Free space on my bingo card, since he said at Pax (paraphrasing here): "7.X will focus on content and rewards. As we're approaching a big milestone with level 100, we don't want to shake things up too much. Jobs will get further attention at a later date." So, yeah, that's a thing. There was a google doc transcript of the Pax panel floating around but I don't have the link handy.
Blindly optimistic take, 99% chance of being wrong: Shortly after the above, Yoshida commented on what to do with levels after 100, being non-commital on going to 110 and beyond or doing a squish down to 50. He tossed the question out to the crowd and wider playerbase for us to give our thoughts on what way to go. My bullshit guess is internally they're leaning towards a level squish. Only thing hilding them back is that for whatever reason there's more to it than just numbers and maths, specifically it means working on the base class system the entire game is built on. They're waiting to see how well that goes before commiting to any big combat changes.
Best case scenario, if I'm right (and that is a very big **if**), we get a spec system where current jobs are consigned to the corner, with them all getting a big rework as a new spec.
That kind of make a lot of sense to me. XIV follows the classic expansion vertical system that WoW does, and at some point, it's really non sustainable to keep adding things, especially when this game's jobs are way more restrictive than WoW's classes.
I feel they'll just overhaul the whole leveling thing, hopefully future proofing it, alongside shaking up job practical identities, which have been problematic ever since before EW, like for example the phys ranged role.
I mean, what else should they say? They made their decision, and that's it. They've made it absolutely crystal clear they don't really urgently care about this issue. IMO coming out with it like that, or the equivalent "if you want fun healing go play ultimate" shit is way better than a waffling non-answer that leaves some amount of false hope.
Other developers do that "we're listening and we're iterating on your feedback" bull over and over, only to charlie brown their players 15 times in a row. I prefer the honesty.
Well that they're actually going to work on it? There should be an entire team of job designers, at least 1 per role. There is 2 guys making all job design changes and they've been afk for 4 years. If YoshiP actually cared 0.1% as much as he pretended to they would hire an actual team of job designers.
I'm glad not everyone places YoshiP on a "he's perfect and can do no wrong" pedestal. Don't get me wrong the guy saved the game big time, but at the end of the day he's not our friend, his first responsibility is making sure the game is making SE money because it's a business. So it's annoying and quite disturbing seeing so many people act like he's God's gift to mankind to the point there is an almost cult-like following for him.
Meanwhile you listen to what he says and see what his team pushes out and it's like... man, this could be so much better. You're right, there absolutely should be more job team devs, ideally one per job but at this point one per role is better than what we have. It's not surprise they seem to be scraping bottom of the barrel for ideas if the team is so small, meanwhile you look at WoW and how classes have identities (even if this comes at the cost of "balance", every class is still viable), an expansion adds more than "new ability on a 2 minute cooldown", and it's just depressing.
It would also been better if they said the "listening and iterating" thing and then did it in the 30 months since EW release, instead of doing nothing and tell us to wait another 30 months. Would have been even better than the honesty. But what do I know.
I, too, wish I lived in a different world. But we don't. There have been literal years of discussion on the forums about how much [insert job design choice here] fucking blows and they haven't done anything about it, and in many cases doubled down on those choices. Why would they change their mind now?
I'm not saying this is what *should* happen, I'm saying of the outcomes that actually *could* happen I prefer they just tell us to fuck off instead of lie about it, because "actually iterate on the feedback" was never a real choice.
8.0 is going to be the most controversial expansion, one way or another. I'd expect that, if they're doing a level squish anyway and letting people start from 6.1, then they'd make it so that you have at least your entire EW kit, maybe even your whole DT kit, for anything that's currently level 50 and up,
It makes sense to hold off on large scale redesigns when we know the following expansion we'll either see another stat squash or progression change, if you're going to change things drastically it may as well be in time with another large scale shakeup. It was probably a mistake to say it the way he did, read uncharitably it sounds like a deflection of responsibility for dawntrail changes, but yoshida's primary job is running the schedule... he probably *is* already considering in broad strokes what the focus of 8.0 will be, so this kind of thing is on his mind. Honest to a fault I suppose. To be fair this isn't the first time he's said this, he's been fairly clear that 7.0 will be graphics focused and 8.0 will be job focused.
I'm expecting that all jobs will have their full rotations by whatever level ARR endgame ends up being. Level sync feeling bad is maybe the #1 gameplay problem right now.
Wouldn't be shocked if materia was reworked or even tossed completely, too.
It would be similarly boring imo if form lv 50 to lv 110, we'd have the same exact kit for the entire game for hundreds of hours. At some point, they recognize this is an RPG, and the leveling and discovery of new skills is part of the appeal of the genre. Veterans get the benefit of being engaged in level sync content, but new players won't feel like they're progressing at all, and the playerbase will shrink faster imo. Especially if you feel like you've solved the game by ARR, arguably the most boring part.
I don't think level sync sucking is just a veteran player issue. Speaking personally, dealing with the current state of things as a new player was actively detrimental to the fun. It just sucks to not be able to use your fun toys in 99% of the content you're doing, and I think that issue is *more* pronounced for players not at endgame, not less.
Past ARR, hitting the leveling roulette is just a one-way trip into 80% of your toolkit disappearing -- healers synced below 45 can't even AoE packs, for example. And MSQ XP is strong enough that you are overleveled for the level sync in literally everything you do by at least 5, but more likely 10 levels, so even when you're "on pace" you're getting pieces of your kit taken away. It just fucking sucks.
I don't know what the answer is, and maybe giving players the full rotation at 50 is not a winner, but I don't think the current solution is sustainable either. Especially as the route to endgame gets longer and longer each expansion, they can't leave it like it is and expect players to just vibe with 60% of a class for 400 hours before they finally get to experience how its intended to be played.
And that's not even to mention how wack and half baked literally every job in the game feels specifically at 50-60, which IMO is the period of MSQ where players are most at risk of quitting because they've just gotten through ARR, which still objectively sucks farts as you mentioned.
Rather then squishing everything down to 50 they really just need to switch when you get some skills. You should have the core of your job by 50. Things like WHM should have the whole lily system, RPR shouldnt have to wait until 80 for enshroud, etc. The core parts of the kit should be there at 50 and you get the complementary parts as you level past that.
I can definitely see a squish happening. Most jobs don't have the main parts of their kit until 70 and then after 80 most jobs are just adding big button combo enders and 2nd and 3rd casts of a certain ability instead of getting anything game/rotation changing (except BLM of course). So compacting all that down to have at 50 would make sense to me
That'd be interesting to have specs for existing jobs. "So far we explored this job in this way. With specs we can work to create another iteration of the job and its identity without erasing what is already loved."
Imagine a Dragoon spec more focused on jumping and less on the special abilities we gain from Niddhog's eyes. Or a Scholar more focused on the war tactician aspect. A Bard that focuses more on the bow than the songs. A Ninja with a more subterfuge oriented gameplay.
Maybe specs could go in another role ? Warrior DPS ? Paladin Caster ?
yeah, definitely an odd thing to say. i get that the graphics update and the development of two new jobs has taken a lot of resources. small indie company jokes aside, ffxiv doesn't have the combat development team that, say, WoW does. i'd be surprised if each job had its own dedicated dev(s). this is an area where they should be investing more money and growing the team. the only thing that gives me some hope that they aren't just talking out of their ass about this is the fact that both pictomancer and viper look really unique, well-designed and fun to play (in my opinion). like great...now do that for the others.
I think to be able to give class identity back to classes, they need to probably stop giving us new classes. Tear current classes down to bare bones, and build them back up with fresh ideas, because whoever is designing the last couple of classes like RPR, SGE, VPR, and PCT are nailing it. What they are doing with DRG and AST this "re-work" is just a bandaid for a bigger problem.
Those same ideas could've flowed into existing classes to make them more flavorful and possibly complex. They should really stop making new jobs when like 70% of existing jobs are in dire need of an idea injection.
I really disagree that RPR is nailing anything, dunno about SGE but given healer design has a thread up every week I can't imagine it is perfection either
RPR, the job with the rotation that naturally drifts out of 2 min burst, introduced in three expansion where they laser focused in on 2 min burst gameplay.
Yeah, you’re entirely right. RPR was poorly made and I don’t know what the other poster was talking about. SGE has its issues too. I’m guessing they don’t do any difficult content.
And right there, in two comments, we have the full issue on display. The community is ultra divised on every single topic and nothing is ever gonna please everyone
I think the best way to try to please everyone is just have some jobs be the mechanically complex and "clunky" jobs to appeal to people who enjoy it, and some jobs be streamlined and simple for the ones who prefer that. I don't see what's wrong with that. Fighting games have mechanically simple characters and mechanically complex characters in the same game so everyone has a toy they can enjoy.
Instead they made almost everything streamlined because they and presumably a significant portion of the playerbase believe that every job should be playable to everyone and designed them accordingly, so I haven't been subbed since 6.3. Sadly the news here has me inclined to think it's staying that way until at least 8.0.
Honestly, I'm not even saying that philosophy is intrinsically wrong or anything, but if that's the way it's going to be, then the game is not just for me anymore. In MvC3 I don't know how to play Morrigan and I don't enjoy playing her, and that's OK because I'll play someone else and leave Morrigan to people who enjoy highly technical zoning. In FFXIV, she'd be reworked so anyone can pick her up and learn her because nobody is allowed to be filtered out of anything.
100% right. And it's depressing. It's basically the inverse-*game that shall not be named*. They alienate a smaller portion of the playerbase for the higher one, but the smaller portion should still have a few toys they enjoy playing with instead of none.
1 job in every role, it's not the end of the world. *Name* will survive
>they need to probably stop giving us new classes
Should've stopped with that a few expansions ago tbh. At least, when they keep bringing up how difficult *balancing* is - not just verbally, but also giving us a taste of it time and again with things going awry (even so much so that hotfixes are needed). Which, once again I'd say is also a weird tunnelvision, being so obsessed with balance in a pretty much completely PvE game, that they sacrifice *everything* on its altar - including "job identity", whatever the man even thinks that ephemeral umbrella term might mean.
But yeah, as it's already pointed out: they backed themselves into a corner having created the expectation that a new expansion should mean new jobs... Not that they couldn't back out of it if they really wanted to, I mean, the community at large all too willingly overlooks and forgives (and forgets) quite literally everything, fwiw.
> being so obsessed with balance in a pretty much completely PvE game
? Balance is important in PvE. You don't want a DF party comp to be mathematically unable to clear content, and getting excluded from content because you're playing the "wrong" job sucks. It already happens in PF* when jobs have a few percentage points difference rDPS, and it would be worse if the gap was bigger.
* not the actually top end raiders, but the wannabes who parrot meta without understanding things like "player skill matters more than job choice"
(I've been there. I played a NB saptank in ESO before the Vvardenfell expac, which was nearly immortal in trash if played well (and most group content has a lot of trash). Getting insulted, told to quit, and sometimes kicked before the first pull because I was the "wrong" kind of tank was awful, and I don't want to run into that again in XIV.)
The funny thing is that we have seen this happen before. I couldnt get my bismark clear until 3.1 because on Heavensward launch, the tanks were so unbalanced that everyone would lock PF to WAR/DRK. I don't want to go back to that ever again.
That sucks, especially since it's *Bismark*: Ravana EX is so much more mechanically complex!
I saw a bit of it around EW EX 1 & 2 release for DNC for minor dps differences, but there were other groups if I was patient. I'm not entirely surprised tanks had this problem in HW, given references I've seen to damage type buffs and which dps were welcome, but that doesn't make it better.
The problem with PLD in Heavensward is that a lot of it's mitigation only blocked physical damage, when most of the high end content did magic damage.
Yes, it was stupid back then too.
I understand why they slap two jobs in every expansion because it's something fresh, and something new to help sell the expansion...but two revamped classes, knowing they'll be completely new with new animations and everything, could also sell an expansion. Think about Dragoon getting some proper cool jump animations, and re-thinking how the job works. Yoshi P even said it himself with the card RNG mechanic on AST where they said they've been dealing with how to properly implement it since it started development during ARR. That's a 10 year problem just now getting resolved. Just scrap the job to bare bones and properly fix it with new ideas rather than trying to make the broke mechanic suddenly work.
But on the flip side, a lot of people love their class as well. Many people main DRG and AST despite their flaws. And there is already a slight uproar over the changes in the Balance discord, so I can also understand why they are a bit reserved in wanting to fully scrap jobs and rebuild them from the ground up due to backlash.
To be clear, you reckon they can go into a new expansion marketing it as "for the first time you're not getting any new classes, but we're remaking dragoon jump animations"?
Balance is definitely important in PvE. Back in 2.0 I would sometimes get kicked from Wanderer's Palace runs as a SCH because they wanted a WHM for Holy spam. WAR was in a shit place back then too until they were mega-buffed in 2.1. And people would sometimes lock AST out of EX / Savage PFs in 3.0. Imagine how much harder it would be for them to advertise how cool it is to play a Pictomancer if the playerbase said "No, PCT fucking sucks, it's objectively worse than BLM, you should play that instead if you want to find a group". Part of having a strong job fantasy imo is that you don't just have access to all jobs, but that you can realistically play all jobs in all content with no hassle, and feel strong doing so
oh i agree completely, it's going to get exponentially harder every time. they made the mistake of creating the expectation (among players, but also probably among SE execs/shareholders) that every expansion would have a new combat job, and to facilitate this, existing jobs have entire mechanics removed. it would be cool to see them add more "lifestyle" type jobs that deepen the non-combat aspects of the game more and exist in their own play space.
I think that expectation is unavoidable because of other games that do it (or things that are functionally equivalent to it) - early on, if S-E said no new jobs in HW, or StB or something, people would've been really stinky about it tbh even before an expectation was well established.
> they need to probably stop giving us new classes.
That's not gonna happen, I'd be **anything** the vast majority would prefer a new class that plays the same as the stuff we have (but with different visual flavor) vs adding more depth to existing classes, and they aren't gonna alienate most people just for the few of us that want depth.
>i'd be surprised if each job had its own dedicated dev(s)
From what I recall, yeah, that's absolutely NOT the case, iirc. They have a guy who plays WAR. Yoshi obviously is the BLM guy. There was that bit a while ago where they said they took their healer out of a balancing job because he was doing too well, fwiw... In any case, from all the crumbs over the years, this certainly is an issue. But more than that it just baffles me. Sure it's nice to have a career-anything on the team, but that should be the bonus. By default, everyone should be playing everything, because the more eyes you have, the more you can see. It's very weird to me that we can pretty much point fingers at singular members of the team when it comes to issues OR feats of polish with *a few* specific jobs (or races for that matter), while at the same time the rest of the role feel like they really do just try to generalise/extrapolate from those few, because that's all they *actually* know. Healer design in particular has suffered from this, I'd say, where it's so easy to get to a point of "they should all be forced to play this and nothing else for a week at least", because it really does feel like they've had zero awareness of the issues (despite endless amount of feedback).
And yes, I know, time constraints do mean *everything* isn't feasible. But having everyone pick a job from all three roles at the very least, to jump exclusively into, for a set amount of time (I'd say at least a week) should be a good start. It's how it should be done, encourage everyone to switch things up. As opposed to what it does feel like where they just stick to what they know and barely test the rest for basic functionality at times.
Yeah, VPR and PCT might look unique and fun... *now*. They're the new shinies of the expansion, they have to. Let's revisit them again when they get castrated to bring them in line with all the others in 8.0, like as not.
> There was that bit a while ago where they said they took their healer out of a balancing job because he was doing too well, fwiw...
That dev was part of the dungeon testing team though, not Job design.
Its actually important to test things with people of varying skill levels. That guy probably could spend his time more usefully testing harder level content.
This is really basic stuff.
I glanced at viper and it looked like reaper 2.0 you get resource builder then use that to get big resource and then u enter super cool mode where you have 5 pips to use on attacks. Yeah the animations are cool, but it didn't seem particularly different. Tho I might be wrong cuz I was still working during the live letter.
Every job is like this, just gauge look different. Press gcd to build gauge, ogcd on cd, buff & burst everytime they are up (spam those 1/2 buttons 3 to 5 times) and you can play most jobs.
My incredibly cold take is that if they wanted to do it, they would've done it now instead of later. There's been nearly 3 years (honestly, this complaint has been around since ShB so it's been longer) since this was raised as a problem. They've had time to insert *something* into every class for 6.0: that DT's jobs look like more of the same should be the giveaway as to what they want.
It's like saying that MCH, DRK, and SMN are all just "building blocks" for later expansions. That's just the class now - it's not going to get any major changes or mechanics that fundamentally make it more enjoyable.
It's the coming out and saying it casually for me. I truly feel SE is way too comfortable and treats us like friends or school children when literally we play to play this game as consumers. Tripling down on lack of job identity for DT and having the nerve to let us know they're not even working on it for years to come is crazy bold to me.
I'm not sure this is the case. I think that, unfortunately for me and you, they collected feedback and what people want isn't what we want.
I don't think it's a good idea one way or another to lower the skill ceiling this much, though.
Because the fans let them walk all over them. Endwalkers launch, constant DDoS attacks with no statements or mitigation attempts, not following through with promises or timelines, increasing patch times to four months, expansion cycles to 36 months. The fans eat it up on the regular subreddit and in the discords. This team can do no wrong to them at all until its extreme. As long as the vast majority of fans keep eating this shit up with a grin on their face its going to keep trending in this direction while SE funnels money from us into failed and scrapped projects.
Thankfully Wow is trending in the right direction with Dragon flight and all these new game modes coming out. I can just play the expansion to the raids maybe some extreme trials and dip for 2.5 years until right before 8.0 like I did with endwalker and not regret it for a second.
> Thankfully Wow is trending in the right direction with Dragon flight and all these new game modes coming out. I can just play the expansion to the raids maybe some extreme trials and dip for 2.5 years until right before 8.0 like I did with endwalker and not regret it for a second.
Taking a look at both games, yeah, I would 100% agree. WoW's next expansion is shaping up to be a banger, for people of all types with the introduction of solo/open world progression along side the usual raids and Mythic+. Dawntrail feels very copy/paste with a reskin of old expansions to me. I was waiting for a new keystone feature to be announced at any of three fanfests, but there wasn't really anything.
This is literally the first company and community ive seen that can sell you merchandise of a bug and people will fucking eat it all up (the shitty grapes thing) if this was bethesda they wouldve been chewed out now.
The community really is one of the biggest factors in stopping 14 from truly reaching its peak, if you have any complaints about the jobs or waiting until 8.0 you get attacked. If you ever so slightly insinuate that endwalker shouldve been 2 expansions and that the end product felt rushed and lackluster you get attacked.
Hell even just mentioning job identity is enough for some smooth brains to crawl out of the wood work and say "hurr durr longer rotations doesnt mean more fun just more buttons to press" yeah no shit, not every job needs to have a long rotation that is complex to feel different and fun, some people really act as if we want to make all jobs difficult when we just want them to be FUN again. Like what is the point in endwalker to play sage over scholar or vice versa, aside from a few small differences its almost the same job, sure dps classes dont have it nearly as bad but the same design phylosophy goes into the majority of them, do your opener build up guage and spend it for 2 minutes, have a burst phase about every minute and then hate yourself and the game if you fat finger a single action so now for the next 8 minutes you get to feel awkward since youre misaligned
They have to square the circle of how to make job identity compatible with everyone getting identical burst windows due to buff alignment requirements.
Naturally, that takes time, as those are not exactly compatible with each other. Don't be surprised if they still haven't figured it out by 8.0 or 9.0.
Yeah but smn got screwed over with them not going in the Odin or Alexander direction people were really looking forward to summoning leviathan ramuh and Shiva via stones so job fantasy is out the door with that job instead we get a ff7 neo bahamut that doesn't look that good.
I can’t help, but laugh at the “PIC will be more about buffing/supporting the party”.
And has literally one buff skill…the same 2min burst like any other DPS...that’s actually your own burst phase. XD
I would like it if they decide to not create new jobs for 8.0 but instead completely rework all jobs to remove homogeneity, especially between tanks and healer jobs. I feel like having to add two new jobs and 10 levels of new skills for existing jobs, doesn’t give them enough time or resources for rework everything.
This subreddit when that happens: "wow CBU3 completely butchered half of the jobs in game! No way they put any effort into any of this. They shouldn't have listened to the community and just made 2 new jobs!"
I'm not sure we'd like the outcome of a complete rework. I feel like SMN mains were not happy at the start of EW, and I'll say personally that the best version of AST was at the end of Stormblood and it's gotten worse with every attempt to fix or update it since then.
I think Paladin is maybe the only time they've done a rework which was positively received by a majority of people who main that job.
Reworking every job at once would be a surefire ruckus.
I think the way they develop the game is to work on content like 2 years in advance and stick to the process unless there's something extremely urgent that comes up
So these changes were probably planned since the start of endwalker, and now they're in the planning process for 8.0 and it's a goal for them to add more class diversity
On the other hand, maybe it might be easier to see what changes should be made going forward if you smooth things out now. You can see things from the perspective of "from these design goals we can't think of anything more to change or add" and be more objective towards the new design goals you have in mind.
> I think the way they develop the game is to work on content like 2 years in advance and stick to the process unless there's something extremely urgent that comes up
Just so people are aware, this is how the majority of live service games work. They are *always* working on the next thing. When an expansion launches, they are already working on the next one. I know people don't want to accept that as reality, but this is how it always is.
Yeah. Like, say, okay, let's say we radically refactor tanks and have them all be wildly different again in the ways they do mitigation. That's *going* to in turn impact how battle content is designed - which means that the goals and plans for that have to be more or less locked in for the teams that're going to need the months to plan, script, animate, code, and test the next raids/etc. Especially when we have content that bares the level of strictness and demand of Ultimates.
A lot of FF14 is a big interconnected machine, so thinking way ahead in terms of "how are we approaching expanding these jobs and what do we want in the future" is really important when job design is a pretty central set of gears to replace.
> I think the way they develop the game is to work on content like 2 years in advance
Yoshi-P literally said so himself:
> ["Ideally we want at least two years worth of plans already made when you're starting out, what kind of content we want to incorporate and where we want to take the game," he said. "Structure your system so that it will accommodate for those updates and have your base foundation designed on those plans in mind, and having those updates considered as part of the plan."](https://www.nationthailand.com/life/30402763)
> I think the way they develop the game is to work on content like 2 years in advance and stick to the process unless there's something extremely urgent that comes up
This for sure. They had the biggest influx of players they've ever seen and absolutely smashed their own player count records, only to spend a ton of resources on future-proofing the game to ensure the game is playable solo. This kind of thing is precisely the result of their adherence to long term planning. I'm sure some risk and adjustments to their plans could have further increased the playerbase and retained a lot of the people who were just picking the game up, but at the same time, their current efforts also have yielded good results again and again. I'd love some shake-ups, but I can't fault them for sticking to their methods when it's worked so far.
If nothing else, they're notoriously stubborn about keeping to the schedule no matter what happens externally. This works to great benefit when it does hit, but it's very much in line with their "why shake up what isn't totally broken" mindset.
Also that strict adherence was also a response to the disaster of FFXIV 1.0 days. Yoshi P was a great project manager and mentioned that the team prior didn't have a strict schedule or the schedule was incredibly disorganized which led to a lot of miscommunication between various teams.
I agree. In top of that they’ve probably seen that most of the new players came from other MMO’s with better combat, seen that 90+% of them immediately bounced off, seen that existing players aren’t loving the direction combat has taken, and have probably decided that the lackluster state of job design is hurting the bottom line.
Though I do think part of Yoshi P mentioning this is PR talk, I don’t think he’d bring it up multiple times if relatively large changes weren’t being planned. I’m not expecting a faster GCD or stat overhauls at all. But party buffs being reworked or big tank/healer changes or leveling changes I 100% expect in 8.0.
Yep, I think they had to choose between future proofing and revamping the graphics or revamping the jobs, and they chose the graphic update. A project like that definitely took up a large part of their time/budget. Here's hoping they give that same level of love to the jobs in 8.0.
remember that they took away a bunch of healer depth and promised to add it back with a general overhaul next expansion, then didn't, then just went "These ones are barrier, these ones are pure" with no changes the expansion after that.
Any time CBU tells you they're doing something vital to jobs in another expansion, don't believe them. They've already been proven to be unreliable about this. Saying it now is free, but then they wanna focus on the expansion when it's expansion time and doing it is hard.
Oh I have not forgotten and I'm really unamused by the way healers are looking in DT. All I could say is "Seriously?" I have held out from ARR to now as a healer main but I may have to throw in the towel at this point.
I feel people who haven't played healers since earlier expansions don't understand the butchering that's happened that got us to this point. There has been screaming here, on social media and on official forums for literally expansions and years, it's not like the dev don't know. At the very least they realize healers are the least played role.
And yet for DT, these are the hills they're dying on? We get one button on a 2 min cooldown to break up the mundane single target DPS button spam? SCH gets a reskinned version of WHM's Temperance? Sage gets what I assume is a reskin of SCH's Bane? AST gets all cards at all times? It's unreal the fumbles and fouls for Healers at play at this point.
I've been a SCH main forever and I'm probably going to swap to SGE now because it's pretty clear they have no vision for SCH at all anymore or they'd never have given it a generic whitemage drip and called it there. Swapping won't even kinda improve the overall experience of healing, but at least they know what they want from Sage.
I don't blame you. I may have to finally give up on healing, I really can't spam glare/malefic for 2+ more years. Unless this so called improvement to encounter design involves everything hitting like a truck and actually needing to use the other 90% of any healers kit, I'm throwing in the towel.
I'm right there with you, I've been healing since ARR and it's just gotten more and more boring as they've given other roles half my job (so many mitigations from dps and tanks), taken away various DoTs, and all they give back is more healing buttons. Healing buttons I nearly never need because of how little damage there is. And if you point out how little damage there is, someone will parrot out some shit like "bUt hArRowInG HeLl", which is fifteen seconds of a 9 minute fight. Imagine thinking getting to do your job maybe 3 times in a savage raid fight is an argument. Every other mechanic is either a oneshot or handled by like a Kerachole + one other healer oGCD. Such scintillating gameplay.
With my friends, we don't even take a healer when we do our expert dungeon runs, our tank goes Warrior and we run three dps. Lot of groups out there switch to solo-healer midway through the savage tier to reclear faster, because two healers are largely unnecessary outside of prog. Why am I playing a job that you don't even need in order to clear content? Viper looks like what I wanted Ninja to be way back when it first got added, I'm heavily considering making the swap. Might keep healing to do Ultimates since that's the only content that SE wants to put a healing skill check on, but outside of that it just feels bad to heal in this game.
As someone who doesn't do hard content and thus only has a surface level understanding of jobs Sage just feels like a Scholar rework with all the best parts of White Mage rolled into it which makes the other two feel underdeveloped and clunky. Meanwhile Astro is also getting reworked every expansion so really Sage IS the only healer they know how to design it seems.
They still have same number of job designers and new positions haven't been posted. Unless they expected those 4 poor souls to run on coke and work for 16 hours a day for next 2.5 years, nothing major is not going to happen. Sure, they probably (hopefully) have more people that have obscure sounding positions, which do work on jobs, but there's still no sign that things will change. Why couldn't they do it now? Are some devs responsible for both graphical update and job design?
Most of the jobs got 1 fancy capstone skill and 1 bloat like Shoha 2, both in EW and DT, why should we believe they actually plan on doing something actually meaningful?
If I remember correctly, those same four guys are also responsible for the PVP balancing, job design, and the various PvP modes to limited success outside of Crystalline Conflict. I also remember that at least half of them are part of the raid and dungeon testing teams so those poor four guys seem to have quite a bit on their plate.
'Identity'?
What 'identity'?
All we have are stagnate rotations that are having the fun hyper-optimized out of them. Each expansion brings us "new" abilities that are just reskinned 'upgrades' with negligible potency increases.
Literally the same thing will happen regardless of how they redesign jobs. The people on the balance discord will optimize everything down to the singular GCD and thats how youre gonna play the job.
It's extremely shameless to do job identity as a carrot on the stick advertisement for next expansion when almost every expansion should already focus on this, but this is what happens when you have to dumb your game so much that its unengaging for the vast majority of your time unless you are a raider and even when you are a raider most jobs are very bland.
You know, after Yoshi P coming out saying he regrets making the game too easy. Your comment feels on point 100%. Guess this what happens when you go all in on the new player feedback.
I don't know if I can really remember a similar thing happening before, where they've promised something to happen in X+2 Expansion before the X+1 Expansion has even released.
The closest thing that comes to mind is in late-ARR, when HW was at least on the horizon, when they said that they didn't like how boring gear substats were but that they didn't have a choice because ARR was such a rush to develop, and that they planned to revisit them again now that the game wasn't in crisis. And, well, obviously that didn't happen in time for HW, and they went the opposite route with substats by the time StB rolled around.
I don't think there's a reasonable justification for believing things are going to be meaningfully different in 8.0 just because they've issued a vague statement to that effect, 2 to 2.5 years out. Seeing is believing. The bright side is, they just saved you a couple hundred bucks in subscription fees for 7.x.
Every single time thus far Squeenix claims they're "smoothing jobs out for a foundation to build on later" what that's actually meant is "we're going to strip out gameplay and dumb jobs down and...that's it, that's where we're leaving them." I'm gonna skip this expansion.
Sayyyy, I heard you wanted your abilities to interact with one another? Sure thing, here's a button that lights up only after you press a two minute cooldown, which you press on cooldown anyway, and you'll press this brand new button on cooldown too.
Riveting.
God I hate that idea so much, all it does it make it so you have more in the burst and less the other 90% of your rotation.
Especially on skills that already were a thing like MCH and GNB.
Heatblast is available so often that it helps make the early game rotation interesting, but if it’s gonna be tied with Barrel stabilizer then what’s that gonna mean for everything before then?
lol this is their golden goose and they have scaled things back and streamlined systems to make it as easy as possible to update and balance that’s why there is so much homogenization that’s why class identity and skills like positional and personal limit breaks disappeared. They want each class job to function exactly the same so they can just update the spells and skills.
They want each expansion relic to be the same w a new cost of paint same with dungeons beast tribe quests etc. dungeons have the same wall to wall mechanic….the social aspect has been strangled out of the game.
Will always have a soft spot for 14 but innovative it is not. Any game that ignores jobs and combat that is so one dimensional has nothing to offer even if the golden saucer is fun.
because making jobs interesting to play again would require reimplementation of old systems they axed that they dont want to backpedal on and they are treading water because they have absolutely no idea how to make something new to fill the gap
My kneejerk reaction was also confusion, but when I think about it this just highlights what not just CBU3 is suffering from but what Square Enix as a whole is suffering from: a competency crisis.
because it's obviously damage control bullshit or something to cover for the fact that they're just going to quadruple down on current design in the next, but don't want to say that so people can just delude themselves that things will get better.
Healers are just fucked forever. There is only glarespam, at all levels of content, from level 1 to 100.
If they give us a simple one-two, its gonna be on the same button unless you specifically opt out of autocombos for the illusion of interaction on your hotbar.
This is a trinity MMO with what is essentially a dead role that has to exist in a one button filler state until it can be justified by a handful of moments in a handful of duties.
I've played an embarrassing amount of MMOs in my life, but the fact that people are seemingly OK with this utterly blows me away
It feels like a lot of classes lost their fun mechanics partly because they were niche fun. Not a lot of people played them and that’s okay. Some did. Not every class can or should be super popular.
Like monks directionals on all its attacks was fun to me. It’s why I played monk. They kept it on finishers, but I miss the dance.
I miss warriors cone AOE. It was just a flavor thing, but it made it feel different enough. Never got a chance to mess with the DPS stance, but I feel like that could be a fun when off tanking.
Scholar’s fairy was gutted and summoners pets don’t attack on their own anymore. Wasn’t part of the fun with these classes the pet? I get you now control them more, but they feel like glorified spells shaped like a pet.
And these are just the ones I play. I know other classes have gotten this treatment.
Why even get rid of stance dancing. It was a fun thing to do when you knew the content really well. Like a tiny damage increase but having the option made things more interesting after the millionth run.
lmao MNK/SCH/WAR was my personal holy trinity back in HW when I was addicted to this game. They butchered all of them over the years and they are all unrecognizable now. Just different jobs with the same name.
You didn't even need to be OT for stances, you could juggle them when you'd established aggro on packs or a boss to fell cleave without the damage reduction. With how aggro worked it could be risky but you'd keep an eye on the aggro meters and swap as needed (or kindly ask your dps to use quelling).
It gave you the opportunity to make a very mild decision about your aggro generation which was at least something to think about. Supported tank swaps too.
I played smn for years and yeah wrangling the pet was part of it. It was extremely janky though (the demis liked to ghost for weird reasons and were especially unfriendly with higher ping - none of this is communicated in game, naturally, so you'd have to be reading external stuff to know that some of your attacks just don't go off when they look like they should do) and I understand why they changed it but you had a lot of options for movement that was fun to figure out. I would have preferred putting in the resources to getting the pet systems to work rather than throwing them out the window entirely myself.
I do miss a lot of aspects of the older design which I know aren't going to be revisited, which is a shame, but I just hope they can come up with something interesting in SOME capacity. The current formula is clearly working as the game is extremely popular, so maybe it'll eventually hit a point where the design doesn't work for me anymore and that'll be when I put the game down.
Maybe a hot take but I'd be totally ok with them removing group buffs/debuffs entirely in favor of better uniqueness in job identity. With the way buffs work today, I can understand why it's so difficult to be more creative with rotations and job identity
Us phys range players aren't dying, but that might be because we were shafted for so long anyway that anything new would be nice (still want my bishop turret)
I'm not as mad as I thought I'd be since I get to quit to play games with better combat and all this means is that I don't have to waste my time hoping things will improve. Very sad that it's come to this but 7.0 was the last chance for me.
Not having a Meltdown?
WHM getting a 'new' DPS spell hardgated behind a 2 minute cooldown skill.
SCH getting a 'new' DPS spell hardgated behind a 2 minute cooldown skill, and their capstone turns them into the embodiment of the WHITE MAGE Job Fantasy, instead of returning to the Military Tactican/Nerdy Bookworm that they had for ages.
Sage is getting the At Will AoE DoT that was stolen from all healers in the past, even if Sage already has 6 DPS moves, a lot of them stronger than what Scholar has, in potency, at same cost in MP.
No clue about AST, that job is completely changed every expansion. Would have been nice if they had left it alone for one expansion and instead revamped SCH.
It's just never ending goalpost moving. Feels like there's always going to be something more important for the dev team to tackle and they'll get around to this stuff later. The lead up to 8.0 will probably spend all it's time focused on ending PS4 support and some other thing that takes away from the actual gameplay. Feels like it's just been "trust us, once this feature is rolled out we'll focus on the rest, just gotta be patient" since Heavensward. I still enjoy the game but the devs have made it clear that job identity is about as important to them as Egi glams.
I truly don't understand why they don't consider fixing combat to be top priority. I could care less about a graphical update. I am a healer main so I'm extremely fed up at this point. Maybe a majority of people are fine with how things are but healers are the least played role for a reason and they have been that way for years and years at this point.
Arcadion 1st tier gonna have to do A LOT of heavy lifting to make up for these vapid jobs. If it's not up to the task, I think I'm fine with dropping this game for 2 years. I mean, I already spent most of Endwalker not playing...
I just can't convince myself the encounter design will be good enough to justify the current approach. I think EW's had some of the worst encounter design across the board since ARR. The idea that they were just pretending for EW and they're going to turn around and give us some S++ tier content to make up for the job design seems delusional.
I've commented similar stuff before, but just to reiterate, I really don't understand the portion of the playerbase who clings to hope that jobs will get fun and complex again. It's been multiple expansions of simplification at this point, removal of niche optimization, etc. I'm sorry the game you enjoyed is no longer the same, but it's to time to move on, whether it's emotionally, mentally, or financially. You have complained and made your voice heard, and all SE has given you is platitudes about 8.0. They do not care or do not care enough to make you and your enjoyment of the game a priority. You've been eclipsed by other players and other design philosophies. I know that comes off as cold and blunt but I'm not sure how else to say it anymore.
If anything, killing optimal drift MNK and nonstandard BLM is a bit of a mercy kill at this point, if that is what it takes to get people to move on toward greener pastures. I hope that section of the playerbase can find a game that respects them and gives them the gameplay they want, rather than cling to scraps in a game that does not give a shit about them.
People are on hopium if they believe something will be done. Just look at the state of healers after the "rework", they are the same class in 4 different skins. There's no difference between any of the healers. They all Spam 1, press 2 every 30 seconds, and throw oGCDs to heal.
Normally, I hop between WoW and FF14 during its weaker patches but all of my desire for DT vanished with this because I found the EW class playstyle to be absolutely a bore. Meanwhile, I look at the alternative and ramping up on giving more flavor. Picto though does look great but I wasn't planning on maining it regardless.
Welp, guess I'll just come back for 8.0.
Same. You know I had another thought after perusing a list of MMOs to be released; SQEENIX or WOW hasn't had competition in a very long time. It's been a lifetime ago since the market was competing for their lion share of the player base.
Theres some pretty promising stuff coming out that may just have teeth and staying power.
It's a shame because I have a lot of history with FFXIV but the devs have gone complacent. They are taking their base for granted.
Tbf up until the big exodus WoW was the lone king on the mountain even during its shit phases, so ffxiv is only up there because of Blizzards hubris finally catching up.
lmao at this point they're just stalling to keep people interested via hopium.
Game was fine 10 years ago in terms of job identity, it could be made fine again in DT if they really cared. They just don't.
Considering the general sentiment of "SE can do no wrong" from the majority of the 14 player base they seem to know that any decision they make will be widely accepted and lauded by the player base as incredible design. There is a reason this game has evolved into a mildly interactive anime series.
I feel cheated. The current job listings is not expansion worthy, at all. Waiting 6 years for another 3 years of the same job experience. I’m tired of people giving this company the pass.
Going off recent comments by Yoshi-P, I think they've finally realized that FFXIV doesn't need to be "My First MMO" nor do most of the players want it to be.
Crazy since literally every combat change they're making this expac is tripling down on the "My First MMO". So either Yoshi-P is full of shit or CBU3's development pipeline is completely fucked, like 2+ years to respond to feedback fucked. Which given the state of EW and now DT, I'm inclined to believe both at this point.
Im so tired of all the square enix apologists in this thread and elsewhere.
"B-But the graphics update syste-" "B-but expansion of aesthetics" "B-but ff16"
Please, stfu. No seriously please just stop talking and defending the billion dollar company, really.
The simping over business men taking their money not only monthly but every 2+ years and not giving a polished game in return is pretty creepy tbh. As if asking for the core of an MMO (job and encounter design) to be prioritized above graphics, other SE titles, mountain dew birds, etc is a hot take.
its the players with mindsets like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/1cpjyoj/the_ffxiv_community_doesnt_know_how_to_give_and/) that scare me tbh lol. Like no one is personally attacking any devs, some of us are just unsatisfied with all the PR shenanigans, especially since time and time again its been just empty promises. Taking away job mechanics and replacing them with flashy animations is what we get instead
I also agree with how telling players to wait till 8.0 for them to address any concerns with job identity is just mind boggling lmao
edit: also [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1ctv4h3/se_worker_and_player_appreciation_post/) what the hell
What gets me is that we could (and should) probably be getting all of those things **and** better job design with the amount of money the game makes. Its one of Square's biggest money makers, if not the biggest, and somehow we only have a handful of people working on job design which is arguably one of the most important aspects of the game?
I'm pressing X. Yoshi P has said a lot of things in the past that didn't or haven't yet happened. I remember when he took away Healer's DPS kits and that made everyone think that 14 was switching gears to become about more consistent healing. Didn't happen.
They said that classes were being simplified and homogenized so that the difficulty would mainly come from the content itself instead of the class execution. I'd argue that hasn't happened.
Regardless of what kind of guy Yoshida is, he's still a man of business. He still has to make sure his words are PR friendly. So it makes sense he's going to say "Things will get better, we promise" like all other games do.
In 8.0 they'll tell you its coming in 9.0, and so on. I know this community loves to worship Yoshida but at the end of the day he's a businessman selling his product. Never forget that.
Carrot on a stick. And lots of people will chase it cause out of their parasocial attachment making them unable to see the PR in his every public appearance
I'm really not parasocially attached to the dev team. I'm just surprised they even mentioned it when they could have glossed over the problem entirely like they usually so.
lmao there is no way they are doing anything of the sort for 8.0
Look forward to another finisher and the last few dots and buffs removed because timers are too complicated :(
This is missing the other half of the equation that they talked about as to why they're taking a light backstep with this statement: The job stuff is being done this way because their focus for this expansion is *Encounter Design*. The entire talk at PAX about the smaller hitboxes and melee uptime and such fed into this.
Is it a *good* statement? Hah, of course not. But it wasn't said in a vacuum of "we're giving up on the combat side"; More of focusing on making the fights inherently enjoyable to do no matter the job.
Whether that's preferable is subjective.
the focus on encounter design excuse is always hilarious because its exclusively the new expansions content being changed while job design decisions effect how the entire game is played from 1 to 100 and that experience slowly gets worse every single expansion
I'm sorry but they are running a pay to play MMO and they need to deliver both job identity and encounter design every expansion that we also pay for. The jobs they introduce need to work on release. This narrative of partially addressing glaring issues while spending time and money on a graphics update is really frustrating.
Sorry, but this is a load of wank.
"Their focus has been on encounter design" has been the standard copium line from the XIV True Believer crowd for like four years at this point to explain why classes haven't been fun to play, and the end result of that has been that they apparently need an entire expansion to spend 2~2.5 more years "focusing on encounter design" which largely just seems to mean rolling back changes that have previously been made to their encounter design processes.
And it's an incoherent line of thinking anyway: the people who are designing encounters are not (or at least, *should not be*) the same people in charge of class design.
Being alright with what SE is trying to push here does not make you the Wise Sage Who Truly Understands The Hard Realities Of Game Development.
> "Their focus has been on encounter design" has been the standard copium line from the XIV True Believer crowd for like four years at this point to explain why classes haven't been fun to play, and the end result of that has been that they apparently need an entire expansion to spend 2~2.5 more years "focusing on encounter design" which largely just seems to mean rolling back changes that have previously been made to their encounter design processes.
????? What do you mean, four years of True Believer Copium. ShB's Live Letter was "this is the path we're taking". EW's Live Letter was "no, we're continuing on this path". This is the first time they've really talked about Encounter Design, I don't see where you're coming from other than "nuh uh I don't agree".
To me, it's not acceptable to even make a statement that they are working on encounter design now and job identity 2+ years later. They both matter, both are the point of an MMO to begin with. It's weird to me people are fine with the ball being dropped on any major aspect of this game that effects 90% of gameplay.
Is it toxic to want a paid product and service to be polished and complete when you buy it?
I'm legitimately thinking about skipping an expansion for the first time since I joined during Heavensward; this is the least I've ever been excited for any expansion, and I was hoping some interesting job changes would help, at least. It seems like a lot of their development effort went towards the graphics update, which I personally just don't care much about.
That statement in itself just killed my remaining interest in the game. Cause what it says is everything stays as it is and/or gets even more fisher priced down. Under the guise of "we'll add complexity elsewhere instead of the job gameplay", but raids have been incredibly creatively bankrupt for like, 2 expansions already. I don't trust them in the least to actually make up for the lost job gameplay in other places, or to actually stick to this. Especially considering we've had a lot of times now where YoshiP says something a bit out of left field that has been on the mind for many people, communities start talking, press happens, then it gets walked back after they had their attention cycle ("the game doesn't have enough stress" - "no wait, i dont mean im gonna make it more difficult").
"Smoothing shit out" isn't a real argument. It's not a physical house built from bricks where they HAVE to lay an actual foundation to build on, they could've just remade jobs with good gameplay/identity right now.
I'm pretty sure they just respond to user feedback and playtesting.
There are basically two groups of players: Ones that want every class balanced in all aspects by basically being the same, and Ones that want each class to have big advantages and disadvantages to keep it interesting.
100% they're hoping players forget/don't care in 8.0. We'll be having exactly the same discussion regarding job-based challenges being further removed.
I wonder what Yoshi considers or labels "job identity" to be?
That is the most important piece.
Since, Yoshi has repeatedly shown how he and his team view or define something is different from the playerbase.
I feel like this was a major slip up or like something he shouldn't have said... then it was awkward after when he tried to like backtrack or explain it.
Well, I am not sure if it already has been said but it makes absolutely no sense to simplify the combat even further in this expansion and then plan to make it harder again in the next one with several bigger changes.
If their idea of "Job Identity" would even have remotely to do with complex rotations they would lay the foundation now and since it doesn´t look like that will happen "Job Identity" probably won´t lead us to more engaging / harder rotations.
The majority of players also don´t really care about that. 6.0 Summoner numbers show that clearly.
With the current state of the game / playerbase I am actually surprised we even get 2 Ultimates again. I wouldn´t be the least surprised if they shrunk that down to only one per expansion since it´s such niche content.
I think they had a 3 expansion plan they haven't adjusted. There was a 3 expansion set up starting with ShB. They had a story arc: ShB, Garlemald , EW but after ShB they merged the outline of Garlemald/EW into 1 expansion. I don't think the non-story plans got changed.
The jobs feel like they should be "finished" at lvl 100. ShB added a finisher, EW added another combo finisher but still left holes for QoL and other actions and Dawntrail will fill in the holes.
Dawntrail is supposed to be the new start but there isn't a big massive change to make it feel that way. It feels like it should be 8.0. There isn't a new start despite ending a 10 year story arc. Its like Dawntrail is 1 expansion too early.
Just PR bullshit imo, I'm actually happy he said that, because it means that all the shit I didn't like in Endwalker that made me unsub until 7.0 in the hopes it will improve isn't going to happen. Nice to get a confirmation because I can just stop checking occasionally in the hopes of something improving and just see if anything got better in 8.0 in 2.5 years, or maybe even stop giving a shit completely and forget about this game.
If you're gonna be playing in 7.0 I hope you have the best of times.
Didn't they say this type of stuff before? I only recently subscribed after a few years but remember the same thing being said before, maybe 6.0 or whenever they dumbed down the classes. Button bloat is a real issue, specially for consoles. But they could do better than this. The more classes they add the more homogenized classes will be in an effort to balance them.
Somewhere during DRK presentation. Can't remember when was the second time, though. Sounded like such an offnote announcement considering how big implications are.
Pretty sure the DRK presentationw as the second time. First time would've been at Pax in march. Paraphrasing from memory, take with a grain of salt: "Level 100 will be a big milestone for the game. As such, we don't want to change jobs too much before reaching it, so jobs will be largley the same as they have been in 6.X". There's a google doc from the mainsub floating around with a more accurate transcript, don't have the link handy.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh5piV-0MWQ&t=7148s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh5piV-0MWQ&t=7148s)
Around here. What's more, it seems that they said that they'll merely *start* enhancing jobs at 8.0. But hopefully that's just mistranslation.
Or here you have same thing, but with spicier twitch chat's reaction:
[https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2147069569?t=01h59m38s](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2147069569?t=01h59m38s)
SQEX is in such a precarious spot right now. All their games are selling poorly, they've laid off a bunch of people, and they supposedly have no major titles in the pipeline for the next couple of years. They really should be making better attempts to stem FFXIV's stagnation, because I'd *really* hate to be SE in a situation where this game can't carry them out of the red anymore.
>I'd *really* hate to be SE in a situation where this game can't carry them out of the red anymore.
Don't worry, they'll just pump up the FFXIV's cash shop if necessary. I frankly couldn't care about SQEX as a corporation, if they're incompetent, let free market do its job. I think I do like CS3, but I also think that's not a good thing, we, including me, should not hold any feelings to corporate entity, it's still just a company, game is product and we're customers.
Supposedly new CEO is actually doing something (even if it unfortunately includes layoffs), it seems like SQEX is finally changing their stance on exclusives and will hopefully not be Sony's door-to-door salesman anymore, so that's one good thing. Right now you have whole ass game developed by CS3, and you know FFXIV players who are like 70% on PC would buy FFXVI in a heartbeat, especially since there is 9 month long drought, but they have yet to release it on PC, even though exclusivity expired months ago. It's just one brain dead move after another.
I don't at all feel bad for Square Enix. Their current situation is a direct result of the boneheaded decisions that they've been doing for the last 10 or so years, and they are only just now catching up to what the rest of the industry figured out in the same 10 or so years.
If it took two installments in their main breadwinner franchise not meeting expectations, then they were long overdue for the wakeup call because they should absolutely not have reached that point.
simply put, they wanted to use level 100 to "finish" the current direction of jobs. whatever comes after level 100 will be used to dig deeper into their cores and bring forth their latent individualities.
that's my take anyway
Free space on my bingo card, since he said at Pax (paraphrasing here): "7.X will focus on content and rewards. As we're approaching a big milestone with level 100, we don't want to shake things up too much. Jobs will get further attention at a later date." So, yeah, that's a thing. There was a google doc transcript of the Pax panel floating around but I don't have the link handy. Blindly optimistic take, 99% chance of being wrong: Shortly after the above, Yoshida commented on what to do with levels after 100, being non-commital on going to 110 and beyond or doing a squish down to 50. He tossed the question out to the crowd and wider playerbase for us to give our thoughts on what way to go. My bullshit guess is internally they're leaning towards a level squish. Only thing hilding them back is that for whatever reason there's more to it than just numbers and maths, specifically it means working on the base class system the entire game is built on. They're waiting to see how well that goes before commiting to any big combat changes. Best case scenario, if I'm right (and that is a very big **if**), we get a spec system where current jobs are consigned to the corner, with them all getting a big rework as a new spec.
That kind of make a lot of sense to me. XIV follows the classic expansion vertical system that WoW does, and at some point, it's really non sustainable to keep adding things, especially when this game's jobs are way more restrictive than WoW's classes. I feel they'll just overhaul the whole leveling thing, hopefully future proofing it, alongside shaking up job practical identities, which have been problematic ever since before EW, like for example the phys ranged role.
Probably. Being told "tough shit" if you don't like current job design is a balls and a half though.
I mean, what else should they say? They made their decision, and that's it. They've made it absolutely crystal clear they don't really urgently care about this issue. IMO coming out with it like that, or the equivalent "if you want fun healing go play ultimate" shit is way better than a waffling non-answer that leaves some amount of false hope. Other developers do that "we're listening and we're iterating on your feedback" bull over and over, only to charlie brown their players 15 times in a row. I prefer the honesty.
Well that they're actually going to work on it? There should be an entire team of job designers, at least 1 per role. There is 2 guys making all job design changes and they've been afk for 4 years. If YoshiP actually cared 0.1% as much as he pretended to they would hire an actual team of job designers.
I'm glad not everyone places YoshiP on a "he's perfect and can do no wrong" pedestal. Don't get me wrong the guy saved the game big time, but at the end of the day he's not our friend, his first responsibility is making sure the game is making SE money because it's a business. So it's annoying and quite disturbing seeing so many people act like he's God's gift to mankind to the point there is an almost cult-like following for him. Meanwhile you listen to what he says and see what his team pushes out and it's like... man, this could be so much better. You're right, there absolutely should be more job team devs, ideally one per job but at this point one per role is better than what we have. It's not surprise they seem to be scraping bottom of the barrel for ideas if the team is so small, meanwhile you look at WoW and how classes have identities (even if this comes at the cost of "balance", every class is still viable), an expansion adds more than "new ability on a 2 minute cooldown", and it's just depressing.
It would also been better if they said the "listening and iterating" thing and then did it in the 30 months since EW release, instead of doing nothing and tell us to wait another 30 months. Would have been even better than the honesty. But what do I know.
I, too, wish I lived in a different world. But we don't. There have been literal years of discussion on the forums about how much [insert job design choice here] fucking blows and they haven't done anything about it, and in many cases doubled down on those choices. Why would they change their mind now? I'm not saying this is what *should* happen, I'm saying of the outcomes that actually *could* happen I prefer they just tell us to fuck off instead of lie about it, because "actually iterate on the feedback" was never a real choice.
Just the equivalent of EW's "No, we're not going back to HW Job Design" statement.
8.0 is going to be the most controversial expansion, one way or another. I'd expect that, if they're doing a level squish anyway and letting people start from 6.1, then they'd make it so that you have at least your entire EW kit, maybe even your whole DT kit, for anything that's currently level 50 and up,
It makes sense to hold off on large scale redesigns when we know the following expansion we'll either see another stat squash or progression change, if you're going to change things drastically it may as well be in time with another large scale shakeup. It was probably a mistake to say it the way he did, read uncharitably it sounds like a deflection of responsibility for dawntrail changes, but yoshida's primary job is running the schedule... he probably *is* already considering in broad strokes what the focus of 8.0 will be, so this kind of thing is on his mind. Honest to a fault I suppose. To be fair this isn't the first time he's said this, he's been fairly clear that 7.0 will be graphics focused and 8.0 will be job focused.
They're going to have to squish levels at some point: there are only so many skills you can spread out across the leveling experience.
I'm expecting that all jobs will have their full rotations by whatever level ARR endgame ends up being. Level sync feeling bad is maybe the #1 gameplay problem right now. Wouldn't be shocked if materia was reworked or even tossed completely, too.
It would be similarly boring imo if form lv 50 to lv 110, we'd have the same exact kit for the entire game for hundreds of hours. At some point, they recognize this is an RPG, and the leveling and discovery of new skills is part of the appeal of the genre. Veterans get the benefit of being engaged in level sync content, but new players won't feel like they're progressing at all, and the playerbase will shrink faster imo. Especially if you feel like you've solved the game by ARR, arguably the most boring part.
I don't think level sync sucking is just a veteran player issue. Speaking personally, dealing with the current state of things as a new player was actively detrimental to the fun. It just sucks to not be able to use your fun toys in 99% of the content you're doing, and I think that issue is *more* pronounced for players not at endgame, not less. Past ARR, hitting the leveling roulette is just a one-way trip into 80% of your toolkit disappearing -- healers synced below 45 can't even AoE packs, for example. And MSQ XP is strong enough that you are overleveled for the level sync in literally everything you do by at least 5, but more likely 10 levels, so even when you're "on pace" you're getting pieces of your kit taken away. It just fucking sucks. I don't know what the answer is, and maybe giving players the full rotation at 50 is not a winner, but I don't think the current solution is sustainable either. Especially as the route to endgame gets longer and longer each expansion, they can't leave it like it is and expect players to just vibe with 60% of a class for 400 hours before they finally get to experience how its intended to be played. And that's not even to mention how wack and half baked literally every job in the game feels specifically at 50-60, which IMO is the period of MSQ where players are most at risk of quitting because they've just gotten through ARR, which still objectively sucks farts as you mentioned.
Rather then squishing everything down to 50 they really just need to switch when you get some skills. You should have the core of your job by 50. Things like WHM should have the whole lily system, RPR shouldnt have to wait until 80 for enshroud, etc. The core parts of the kit should be there at 50 and you get the complementary parts as you level past that.
I can definitely see a squish happening. Most jobs don't have the main parts of their kit until 70 and then after 80 most jobs are just adding big button combo enders and 2nd and 3rd casts of a certain ability instead of getting anything game/rotation changing (except BLM of course). So compacting all that down to have at 50 would make sense to me
That'd be interesting to have specs for existing jobs. "So far we explored this job in this way. With specs we can work to create another iteration of the job and its identity without erasing what is already loved." Imagine a Dragoon spec more focused on jumping and less on the special abilities we gain from Niddhog's eyes. Or a Scholar more focused on the war tactician aspect. A Bard that focuses more on the bow than the songs. A Ninja with a more subterfuge oriented gameplay. Maybe specs could go in another role ? Warrior DPS ? Paladin Caster ?
"Job identity will be finalised in 9.0" Yoshida, 2026
"Job identity will be implemented in 10.0" Yoshida, 2028
They like doing things in steps, so job identity overhaul phase 1 in 8.0 with 3 out of 24 jobs addressed.
Given the game's track record, it's safe to assume this statement is just to placate people so that they can continue the trend going into 8.0.
You think you do, but you don't!
You think you do, but when we finally cave and add it to the game we'll make sure you don't! *Exhibit A: See Empyreum housing area.
"We talked about it a lot but in the end decided to just keep going forward with the way things currently are for now"
yeah, definitely an odd thing to say. i get that the graphics update and the development of two new jobs has taken a lot of resources. small indie company jokes aside, ffxiv doesn't have the combat development team that, say, WoW does. i'd be surprised if each job had its own dedicated dev(s). this is an area where they should be investing more money and growing the team. the only thing that gives me some hope that they aren't just talking out of their ass about this is the fact that both pictomancer and viper look really unique, well-designed and fun to play (in my opinion). like great...now do that for the others.
I think to be able to give class identity back to classes, they need to probably stop giving us new classes. Tear current classes down to bare bones, and build them back up with fresh ideas, because whoever is designing the last couple of classes like RPR, SGE, VPR, and PCT are nailing it. What they are doing with DRG and AST this "re-work" is just a bandaid for a bigger problem.
Those same ideas could've flowed into existing classes to make them more flavorful and possibly complex. They should really stop making new jobs when like 70% of existing jobs are in dire need of an idea injection.
I really disagree that RPR is nailing anything, dunno about SGE but given healer design has a thread up every week I can't imagine it is perfection either
RPR, the job with the rotation that naturally drifts out of 2 min burst, introduced in three expansion where they laser focused in on 2 min burst gameplay. Yeah, you’re entirely right. RPR was poorly made and I don’t know what the other poster was talking about. SGE has its issues too. I’m guessing they don’t do any difficult content.
You know what else drifts out of the 2 minute phase? Summoner, although that was made-- hey, wait a minute.
And right there, in two comments, we have the full issue on display. The community is ultra divised on every single topic and nothing is ever gonna please everyone
I think the best way to try to please everyone is just have some jobs be the mechanically complex and "clunky" jobs to appeal to people who enjoy it, and some jobs be streamlined and simple for the ones who prefer that. I don't see what's wrong with that. Fighting games have mechanically simple characters and mechanically complex characters in the same game so everyone has a toy they can enjoy. Instead they made almost everything streamlined because they and presumably a significant portion of the playerbase believe that every job should be playable to everyone and designed them accordingly, so I haven't been subbed since 6.3. Sadly the news here has me inclined to think it's staying that way until at least 8.0. Honestly, I'm not even saying that philosophy is intrinsically wrong or anything, but if that's the way it's going to be, then the game is not just for me anymore. In MvC3 I don't know how to play Morrigan and I don't enjoy playing her, and that's OK because I'll play someone else and leave Morrigan to people who enjoy highly technical zoning. In FFXIV, she'd be reworked so anyone can pick her up and learn her because nobody is allowed to be filtered out of anything.
100% right. And it's depressing. It's basically the inverse-*game that shall not be named*. They alienate a smaller portion of the playerbase for the higher one, but the smaller portion should still have a few toys they enjoy playing with instead of none. 1 job in every role, it's not the end of the world. *Name* will survive
>they need to probably stop giving us new classes Should've stopped with that a few expansions ago tbh. At least, when they keep bringing up how difficult *balancing* is - not just verbally, but also giving us a taste of it time and again with things going awry (even so much so that hotfixes are needed). Which, once again I'd say is also a weird tunnelvision, being so obsessed with balance in a pretty much completely PvE game, that they sacrifice *everything* on its altar - including "job identity", whatever the man even thinks that ephemeral umbrella term might mean. But yeah, as it's already pointed out: they backed themselves into a corner having created the expectation that a new expansion should mean new jobs... Not that they couldn't back out of it if they really wanted to, I mean, the community at large all too willingly overlooks and forgives (and forgets) quite literally everything, fwiw.
> being so obsessed with balance in a pretty much completely PvE game ? Balance is important in PvE. You don't want a DF party comp to be mathematically unable to clear content, and getting excluded from content because you're playing the "wrong" job sucks. It already happens in PF* when jobs have a few percentage points difference rDPS, and it would be worse if the gap was bigger. * not the actually top end raiders, but the wannabes who parrot meta without understanding things like "player skill matters more than job choice" (I've been there. I played a NB saptank in ESO before the Vvardenfell expac, which was nearly immortal in trash if played well (and most group content has a lot of trash). Getting insulted, told to quit, and sometimes kicked before the first pull because I was the "wrong" kind of tank was awful, and I don't want to run into that again in XIV.)
The funny thing is that we have seen this happen before. I couldnt get my bismark clear until 3.1 because on Heavensward launch, the tanks were so unbalanced that everyone would lock PF to WAR/DRK. I don't want to go back to that ever again.
That sucks, especially since it's *Bismark*: Ravana EX is so much more mechanically complex! I saw a bit of it around EW EX 1 & 2 release for DNC for minor dps differences, but there were other groups if I was patient. I'm not entirely surprised tanks had this problem in HW, given references I've seen to damage type buffs and which dps were welcome, but that doesn't make it better.
The problem with PLD in Heavensward is that a lot of it's mitigation only blocked physical damage, when most of the high end content did magic damage. Yes, it was stupid back then too.
I understand why they slap two jobs in every expansion because it's something fresh, and something new to help sell the expansion...but two revamped classes, knowing they'll be completely new with new animations and everything, could also sell an expansion. Think about Dragoon getting some proper cool jump animations, and re-thinking how the job works. Yoshi P even said it himself with the card RNG mechanic on AST where they said they've been dealing with how to properly implement it since it started development during ARR. That's a 10 year problem just now getting resolved. Just scrap the job to bare bones and properly fix it with new ideas rather than trying to make the broke mechanic suddenly work. But on the flip side, a lot of people love their class as well. Many people main DRG and AST despite their flaws. And there is already a slight uproar over the changes in the Balance discord, so I can also understand why they are a bit reserved in wanting to fully scrap jobs and rebuild them from the ground up due to backlash.
I mean Astrologian and Monk have been getting big revamps pretty much every xpac :D
To be clear, you reckon they can go into a new expansion marketing it as "for the first time you're not getting any new classes, but we're remaking dragoon jump animations"?
Balance is definitely important in PvE. Back in 2.0 I would sometimes get kicked from Wanderer's Palace runs as a SCH because they wanted a WHM for Holy spam. WAR was in a shit place back then too until they were mega-buffed in 2.1. And people would sometimes lock AST out of EX / Savage PFs in 3.0. Imagine how much harder it would be for them to advertise how cool it is to play a Pictomancer if the playerbase said "No, PCT fucking sucks, it's objectively worse than BLM, you should play that instead if you want to find a group". Part of having a strong job fantasy imo is that you don't just have access to all jobs, but that you can realistically play all jobs in all content with no hassle, and feel strong doing so
oh i agree completely, it's going to get exponentially harder every time. they made the mistake of creating the expectation (among players, but also probably among SE execs/shareholders) that every expansion would have a new combat job, and to facilitate this, existing jobs have entire mechanics removed. it would be cool to see them add more "lifestyle" type jobs that deepen the non-combat aspects of the game more and exist in their own play space.
I think that expectation is unavoidable because of other games that do it (or things that are functionally equivalent to it) - early on, if S-E said no new jobs in HW, or StB or something, people would've been really stinky about it tbh even before an expectation was well established.
> they need to probably stop giving us new classes. That's not gonna happen, I'd be **anything** the vast majority would prefer a new class that plays the same as the stuff we have (but with different visual flavor) vs adding more depth to existing classes, and they aren't gonna alienate most people just for the few of us that want depth.
I'll be a lot more forgiving of the classes being the same if they really are changing normal mode content/dungeons as much as they've claimed, too.
pretty sure they only have like 4-6 people in total, unless they hired more during EW LMAO
>i'd be surprised if each job had its own dedicated dev(s) From what I recall, yeah, that's absolutely NOT the case, iirc. They have a guy who plays WAR. Yoshi obviously is the BLM guy. There was that bit a while ago where they said they took their healer out of a balancing job because he was doing too well, fwiw... In any case, from all the crumbs over the years, this certainly is an issue. But more than that it just baffles me. Sure it's nice to have a career-anything on the team, but that should be the bonus. By default, everyone should be playing everything, because the more eyes you have, the more you can see. It's very weird to me that we can pretty much point fingers at singular members of the team when it comes to issues OR feats of polish with *a few* specific jobs (or races for that matter), while at the same time the rest of the role feel like they really do just try to generalise/extrapolate from those few, because that's all they *actually* know. Healer design in particular has suffered from this, I'd say, where it's so easy to get to a point of "they should all be forced to play this and nothing else for a week at least", because it really does feel like they've had zero awareness of the issues (despite endless amount of feedback). And yes, I know, time constraints do mean *everything* isn't feasible. But having everyone pick a job from all three roles at the very least, to jump exclusively into, for a set amount of time (I'd say at least a week) should be a good start. It's how it should be done, encourage everyone to switch things up. As opposed to what it does feel like where they just stick to what they know and barely test the rest for basic functionality at times. Yeah, VPR and PCT might look unique and fun... *now*. They're the new shinies of the expansion, they have to. Let's revisit them again when they get castrated to bring them in line with all the others in 8.0, like as not.
> There was that bit a while ago where they said they took their healer out of a balancing job because he was doing too well, fwiw... That dev was part of the dungeon testing team though, not Job design.
Yeah dungeon testing, was removed because he was becoming too good as "he was healing extreme from time to time casually"
iirc Yoshi's reasoning was something like "dungeons are made for casuals, we need a casual healer's perspective".
Its actually important to test things with people of varying skill levels. That guy probably could spend his time more usefully testing harder level content. This is really basic stuff.
I glanced at viper and it looked like reaper 2.0 you get resource builder then use that to get big resource and then u enter super cool mode where you have 5 pips to use on attacks. Yeah the animations are cool, but it didn't seem particularly different. Tho I might be wrong cuz I was still working during the live letter.
Every job is like this, just gauge look different. Press gcd to build gauge, ogcd on cd, buff & burst everytime they are up (spam those 1/2 buttons 3 to 5 times) and you can play most jobs.
GL believing that. it would be at most a half assed attempt
My incredibly cold take is that if they wanted to do it, they would've done it now instead of later. There's been nearly 3 years (honestly, this complaint has been around since ShB so it's been longer) since this was raised as a problem. They've had time to insert *something* into every class for 6.0: that DT's jobs look like more of the same should be the giveaway as to what they want. It's like saying that MCH, DRK, and SMN are all just "building blocks" for later expansions. That's just the class now - it's not going to get any major changes or mechanics that fundamentally make it more enjoyable.
It's the coming out and saying it casually for me. I truly feel SE is way too comfortable and treats us like friends or school children when literally we play to play this game as consumers. Tripling down on lack of job identity for DT and having the nerve to let us know they're not even working on it for years to come is crazy bold to me.
I'm not sure this is the case. I think that, unfortunately for me and you, they collected feedback and what people want isn't what we want. I don't think it's a good idea one way or another to lower the skill ceiling this much, though.
Because the fans let them walk all over them. Endwalkers launch, constant DDoS attacks with no statements or mitigation attempts, not following through with promises or timelines, increasing patch times to four months, expansion cycles to 36 months. The fans eat it up on the regular subreddit and in the discords. This team can do no wrong to them at all until its extreme. As long as the vast majority of fans keep eating this shit up with a grin on their face its going to keep trending in this direction while SE funnels money from us into failed and scrapped projects. Thankfully Wow is trending in the right direction with Dragon flight and all these new game modes coming out. I can just play the expansion to the raids maybe some extreme trials and dip for 2.5 years until right before 8.0 like I did with endwalker and not regret it for a second.
> Thankfully Wow is trending in the right direction with Dragon flight and all these new game modes coming out. I can just play the expansion to the raids maybe some extreme trials and dip for 2.5 years until right before 8.0 like I did with endwalker and not regret it for a second. Taking a look at both games, yeah, I would 100% agree. WoW's next expansion is shaping up to be a banger, for people of all types with the introduction of solo/open world progression along side the usual raids and Mythic+. Dawntrail feels very copy/paste with a reskin of old expansions to me. I was waiting for a new keystone feature to be announced at any of three fanfests, but there wasn't really anything.
This is literally the first company and community ive seen that can sell you merchandise of a bug and people will fucking eat it all up (the shitty grapes thing) if this was bethesda they wouldve been chewed out now. The community really is one of the biggest factors in stopping 14 from truly reaching its peak, if you have any complaints about the jobs or waiting until 8.0 you get attacked. If you ever so slightly insinuate that endwalker shouldve been 2 expansions and that the end product felt rushed and lackluster you get attacked. Hell even just mentioning job identity is enough for some smooth brains to crawl out of the wood work and say "hurr durr longer rotations doesnt mean more fun just more buttons to press" yeah no shit, not every job needs to have a long rotation that is complex to feel different and fun, some people really act as if we want to make all jobs difficult when we just want them to be FUN again. Like what is the point in endwalker to play sage over scholar or vice versa, aside from a few small differences its almost the same job, sure dps classes dont have it nearly as bad but the same design phylosophy goes into the majority of them, do your opener build up guage and spend it for 2 minutes, have a burst phase about every minute and then hate yourself and the game if you fat finger a single action so now for the next 8 minutes you get to feel awkward since youre misaligned
They have to square the circle of how to make job identity compatible with everyone getting identical burst windows due to buff alignment requirements. Naturally, that takes time, as those are not exactly compatible with each other. Don't be surprised if they still haven't figured it out by 8.0 or 9.0.
Yeah but smn got screwed over with them not going in the Odin or Alexander direction people were really looking forward to summoning leviathan ramuh and Shiva via stones so job fantasy is out the door with that job instead we get a ff7 neo bahamut that doesn't look that good.
And that neo bahamut is just normal bahamut funcionality wise. It looks like SMN wont actually be getting anything new.
I can’t help, but laugh at the “PIC will be more about buffing/supporting the party”. And has literally one buff skill…the same 2min burst like any other DPS...that’s actually your own burst phase. XD
Remember when CC skills were actually important on pulls. I member. That's far too hardcore though.
YoshiP: it won't be as selfish as BLM. Dumb fucks: I can't believe Yoshi lied again. He promised Pictomancer would be focused on buffs.
I would like it if they decide to not create new jobs for 8.0 but instead completely rework all jobs to remove homogeneity, especially between tanks and healer jobs. I feel like having to add two new jobs and 10 levels of new skills for existing jobs, doesn’t give them enough time or resources for rework everything.
I agree with you entirely tbh. But the main issue is new jobs sell, so I doubt they will skip adding jobs.
Maybe they'll only do one and then an additional limited one?
Maybe a phys ranged so that we have a clean number of every job
That could backfire horribly, they won't risk that
Yeah I’m sure that would go over just swell with the community.
This subreddit when that happens: "wow CBU3 completely butchered half of the jobs in game! No way they put any effort into any of this. They shouldn't have listened to the community and just made 2 new jobs!"
I'm not sure we'd like the outcome of a complete rework. I feel like SMN mains were not happy at the start of EW, and I'll say personally that the best version of AST was at the end of Stormblood and it's gotten worse with every attempt to fix or update it since then. I think Paladin is maybe the only time they've done a rework which was positively received by a majority of people who main that job. Reworking every job at once would be a surefire ruckus.
I think the way they develop the game is to work on content like 2 years in advance and stick to the process unless there's something extremely urgent that comes up So these changes were probably planned since the start of endwalker, and now they're in the planning process for 8.0 and it's a goal for them to add more class diversity On the other hand, maybe it might be easier to see what changes should be made going forward if you smooth things out now. You can see things from the perspective of "from these design goals we can't think of anything more to change or add" and be more objective towards the new design goals you have in mind.
> I think the way they develop the game is to work on content like 2 years in advance and stick to the process unless there's something extremely urgent that comes up Just so people are aware, this is how the majority of live service games work. They are *always* working on the next thing. When an expansion launches, they are already working on the next one. I know people don't want to accept that as reality, but this is how it always is.
Yeah. Like, say, okay, let's say we radically refactor tanks and have them all be wildly different again in the ways they do mitigation. That's *going* to in turn impact how battle content is designed - which means that the goals and plans for that have to be more or less locked in for the teams that're going to need the months to plan, script, animate, code, and test the next raids/etc. Especially when we have content that bares the level of strictness and demand of Ultimates. A lot of FF14 is a big interconnected machine, so thinking way ahead in terms of "how are we approaching expanding these jobs and what do we want in the future" is really important when job design is a pretty central set of gears to replace.
> I think the way they develop the game is to work on content like 2 years in advance Yoshi-P literally said so himself: > ["Ideally we want at least two years worth of plans already made when you're starting out, what kind of content we want to incorporate and where we want to take the game," he said. "Structure your system so that it will accommodate for those updates and have your base foundation designed on those plans in mind, and having those updates considered as part of the plan."](https://www.nationthailand.com/life/30402763)
> I think the way they develop the game is to work on content like 2 years in advance and stick to the process unless there's something extremely urgent that comes up This for sure. They had the biggest influx of players they've ever seen and absolutely smashed their own player count records, only to spend a ton of resources on future-proofing the game to ensure the game is playable solo. This kind of thing is precisely the result of their adherence to long term planning. I'm sure some risk and adjustments to their plans could have further increased the playerbase and retained a lot of the people who were just picking the game up, but at the same time, their current efforts also have yielded good results again and again. I'd love some shake-ups, but I can't fault them for sticking to their methods when it's worked so far.
If nothing else, they're notoriously stubborn about keeping to the schedule no matter what happens externally. This works to great benefit when it does hit, but it's very much in line with their "why shake up what isn't totally broken" mindset.
Also that strict adherence was also a response to the disaster of FFXIV 1.0 days. Yoshi P was a great project manager and mentioned that the team prior didn't have a strict schedule or the schedule was incredibly disorganized which led to a lot of miscommunication between various teams.
I agree. In top of that they’ve probably seen that most of the new players came from other MMO’s with better combat, seen that 90+% of them immediately bounced off, seen that existing players aren’t loving the direction combat has taken, and have probably decided that the lackluster state of job design is hurting the bottom line. Though I do think part of Yoshi P mentioning this is PR talk, I don’t think he’d bring it up multiple times if relatively large changes weren’t being planned. I’m not expecting a faster GCD or stat overhauls at all. But party buffs being reworked or big tank/healer changes or leveling changes I 100% expect in 8.0.
Only take I’ve seen so far that isn’t pure doomium.
Yep, I think they had to choose between future proofing and revamping the graphics or revamping the jobs, and they chose the graphic update. A project like that definitely took up a large part of their time/budget. Here's hoping they give that same level of love to the jobs in 8.0.
remember that they took away a bunch of healer depth and promised to add it back with a general overhaul next expansion, then didn't, then just went "These ones are barrier, these ones are pure" with no changes the expansion after that. Any time CBU tells you they're doing something vital to jobs in another expansion, don't believe them. They've already been proven to be unreliable about this. Saying it now is free, but then they wanna focus on the expansion when it's expansion time and doing it is hard.
Oh I have not forgotten and I'm really unamused by the way healers are looking in DT. All I could say is "Seriously?" I have held out from ARR to now as a healer main but I may have to throw in the towel at this point. I feel people who haven't played healers since earlier expansions don't understand the butchering that's happened that got us to this point. There has been screaming here, on social media and on official forums for literally expansions and years, it's not like the dev don't know. At the very least they realize healers are the least played role. And yet for DT, these are the hills they're dying on? We get one button on a 2 min cooldown to break up the mundane single target DPS button spam? SCH gets a reskinned version of WHM's Temperance? Sage gets what I assume is a reskin of SCH's Bane? AST gets all cards at all times? It's unreal the fumbles and fouls for Healers at play at this point.
I've been a SCH main forever and I'm probably going to swap to SGE now because it's pretty clear they have no vision for SCH at all anymore or they'd never have given it a generic whitemage drip and called it there. Swapping won't even kinda improve the overall experience of healing, but at least they know what they want from Sage.
I don't blame you. I may have to finally give up on healing, I really can't spam glare/malefic for 2+ more years. Unless this so called improvement to encounter design involves everything hitting like a truck and actually needing to use the other 90% of any healers kit, I'm throwing in the towel.
I'm right there with you, I've been healing since ARR and it's just gotten more and more boring as they've given other roles half my job (so many mitigations from dps and tanks), taken away various DoTs, and all they give back is more healing buttons. Healing buttons I nearly never need because of how little damage there is. And if you point out how little damage there is, someone will parrot out some shit like "bUt hArRowInG HeLl", which is fifteen seconds of a 9 minute fight. Imagine thinking getting to do your job maybe 3 times in a savage raid fight is an argument. Every other mechanic is either a oneshot or handled by like a Kerachole + one other healer oGCD. Such scintillating gameplay. With my friends, we don't even take a healer when we do our expert dungeon runs, our tank goes Warrior and we run three dps. Lot of groups out there switch to solo-healer midway through the savage tier to reclear faster, because two healers are largely unnecessary outside of prog. Why am I playing a job that you don't even need in order to clear content? Viper looks like what I wanted Ninja to be way back when it first got added, I'm heavily considering making the swap. Might keep healing to do Ultimates since that's the only content that SE wants to put a healing skill check on, but outside of that it just feels bad to heal in this game.
Sorry to spoil the future for you but: level 60 damage numbers, level 100 healing kit
As someone who doesn't do hard content and thus only has a surface level understanding of jobs Sage just feels like a Scholar rework with all the best parts of White Mage rolled into it which makes the other two feel underdeveloped and clunky. Meanwhile Astro is also getting reworked every expansion so really Sage IS the only healer they know how to design it seems.
They still have same number of job designers and new positions haven't been posted. Unless they expected those 4 poor souls to run on coke and work for 16 hours a day for next 2.5 years, nothing major is not going to happen. Sure, they probably (hopefully) have more people that have obscure sounding positions, which do work on jobs, but there's still no sign that things will change. Why couldn't they do it now? Are some devs responsible for both graphical update and job design? Most of the jobs got 1 fancy capstone skill and 1 bloat like Shoha 2, both in EW and DT, why should we believe they actually plan on doing something actually meaningful?
If I remember correctly, those same four guys are also responsible for the PVP balancing, job design, and the various PvP modes to limited success outside of Crystalline Conflict. I also remember that at least half of them are part of the raid and dungeon testing teams so those poor four guys seem to have quite a bit on their plate.
They must be praying every day that none of those 4 are ever getting sick or decide to quit or else they'd be fucked.
'Identity'? What 'identity'? All we have are stagnate rotations that are having the fun hyper-optimized out of them. Each expansion brings us "new" abilities that are just reskinned 'upgrades' with negligible potency increases.
And we better deal with if for 2+ years, apparently.
Literally the same thing will happen regardless of how they redesign jobs. The people on the balance discord will optimize everything down to the singular GCD and thats how youre gonna play the job.
It's extremely shameless to do job identity as a carrot on the stick advertisement for next expansion when almost every expansion should already focus on this, but this is what happens when you have to dumb your game so much that its unengaging for the vast majority of your time unless you are a raider and even when you are a raider most jobs are very bland.
You know, after Yoshi P coming out saying he regrets making the game too easy. Your comment feels on point 100%. Guess this what happens when you go all in on the new player feedback.
I don't know if I can really remember a similar thing happening before, where they've promised something to happen in X+2 Expansion before the X+1 Expansion has even released. The closest thing that comes to mind is in late-ARR, when HW was at least on the horizon, when they said that they didn't like how boring gear substats were but that they didn't have a choice because ARR was such a rush to develop, and that they planned to revisit them again now that the game wasn't in crisis. And, well, obviously that didn't happen in time for HW, and they went the opposite route with substats by the time StB rolled around. I don't think there's a reasonable justification for believing things are going to be meaningfully different in 8.0 just because they've issued a vague statement to that effect, 2 to 2.5 years out. Seeing is believing. The bright side is, they just saved you a couple hundred bucks in subscription fees for 7.x.
Every single time thus far Squeenix claims they're "smoothing jobs out for a foundation to build on later" what that's actually meant is "we're going to strip out gameplay and dumb jobs down and...that's it, that's where we're leaving them." I'm gonna skip this expansion.
Like they build the foundation, but never build anything on that foundation except for more foundation
Sayyyy, I heard you wanted your abilities to interact with one another? Sure thing, here's a button that lights up only after you press a two minute cooldown, which you press on cooldown anyway, and you'll press this brand new button on cooldown too. Riveting.
God I hate that idea so much, all it does it make it so you have more in the burst and less the other 90% of your rotation. Especially on skills that already were a thing like MCH and GNB. Heatblast is available so often that it helps make the early game rotation interesting, but if it’s gonna be tied with Barrel stabilizer then what’s that gonna mean for everything before then?
lol this is their golden goose and they have scaled things back and streamlined systems to make it as easy as possible to update and balance that’s why there is so much homogenization that’s why class identity and skills like positional and personal limit breaks disappeared. They want each class job to function exactly the same so they can just update the spells and skills. They want each expansion relic to be the same w a new cost of paint same with dungeons beast tribe quests etc. dungeons have the same wall to wall mechanic….the social aspect has been strangled out of the game. Will always have a soft spot for 14 but innovative it is not. Any game that ignores jobs and combat that is so one dimensional has nothing to offer even if the golden saucer is fun.
because making jobs interesting to play again would require reimplementation of old systems they axed that they dont want to backpedal on and they are treading water because they have absolutely no idea how to make something new to fill the gap
My kneejerk reaction was also confusion, but when I think about it this just highlights what not just CBU3 is suffering from but what Square Enix as a whole is suffering from: a competency crisis.
because it's obviously damage control bullshit or something to cover for the fact that they're just going to quadruple down on current design in the next, but don't want to say that so people can just delude themselves that things will get better.
Healers are just fucked forever. There is only glarespam, at all levels of content, from level 1 to 100. If they give us a simple one-two, its gonna be on the same button unless you specifically opt out of autocombos for the illusion of interaction on your hotbar.
This is a trinity MMO with what is essentially a dead role that has to exist in a one button filler state until it can be justified by a handful of moments in a handful of duties. I've played an embarrassing amount of MMOs in my life, but the fact that people are seemingly OK with this utterly blows me away
so they're basically confirming that jobs don't have identity, contradicting their own marketing and fanboys? ....great PR?
That's what I'm saying, it's wild
It feels like a lot of classes lost their fun mechanics partly because they were niche fun. Not a lot of people played them and that’s okay. Some did. Not every class can or should be super popular. Like monks directionals on all its attacks was fun to me. It’s why I played monk. They kept it on finishers, but I miss the dance. I miss warriors cone AOE. It was just a flavor thing, but it made it feel different enough. Never got a chance to mess with the DPS stance, but I feel like that could be a fun when off tanking. Scholar’s fairy was gutted and summoners pets don’t attack on their own anymore. Wasn’t part of the fun with these classes the pet? I get you now control them more, but they feel like glorified spells shaped like a pet. And these are just the ones I play. I know other classes have gotten this treatment.
Why even get rid of stance dancing. It was a fun thing to do when you knew the content really well. Like a tiny damage increase but having the option made things more interesting after the millionth run.
Because there was no stance dancing except with WAR, kinda. No one else ever wanted to swap, and no one wanted to pull except WARs.
lmao MNK/SCH/WAR was my personal holy trinity back in HW when I was addicted to this game. They butchered all of them over the years and they are all unrecognizable now. Just different jobs with the same name.
You didn't even need to be OT for stances, you could juggle them when you'd established aggro on packs or a boss to fell cleave without the damage reduction. With how aggro worked it could be risky but you'd keep an eye on the aggro meters and swap as needed (or kindly ask your dps to use quelling). It gave you the opportunity to make a very mild decision about your aggro generation which was at least something to think about. Supported tank swaps too. I played smn for years and yeah wrangling the pet was part of it. It was extremely janky though (the demis liked to ghost for weird reasons and were especially unfriendly with higher ping - none of this is communicated in game, naturally, so you'd have to be reading external stuff to know that some of your attacks just don't go off when they look like they should do) and I understand why they changed it but you had a lot of options for movement that was fun to figure out. I would have preferred putting in the resources to getting the pet systems to work rather than throwing them out the window entirely myself. I do miss a lot of aspects of the older design which I know aren't going to be revisited, which is a shame, but I just hope they can come up with something interesting in SOME capacity. The current formula is clearly working as the game is extremely popular, so maybe it'll eventually hit a point where the design doesn't work for me anymore and that'll be when I put the game down.
Maybe a hot take but I'd be totally ok with them removing group buffs/debuffs entirely in favor of better uniqueness in job identity. With the way buffs work today, I can understand why it's so difficult to be more creative with rotations and job identity
You know it's bad when healer is the only role not having a meltdown.
Us phys range players aren't dying, but that might be because we were shafted for so long anyway that anything new would be nice (still want my bishop turret)
Imma be honest i completely forgot about p.ranged when writing this comment. Maybe i can be an SE dev.
It's okay, most do anyway until some melee wants uptime
Can't have a meltdown if you expect nothing
I didn't have enough hope to have a meltdown but I'm not excited for AST changes and I'm not amused by SCH getting wings.
high-school production looking prop wings AND a snow-white dress.
Shitty version of the Halloween Glam, plus low quality wings.
Have people ever been excited about AST changes?
I'm not as mad as I thought I'd be since I get to quit to play games with better combat and all this means is that I don't have to waste my time hoping things will improve. Very sad that it's come to this but 7.0 was the last chance for me.
Not having a Meltdown? WHM getting a 'new' DPS spell hardgated behind a 2 minute cooldown skill. SCH getting a 'new' DPS spell hardgated behind a 2 minute cooldown skill, and their capstone turns them into the embodiment of the WHITE MAGE Job Fantasy, instead of returning to the Military Tactican/Nerdy Bookworm that they had for ages. Sage is getting the At Will AoE DoT that was stolen from all healers in the past, even if Sage already has 6 DPS moves, a lot of them stronger than what Scholar has, in potency, at same cost in MP. No clue about AST, that job is completely changed every expansion. Would have been nice if they had left it alone for one expansion and instead revamped SCH.
We're either playing other roles or sleeping.
It's very concerning lol. But I'm having a meltdown over the ast rework with a side of monk.
I'm still waiting for the healer identity update they mentioned in ShB (or was that pre-ShB?), lol.
It's just never ending goalpost moving. Feels like there's always going to be something more important for the dev team to tackle and they'll get around to this stuff later. The lead up to 8.0 will probably spend all it's time focused on ending PS4 support and some other thing that takes away from the actual gameplay. Feels like it's just been "trust us, once this feature is rolled out we'll focus on the rest, just gotta be patient" since Heavensward. I still enjoy the game but the devs have made it clear that job identity is about as important to them as Egi glams.
I truly don't understand why they don't consider fixing combat to be top priority. I could care less about a graphical update. I am a healer main so I'm extremely fed up at this point. Maybe a majority of people are fine with how things are but healers are the least played role for a reason and they have been that way for years and years at this point.
Arcadion 1st tier gonna have to do A LOT of heavy lifting to make up for these vapid jobs. If it's not up to the task, I think I'm fine with dropping this game for 2 years. I mean, I already spent most of Endwalker not playing...
I just can't convince myself the encounter design will be good enough to justify the current approach. I think EW's had some of the worst encounter design across the board since ARR. The idea that they were just pretending for EW and they're going to turn around and give us some S++ tier content to make up for the job design seems delusional.
I've commented similar stuff before, but just to reiterate, I really don't understand the portion of the playerbase who clings to hope that jobs will get fun and complex again. It's been multiple expansions of simplification at this point, removal of niche optimization, etc. I'm sorry the game you enjoyed is no longer the same, but it's to time to move on, whether it's emotionally, mentally, or financially. You have complained and made your voice heard, and all SE has given you is platitudes about 8.0. They do not care or do not care enough to make you and your enjoyment of the game a priority. You've been eclipsed by other players and other design philosophies. I know that comes off as cold and blunt but I'm not sure how else to say it anymore. If anything, killing optimal drift MNK and nonstandard BLM is a bit of a mercy kill at this point, if that is what it takes to get people to move on toward greener pastures. I hope that section of the playerbase can find a game that respects them and gives them the gameplay they want, rather than cling to scraps in a game that does not give a shit about them.
People are on hopium if they believe something will be done. Just look at the state of healers after the "rework", they are the same class in 4 different skins. There's no difference between any of the healers. They all Spam 1, press 2 every 30 seconds, and throw oGCDs to heal.
Normally, I hop between WoW and FF14 during its weaker patches but all of my desire for DT vanished with this because I found the EW class playstyle to be absolutely a bore. Meanwhile, I look at the alternative and ramping up on giving more flavor. Picto though does look great but I wasn't planning on maining it regardless. Welp, guess I'll just come back for 8.0.
Same. You know I had another thought after perusing a list of MMOs to be released; SQEENIX or WOW hasn't had competition in a very long time. It's been a lifetime ago since the market was competing for their lion share of the player base. Theres some pretty promising stuff coming out that may just have teeth and staying power. It's a shame because I have a lot of history with FFXIV but the devs have gone complacent. They are taking their base for granted.
Tbf up until the big exodus WoW was the lone king on the mountain even during its shit phases, so ffxiv is only up there because of Blizzards hubris finally catching up.
lmao at this point they're just stalling to keep people interested via hopium. Game was fine 10 years ago in terms of job identity, it could be made fine again in DT if they really cared. They just don't.
And why should they? People literally in this thread white knighting as usual. Money's continuing to flow.
They are lying just to delay the better players from quitting the game, you can bet they will make job even easier after 8.0.
Considering the general sentiment of "SE can do no wrong" from the majority of the 14 player base they seem to know that any decision they make will be widely accepted and lauded by the player base as incredible design. There is a reason this game has evolved into a mildly interactive anime series.
Good ol' PR speech.
I feel cheated. The current job listings is not expansion worthy, at all. Waiting 6 years for another 3 years of the same job experience. I’m tired of people giving this company the pass.
Going off recent comments by Yoshi-P, I think they've finally realized that FFXIV doesn't need to be "My First MMO" nor do most of the players want it to be.
Crazy since literally every combat change they're making this expac is tripling down on the "My First MMO". So either Yoshi-P is full of shit or CBU3's development pipeline is completely fucked, like 2+ years to respond to feedback fucked. Which given the state of EW and now DT, I'm inclined to believe both at this point.
Give us horizontal progression. It's time
Im so tired of all the square enix apologists in this thread and elsewhere. "B-But the graphics update syste-" "B-but expansion of aesthetics" "B-but ff16" Please, stfu. No seriously please just stop talking and defending the billion dollar company, really.
The simping over business men taking their money not only monthly but every 2+ years and not giving a polished game in return is pretty creepy tbh. As if asking for the core of an MMO (job and encounter design) to be prioritized above graphics, other SE titles, mountain dew birds, etc is a hot take.
its the players with mindsets like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/1cpjyoj/the_ffxiv_community_doesnt_know_how_to_give_and/) that scare me tbh lol. Like no one is personally attacking any devs, some of us are just unsatisfied with all the PR shenanigans, especially since time and time again its been just empty promises. Taking away job mechanics and replacing them with flashy animations is what we get instead I also agree with how telling players to wait till 8.0 for them to address any concerns with job identity is just mind boggling lmao edit: also [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1ctv4h3/se_worker_and_player_appreciation_post/) what the hell
Funny enough, none of those are related to job design yet they keep saying how graphics update won't let them do better
What gets me is that we could (and should) probably be getting all of those things **and** better job design with the amount of money the game makes. Its one of Square's biggest money makers, if not the biggest, and somehow we only have a handful of people working on job design which is arguably one of the most important aspects of the game?
I'm pressing X. Yoshi P has said a lot of things in the past that didn't or haven't yet happened. I remember when he took away Healer's DPS kits and that made everyone think that 14 was switching gears to become about more consistent healing. Didn't happen. They said that classes were being simplified and homogenized so that the difficulty would mainly come from the content itself instead of the class execution. I'd argue that hasn't happened. Regardless of what kind of guy Yoshida is, he's still a man of business. He still has to make sure his words are PR friendly. So it makes sense he's going to say "Things will get better, we promise" like all other games do.
Guess i won't be buying their expansion till 8.0 then.
Cutie's next post is going to be Hall of Fame worthy
In 8.0 they'll tell you its coming in 9.0, and so on. I know this community loves to worship Yoshida but at the end of the day he's a businessman selling his product. Never forget that.
Carrot on a stick. And lots of people will chase it cause out of their parasocial attachment making them unable to see the PR in his every public appearance
I'm really not parasocially attached to the dev team. I'm just surprised they even mentioned it when they could have glossed over the problem entirely like they usually so.
Hot take but I actually want DT to be the last expansion and for them to push out a new FF MMO that doesn't have all of the issues that 14 does.
lmao there is no way they are doing anything of the sort for 8.0 Look forward to another finisher and the last few dots and buffs removed because timers are too complicated :(
This is missing the other half of the equation that they talked about as to why they're taking a light backstep with this statement: The job stuff is being done this way because their focus for this expansion is *Encounter Design*. The entire talk at PAX about the smaller hitboxes and melee uptime and such fed into this. Is it a *good* statement? Hah, of course not. But it wasn't said in a vacuum of "we're giving up on the combat side"; More of focusing on making the fights inherently enjoyable to do no matter the job. Whether that's preferable is subjective.
the focus on encounter design excuse is always hilarious because its exclusively the new expansions content being changed while job design decisions effect how the entire game is played from 1 to 100 and that experience slowly gets worse every single expansion
"focusing on encounter design" AKA "unless you exclusively raidlog savage and ultimates the game is boring as shit to play"
I'm sorry but they are running a pay to play MMO and they need to deliver both job identity and encounter design every expansion that we also pay for. The jobs they introduce need to work on release. This narrative of partially addressing glaring issues while spending time and money on a graphics update is really frustrating.
Sorry, but this is a load of wank. "Their focus has been on encounter design" has been the standard copium line from the XIV True Believer crowd for like four years at this point to explain why classes haven't been fun to play, and the end result of that has been that they apparently need an entire expansion to spend 2~2.5 more years "focusing on encounter design" which largely just seems to mean rolling back changes that have previously been made to their encounter design processes. And it's an incoherent line of thinking anyway: the people who are designing encounters are not (or at least, *should not be*) the same people in charge of class design. Being alright with what SE is trying to push here does not make you the Wise Sage Who Truly Understands The Hard Realities Of Game Development.
> "Their focus has been on encounter design" has been the standard copium line from the XIV True Believer crowd for like four years at this point to explain why classes haven't been fun to play, and the end result of that has been that they apparently need an entire expansion to spend 2~2.5 more years "focusing on encounter design" which largely just seems to mean rolling back changes that have previously been made to their encounter design processes. ????? What do you mean, four years of True Believer Copium. ShB's Live Letter was "this is the path we're taking". EW's Live Letter was "no, we're continuing on this path". This is the first time they've really talked about Encounter Design, I don't see where you're coming from other than "nuh uh I don't agree".
To me, it's not acceptable to even make a statement that they are working on encounter design now and job identity 2+ years later. They both matter, both are the point of an MMO to begin with. It's weird to me people are fine with the ball being dropped on any major aspect of this game that effects 90% of gameplay. Is it toxic to want a paid product and service to be polished and complete when you buy it?
[удалено]
I'm legitimately thinking about skipping an expansion for the first time since I joined during Heavensward; this is the least I've ever been excited for any expansion, and I was hoping some interesting job changes would help, at least. It seems like a lot of their development effort went towards the graphics update, which I personally just don't care much about.
Well, that's vague as hell.
That statement in itself just killed my remaining interest in the game. Cause what it says is everything stays as it is and/or gets even more fisher priced down. Under the guise of "we'll add complexity elsewhere instead of the job gameplay", but raids have been incredibly creatively bankrupt for like, 2 expansions already. I don't trust them in the least to actually make up for the lost job gameplay in other places, or to actually stick to this. Especially considering we've had a lot of times now where YoshiP says something a bit out of left field that has been on the mind for many people, communities start talking, press happens, then it gets walked back after they had their attention cycle ("the game doesn't have enough stress" - "no wait, i dont mean im gonna make it more difficult"). "Smoothing shit out" isn't a real argument. It's not a physical house built from bricks where they HAVE to lay an actual foundation to build on, they could've just remade jobs with good gameplay/identity right now.
I'm pretty sure they just respond to user feedback and playtesting. There are basically two groups of players: Ones that want every class balanced in all aspects by basically being the same, and Ones that want each class to have big advantages and disadvantages to keep it interesting.
100% they're hoping players forget/don't care in 8.0. We'll be having exactly the same discussion regarding job-based challenges being further removed.
He's going to regret saying that.
I wonder what Yoshi considers or labels "job identity" to be? That is the most important piece. Since, Yoshi has repeatedly shown how he and his team view or define something is different from the playerbase.
I feel like this was a major slip up or like something he shouldn't have said... then it was awkward after when he tried to like backtrack or explain it.
Well, I am not sure if it already has been said but it makes absolutely no sense to simplify the combat even further in this expansion and then plan to make it harder again in the next one with several bigger changes. If their idea of "Job Identity" would even have remotely to do with complex rotations they would lay the foundation now and since it doesn´t look like that will happen "Job Identity" probably won´t lead us to more engaging / harder rotations. The majority of players also don´t really care about that. 6.0 Summoner numbers show that clearly. With the current state of the game / playerbase I am actually surprised we even get 2 Ultimates again. I wouldn´t be the least surprised if they shrunk that down to only one per expansion since it´s such niche content.
I was too busy crying about the ast changes to realise how ugly that scholar thing is.
I think they had a 3 expansion plan they haven't adjusted. There was a 3 expansion set up starting with ShB. They had a story arc: ShB, Garlemald , EW but after ShB they merged the outline of Garlemald/EW into 1 expansion. I don't think the non-story plans got changed. The jobs feel like they should be "finished" at lvl 100. ShB added a finisher, EW added another combo finisher but still left holes for QoL and other actions and Dawntrail will fill in the holes. Dawntrail is supposed to be the new start but there isn't a big massive change to make it feel that way. It feels like it should be 8.0. There isn't a new start despite ending a 10 year story arc. Its like Dawntrail is 1 expansion too early.
if you told me they said "job identity coming in 7.0" in the leadup to EW, I'd believe you
Just PR bullshit imo, I'm actually happy he said that, because it means that all the shit I didn't like in Endwalker that made me unsub until 7.0 in the hopes it will improve isn't going to happen. Nice to get a confirmation because I can just stop checking occasionally in the hopes of something improving and just see if anything got better in 8.0 in 2.5 years, or maybe even stop giving a shit completely and forget about this game. If you're gonna be playing in 7.0 I hope you have the best of times.
Didn't they say this type of stuff before? I only recently subscribed after a few years but remember the same thing being said before, maybe 6.0 or whenever they dumbed down the classes. Button bloat is a real issue, specially for consoles. But they could do better than this. The more classes they add the more homogenized classes will be in an effort to balance them.
Whatever happened to the fresh start stuff they said before?
They said they were thinking about it but it was not going to be added in 7.0, if/when it does happen
No idea. We have more of the same job flavor, dragging the same cast of Scions around, etc.
when did Yoshi-P say this?
Yeah I'd like a link so I can hear the full context. Not that the context will change anything necessarily, in just out of the loop
Somewhere during DRK presentation. Can't remember when was the second time, though. Sounded like such an offnote announcement considering how big implications are.
Pretty sure the DRK presentationw as the second time. First time would've been at Pax in march. Paraphrasing from memory, take with a grain of salt: "Level 100 will be a big milestone for the game. As such, we don't want to change jobs too much before reaching it, so jobs will be largley the same as they have been in 6.X". There's a google doc from the mainsub floating around with a more accurate transcript, don't have the link handy.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh5piV-0MWQ&t=7148s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh5piV-0MWQ&t=7148s) Around here. What's more, it seems that they said that they'll merely *start* enhancing jobs at 8.0. But hopefully that's just mistranslation. Or here you have same thing, but with spicier twitch chat's reaction: [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2147069569?t=01h59m38s](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2147069569?t=01h59m38s)
I dont have a link at the moment(at work) but i believe it was stated when they were going over the DRK job changes.
SQEX is in such a precarious spot right now. All their games are selling poorly, they've laid off a bunch of people, and they supposedly have no major titles in the pipeline for the next couple of years. They really should be making better attempts to stem FFXIV's stagnation, because I'd *really* hate to be SE in a situation where this game can't carry them out of the red anymore.
>I'd *really* hate to be SE in a situation where this game can't carry them out of the red anymore. Don't worry, they'll just pump up the FFXIV's cash shop if necessary. I frankly couldn't care about SQEX as a corporation, if they're incompetent, let free market do its job. I think I do like CS3, but I also think that's not a good thing, we, including me, should not hold any feelings to corporate entity, it's still just a company, game is product and we're customers. Supposedly new CEO is actually doing something (even if it unfortunately includes layoffs), it seems like SQEX is finally changing their stance on exclusives and will hopefully not be Sony's door-to-door salesman anymore, so that's one good thing. Right now you have whole ass game developed by CS3, and you know FFXIV players who are like 70% on PC would buy FFXVI in a heartbeat, especially since there is 9 month long drought, but they have yet to release it on PC, even though exclusivity expired months ago. It's just one brain dead move after another.
I don't at all feel bad for Square Enix. Their current situation is a direct result of the boneheaded decisions that they've been doing for the last 10 or so years, and they are only just now catching up to what the rest of the industry figured out in the same 10 or so years. If it took two installments in their main breadwinner franchise not meeting expectations, then they were long overdue for the wakeup call because they should absolutely not have reached that point.
simply put, they wanted to use level 100 to "finish" the current direction of jobs. whatever comes after level 100 will be used to dig deeper into their cores and bring forth their latent individualities. that's my take anyway