My problems with Endwalker… boring job design and oversimplicity, lack of content that provides longevity and the gearing… I love this game but I’m also an avid critic, I just want for it to push its potential further!
Once Endwalker has concluded I plan to do a fully fledged out review of the expansion, its pros and cons included!
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EW in itself is boring
You really said every problem I had after I finished the MSQ. Especially the changes to the tanks. The job fantasy on tanks are gone and it feels like I’m just changing my weapon and not tue job. I hope someday the devs would consider balancing the jobs based on there job identity.
Good for you. Stop play the game. Problem solved. Next.
Thanks for coming out and starting the conversation. I think this is a conversation that should be had, and I hope more people come out and say something.
If you find healing boring you need to play with people who make more mistakes.
You’re 100% correct. Ive been playing 14 since 3.3. I started playing WoW just for the lols after I cleared UCoB last year. If you told me a year ago that now I’d be playing WoW infinitely more than 14 I would have told you you’re insane. There’s a TON about WoW I don’t like, but every single spec I’ve tried (which is all of them except hunter’s) is fun, unique, engaging and has some level of depth beyond “roll your GCD, don’t overcap resources, press your cooldowns”. I mean healers don’t just press 1 button the whole time. Tanks actually have to guide the group, and pull enemies to different locations and their mitigation isn’t just buttons that don’t interact with anything.
If job design in 14 were as good as it was in Stormblood I’d put WoW down in an instant and not look back, but 14’s jobs just are so stale, generic, unengaging. WoW has a shitload of problems, but at least it’s fun.
As a monk main, I miss my positionals. It kept me on my toes! I'm all for making the game casual for folks. But not at the cost of jobs. If you can't hack it don't play it.
Problem is that they ONLY listen to their Japanese players when its comes to player problems
9:55 Mythic+ isn't really random. You get the same gear you typically would from the dungeon at a higher iLvl
But all it really is is the higher the key level, the more health and damage the mobs have/deal. Each week there's predetermined affixes that change how you approach the dungeon, they will alternate between Fortified (Trash mobs have more health/damage) and Tyrannical (bosses have more health/damage), then 2 more affixes depending on the key level. Finishing a dungeon faster then the designated time limit will determine how much your next key will upgrade by
As for other points of the video: The 2 minute buff window is a big reason I stopped enjoying raiding in 14. I just don't want my DPS to be in the hands of my other party members playing right and their DPS to be in my hands (save for Dancer or Astrologian for example, classes designed to support damage). A single party member's death throws off the entire party and that feels terrible
I don't mind over simplification of jobs at all, in fact I absolutely hate class complexity. I want to fight a boss, I don't want to fight a boss while fighting my rotation too. Because of personal reasons, I'm severally limited in what jobs I can play, because the jobs I can play are simple. In a game where you can play another job at the click of a button, it feels terrible feeling as limited as I am. I do have a problem with class homogenization though, like the tank situation. Every class should feel different to play, like the DPS do
I haven't touched anything other than Island Sanctuary and Crafter Relics after Endwalker. I'm in no rush for literally anything in combat content, and won't get into MSQ until 6.5. I'm just excited what Yoshi and team have cooking for this upcoming Fan Fest and Live Letter
SHB > EW in every shape & form… been saying that after about 2 months into EW, honestly the only standout thing EW brought was CC pvp mode and islands other than that everything else has been mid or trash.
ye ''lets make healers super complicated so no one will play them ''L take , this guy must be new to mmorpgs. Not everyone sitting playing online like you 24/7 the normal working person barely have so much time to play they want to use 0 braincells.
Bring TP back
To me it's got more to do with the reward structure of content they've been making, as well as the integration between different types of content.
They could've easily made it so that the relic quest gave you the option to get the items needed from criterion/ variant dungeons (or older content that they could want people engaging more with, like the ivalice raids or something), increasing interest in engaging with that particular content.
They could've done a new set of gear for criterion, or in the very least made the upgrade mats for the tomestone gear obtainable through that contents currency, since it appeals to mostly the same type of players that do High-end PvE content.
It's extremely weird how disconnected they feel from the overall PvE sphere of the game, idk. and same goes for the other new additions they've made.
it's not like they don't know how to properly do these things, they did it in shadowbringers and even in this expansion, with the pvp rewards.
Totally agree about tanks and healers, as a healer main that got pushed into dps just cause I got bored
I don't think moving 2 minutes back to 90/180 cds will affect much at all, really, other than split meta comps for speed kills based on cd alignment. I think the real issue is how bursty every dps is, and that the game needs variation in some jobs being less focused on the big 2 minute window.
I think the raid tiers are a bit more of a subjective case. Very few of the savage fights are objectively bad to me (p7s, e7s especially are flawed to me, there are some other individual things).
I was ready to be completely objective but every point raised here just be pure facts! Couldn't have summarised it any clearer than this. Thanks for making me feel seen!!! 👀
Well my biggest problem with FF14 as a whole is that we can't share glamour between each jobs, that limits so many potential combinations.
The real test is gunna be when we get to the very large content lull between 6.55 and 7.0 because in 5.x with all the stuff Bozja added I could decide to do something wild and grindy like grind all of the relic weapons and that kept me busy basically up to 6.0 launch, however with how most of the content now can be kind of breezed through same patch and just be done with it like Islands and Relics being just tomes (ive already got like half of the weapons completely caught up even doing it casually) and there being no real big grind i feel like the lull in content is going to feel awful before 7.0 comes out.
My comments
1. I think healer is one of the hardest jobs in the game as is in savage. Not rotationally, but if you added a "tank rotation" you would have a lot of issues with the rotation being broken by use of healing. On top of all of that, you are suggesting adding more buttons to healers. We absolutely don't need that, especially for controller players.
2. Saying tanks all play similarly I think is false. Thinking a warrior has a similar play style to a gnb is just crazy. One presses fell cleave on repeat, the other is a build up job with an ass load of weaving and managing the rotation to fit a specific set of abilities into no mercy. Dark has to balance their mana to use TBN and has a crazy burst. I can't talk much about PLD, but what are you even looking for? Yes, all thanks have a rotation and a similar set of mitigation with a few niche ones, but all tanks need these tools? What would you expect to change?
As far as the 2 mins burst, I kind of agree. I mean, I don't think pressing a button on a different job every 90 second instead of 120 would make it more exciting like you suggest, but I think death punishes the 2 min meta a lot and I don't love this
Everything else I agree with. Bozja/Zadnor had a lot of longevity to it end pretty much no EW side content has been able to match this, not not mention that the new relics are incredibly BORING
stormblood is better
Hoping theyre doing Major changes on this regards correctly for 7.0 since its also marking a new beginning for the story arcs
I'm pretty sure they will make changes, but if its the right one, that is the scary part most of the time, remembering what they was doing with Range DPS on HW expansion
So yeah.. fingers crossed everyone and send a LOT of feedback to forum and during live letter
Been playing since ARR Endwalker is the only expansion to feel weak in terms of gameplay content, everything is so simple now you can alt tab and clear dungeons and there is no combat zone with progression like Bozja so nothing to grind either 😢
I personally just want a little more complexity in the jobs again, like SMN didn't need to be made baby easy like it has been. Typically even the Melee DPS can be picked up pretty quickly, give some like nuance to the jobs again instead of their being a very set rotation for most of them. People having a preference for when they'd like refresh SMNs dots was nice and I feel like very few jobs still have that variety outside of maybe DNC, but thats all fight specific with them.
Oversimplicity. Yes. The only problem with this game for me. Lack of job personality. I trust Yoshi-P for 8.0 all the same anyway, let's see
White knights who think its a crime to criticize a game seem to have downvoted this video a bit. Fuck yall for being blind
The game is stale right now cause the next expansion has not come yet. The economy is in shambles and everyone wants stuff dirt cheap.
They also need to make all jobs start at lv 1 instead of making new jobs start at lv 70 or 80 etc etc for example.
I think they made the 2min meta so statics dont have higher dps than partyfinder which absolutly was the case before. Syncing the old buffs in weird ways gave a huge dps boost. More people than ever are clearing savage week 1 in PF. So the 2min meta is a huge boon for people who physically cant raid on a schedule. The price of more invested players being bored earlier is for sure worth paying. The easiest fix would be to remove raidbuffs entirely and replace them with unique personal cooldowns. That way your dps is not anymore based on how well your static spreadsheets but how well the individual player plays. The whole raidbuffs syncing thing in general is bad imo.
Very valid points but I think in some of the points you might be neglecting what most players need. For example, from my experience, a lot of my friends think the combat system is quite overwhelming already and I believe simplifying it is probably better as long as it is made to be interesting and not brain dead. Other points are also quite niche and most players don't pay much attention to these things but I do agree with much of this though
See, number one is why i will never touch endgame. For me, it’s the opposite. There’s too much ability bloat, the jobs are too complicated. There’s too much to keep track of. I just can’t do it. It’s physically impossible. I do love White Mage but i will never touch endgame content until things are simplified.
Did you mention Eureka Orthos? I don't remember at the end of the video… I think it's telling that some of the content is already able to be kinda forgotten and glossed over lol.
Yoshi-P has gone on the books saying that the current trends in job design will continue into the next expansion. He's been wrong before, of course, but it still makes me nervous about the future of FFXIV. I basically only log in for PvP (which at least has good job design–WAR, DRK, PLD, and GNB all feel functionally different instead of copies of the same job, healers have more DPS buttons than healing buttons, etc) and raiding with my static. I want to feel excited about PvE again. Criterion was fresh and promising, but as you said, has awful retention.
Island Sanctuary is neat, but I don't care for gathering/crafting content.. Hildebrand humor isn't my cup of tea, and the relic grind is non-existent. Revamping the MSQ with Trusts is cool, but I don't see myself replaying it any time soon. There's no trial questline, since it was folded into the current MSQ. I love deep dungeon, but this one feels like more of the same. All in all, there's so little for me personally to do and the act of doing it feels worse than it ever has. I think I'll always love FFXIV but I want more reasons to play it.
sounds like someone misses WoW
I think making the jobs simpler although make them boring make sense imo.
A good chunk of the player base in ffxiv is not too young and they do have works and stuff, so they might have a hard time learning hard jobs.
The ffxiv team has counter this by applying harder and harder mechanics, although the job is boring, progging is still challenging (for example, our healers although have only 1 dps button but still struggle to keep up with P10S in the mist of mechanics).
So i think simplifying the job make sense, i myself im afraid of changes that make my job harder so i have to learn it again 😂
"Evreything is viable" yes….that's true. I can say the same thing about wow, evreything is viable…but that dosen't mean it's perfect. Espically because you have to consider that unlike wow, EVREY FIGHT is a dps check in 14. And when you end up with fights like P8s where the jobs that lag behind by so much as half a % can't be taken, then it shows an issue. It also means that unlike in most other MMOs, it's hard to have differing damage profiles between jobs. Again, using wow as an example cuz it's what I have the most experience with….some classes like arms are super bursty and have all their damage focused into the execute phase of the boss (35% if you didn't know already), some are build on the idea of sustained damage over the course of a fight….14 dosen't allow for that. You can't have sustained dps jobs because, as we saw with paladin, they WILL lag behind evrey other job with proper 2 minute burst rotations, and it will be because of design. This also limits dev expression, because they KNOW evrey job has to be a job at least somewhat focused around burst. Also you brought up M+ when talking about criterions. So, to ensure you understand, M+ has no randomized stats. The only thing it does is increase the item level of already existing armor and weapons (including trinkets). The only RNG is the loot you get from the key level, as it's set in stone for each dungeon. The dungeon rotation changes evrey season so evrey season you get a new set of 8 dungeons that have M+ enabled. However, Critierion dosen't have the speed running element or affixes witch are what keep dungeons fresh and interesting. Evrey week in M+ is completely different from one another. Now….am I saying 14 should do affixes?….No. But that's a whole other can of worms. In fact, I really do fail to see the comparison between criterion and M+ as they are just completely different systems with the only remotely similiar thing about them being that they're dungeons. As for gearing, I feel like adding an alternative to savage gearing that is maybe a bit weaker (say by 5 ilvls) is fine. In fact, yes they should do it. 14 gearing is extremely stale and also very limiting in my opinion, as it just takes WAY too long to fully gear out a character in 100% bis. It's FAR too heavily time gated, to the point where it's comedical. In PvE for wow, you can gear a character in a matter of weeks if you know what you're doing. It's espically easy with the new upgrade system and being showered in currencies to upgrade with. Meanwhile, in 14 it can take 1/3rd of the entire tier to gear up and that's insane….That has to be brought down. And if you come into savage late it feels like you're always behind and can't catch up. Also, with the gear difference….just do what wow does. Wow allows you to have multiple different main stats on a single piece of gear, but the active one will be determined by your spec. So if I'm a ret paladin who goes to holy (ret uses strength, holy uses intellect), my gear just immediately swaps over to that stat. I….fail to see why this isn't the case for meele. It's really stupid to have to gear up THREE different armor types and I think they should just consolidate all meele armor into one. This isn't a game where alts are a realistic option due to the amount of content you'd have to do (even with boosts in mind) to get on par with a main, espically in the last tier of an expansion. Please just make all meele dps share a gear set and call it a day. No more striking, maiming, and scouting. Just make it striking or something….Also it's still kinda funny espically considering 99% of the time maiming is just a recolor of the tank armor.
Stormblood was the best content expansion besides story not being so well received, change my mind.
i agree that ffxiv has a myriad of gameplay problems, but i think they started WITH shadowbringers. stormblood was the peak of this game 100% in terms of gameplay and i noticed a big shift in shadowbringers when they started over simplifying jobs like machinist and all tanks and all healers. i was a healer/mch main and really enjoyed the complex and versatile rotations with mch but ill be real and say i preferred ast in shb because higher apm than just fishing for balance rr spire. dnc completely shat the balancing with phys ranged and ruined it since they felt the need to remove aoe trick attack from mch to shift it away from buffing which is why its in the sorry state its in now along with brd having reduced buffing to make way for dnc lmao. the homogenization of tanks, gutting of a rotation for healers, and dumbing down of jobs and mechanics have really put this game in the shitter for gameplay for me, and the funniest thing is the pvp changes are significantly better than anything theyve done this whole expansion. also the sad excuse for relic content still gets to me, and i assume its because people complain so much about actually playing the game, which is why bozja was so bad after first week and no one returned to it. Eureka will always be the best relic content
the game is too casual, and caters to the casual playerbase too much, that is the problem
Nah he's right about Healers. I'm new to Healers and just got to lv 32 for my Conjurer/White Mage. The rotations at first are hilariously gruelingly boring. I just hope I get a thrill before 40 or imma skip Healers
I both like and hate the two minute meta. On one hand it makes the game easier to get into for the newer or less MMO experienced players out there which is great. On the other, it's violently boring and bland for anyone that knows what they are doing.
I miss Gauss Barrel, I miss the old astro cards, I miss cleric stance, stance dancing as a tank. I miss skill expression and knowledge.
The more they simplify, the more boring it's going to get. They go the same route that WoW went some point. Job choice does not matter at all anymore.
I agree about healers, they need some remixing to help them not feel stale. I don't feel excited to press my keybinds as a healer anymore, I'm just going through the motions and spam-pressing my damage ability.
I need more exciting damage abilities to use or some type of support buffs I can throw on my allies (yes I know AST has cards, but those are extremely boring).
"It is boring to play healer outside of Ultimates" it seems from every healer main that i have talked too
There's another gripe too that a lot of people don't give too much credit. The gear treadmill–and yeah you kinda touch on this. I know, I know, people have been complaining about gear for ages, but it's really reached a head in Endwalker. I took my first Savage tier all the way up to the last half of P4S, we were an opt-in FC group and honestly weren't too bad. We were actually ahead of the curve than most at two sessions a week.
By the time we got to BiS area or anywhere close, it took so long because of a mixture of gear lockout timers, how one takes a loot hit taking a SINGULAR person who has already cleared nukes loot rates . . . we were just about BiS . . . RIGHT as the next tier was coming out. Their raiding scene in the most unintuitive, time wasting, grindy process that has no staying power. We were more organized than party finder. If party finder is WORSE in general, then some people will never BiS before that gear is already outdated.
So the arguments the raiding scene has towards how to treat raiding just aren't valid anymore besides 'you don't have to do it'.
Not having to do it doesn't mean the system should feel like crap, or that it takes so long you can never reasonably take it. You could be the best player in the best group, but if you only have an hour to play a week and not every session is a clear . . . you really don't need to be good at math to tell that that system is flawed. It's even WORSE now that everything Savage is delayed, so you have even LESS time to be BiS.
BiS is something to work towards, but when you have NO TIME to enjoy it before you're outclassed and need to do it all over again, what is the point? Especially if you're not the most social person, or need to do party finder. I asked myself this question and stopped bothering before I managed to clear the Savage tier. I felt like I was wasting my time.
Telling me 'you're tackling the content for the wrong reason' when it comes to gear and glam is not appropriate. That is the constant argument I get thrown my way, and it's so amazingly rude and disrespectful. I shouldn't be being shamed for having a goal to work towards. If I'm missing the 'social' point, that's what Limsa, randomly approaching people, and a slew of other places and ways are for. The whole process of tackling Savage is hell and punishes you for not being a social butterfly or having a goal in mind besides hanging out.