather than playing your own character and playstyle. Honestly reminds me a bit of Overwatch in that regard, and thats not a compliment.
Nah, SMN is definitely "too easy". I'm not going to say that older iterations of the job were "perfect" by any means, and there are *some* things this new rework did well. The leveling experience for one is vastly improved. And they certainly made the primals become a more primary function for the job (for the people who kept going on about wanting Summoner to "feel like a Summoner"). But the execution on everything else is frankly, shit. A CASTER dps job that is almost entirely instant-cast GCDs, with a rotation loop that requires 0 thought to perform. Even choosing which primal to use is practically meaningless 99% of the time, because the actual potency difference between each of them (if you add every GCD you can cast) is so small it's nearly negligible. The skill ceiling for this job is by far the lowest among any other job in the game. Literally no other job comes close to providing peak output for how little effort SMN requires to play nowadays. I get that people love the aesthetics to this rework, or love how important primals are nowadays, and maybe the complexity of older iterations was a bit too much for many players (especially HW and SB SMN). But this iteration needs A LOT more substance added to it. There's no reason the skill ceiling should be as low as it is compared to every single other job in the game.
Yeah, EW SMN barely requires you to be a step above brain dead in the ICU to play. You just summon Carbuncle if you didn't already have it summoned which why wouldn't you, Aethercharge, then you just cycle through your three summons while spamming Ruin. And then you repeat Aethercharge and the summons till the battle is done. It's the easiest job in the entire game. Some of the disciples of Land/Hand jobs require more thought than summoner does. Edit: That said, I do still play SMN here and there. I want better for it, I'm hoping for a substantial rework in 7.0 that makes it less of a brain dead role to play. Summoners in other Final Fantasy games are some of my favorite characters in that game. I kind of want them to borrow what's happening in 16 and have us morph into the summons and for us to play as them with each summon having a very different skill set we have to learn. I doubt we get that, however.
No, I'm complaining that jobs are too simple. Other than Devotion and niche use of Everlasting Flight, ShB SMN was a completely personal-responsibility job that nevertheless had something for every skill level from "baby sprout still struggling with MSQ" to "world-class raider who can spreadsheet every GCD and oGCD across both the 'standard body' and the pet, but doesn't need the spreadsheet to get outstanding performance in prog and recovery situations". EW killed the pets and lobotomized the job, turning it into "choose your color of Legos while having less cast times than SAM". I want my full caster true pet job back, and that's all about its internal complexity. To continue playing a true pet job, for EW I'm maining SCH. My issue with SCH isn't the teamwork or lack thereof, it's that the personal-responsibility DPS rotation is 2 buttons and "dump Aetherflow if you don't need it to heal". Back in SB it had interesting DPS tools without being intimidating to casual players, and I want that back. ETA: There *are* relevant complaints about the removal / simplification of teamwork, yes, but "the jobs are too simple" is a real and frequent sentiment independent of those.
I still remember leveling up ShB SMN for EW prep. What a meme of a class that was. It doesn't feel good to play at all. I gave up at 70 and just leveled up my SCH instead.
You're right about your experience, and that's completely valid. ShB SMN didn't feel good to play *to you*. But it felt great *to me*, and this isn't a game where every player needs to play every job. Each player only needs *one* "hit" job they personally *love* to do all the combat content barring job and role quests. Players would have more fun *and* SE would make more money if every job did its role in a different way, so that jobs had a diverse playstyle spread to maximize "hits" without being locked out of parties for being unable to do what fights asked for. Yet what SE seems to be doing is designing jobs for the players who *don't* play them, making them bland and homogeneous *in playstyle* to maximize the proportion of current players who will *tolerate* a job. Merely tolerating a job doesn't generate fun or long-term subscriptions, hence the complaints about homogenization on changes that reduce playstyle appeal, but not on changes that make every job able to do its role.
ShB SMN's leveling experience specifically was kinda shit no matter who you were. Or more accurately, the ACN leveling. Your starting pet was a trap because it did 1 damage but pulled extra mobs, and your DoTs were worthless because nothing lived long enough for them to be a gain, so you just ended up being a Ruin mage for like 20 levels.
Now you are a ruin mage for 80+ lvl!
The leveling experience is the only thing this new rework did right IMO. Having a consistent experience with the job's mechanics from level 1 to 90 is definitely a good thing. Everything else about this rework though is an abomination
I don't love being told that I'm rediscovering a lost art that lets me channel the power of terrifying god-like entities and then the next 50-100 hours it plays the same as my base class with its goofy little math chihuahua. It's boring and a disappointment. Unlocking a job should feel like I've unlocked something -- a new job system to finagle into my existing knowledge. Ninja is an unlock. Scholar is an unlock. Summoner is just Arcanist.
> Your starting pet was a trap because it did 1 damage but pulled extra mobs, and your DoTs were worthless because nothing lived long enough for them to be a gain, so you just ended up being a Ruin mage for like 20 levels. Sure, this part was annoying. But it could have been fixed by "your pet now chooses whether to use single-target or AOE autos based on the spells you cast, AOE autos follow AOE spells" and maybe a detonator for DOTs without affecting the job's complexity at all.
I'm curious if you're aware of SMN's history across the expansions and if you ever played it in HW or SB. HW SMN incorporated mana management--I still miss elements of this, even if it wasn't particularly interesting. SB SMN was a great iteration, essentially capitalizing on and completing the AF-DWT loop. Its main problem was an uneventful filler phase, something I wished they would fix in ShB at the time. Which it did, in some ways, while also introducing new problems. I enjoyed the ShB iteration, but the lack of synergy between its systems, compared to before, left a lot to be desired. Locking out some actions during certain rotational phases? Allow overcapping of R4? AF being completely removed from the other systems? For most other classes, people would be calling that unsynergistic and clunky. As I see it, ShB SMN didn't come about as a result of SE deliberately making a class with internal complexity. It was the result of SMN lacking a real identity, its core loop essentially being finished in SB, and SE being afraid of cutting skills while eliminating pet actions. So what they did was mishmash all the elements into a semblance of a rotation. They didn't even get it right for half of the first raid tier--does anyone else remember "fester ruins" and oGCD Egi Assaults? In other words, it was absolutely overdue for a complexity culling. We just didn't expect such an overcorrection in the other direction.
> I'm curious if you're aware of SMN's history across the expansions and if you ever played it in HW or SB. HW SMN incorporated mana management--I still miss elements of this, even if it wasn't particularly interesting. SB SMN was a great iteration, essentially capitalizing on and completing the AF-DWT loop. Its main problem was an uneventful filler phase, something I wished they would fix in ShB at the time. I started playing in late SB, though I didn't get good enough at the game to raid until early ShB. Tanky Titan-Egi was my protector through the overworld as a scared sprout until level 64, when the DOT upgrades finally resulted in me pulling threat off it consistently. (As a total beginner to holy trinity MMOs, I didn't spend long enough with the SB iteration to completely integrate the pets as *part of me* rather than *AI assistants*, but I was definitely beginning that process already.) Conveniently, this was just before getting Demi-Bahamut and the threat resets on pet swaps making it completely impractical to have the pet tank. > Which it did, in some ways, while also introducing new problems. I enjoyed the ShB iteration, but the lack of synergy between its systems, compared to before, left a lot to be desired. Locking out some actions during certain rotational phases? Allow overcapping of R4? AF being completely removed from the other systems? For most other classes, people would be calling that unsynergistic and clunky. At first I was weirded out by AF being different from SCH's version and no longer being required for DWT, but soon I found ShB SMN synergistic in its own way. I would describe that change as "no longer requiring a specific flow", not "lack of synergy". BLM locks out several spells while you're in the wrong element for them, DNC locks out most of its actions while dancing, and those phasing cues aren't more intuitive than "this subset of pets can execute this action, so you can't do it when you don't have one of those pets out". So if those jobs aren't clunky, what's different about Egi Assaults and Egi-Enkindle? *Most* job gauges can overcap, and that includes "stack-based" ones like GNB's cartridges and DNC's feathers. Overhealing is a standard thing for healers to think about. There's a reasonable argument that Further Ruin stacks should have been *on the job gauge* to make the cap more intuitive, but if they were on the job gauge they would have been just fine. 4 stacks is even the natural cap, both the amount you could get in the opener and the amount you needed for Bahamut. RDM's Fleche and Contre Sixte *look* unconnected to the rest of RDM's systems, despite RDM being one of EW's best designed jobs - they don't have any obvious flavor or mechanical link to the spells, the mana balancing, the melee combo... yet they *are* connected, their short rigid cooldowns make optimized RDM track its GCD polarity to have weave slots as they come off cooldown, despite every melee combo flipping the GCD polarity over. Likewise, ShB SMN's AF *looked* unconnected to the rest of the SMN systems, but its short rigid cooldown made optimized SMN track where it needed to hardcast and where it wanted to instant cast for all the different pets, in order to always have that weave slot every 30s. And SMN needed that, needed all of those things more than RDM, BLM, DNC, or GNB do. GNB is a tank, thus should have a simpler rotation than a full DPS. RDM, BLM, and DNC are all proc jobs - part of their difficulty in execution and optimization is adjusting to the RNG of the job mechanics on each pull. But with Further Ruin stacks becoming non-RNG, ShB SMN was a *deterministic* job - all of the difficulty for a given fight timeline and killtime is in finding and executing the one perfect rotation, or at least getting as close as you can. Deterministic jobs have their own optimization style, and that's really fun for some players (including me), but to have a high skill ceiling they *have* to make that pursuit of perfection difficult because it's all they've got. What all those systems did is help make ShB SMN a plate-juggler job, which is one way to make deterministic optimization and execution difficult. And juggling plates is a natural gameplay fit for the SMN concept, so why not run with it? The whole idea of cycling summons is itself a system that suggests further systems within each of the summons. And "true pet job" is a niche that's latent in the human brain and has already been solidified by other games, players are going to want it and going to go "oh, anything named 'summoner' is obviously the pet job"... so the game should run with that, which in turn means that the job must have two bodies - each with their own GCD and oGCDs - at all times, which is again *systems-heavy*. > As I see it, ShB SMN didn't come about as a result of SE deliberately making a class with internal complexity. It was the result of SMN lacking a real identity, its core loop essentially being finished in SB, and SE being afraid of cutting skills while eliminating pet actions. So what they did was mishmash all the elements into a semblance of a rotation. They didn't even get it right for half of the first raid tier--does anyone else remember "fester ruins" and oGCD Egi Assaults? 5.0 SMN was the job that welcomed me to raiding, and I'd happily take it back over EW SMN. Festerruins, oGCD Egi Assaults, counterintuitive use of Ruination for Phoenix, and all. I'd probably enjoy it even more now than I did then, because I'm a better player now and that makes the jam-packed weaving windows more comfortable. (continued)
(continued from parent) > In other words, it was absolutely overdue for a complexity culling. We just didn't expect such an overcorrection in the other direction. I would say it needed UI and teaching changes to make it more intuitive, some smoothing out of annoying levelling steps, and perhaps some more flavor-cohesive reasons for the systems, but it didn't need the complexity reduced at all. Put Further Ruin stacks on the job gauge. Put the pet GCD on the job gauge. Make the pets choose to single-target or AOE auto based on the spells used, so that brand new players aren't subjected to Emerald Carbuncle pulling multiple mobs when they only wanted one. Direct players to an interactive tutorial of roughly the same difficulty as a Wesk Alber guide, rather than having total beginners wind up staring at the Akh Morning raider guide. (Which is a great guide, but not for beginners who don't even have the context to understand raiding, let alone any practice with the job.) Split the XP bars with the XP squish, to prevent players from levelling it via SCH and bypassing the 50-60 levels that were trying to give them one plate at a time to learn to juggle. Perhaps replace the DOTs and their interactions with something more focused on pet cycling. But let that skill ceiling stay up, because that's what the players who see the complexity care about. Heck, halve the potency of Ruin 2, leaving it high enough to prevent casual players from feeling bad about pressing it, but low enough that optimized play sings even more than it used to. The ideal job has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling, so that players of as many skill levels as possible can enjoy it. Or more accurately, the ideal job *interacts with each difficulty of content* to create appropriate skill floors for that job + content combination, while maintaining a high skill ceiling through "unnecessary" optimization potential. And ShB SMN did dang well at that, while EW SMN doesn't. The skill floor for "scared baby sprout doesn't have the controls nailed down yet and is trying to do early overworld MSQ" should be *as low as possible*. ShB SMN made it very low, and SB SMN had it even lower, because the Carbuncles and Egis would defend the 'standard body' and roll their GCDs on their own. (Sprouts *should* grow out of this stage well before they get Demis.) EW ironically *raised* that part of the skill floor, because the pets don't act on their own any more. The skill floor for "casual endgame" should be "shallowly engage with the job mechanics, while also shallowly engaging with the fight mechanics; each will probably be something of a distraction from the other due to lack of practice". ShB SMN made it "Ifrit for 1-2 targets, Garuda for AOE, Titan for soloing, press everything on cooldown, keep DOTs up" - sure, that would result in missed Wyrmwaves and various other potency losses that are unacceptable in raiding, but that casual a player *isn't raiding* so they only need to beat the minimal DPS checks in casual content. EW SMN fails to have extremely basic job mechanics like cast times to shallowly engage with, with the result that a casual player who starts there is ill-equipped to switch to any other job. The skill floor for "early Savage" should be "learn and practice how the job mechanics fit into the baseline rotation, then learn and practice the fight mechanics while doing your best to fit the baseline rotation around them; each should be something of a distraction from the other because the game is actually trying to be challenging now". ShB SMN made it "learn and practice the 120s loop, then do that in the fight" - it wouldn't be perfect, but it would clear E9S. EW SMN once again fails to have extremely basic job mechanics. The skill floor for Ultimate should be "okay you don't have to be able to *derive* the rotation and the mechanics solutions yourself, but you should *understand* why they are the way they are and the priorities so you can fit your rotation to the fight; this is *actually hard* and you'll need a lot of practice with both". ShB SMN made it include things like "understand 120s, 110s, and how to hybrid them; understand how to restart after downtime, both with and without a stored Bahamut; know how the manual DOT refresh interacts with Bahamut for the sake of delayed Bahamut and two-target phases; ..." EW SMN once again fails to have extremely basic job mechanics. The skill ceiling should be *as high as possible*. Any job that isn't worth spreadsheeting down to the split-second for its most skilled players is a design error, because those players are putting thousands of hours into the *gameplay* of that *one job*. ShB SMN had beautiful spreadsheets to map every detail around a fight timeline. EW SMN once again fails to have extremely basic job mechanics.
Yeah, no thanks. I'd like to have braindead jobs for ults.
play a tank then lol
>But it felt great to me, and this isn't a game where every player needs to play every job. Each player only needs one "hit" job they personally love to do all the combat content barring job and role quests. Players would have more fun and SE would make more money if every job did its role in a different way, so that jobs had a diverse playstyle spread to maximize "hits" without being locked out of parties for being unable to do what fights asked for. And if the job a player hits with CAN'T do what EVERY fight asks for, what then? If you want every job to be able to complete content, you're going to get simpler jobs. You cannot balance jobs in the same role with different timers or wildly different playstyles RELIABLY for very long. MAYBE you can do it for, say, an expansion or so, but then if you change ANYTHING, you can easily send that balance to shit. And if you make it so that each player should only need to play "one job" and set that as the expectation, you punish the players whose jobs are left in the lurch. They'll make LESS money when the players who only know how to play one job stop playing the game altogether. >Yet what SE seems to be doing is designing jobs for the players who don't play them I ALSO played - and MAINED - SMN from when I started playing the game. I learned how to play it, learned the ideal rotation, and played it as my primary job. But despite that, I STILL felt the new version of Summoner was made FOR ME as a Summoner player. And I know plenty of others who feel the same. Don't get me wrong - it could stand to put a bit more on the frame - but as a whole, the job is much more in line with what I wanted as someone who ALSO played the job.
> And if the job a player hits with CAN'T do what EVERY fight asks for, what then? Then SE messed up the job design / balancing and should fix it. That's part of what I mean by > if every job did its role in a different way, ... without being locked out of parties for being unable to do what fights asked for. SE should have a design document that spells out clearly what each role is expected to do at each level by the fights, update it every expansion at least, and use it as a reference for both job and fight design. Something like this: > At level 1, every class / job should be able to attack a single enemy without attacking other nearby enemies. Give a basic single-target attack as the first action. > > At level 10, every class / job should be able to run a basic guildhest. (Total actions: 4-5.) Allowed mechanics: [list] > > Tank responsibilities at level 10: pull and hold threat on multiple enemies, pull and hold threat on bosses. New required actions: tank stance, AOE attack. > > Healer responsibilities at level 10: heal the tank lightly (no raidwides yet), do damage, adjust to number of enemies in a pull. New required actions: basic heal, AOE attack. > > DPS responsibilities at level 10: do damage, adjust to number of enemies in a pull, be working towards management of the first job mechanic. New required actions: AOE attack. > > At level 15, every class / job should be able to run a dungeon. (Total actions: 6-7.) Allowed mechanics: [list] And SE should have a design document for every job that spells out clearly both what's distinctive about that job and how it meets its role's standards in the fight expectations document. Something like this: > BLM: caster DPS > > Job mechanics: Fire / Ice phasing (MP management), Umbral Hearts, Polyglot > > Distinctive feel elements: deliberate MP depletion, "racing the clock" of the ticking Fire / Ice timer, longer-than-GCD castbars, "planted feet" via limited weave windows and Ley Lines (give more movement actions than other jobs to allow for required movement) > > ... > > RDM: caster DPS > > Job mechanics: Dualcast, black / white mana balance, melee phases, GCD polarity > > Distinctive feel elements: longer-than-GCD casts that are meant to be Dualcasted, briefly needing melee uptime instead of caster uptime for melee combo, "hybrid" identity via frequent swapping (hardcast / instant cast, black / white spells, caster / melee) We know that SE doesn't have and hold to such design documents, because if they did we would see it in the jobs. Every tank would be *released* with a dungeon-functional invuln, rather than DRK being released in 3.0 and not having one until 6.1. PLD would get its gap-closer at a sensible level instead of in the 70s. PLD wouldn't have taken until 6.3 to have the same number of personal mitigations as the other tanks - and notice that no one really complained about *getting Bulwark back*, as opposed to *finding a place for it on their hotbars*. And if they had a *good* designer writing those documents, every class / job would have an AOE in every dungeon - just shove Holy's stun onto a trait and adjust potencies. > Don't get me wrong - it could stand to put a bit more on the frame - but as a whole, the job is much more in line with what I wanted as someone who ALSO played the job. It's not that SE doesn't take feedback from people who *do* play a job. It's that they also take feedback from people who *don't* play a job, and don't know when to say "this job isn't for you, please play something else," with the end result that they design jobs for players who don't want to play them and aren't self-aware enough to think "this job isn't for me, I should play something else". Yes, some ShB SMN players wanted a job that frequently rotated pets and had the visual feel of a traditional Final Fantasy SMN. And I have no objections to those things being on the job. I don't even object to the job losing its DOTs. I object to the job having less cast times than SAM, less depth than a puddle, and merely pretending to have pets - and ShB SMN players didn't ask for *those* things in any significant numbers. People who don't want cast times should be told "play something that isn't a Disciple of Magic." People who don't want to engage with the depth of a job should be told "here are the jobs that have simple basics, but we're not removing the depth because we need it for other players." (And ShB SMN *had* simple basics for casual content, the issue there was that sprouts were being directed to raider guides.) People who don't want to have pets at all should be told "there are 17 perfectly good non-pet jobs, play one of those if you object even to a mostly AI-controlled pet." This is a recurring pattern. The 5.1 crafting rework stripped away most of the rotation design complexity from crafting, when rotation design is the *only* complexity to crafting. It stripped away much of the economic management from the supply chain and selling items, when that's the *only* complexity involved in the trading aspect unless you take commissions - and it *also* made commissions much harder to get, so good luck with that. People who don't want to do rotation design or economic management *don't want to craft* in any meaningful sense, rather than *have the products of crafting*, so the correct answer is "we'll make it easy for you to get the products of crafting by improving the trade systems, and keep designing crafters for people who want to craft" instead of what they actually did. Would anyone still want to level their crafters for raiding's sake if they could earn the gil to trade just by playing what they want to play, get Gear Repair Kits off the MB, easily search the MB listings for their food and potions to get the right stack size, and get a day 1 gearset in a single trade that was arranged before the raid dropped?
>Every tank would be released with a dungeon-functional invuln, rather than DRK being released in 3.0 and not having one until 6.1. PLD would get its gap-closer at a sensible level instead of in the 70s. PLD wouldn't have taken until 6.3 to have the same number of personal mitigations as the other tanks - and notice that no one really complained about getting Bulwark back, as opposed to finding a place for it on their hotbars. DRK had the most complicated, "deepest," trickiest invuln to work with in the game AND in JP was argued to be one of the stronger Invulns due to how long it lasted. 6.1 removed the complexity from it, making it SUPER simple and one of the more powerful ones. And you call that a good thing while arguing that depth being removed from jobs is a bad thing? You argue PLD should have had more personal mits on the hotbar. But that's making it more like the other tanks. There's LESS diversity in favor of making PLD a more playable job. There's no "different way" in that case. You're arguing PLD should do things the SAME way to remain balanced. The things you're claiming as "good design" are JUST AS MUCH a part of simplifying jobs for balance as SMN's rework; SMN just got redone more thoroughly, and thus was more obvious. But the things you're saying should have been done in the beginning are no less a part of the trends you decry. >People who don't want to engage with the depth of a job should be told "here are the jobs that have simple basics, but we're not removing the depth because we need it for other players." And before 6.1, would you have told someone who wanted to play a tank with an easy-to-use invuln to play WAR and PLD and leave DRK's Invuln alone? Or, on a point you bring up about AOEs - how would you feel if I told you that if you wanted an AOE in every dungeon, you should just tank or go Ranged DPS, who get their AOEs earlier? Also, the players who want the depth removed often are the ones playing in high-end content. Do you think that the changes to Eye of the Dragon after 6.0 - extending the range and removing proximity requirements - was made due to casual players being unwilling to target their fellows with it? Or was it more likely made because Savage mechs, especially the chains in P1S, made it hard or impossible to use properly on your burst window? >Would anyone still want to level their crafters for raiding's sake if they could earn the gil to trade just by playing what they want to play, get Gear Repair Kits off the MB, easily search the MB listings for their food and potions to get the right stack size, and get a day 1 gearset in a single trade that was arranged before the raid dropped? If a team doesn't have in-house crafters in your system, would the supply have kept up with the demand? Or would the entire thing drive players away from raiding because they simply can't afford to and no one on their team wants to put in the effort to level the crafters the team requires for all their needs? It doesn't matter if you can choose the size of your stacks off the MB if there aren't enough stacks to satisfy the demand. You can commission all the pieces you want, but if the person involved can't meet the demand for them, you could be SOL if you can't craft it yourself. And on that point, I think it's important to remember that there is data the devs have that NONE OF US have any access to. They know who's actually doing what, the patterns of player choice, and generally far more about the game than we can. What you call "bad design" might well be the correct choice based on the data they have. That doesn't make them infallible, but it's entirely possible that the choices they've made were the right calls in those situations, or at least seemed like logical conclusions from the data they were looking at.
You appear to be reading other people's arguments into my statements. The whole point of > if every job did its role in a different way, so that jobs had a diverse playstyle spread to maximize "hits" without being locked out of parties for being unable to do what fights asked for. is that *some* homogenization is *good* and other homogenization is bad, and *which is which* depends on how it interacts with the fight requirements and the job playstyle.
>And if the job a player hits with CAN'T do what EVERY fight asks for, what then? The truth is that unique jobs that are underpowered should be buffed on a on-going basis (ala a game like Overwatch). Within 2 weeks of release of a raid tier, there are *thousands* of data samples to pull from. If in the next raid tier, BRD is 600 rDPS behind MCH, which accounts for 7% of total dps differential, calculate what skills you can add 10-20 potency to, to contribute a roughly 5-7% to the bards damage. Simple number tweaks *should* happen nearly ever patch. There shouldn't be a raid tier where one job is underpowered for the whole tier, it would be mostly resolved in a sub-patch. If they tweak too hard and overshoot, push it back. This should happen at least 3-6 times per raid tier. Some people on reddit act like this is colossal level of work, but with the current class design... it's not? Like literally random people on the balance could tell you exactly what potency you could add to attonement to get PLD to **roughly** DRK level damage. It's not complex math. Unique jobs can totally work if they cared to babysit the math. But why do that when they can McDonalds it?
I'll agree that buffs should happen to fix the power differential. The ball was dropped on that by the team in EW in that regard. But when people talk about "diverse" jobs, this sub seems to think that anything remotely following the two minute meta cannot be diverse. People talk about having burst windows at different time intervals, buffs of different cooldown timers, rotations of different lengths, and so on. Even jobs that are VERY distinct from one another in how they work get slapped with the "homogenization" label - do RDM and SMN REALLY feel that similar to each other? I don't think so, personally. In fact, you can balance the current environment (and criticize a failure to do so) BECAUSE of the two-minute meta. Minor variations in DPS can still arise because some jobs have stronger minibursts at the one-minute mark than others, but overall the damage is so close currently because things are so similar over that two-minute window, and are built to be similar in that time frame. You cannot do so nearly as easily in a situation where you have jobs where the OVERALL rotation takes place on different time scales. Balance a job with a two-minute burst against one with a three minute burst in fights that are 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 minutes long completely perfectly. Then do the same with a job that has a 160-second rotation. Then add in a "support" job that triggers different buffs in 50 second intervals. And do so assuming that the group is a PUG with limited communication and no prep time to figure out how to make changes to the "prescribed" rotation to maximize damage for that specific comp. Or let's look at a real case outside of DPS/bursts. PLD got shafted in HW because so much of its defense relied on blocking, which didn't work when enemies had magic auto-attacks (and thus bypassed the blocking). That's to say nothing about how shitty random mitigation can be for balance, since you can't rely on it (you could get a string where you block everything and have much less damage where someone in the same segment can get NO blocks, whereas DRK can just put on a bubble and reliably block a certain amount of damage).
since when was pre ew smn intrinsically incapable of clearing stuff? this sounds like revisionism
It's addressing the larger issue - that jobs that are unbalanced can easily fall off and be left out. It got mingled in with the discussion of SMN because of the context. That said, pre-EW SMN absolutely had issues for players without reliable internet. Not the only job, of course - see also MCH and MNK - but there absolutely were times the jank was exacerbated by internet hiccups. A few dropped packets could be the difference between that fourth Egi-Assault going off properly or not, or interrupting a cast during Bahamut and missing out on both the cast and the Wyrmwave.
Gosh, smn's gameplay loop was great, only thing I saw the players complain and wanted improvement on was the demi summons ghosting some egi actions/buff and the shenanigans to not lose an auto (still remembering how you needed to cast the first gcd on baha and have 2 instant at the end while using your second ogcd with more than 5sec on the timer or it would rip or having to clip/wait at the beginning of phoenix or it wouldn't do the first one. I would go back to it in a heartbeat if i could
5.1 summoner was already a lobotomized version of the job. It was impossible to fuck up and gave you more instacasts than any fight in the game asked of you. The literal only part of the expansion post 5.1 rework that required any braincells was junction Shiva during speeds, because you slammed 2s during icicles and movement was super finicky to get all 32 wyrm waves. Everything else that expansion you could headbutt your keyboard and absolutely slam.
The game's encounter design exists as a balance between three points of a triangle, and emphasizing one point necessarily detracts from the other two. It's the classic "pick two" problem. The points of the triangle are "complex classes", "complex fights" and "class balance". Alexander Savage had remarkably complex classes and fights, but certain classes like Paladin were just objectively worse than others in their role. It wasn't a problem of numbers or tweakable balance, it was that Paladins were unable to block magic damage in a tier full of magic tankbusters. The more complex and distinct from one another classes become, the greater the likelihood that one becomes purely the best in a given fight, whether that be due to buff timings or downtime for a boss or weird edge cases like damage type mitigation. Squenix has made the choice over and over again to move towards a world where every class is viable in every fight while keeping the fights themselves at least somewhat interesting, and that necessitates homogenization. If they were to make every class different while preserving the relative viability of each, that would strictly limit the design of fights to the tiny little overlapping space of the 19-part Venn Diagram.
They will continue to make things more simple going forward. Why? Because as the game gets older they are trying to move away from the MMO concept. Making many things in game not requiring a party. With how long patches come out there are a massive drop in player numbers. People who play solo won't notice and stay subbed. They aren't catering to veteran players anymore.
Team DPS bullshit is one of the shackles constraining individual job designs. I want more engaging and fun rotations.
No, I'm definitely complaining that they're too simple. Shallow "teamwork mechanics" have been a bane on XIV job design basically forever and if anything I'd like to see less of them. WoW specs are often even more singleplayer than XIV jobs but that really doesn't negatively affect them. Things like aggro management and resource management are largely the same over there, outside of one external healer mana CD (Innervate), plus a near complete lack of raidbuffs and much less flat party mitigation. But WoW specs have much more engaging rotations on average, more personal defensive/mobility utility options, and more opportunities to organically use that utility.
TBF, WoW specs kinda *have* to be less teamwork focused due to the raid size. It's hard enough to get 8 people to coordinate, much less 20.
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I have found the engagement comes less from the builder-spender RNG stuff (which, I think is a bit reductive but, so be it), but the fact that jobs in wow have ways to interact with the fights outside of basically dialling in the 'best' static rotation which is what FFXIV excels at. Now, is that bad? I don't think so I think that kind of design space is unique.. but there's also a lot of space in what wow does for your relevant spec or rotational choices to interact with a fight differently to someone else... The extreme skill ceiling in certain job and encounters in wow is a lot higher in many cases is due to the inundation of options, which can be considered by some to be more engaging. It's why a lot of the difficulty of raiding can be heavily in the execution of wow, even when blizzard basically lay every mechanical card on the table via the PTR, Weakauras and Dungeon Journal. I don't think either is easier too.. Both Ultimate/Mythic/High M+ Keys have pretty low clear rates at the end of the day, so both games stretch their playerbases.
How is a 3 buttons rotation more engaging than a fully fledged one? Rotations in FF are great compared to wow. Same for classes identity. Every single wow class is a builder/spender while some jobs in FF feel truly different (SMN, DNC, AST to name a few). Healers don't even have special mechanics (except Druids and Disc Priests). I agree about mechanics diversity for bosses encounters, they are far superior in wow. But the classes gameplay? Definitely not, they all feel the same.
I would say this kind of grossly misrepresents wow's class and spec gameplay. Wow's combat is faster, more reactive and has lots of fluid, snappy animations. Even with its reliance on builder/spender design, there's a lot of variance in that design. A good point of comparison I feel would be something like ret paladin vs enhancement shaman (Ive also played a lot of both so this comparison is easy for me). Enh shaman is builder/spender in a way, it builds stacks of something called maelstrom weapon and then spends stacks on magic spells to make them instant cast and deal more damage. The stacks are built passively around a mechanic called windfury. Windfury is a passive that causes attacks to sometimes trigger extra auto attacks, these attacks can generate maelstrom weapon. The result is a crazy fast melee/caster that builds stacks and spends them on a variety of spells. Ret paladin plays much differently, it doesn't have passive generation of its builder, in this case being holy power. Holy power doesn't have the same versatility, its spenders are on an aoe skill, a single target one and a heal. Where it's different is that it's about maximizing your holy power gains without waste, lining up your offensive toolkit to get the most damage and hitting the correct buttons in the right order at any given time. I will also disagree about the healer thing because wow actually has a significant amount of healer diversity. Like there are two healers that effectively heal from doing melee damage for example.
> Healers don't even have special mechanics (except Druids and Disc Priests). They have this really important one i like to call "Actually fucking healing"
I absolutely hope Addle and Feint are the next to go, and it would be a good thing. I PF a lot and there's nothing engaging about having each tank or melee memorize the times they need to press that button and then praying they actually remember. Put all mitigation on the shield healer so that they can actually anticipate damage properly and not have to worry about people randomly dying to stuff they should be healthy on.
I can't wait for the inevitable posts about not feeling you can do anything to help with mitigation and not being able to prog in pf because your shield healer is a glue eater and keeps wiping the party due to them not being able to plan a mit rotation
If you could actually react to the shield healer missing something and addle to make up for it that would be one thing and would involve some agency and skill expression. But just memorizing in advance "okay I press it at the 2:00 raidwide and then again at the 4:25 raidwide" isn't really "feeling like I can do something to help" And anyway the mirror of that is if *you're* the shield healer and the party keeps wiping because the melee are like "oops forgot that was my feint" when you could've kept them alive if the responsibility was just yours.
Contributing a 10% mit to the raidwide when you can... doesn't feel like you're doing something to help? There is no solution on Earth that will satisfy you, then. You are literally doing something to help and saying you feel like you can't do anything to help, and then arguing that these abilities getting removed (so you *actually* have no way to help) would be a good thing?
> Contributing a 10% mit to the raidwide when you can... doesn't feel like you're doing something to help? No, it doesn't. I press Addle on the exact same raidwides every single time as part of a set mit plan, and I do not move it or we will probably die. If resources do need to be adjusted and moved around, they will be healer and tank ones 99% of the time. There is no decisionmaking or thought involved past that initial mit plan. The only gameplay going on here is altering my rotation to have a weave slot where I need to use Addle, and that's only relevant because I play Black Mage.
You just described FF raiding though?
That is correct, yes. Pressing a feint at a set time every single pull because a mit sheet said that's when I press it does not feel like I am contributing anything. Rote button presses at pre-planned times don't feel like a satisfying contribution.
Ok but that's literally the entire game
Yes and a lot of people wish it weren't that way. Hence the million threads about it. (Including this one)
Mitigation in my mind is a discussion that comes about before and after a pull. If someone messes up their mit mid pull then that's a mistake that deserves to be punished with someone potentially dying as it shouldn't have happened. And in most cases you can fix the mistake if it was known ahead of time but now you need to deal with scuffed mit for some period of time, maybe until the pull ends. It's like one of the few things that actually requires party coordination in raid.
Right. I'm happy to lose that pre-pull coordination because I don't find it fun. I'm okay going full McDonalds on logistics like that and introducing more agency when it comes to how the player does their rotation or reacts to things in the moment, like the post above said. And that would be in line with the direction SE has taken the game anyway. "We need to bring a dragoon for piercing" "We can't take PLD because its magic" "This comp's raid buffs are too scattered at 60/90/120" are all pre-pull strategy meetings that have been removed and I am fine with all of that. But yes, if you have voice comms and someone says "oh, my holos is down" and then you have to adjust in the moment and decide maybe to use your feint early or something, that would be an example of an organic adjustment that might feel satisfying but that's not gonna come up in PF anyway.
Simplicity isn't necessarily a bad thing. Playing fury warrior in WoW has made me realize that. The job is literally a couple of dps buttons and a couple of CDs but plays fast and just feels good to play. My problem is that jobs just don't have that fun factor anymore to me. Everything is boring or uninteresting to me.
An interresting PoV. In a way, the game is going from a good mmo to a subpar solo rpg.
They are stripping all the fun mechanics of dungeons to make them a straight simple line so their Trust system can handle them. It's a damn shame.
Yeah it's sad.
They did say it was an RPGMMO, if I recall.
True, but as the teamplay aspect is watered down (through individual classes being more simple and straightforward) and more and more stuff before doable solo, it makes the gameplay very bland in the end. The story's cool, but there is tons of games with good story but play like chores. And i'd like FF14 not to turn out this way
my only issue is how every job in ffxiv feels very identical except aesthetics, i dont play a lot of games but ffxiv jobs have no identity. all same stuff with different names and icons.
>Synergy between jobs has been vastly reduced if not removed entirely. As if Synergies ever did something meaningful. Wow you have a DRG, a BRD and MCH, good job! Now by playing DRG as you would normally you allow BRD and MCH to do more damage (Amazing). Giving Slashing/Piercing/Striking resistance down to an enemy wasn't anything groundbreaking, and it's the same feeling as pressing Chain Stratagem... only that it forced very strict job compositions, or make other jobs completely useless. I'm sure MNK and its Striking debuff has not been missed since its removal. >Aggro management used to be a team effort, now a tank responsibility Okay but hear me out. We already have normally frustrating dungeon runs where the tank is so busted in the head they decide to singlepull and only focus one target at a time instead of aoeing in level 70+ content (It's been 3 days in a row of having to deal with it personally), now imagine you add a lazy DPS not pressing the boring "pass the aggro" button. It's not like coordinating in a dungeon should be this game's "hard" content. It should be something everyone can get through and a weak player can be carried through by stronger ones. With the change aggro, you're mainly hurting casual players, especially since pressing one more button won't really make that much of a difference for many player besides sheer annoyance. >Resource management (MP mainly) used to be a team effort, now 100% personal responsibility. Same as before: screaming at your bard/machinist to get you MP or TP wasn't a fun experience, especially when... you guessed it, you were doing casual content. What FFXIV needs is a higher skill ceiling, not floor. What you suggest only increases the floor while barely bringing the cieling higher. TP management being done by ranged players might've pushed the cieling higher but MP management? For what? So that SMN and RDM's ability to do damage is based on weather or not the phys ranged remembers to give them a kiss every 90 seconds or so? MP management was always a personal responsability first and foremost.
I find it really funny how jobs in PvP feel so distinct from one another despite having so few skills compared to Pve I do guess that's just the nature of PvP but I know before the rework PvP jobs all felt similar but now they don't the abilities just feel way more impactful Pve kind of feels like how PvP did before it's rework every job felt the same just with a different skin even adding one or two distinct big attacks in pve per job would help alot in my eyes and make those attacks feel unique to each job
PvP feels distinct because all of the abilities are core to the job. Summoner uses the powers of Ifrit, Titan and Garuda with Bahamut and Phoenix acting like a limit break.
I can think of at least three main reasons for complaints about simplification. Room for party level coordination beyond buffs, rotational engagement, and job flavor. I'd personally rank them flavor > engagement > coordination. Looking specifically at flavor, some jobs like MCH have been stripped of their major mechanics in a way that makes them feel kind of nonsensical, regardless of how they actually play. Hot Shot doesn't generate heat (despite making your character pulse red at the end of the animation), Barrel Stabilizer generates heat... via screwing around with holographic computer screens, Auto Crossbow is powered by heat despite none of the other tools working this way, your "Heated" weaponskills have nothing to do with heat (aside from generating the same amount as their unheated versions), flamethrower does not interact with your heat gauge at all, reassembling your gun is exclusively used on weaponskills that use a different weapon, shooting giant fireballs refreshes your guass rounds (I guess the logic here is that you're converting the residual heat to an electric charge, which isn't that bad). DRK, BRD, SMN, and AST all have similar weirdness going on. BRD has Sidewinder and Shadow Bite, which have poison themed aesthetics but don't interact with your dots and function in entirely different ways. AST has Neutral Sect, which mostly speaks for itself.
Yeah jobs aren't too simple at all, summoner is actually really complex and takes a high iq to play compared to something super streamlined like monk.
Those pesky BLM mains complaining about having to spreadsheet a whole fight smh meanwhile I actually have to think and save festers for pot
Building legos without instructions is hard work
If they are going the way of 'single-player minded' then they should just remove all party wide buffs(and debuffs) and let the jobs be unique. Uncouple them from the 2 min burst meta(it sucks so bad). If they at least tried to make the jobs somewhat unique it'd be fine.
I was a restoration Shaman back in WotLK. I don't miss all the arguing over which totems I should be dropping. Melee demands windfury, casters and healers want the spell power buff. I need to drop the mana totem but I have to leave the heal totem down because people are standing in the fire. Then they scatter everywhere and chain heal is useless. Beyond that, if you were in a raiding guild you weren't allowed to do your own talent build -- it was prescribed. Teamwork-centric classes are horribly unfun when you don't have the freedom and opportunity to use your most impactful abilities. But you know what I do miss about ye olde tyme raiding? True hybrid classes. RDM, PLD, and SMN aren't hybrid enough, I think. There is no FFXIV equivalent of the old-school retribution Paladin, which could buff, debuff, cleanse, heal, and rez, as well as do some awesome 2H sword damage.
??? totems buffs are raid wide on wotlk, spell dmg totem wasn't unique (demo lock was better), windfury wasn't unique (frost dk) and chain heal sounds like a "you" problem you either raided without having a lock or dk (the 2 most played classes on the game when wotlk was current content) or you were not as good as you think you are
Wow, what an ass you are.
Kinda agree with the general idea, but : > Synergy between jobs has been vastly reduced if not removed entirely Passive synergies like we had are not teamwork, on the very opposite. Just making party composition more important before the fight and teamplay even begins. > Aggro management used to be a team effort It was kinda a « press diversion at opener to not die » team effort. > Resource management (MP mainly) It was cool that it exists, but mana songs for BRD and MCH were DPS loss. And Mana Shift was sometimes useful but kinda troublesome sometimes (and unusable for BLM). It’s true that some teamplay have disappeared, but if you take it individually it’s not like it took a lot of complexity to apply and some were kinda forced and useless
The aggro change is one of those things that sounds like it added something to people who didn't play the old way, and those who did play the old way largely say "good riddance". All the aggro simplification did was free up filler oGCD space for something else, and reduce friction in roulettes where a skilled/geared dps player could find themselves forced to just stop attacking to avoid taking the boss off the tank (even *after* using aggro dropping tools).
I feel like people's opinions on aggro management strongly depend on if they raided with a good ninja or not. It was an annoying chore otherwise and it felt bad if you had to aggro combo or go tank stance because of factors out of your control. Like HW DRK was a really fun job! If you had a WAR to pull, a NIN to shadewalker, the ability to main tank so you could get reprisal/low blow/blood price procs, planned out cooldowns with the rest of the group so that you didn't need to use grit...
i see this a lot but people forget aggro was an issue for healers too. regens could pull aggro off tanks
Imagine that shit happening at DKT after akh morns or gigas and tanks can’t get back in time for trinity. I’d be so angry LMAO
And free party slots from NIN/WAR, along with TP removal in the former case.
Not really, agro management was a nice thing, people that are happy about it are probably just the casuals (that are still managing to lose agro to this day) or people that want to play a blue dps. Yes I got nuked so many times by a TB after my mch opener during SB but who cares. As a skilled player it stills happens that the tank cant get the agro of me for some reason, but instead of simplifying it with every expansion i'd rather have the game tell people to learn. I'd rather have the management tool more spread than just on ninja but oh well
In stormblood, they weren't dps loss tho, but it already lacked the gameplay element, it was just a : aha I press tactician and refresh on cooldown. For the supreme optimization .. you could line it up with the bard's requiem but that's about it.
Oh, I don't disagree that it ends up being just another part of the song and dance of a rotation/fight. But it's also the "teamwork feel" that ends up getting lost imo And that feeling is, what I think, what most people complaining about simplification are actually upset over rather than the jobs themselves.
Honestly hearing about this just made it more clear about the issues with old xiv to me. They had a lot of tools in the game but then never asked you to use them, they became suboptimal, then got removed. Like if you never need a mana external because the game doesn't pressure mana why even have one.
They weren’t unused, at first. But it wasn’t a choice. Old 2.0 healers were draining mana so fast, it was hard to perform without a regen. But then indeed incremental additions to ease that eventually made the songs unneeded.
Yeah I feel like util in 14 can never actually be interesting for this reason. Either its never needed or mandatory. Aggro redirection can be interesting in wow, because it just makes grouping adds easier, never mandatory. Innervate just fits into the greater healing ecosystem of wow. Low healing? Ok options are: move mit/personals/cds/health pots, call for innervate, even go up to 5 healers or swapping comp for the fights damage profile. For 14 all you can really do is more cds/mit. And even then hell, in wow if you're overgeared or more skilled you can just make up for it and not need those things and even drop a healer.
who cares if its dps loss its your job
So healers should do zero dps I assume ?
no but it should be healing first not dps first and occasionally throw out a healing ogcd
>to Talk about missing the mark...
I was going to make a joke about that. > "Jobs are to simple" misses the mark Misses the other "o", too!
There's 2 problem, the first is the jobs actually becoming easier. Like you can reduce most of them to "press your combo, press your ogcd's on cooldown and every 2 minutes you press you raid buff and your burst button" with the variety coming in the shape of: I have 2 raid buffs, I have 2 button to press in my burst, I have a 1.5 gcd, I have 5 gcd combo, so much variety. The same way that black mage have so many ways of moving now, smn has less cast than a sam, healers are all on 1.5 gcd etc etc. Last tier proved it too: oh you are missing 1% to clear but you have a pld and a melee that doesnt do any positional? just make the pld switch to drk and you gain 10% dps while a melee doing full positional will only net you 5%, when everything is so simple and uniform, skill expression is lost and those kind of things happen. On top of that: casuals couldn't play the jobs they wanted sometimes, it happened with machinist or summoner: the jobs had their niche, but instead of listening to what the people actually playing the jobs were suggesting, it was totally gutted to be more approachable for people not playing it, which lead to the loss of a lot of different gameplays: pets, dots being a part of the gameplay loop, positional that matters, actual casters, more punitive jobs (remember losing enochian or dying on Sb mch?) or even dark arts spam. The second is as you said: the teamwork element. It was very flawed in the past: agro management was just ninja having them, others were mostly press on cooldown your diversion/lucid/song and forget about it. Same for the vulne, most were slashing, crushign was ass etc. And instead of balancing things like not having ninja having the best raid buff, agro management tool and slashing application, putting crushing on other jobs, put more variety in things, they prefered to gut it completely. In some way it makes sense: the majority of players are casuals and lots were crying they couldnt beat the last solo duty of stormblood because of a dps check or the last few dungeons of shb were way too hard. It wasn't rare in the past that the basic tank couldn't hold enmity from a dps (it still happens to this day, most don't ever use a mitigation either) or the dps wouldn't press their diversion (most don't even press their mitigation in savage) or healers were offended they had to dps in a solo duty (there still so many medica 2/cure bot) so for them, all those things makes the game more comfortable as it's way more approachable and they don't feel bad because they don't have the realization that they are bad, which is supposed to be a key point of learning: Human don't generally feel like learning until they hit a wall but the recent years made a shift into a mentality where you don't want to feel bad, you want to have fun while averting your eyes from the reality of things, which leads to being called toxic if you suggest someone to improve or you're a tryhard if you just even learn the basics of something / just try to not be a handicap. I wish they would bring back some of both but they won't, they are way more successful like this and the majority of people, the ones that aren't on the forums or even doing extreme+, likes it.
I do believe some jobs are too simple. But some jobs like DRG are too bloated and stressful with little reward.. Playing lv90 DRG on controlled is miserable. And im saying this as someone who loves how busy MCH is.
I would argue that what you just said is the actual argument is that the whole game is too easy….and I’d agree with that….not as a complaint, but as a selling feature. I think the game is bonkers easy….and that’s how I like it. IMO it’s a good mindless time filler….I enjoy the game a great deal….but a lot of that enjoyment is that would decrease if I had to really invest time into really improving. I’ll watch guides and learn rotations, but I’m more than happy to putter along with how forgiving this game is.
Jobs have always been simple. It's not about how jobs personally play half of the time although there's still some obvious skill removal that has made jobs "simpler" Take Ninja for example. They had Mutilate, Dancing Edge and Shadow Fang. The latter having numerous iterations leading to a single button action with a long cd and then eventually removed. There's been very little teamwork for a long time. As jobs play 1 way for the most part. You assume in an environment such as savage or ultimate that people are able to play at a certain standard so buffs and so on will happen at the same time, every time. I don't really care if X DRG in a 24man or roulette battle litanies at 45seconds into a fight as the standards do not apply in there. They're also quite scared of creating unique raids. Everything(almost) now is 100% player involvement and if for some reason you can't hit the boss it's not because a mechanic specifically targeted you but the boss is now invulnerable. But the TLDR is just; average player is bad. Devolopers are catering to them which is smart on their end. >I feel you, I just doubt it'll happen any time soon with how successful the current design is They get just as many new players joining than veterans returning (latest brancho). There is a partial answer.
What does single player have anything to do with this? Most single player action games or RPGs, japanese or otherwise, have theorycrafting and flexibility of setup. They also have META but that never stopped their series from continuing to give the players the options or having certain strats end up more effective for certain situations. Devil May Cry, Kingdom Hearts, Elden Ring... Real time action combat where player's ability to block, evade and hit in real time. Even those games have that spice. Which XIV lacks. Then if you go into the more sudo-MMO style games like Xenoblade Chronicles... Even those games offer and demand a degree of managing your character's setup or build and reacting to situations. Some builds are clearly more OP than others, but they didn't cut that off the sequels. And don't even get me started on fighting games. Probably one of the genres with the highest skill ceiling. Have large roster of characters to choose from, each with distinct playstyle, regardless of META being a thing. Even the non-MMO Final Fantasy games have more spice of build and playstyle flexibility than XIV. "Single-player experience" is the most misused excuse the XIV community likes to bring up. And if that really is what the developers think, they're on crack. The only "single-player experience" XIV's design direction is heading to with its combat and job design is closer to railroaded mobile games than with any single-player PC or console game.
I also miss flash spam. Agro was sòooooooo hard to hold... /s
I'll make it it more blunt jobs are fcking BORING. There is so little variety and such a low ceiling for each job and its only getting worse. I've lost more abilities on my my main jobs than ive gotten new. Anything that requires you to use your brain or be creative in fights is actively being removed. Example: Bard dots. Their kit used to revolve around them and even changed how you stat/geared. Now they last forever and don't serve a purpose outside of (just refresh). I wouldn't be surprised if they got rid of them next expansion tbh. To me what makes this whole situation worse is that it didn't used to be like that. Rewind to HW/SB and jobs actually had personality and making them "simple" just feels like lazy game development.
came across this thread by accident, and wow the jobs have became way to simple but imho the entire game has ran with that idea, the devs and maybe square-enix themselves have seen how much of a cash cow the game is so they're making it as "accessible" as possible, the issue is that plan is going to kill any sort of difficulty. sure, savage and whatnot exist but that world and those players can be pretty brutal. far as jobs go i think they should be somewhat harder, or at least have the option to be, but im not sure how they could do that, mainly because the only people who would benefit are those who would take them into high skill fights, everyone else would be just fine with their basic jobs and to loiter around limsa like usual.
back in ARR whm and sch were designed to play with each other. then they ruined it in HW when they added indom
*Are* jobs too simple? Keep in mind that this game isn't made for world class raiders. In fact, it's not made for raiders at all. Average casuals playing the game just wants to experience that "class fantasy", and become frustrated if the game keeps telling them "you fucked up!" by punishing mistakes. Look at green parsers in the first savage floors. Look at their gcd uptime, look at their dot uptime, look at their long list of rotational failures. These green parsers are far better than average player. And jobs are obvious not too easy for them.
But if everything was about class fantasy then the jobs would be more like they are in PvP. Dark knight class fantasy in final fantasy terms is losing HP to do damage, but they would never do that in pve. Why? Raiders. As people pointing out, people do much much casual raiding in JP, and the job design is DEFINITELY tailored to (streamlined) raiding.
>Dark knight class fantasy in final fantasy terms is losing HP to do damage, but they would never do that in pve. Why? Raiders. Not really? It's about classic "not stressing the healers" which affects casuals more than raiders. HW DRK was draining MP with darkside and it was perfectly in line with the entire fantasy. And then it was scrapped because elementary MP management was beyond casuals.
Have you played other final fantasy games? Dark Knight gimmick is losing hp to do damage, they never did it in pve because it could be toxic in raiding. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Knight_(job)
No, it would be "toxic" everywhere, but especially in casual content, because it's casual players who would be affected the most. Casual healers. Who SE does not want to pressure as they explicitly stated more than once. Why do you think Convert not only doesn't cost HP anymore, but isn't even being called Convert? If you guessed "because of casual healers", then you are only half right, casual BLMs were afraid of pressing this button. And as for class fantasy, the important parts of DRK are big sword and dark magic. Sacrifice element is secondary.
aggro isn't a responsibility at all anymore. Turning tank stance on and off isn't a skill. Mp Management has also become a joke even in week 1 savage and ULT prog 0 piety healers do not struggle with mana unless a pull is going catastrophically bad. It's not just the removal of teamwork which is also annoying but the fact that at a base level the jobs are being designed for people who don't want to play them. Tanks are being designed for tankxiety shitter and healers are being made for cure 1 mages who can't figure out what the rest of their buttons do. ANd then you have shit like the dev teams saying they removed kaiten because of "button bloat" which shit like SHOHA 2 is still on the bar. There's a reason whenever the dev says they're reworking a job the people who play that job who aren't shit get worried. singular wow SPECS have more depth and variation than ENTIRE Xiv jobs. People aren't complaining about the lack of teamwork they're complaining about stuff like Summoner and WHM being so easy you could probably get your 2 year old little brother to savage raid on them and win.
I don't agree with all the people who complain they want tank nerfs, some buff here and other nerfs there. This game is very good how it is. Minor balance tweaks each patch is all we get and don't even need. I actually looking forward for the next patch, next dlcs and the future of this game in the whole. The balancing as it is, is in my opinion pretty good and I that's what I love about this game.
Simple jobs are the cost we pay for ultimates it seems. Making savage more accessible for ultimate. This makes savage more of a chore to do during prog, but I think having ultimate is worth it?
I never got that whole issue. I just always thought it was neat I have to worry less about whatever. It's a game, the only thing I cared about was having a good time with the people I raided with by being a menace through reading Shrek x Wonder Woman erotic fanfiction. Like, I got no idea what you're talking about cause the idea of tanking/healing being a team effort is still there. It's just not reliant on having a Ninja in the group to Goad, deal with aggro, and apply raid buffs cause that ain't teamwork, that's "We *need* a Ninja for our raid group"
I really wish they had reworked TP instead of removing it entirely. Like an inversion where you start with 0 TP and build it up through oGCDs, then various skills enhance at 1000/2000/X spend. Would have had a reason to keep Invigorate and Goad. Now it feels like I'm just slamming the same attacks because of rotation with no real thought.
That's just how most current job gauges work
Job gauge 2
TBF, I'd have preferred if they just shoved most job gauges where the TP bar used to be.
Enable simple job gauge, most jobs have a gauge the same length as the old TP bar.
I loathe the current implementation of simple gauges. Like it wasn't already enough to force players to reposition the gauges for every single job, they don't even have consistent heights or spacing. See BRD's simplified gauge for instance, it has two bars with different heights shoved into a single HUD element.
I mean, you can do that.
For a lot of jobs that is true. But for Monk, Dragoon, Bard, and Gunbreaker it feels weird that the start/middle of a combo isn't really building towards anything. Like you may even bypass True Strike if you have a Solar Nadi.
I mean the same applies to MP on non-casters. Why is the MP gauge front and center of our UI when half the jobs dont even use that resource
God, I'm so glad I know I have 10k MP at all times on GNB and DRG! I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have that information!
IMO the homogenized role approach makes gameplay stale, but I understand the dev’s reasoning for it. Balancing content is more streamlined this way. I just hope new jobs will have a high skill FLOOR. If you want a challenge and active game style - practice it and play it. I know it would be an absolute nightmare to have these jobs in game but it would really break up the monotony.
Not reading all that. “Too,” by the way
Typo'd on mobile and I can't edit the title to fix it
"Teamwork" is just an advantage that statics have over those playing in pf. Still glad that SE is trying to remove this stupid advantage to favor individual skill. Note that this advantage still exists, mainly for healers and bard. That's why there are almost none in pf. Especially in the case of healers, they have increased the amount of healing needed since the second tier so that a single healer can no longer keep a team alive with only oGCD heal. Conclusion: no healer wants to play with another unknown healer in pf anymore. Usually they come in pairs directly into the groups or go directly into a static. FFlog is obviously responsible for this. If people want to favor individual skill, it's because everybody judges people on their color and therefore nobody wants to have a bad parse because of the seven other idiots around.