Feeling nostalgic or like doing some history digging?! In this video I go over ten features that were reasonably significant for FFXIV that over the years have been entirely removed! For some, we also discuss the benefits of the removal of said mechanic or feature!
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:30 (1) Jobs requiring 2 Classes
02:11 (2) Cross-class Actions
04:19 (3) Choosing Role Actions
05:51 (4) Crafter Cross-class Actions
07:23 (5) Tank and DPS Stances for Tanks
10:15 (6) Meaningful Pet Hotbars
11:23 (7) Converting Gear INTO Materia
11:56 (8) Missing on Same Level Mobs
12:47 (9) Mandatory Positionals
13:32 (10) TP or Tactical Points
15:19 Fun Fact
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People will call me crazy, but I actually miss the ability to cross-class things. It pushed me to try the other jobs and is how learned I actually enjoyed all of them, except WAR. I really love WAR now, though.
I want more class's with exp synk like SMN and SCH, is too good to lvl up!
Weirdly cross class actions still exist for gatherers
I have the miner node detector in my botanist hotbar and vice versa but i keep changing jobs to do it anyway
In earlier EW you still had to pick a few from a selection that would cross over but now you can have them all? Not sure when it was changed
I wish they were still unlocked across jobs for those in the same role
Leveling a new tank then realizing you don't have reprisal or arm's length at the end of a wall to wall is bad for blood pressure
…Wait. Is THAT why Dragoon takes so long to get the buttons of it's AoE combo!? Because TP used to be a concern? 😑
I find it funny how many times veteran players will mention an old removed feature, the sprouts will respond with "wow, that sounds so interesting, I wish it still existed" and watch every older player in the room go "god, no, it was terrible!". So much game design sounds cool only in theory, never in practice…
This game played way more like Tactics at launch
Weird for a real time game
With 2.0 Black Mage learning mediocre skills like Convert (trading HP for MP), Freeze (an utterly useless AOE), and Apocatastasis (an elemental resistance buff) in its early levels while locking you out of cross-class skills like Cure and Protect it wasn't hard to see why staying Thaumaturge was the better option until higher levels.
I lost count of how many things were cut from the game… really sad times we are living. They transformed this game into the most generic experience ever. No matter what you play, it feels the same. We will end up with only one ultimate and one class at this rate.
I miss ultimatum. Idk when I'd use it, but I like the idea of having it.
I remember all of these since I've been playing since like patch 2.2 and I can't say I miss any of them aside from having actual pet management. It made Summoner feel super unique having to actively manage your pets between trash, bosses and world content. Especially in ShB when your pet actions gave you charges of Ruin IV so there was some depth to using pet actions vs spending your Ruin IV stacks for your burst.
The old job system also drove me up a wall, since while I miss having jobs/classes I had no interest in ever playing, it was usually the case that the job I didn't want to play was required to get a job I did. So in order to play BLM, I had to level Archer, which I hated for its one button rotation and mediocre damage.
This was even worse with the cross class skills since, like you said, most jobs had mandatory actions which exacerbated the above issue, since it meant that you had to play even more of a job you might not enjoy. For example, Blood for Blood was unlocked at level 33 or so, so you had to basically go unlock Dragoon in the process of progressing to doing any sort of raid content as a melee DPS.
Very nice list. You perfectly said why some of these things MAY seem cool on paper, in practice it was either players not bothering or the actual management being tedious made for good reasons why these things were changed or removed. This is the illusion of choice MMO (and not just MMO players sometimes fall into. Oh look at all these role actions I can choose from! Look at this massive talent tree. The sad truth is, the majority will go for the 'strongest' meta picks and stay with those unless something gets changed in a path.
Videos like these put things in a good perspective I think, just because you had more buttons to press doesn't mean it's suddenly meaningful! Good design isn't based solely on lots of skills to press and manage.
When I first unlocked BLM and I saw the ARC requirement, I assumed it was Arcanist rather than archer. It was an interesting shock
Honestly a lot of these are ideas that would be fine in a single-player title, where suboptimal builds are sometimes a fun challenge, but in a coop-focused mmo anything that is clearly suboptimal or is unintuitive negatively impacts other people and thus becomes way, way worse for it.
…Not crafter cross-class actions. That was just shit given that even now crafters take a long fucking time to level. Which, while doubtlessly the point at the time given 2.0's design paradigms, still ain't great.
Not sure how much of a hot take this is by I really miss tanks stances. I started in stormblood and played WAR and DRG so maybe I was spoiled but it felt so good swapping and communicating with friends to balance the enmity while maintaining enmity on myself and rushing through. It alongside with SE making bosses rush back to middle or certain spots during attack and the massive hitboxes have all culminated into tanks being dps but with simpler rotations and occasionally using provoke. I can see the issues with the tanks stance but they could def have fixed it.
Role actions now being something every job has I think is more good but also…. Kinda also useless and a relic. They honestly should ditch the role actions and give more unique actions to each job instead of the same skill to all jobs of each role.
Last thing I would say is I honestly feel like mp could be ditched too at this point. While a single health bar might look awkward and black mages entire job is to manage mana the other casters I find rarely ever have to touch lucid almost ever except in odd scenarios like red mages having haste gear in bozja. That and if they did ditch the mana bar black mages could just….. have another bar like red mages already do anyways where they swap between fire and ice management instead of mp. Same concept different style. Less concerned about mp going away but its a thought considering how little of an impact it has.
I remember playing like 9 years ago and the jobs felt fun.. now it feels boring.. I don't know why since I just quit when I got a few classes to 90
When I was new to FF14, the class vs job system and how the cross-class system worked alongside confused me, so I tried both. My verdict at the time: "The job stone passively gives extra stats just for being equipped, so a job is better". Job stones still give extra stats today. Try it out if you've never noticed!
Good I started to play FFXIV in ShB lol
This video is very similar to one someone else made…
Panic buying during the Calamities hit Eorzea so hard there's not a single roll of TP left to be seen.
I heard back then. A tank Who raid and a tank Who doesn't have a vastly different rotations. Probably Se saw that as a problem Thus the simplifications. A lot of the casuals will not rise up to the challenge. They will just quit… So from business perspective, these simplifications make a lot of sense
Ah, I rejoined just after TP was removed. Good times—using Sprint, going "OH SHOOT" and then realizing that TP wasn't a thing. I do remember that I was equally confused by no cross-class actions and two classes for one job. Usually as soon as I unlocked airship travel, I'd unlock the class I needed just so I didn't have to later. Imagine my surprise hitting 30 on the main job and it just giving me the job quest, lol. What a time.
I don't miss Accuracy. I also don't miss Morale. The PvP win harder stat. They can stay in the pit of never returning.
Also, elemental resistance still technically exists. It's just hidden and basically doesn't matter anymore(look at any fight that plays with a specific resist down).
I COMPLETELY forget Paladins had raise (even though it wasn't as useful) and that makes me sad, it's good thing i've been able to fulfil that role in Bozja recently to get a healer oriented paladin.
I never got to experience tp but I'll always miss it! I wish I could have the choice to dump my resources versus having to stick to rotations! D:
I started mid Stormblood. I never got to make it to endgame by the time Shadowbringers released but I remember running dungeons and being so confused about using TP replenishing actions on the tanks during trash pulls lmao.
Can we make a video about the way removing some entire game mechanics made the game worse? One of my least favorite things about XIV recently it how deconstructed the game in favor of balance/simplicity, but a majority of game mechanics added a lot of nuance that made the game more fun/ interesting.
Missing fire 1 gives me PTSD
If I could still pick role actions, I would replace foot graze (I think that's the bind) any day. Hm… bloodbath seems a good choice… totally not copium
Man, I'm glad I missed the mandatory positional and TP phases of the game, that stuff would have gotten me to give up playing melee DPS real fast.
Guessing Archer to Black Mage is for aiming your spells, things like Focus; it sort of makes sense, especially with how in-depth FF14 can get with its lore sometimes
I know its not really connected with this video,but i just wanna say a huge THANK YOU for all the guides and videos you are making,me being a sprout your videos on classes,in game mechanics etc etc are really helping me a lot, keep rocking my dude, i hope in the next year you will get a big boost of subscribers <3
Remember when Black Mages used to put level up points into Piety to min/max mana usage between ice phases (also the fact that piety gave mana back then).
rapid synthesis is pretty much essential for expert recipes
I feel like Tank stances could have worked.
The issue was that aggro management was up to other jobs, instead of up to the tank and that you could still comfortably tank in a Dps stance.
Crazy Idea but I'd actually love if tanks got Dps stances while being the designated OT while the MT should use a tanking stance and be able to go into Dps stance when they don't have to manage aggro. (Only tank Jobs should manage it!), Dps stance should have a 0.5x damage modify while in tanking stance tanks should get x3 (whole having bonus defence ect). The stances should be ogcd with a 15s recast. To make switching fluid.
You could add intresting differences in how a OT and MT feels, with this approach.
Something that was miserable at the time but kinda funny in retrospect about TP back then was playing as a monk, who already had the fastest native gcd thanks to greased lightning, and then getting hit with that AST card that lowered the gcd even further and immediately burning through your entire TP reserves. As a MNK main I don't miss TP management, but I do sometimes miss the shenanigans.
I remember accidentally hitting sprint on a physical class and then having no TP to use weaponskills…
Good riddance.
Talking about tank damage/tank stances and not covering Cleric Stance?
For Shame!
God i remember back in arr and hw i always hated having a blm in my party because of how easy it was for them to steal aggro forcing me to stay in my tank stance
Part of me still misses TP, or at least the concept of TP being an MP like resource that non-magic jobs needed to manage. It felt a little more organic than the super strict locked in 2 minute rotations we have now and I'd actually like to see it brought back in some form even for just a single job. Heck, if they didn't want to bring TP back they could even just make a melee job that uses MP similar to how Dark Knight used to.
But Sprint eating your TP was and will always be stupid. That can stay in the graveyard forever.
"We don't use raid synth that much anymore" cries in expert recipes and failing rapid synth 4 times in a row
I just love the fact that threat for tanks was enchanced since 2.0. Tanking back then kind of sucked, spec for paladins. dps had to wait 5-10 sec's to start attacking or they'd pull mobs off even the best of tanks. Nowadays, all a tank needs to do to hold aggo is just look at the mobs lol jk.
I'm surprised you didn't mention healer stances with your tank stances. I don't remember a DPS having a stances, but I remember cleric stance (unlocked as WHM and cross class with SCH). It would swap the user's current Intelligence and Mind stats, while increasing potency of attack spells by 10% and reducing potency of healing spells by 20%. If the healer forgot to remove this stance, their heals were very weak because it dropped their mind value to base value of intelligence and gave you the 20% potency loss.
There was also a stat bonus system where you could add points to your stats main stats like STR, MND, INT, DEX, VIT, and I forgot what the MP one was called. Most of the time it was very basic. NIN and BRD used DEX, melee DPS (not NIN) used STR, mage DPS used INT, Tanks used VIT or STR or both, and healers used MND. If you wanted to change where your bonus stats points were going to, you would have to buy The Keeper's Hymn with GC seals that would reset your stats. The issue was ACN (Arcanist). ACN split up into SCH (healer) and SMN (mage DPS). When you apply the stat bonus, it applies it to the class and not the job. That means if you wanted to play SCH but were on SMN and all your stats are set to INT, you would have to use Keeper's Hymn to reset your stats so you can apply it to MND so you are not nerfing your SCH. Same thing when going from SCH to SMN. Some people just split the stats up between MND and INT so it wouldn't hurt the jobs as much, and they wouldn't have to buy and carry The Keeper's Hymn as often. Then you had people like me that would forget to switch the bonus stats over when switching from SMN to SCH or vise versa. To be honest, I am SOOO glad they removed this and I did not miss this one bit. I loss a lot of GC seals because of this, but at the time, I would only get GC seals just to buy The Keeper's Hymn.
I was genuinely thinking about the positional change today during dailies. I main NIN and srarted playing towards the end of Shadowbringers, but my FC was doing EXes and Coils at min ilvl before Endwalker came out and I remember that always hitting our positionals and knowing when to use True North was pretty important. Our Samurai still had Kaiten too, and she was really good at using those abilities to always deal max damage. I dont want most of these things back but honestly I kind of do want the old positionals.
If I recall you'd get CNJ for the Shield it provided a nice thing to have as a cloth wearing caster during leveling solo