@XenosysVex footage used – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7pLDOVDAoI&t=228s
In this video, we dive into why making Final Fantasy XIV jobs harder isn’t the solution for improving gameplay. Instead, we explore how enhancing job mechanics and adding depth can make the game more engaging without increasing difficulty. Join us as we discuss the importance of balance and player enjoyment in MMORPG design. Whether you’re a seasoned player or new to the game, this discussion is sure to spark some interesting thoughts on the future of FFXIV!
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I appreciate this can be a little contentious but lemme no your thoughts or the direction you would go in the innevitable revist of job design in 8.0 please try to keep it respectable in the comments !
Maybe a weird comparison… But literally arguing for jobs to be harder is a retarded argument on the level of Smash Brothers controls should be harder. Or fgc command inputs should be harder than they already are for casuals.
Using a character in anything is like piloting a war robot or operating some form of weapon… It should be simple to pick up, understand and be effective maybe have some slight operation training at best.
I'm probably the one special weirdo who likes positions but thats cause I come from a Xenoblade background… I kind of wish they actually mattered and gave a big OOMPH! to you hits that's noticeable when you follow them.
im at 50 seconds and i just realised your fucking weird
I think Bard is the poster child for engaging without being complicated. Especially during wanderer's minuet, you've got to keep track of your pitch perfect stacks while spending your meter and heartbreak shot stacks, and making sure you don't overwrite a hawk eye proc. Mages ballad is also very engaging with how quickly you can build up heartbreak shot! Army's paean gives us a nice bit of downtime, only needing to worry about the dot refresh and Hawk eye procs, before bringing us back to burst town! There's such a nice flow and cadence granted by all the different phases of the rotation. More jobs could learn from its example, and integrate more stances that change the feeling of your rotation beyond whether or not you're in your burst phase.
The only caveat of course being that bard is incredibly punishing if you die at all, it would be nice if song cool downs were just a little shorter so you can get back to the proper rotation eventually without sacrificing too much uptime on your songs.
Fk positionals running around like an idiot for 50 more dmg is stupid af. What do hard jobs even mean?.. Muscle memory kicks in after a week anyways.
I brought this up with the Viper changes. Are positionals outdated? Yes. Should they be replaced with stuff that's more interesting? Yes. But the problem currently is, the devs are just removing parts of jobs that actually make you do something and they aren't replacing them with anything or they replace them with stuff that is effectively passive like the BLM changes killing non-standard optimization and just forcing you to do the exact same rotation, the same way, always or you don't get the fire ball.
With Viper in particular, positionals are kind of the only thing you have to actually go out of your way to do so it causes an uproar to remove them unless they add something that at least adds some engagement, because a lot of us care more about feeling even a tiny bit engaged over having flat damage and the job goes from almost no engagement to braindead, it feels boring.
I would love for positionals to go if they gave Viper something else to manage or that let you switch up what you do moment to moment more since so much of it is automated.
That's the real issue to me, because they could do it if they wanted to, we have PCT and it feels very engaging without being overly difficult.
Fastest downvote I have ever given a video
I think you hit the nail in the head considering that Pictomancer doesnt exactly play itself and is quite dynamic.
Sure you have a single combo button (Which shouldve been a standard for majority of jobs tbh because… it is kind of pointless to keep tank combo strings in separate buttons.) but your decision making is on when you throw out your damage tools outside of burst windows since you will be hardcasting and weaving in between.
There is also Tempera Coat which rewards you like Sage when shields pop. It isnt mandatory but it was a nice thing to have.
The biggest thing I think Picto did right is the fact that you always will have to be aware of when and where you do your burst and you collecting your creatures overtime.
Viper on the other hand… they werent kidding about it being a Press the Shiny button because the job requires you to make sure you dont overcap. But there wasnt anything interesting considering it plays almost adjacent to reaper.
I completely agree and I think that there are a lot of gatekeepers that actually have the view of "well if you don't like it, then don't play it" or they just call people noobs because they don't want to spend every waking moment optimising their character and job, newsflash, I have like 3 MMOs that I play and I don't want to devote too much time optimising a character when the game doesn't even have any content that I want to do worth optimising.
Personally I love the viper job, but like all melee jobs, I think positionals are aids and I agree that they limit encounter design.
I'd rather a more simplistic job design with some engaging class mechanics and then have a Mythic+ or Fractal like system that encourages you to play the more simple job design in harder content, rather than make the whole difficulty being job design in easy content.
I personally think positionals are fine as they are, people actively following them should rightly be rewarded with extra damage, but it should still be looked at as a damage bonus when hitting them rather than a damage loss for missing them. For example, Everkeep EX is easily cleared without either melee dps even trying to get a single positional or using true north, but that shouldn't be true for the upcoming savage tier content.
Maybe really what they need to do is change it from flank/rear positions to being behind the boss vs DON'T STAND IN FRONT OF THE BOSS YOU'RE NOT A TANK, rewarding basic, proper positioning in general.
On one hand I agree on the other hand I do think difficulty has its place in the game for both job & combat.
Stormblood encounters was the perfect mix of job difficulty and combat encounters. The only drawback was that there was old systems still tact into the game at that point (ie depuffs that certain classes put on the boss),
Misshapenchair is probably the worst creator (because his whole stance is they took away that was a button bloat) who has complained about the simplication of XIV jobs and hasn't really put anything forward on how to fix it. Although to his credit has mention that difficulty does not always mean fun.
i played monk back in HW with that job you EARNED your top on the AGGRO list with the ridicoules Positionals and greese lightning uptime, When stormblood came….. you didnt earn sh1t they f4cked monk with new gap close skills and other sh1t and in my opinion lost their place as top dps even tho they still had their positionals… that was when positionals became a hassle and not a reward….. ATM im playing VIPER with a few positionals… is it fun? YES. is it to much Button Pushing for No Reward? YES. Are The Positionals useful and makes the game play better? NO because of their 2 Charges its just clutter, instead of just making one big skill that did all of it, they weirdly had to make 2 diffrent skills linked to 2 other skills instead of just making one big skill, and for the love of god JP. make more off global cooldown skills……there is notthing more annoying than waiting for the global cooldown to finish to use uncoiled Fury…. ALSO Meleee Jobs with positionals SHOULD ALWAYS Have More DMG than Ranged Jobs except HARD CASTING JOBS were good positioning SHOULD be rewarded with MORE DMG…. Just my smol Rant lool
People complain about class/job design and balance in all mmorpgs, and always will. But they all keep playing regardless. I am in favour of a big change in the way jobs are played, but I couldn't care less about how "difficult" they are, I prefer the difficulty to be in the encounters, not so much the buttons I press.
At the moment, the difference between an experienced player and a new player is painfully obvious, with the experienced player often doubling the dps of the new one. To make jobs harder will just increase the gap between these two groups.
seem like the way they make the jobs harder is to just keep adding more buttons. which certainly makes it harder to find more space on my cross-hotbar but aside from that…
Maybe it's cause I come from fighting games but I like when games have like 4 or 5 characters that are harder to immediately pick up and play. A few characters (or classes) there for the people who really wanna push themselves. Sometimes it's just more fun to press more buttons and move around and shit. Also I've never been good at it but I always loved hearing old black mage mains talk about how they were gonna optimize a fight. Not sure how much it's changed but it seems like that's not really a thing anymore which is a shame
naa we need so many abilities we need a 4th Hotbar filled with Abilities.
I would love to see Job Ascension modes for the Jobs. Like Trance from FF9 a limited window during combat where you get a new stronger skillset for doing correct combos etc and filling a bar like a limit break but just for you. Like Red Mage going into Grey Mage mode and having huge blasts that heal and damage for a short time. Not a whole new action bar with 15 abilities but like 2 or 3.
I always ask the same question, if you think a more difficult battle job makes things better you must be someone who wants more difficult crafting jobs and macros removed so you do it all by hand too. Dynamic choices and taking advantage of small changes to the moment that are rewarded, not adding more 1 2 3 combos.
You've got to use the concept of job floor and job ceiling when talking about these things. I don't think the job floor should go as low as it was in heavensward, doing 30% of your damage because you fucked up your rotation would make balancing content nightmarish and be too much for what the game is now. Likewise though I don't like as much rigidity as is in the game now.
Endwalker black mage losing that bit of wiggle room is a good example, pictomancer has that same amount of wiggle allowed with needing to prepare in advance for burst but depending on the fight can shift around what to use where.
I agree positionals have long overstayed their welcome but that's not the only thing being removed from jobs, Samurai losing hissatsu kaiten is a good example. It's a gap between floor and ceiling that gives you more room to optimise and express skill but even if unoptimised doesn't lower the floor too much. Summoner is a good example of too much simplicity, it has an abundance of instant casts, is incredibly rigid and doesn't have any gameplay quirks to optimise or express yourself. They added a third summon and you can't even decide the order the major summons go. It's too on rails.
The final part is that whilst fight design can be toned up to account for that the bulk of content in the game is outside of that area, dungeons for healer were improved vastly for me this xpac by having to heal significantly in a lot of the bosses. Especially since healer damage rotation has been supremely streamlined over time.
I'm with Xenos anyhow, tone fights down a smidge and tone jobs up a smidge. Also give healers decision making on damage, also bring back the Aero 3 animation.
Watch the devs actually make jobs harder only for the community to either complain it’s too hard or just abandon the job completely
Why are positionals that bad?
You just need to move…and you even have True North, c'mon
The biggest problem with the want for more complexity or even difficulty in classes is due to the huge difficulty gap between story content and high-end duties.
Seriously, you're playing two COMPLETELY different games! Story content can all be won through attrition. So long as the tank is really good and or the healer and tank know the fight, everyone can get a clear even when the DPS don't do anything. It'll take longer, sure, but it can be done.
High-End duties change that completely by having an enrage timer and a damage down debuff from failing mechanics. Now it's no longer a battle of attrition. Now you actually need to have an understanding of your rotation and how to play the game, which is something you're NEVER required to do outside of High-End duties.
The biggest issue is when people finally understand High-End content is a different game but they still have to engage in story content to progress in the MSQ and/or keep up with their weekly tomes since their BiS is based off of both Raid Gear and Augmented Weekly Tomes Gear. These players are bored to sleep doing story content because the skill ceiling required for story content is LOWER than the skill floor required for High-End content.
So long as these two commutites have to continue to interact with each other this debate will be unending.
I understand both sides of the positional argument. When doing story content positionals is an optional optimization that can be used to keep your brain active during the content, but in High-End duties I can understand the frustrations of trying to do positionals on fights that require a lot of kiting and dodging precise mechanics.
Someone said this already and I absolutely agree, I think StormBlood was the best balance we've seen of combat complexity and class complexity.
Harders jobs are needed. Positionals are not, outdated af. Doing top was fucking boring on caster and ONLY exciting on blm for p6 and once you timelined it, it was boring as well. I then did melee in the fight and oh god it was so boring. Only monk had somewhat any opti and even then it was meh. Problem is, classes are so streamlined that once you know how to play it, you can fit the same exact rotation in almost every fight and it works just fine. Classes need some type of excitement, a lot of them are just afk gage dumps now with barely any management. Thats why EW monk was like the few exception of any complexity but that was pushing it lol.
i believe they should start thinking outside the box in job design. Every job within their roles just feels the same to me.
Two things you DO NOT want Square to do: Increase the difficulty of the game (remember what happened in Gordias)
Make jobs very difficult to play + what I previously mentioned.
I think they need to remove positionals but make the jobs more fluid and interactive. Bring back dots and more supportive abilities.
@4:00
Oh endwalker monk. God I miss it.
I've seen other games do that kind of cross job combo and it works in those games but in an mmo it might as well just be a mug-reskin. Because (in the example given) they'd have to make element resistance matter again.
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I do not agree with people arguing harder class needs more damage; as some other watchers have pointed out, look to fighting games – there are a wide breadth of extremely simple characters, and more complex/technical characters, but the complex/technical characters aren't better, and sometimes aren't even 'good', theyre just much harder to pilot. People like that design, because it is fun to learn, and you have more to master. No one cares about the reward of their character being better, they care about the reward of doing cool stuff that not just everyone can do. I think ff14 could do the same with jobs; we can have some more difficult, some much simpler, and still feel rewarded for doing cool stuff with the hard job, not rewarded with higher DPS.
i always thought positional were fine i actually didn't even really know people had a problem with them
casters have cast times that lose more damage if it gets interrupted and they have to master the .5 slide which is kinda like a positional ?
though i have no real attachment to them,
ranged dps feels kinda boring though (maybe outside of dancer).. while i dont play them all that often
sage has always been fun for me, i love the idea that if a shield i put on breaks i get to cast a bigger spell.
positionals should go because it was for a bygone era where fight design didn't have 50 thousand lasers and ground target aoes happening across 5th dimensional space