GO CHECK OUT OUR DISCUSSION ON VIT’S CHANNEL ABOUT GEARING AND GEAR DESIGN HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMWBczn6124
Huge thanks to@99_Vit for jumping into a call with me to discuss a few things! In this video, we talk about job design and where we might go from here in future patches and expansions!
CHECK OUT @99_Vit !!!
YT: https://www.youtube.com/@UC27z3vE0HXI_Sg8IPOXXaag
TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/99_vit
Join the Forum! : https://discord.gg/KNPAMbJ6YE
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Please keep in mind that Final Fantasy XIV is a live game that is constantly undergoing adjustments. All information in this video is subject to change by the development team of FFXIV.
The Balance Discord Server: https://discord.gg/thebalanceffxiv
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Outro Song: Strange Fantasy – Chaxti
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound
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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Introduction(s)
2:40 The Pros and Cons of XIV’s Job Design
11:00 Concerns About 8.0 and Beyond
30:00 Talking About Current Jobs
1:20:53 Let’s Talk Future Jobs!
1:29:35 7.1 and Some Closing Thoughts
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Two of my fave newer XIV content creators? Time to get some good food and sit down and watch❤
They need to figure it out before the game goes stale. Never thought i'd say that, but my god am I bored with the jobs :(.
Yaaay, saw the collab on vit's channel earlier, so im excited for this one
I truly don’t think we need new jobs atm. I would prefer the team gives 100% of their attention to the current jobs to improve their identity and then introduce new jobs. If this expansion proved anything it’s that, even with 2 new jobs, it’s still difficult to overlook all the flaws of the prior classes.
Idk, I dont feel a lot of jank with sch fairy. It used to be really bad, but i havent had a problem with it for a while
insane take: I don't think Yoshi-P fundamentally understands how to make gameplay feel like Final Fantasy. I see this in XIV and XVI. The gameplay he comes up with is absolutely solid, with room for improvement, but it's not Final Fantasy-y enough. The set dressing, the humor, the characters, the style, that's all Final Fantasy, but there's a bit of a lack of choices to make other than which ability are you using second, which is third, repeat. I think Pictomancer is the most successful job that feels very open to making choices and having options, and being able to account for that strategy feels good. Anyway when is puppetmaster
As a melee dps main i just wish there was a little pling or ding when you hit a positional, theres no feedback if youre in a obscure position, it would actively encourage more dps to hit their positionals too
i just wish if we getting to next expac, all jobs would just have some job class rebirth like going back to lvl1 but an upgraded version of the job, or new weapon type and maybe shuffle some roles to make the entire experience fresh and unique. I'd be so happy to have a dual wielding axe warrior and maybe a tank Monk and Dragoon, then a FF16 inspired melee summoner, with spell slinging Gunbreaker and a summoner type Machinis (instead of shooting a gun, its just casting and summoning turets or robots)
I've played the game all the way back through the jank of the job/subjob system of FFXI all the way through to FFXIV's current iteration (including FFXIV 1.0 for a number of months but before they introduced the jobs to that version). I am a career tank and for me the real hey day of the role was during 3.0 and 4.0 where tank stance dancing was the norm and it was genuinely quite interesting balancing defence and offensive stances (particularly with WAR and DRK although PLD kind of suffered a little but but was still perfectly viable but had to optimise being close to the enemy as much as possible under sword stance).
The change that felt the worst for me was the simplification and streamlining of the tank and healer roles from 5.0. They did this with the promise of more interesting battle mechanics to make up for the simplification but I haven't felt or seen either so far and the additions to tanks in 6.0 and 7.0 were even more powerful defencive CDs (so we can be even more invincible) and another button or two to the offensive rotation (or revision of the rotation in the case of PLD). Hate management and defence/offense management effectively disappeared and I dont feel the battle mechanics have gotten more interesting. Job simplification helps encourage more people to take the role but once you get to the upper end, I dont feel there is any "moments of glory" for tanks…I just feel like I am a subpar dps that hold the mobs attention, absorb tank busters and provide some party defensives. Even things like cover got nerfed so that it wasnt really any fun to use anymore (I LOVED Hallowed ground + Cover (before the Cover nerf) on main tank…one of the unique things to bring PLD for) along with rarely needing to interrupt anything (Shield bash is still so incredibly pointless) or do anything else other than hit the mob like a wet noodle (compared to DPS) and shield the party.
Fun is slowly being sapped from the role in the name of balance. While balance is great…I just feel like there isn't any excitement in the tank role anymore.
Imagine if positional attacks actually did something positive other than force positioning.
Oh wait they did, they allowed dragoons to execute two extra combos… and it was removed and automatically applies because casual players couldn't do it.
They have to stop dumbing the game down to the level of pre-schoolers and realize that people that PLAY the game, want to be challenged. The challenge doesn't have to be hard, but it has to be better than letting the job play itself on auto-pilot.
Personally, I think they should move to making each job in a role have specific strengths and weaknesses that are very distinct and push maining a role, maybe guve a big leveling buff to jobs in the same role for each that is levelled or something. And then make content that strongly favors different ones, so that as long as the spread of mechanics has about the same amount favoring each of the jobs, they would still technically be balanced without effectively being the same. I think the homogenization issue is really down to the idea that all jobs have to be able to do all content at the same level instead of how jobs work in mainline games where one boss may be weaker to casters, or susceptible to ailments, or buffs allow you to exploit a certain phase or something so you are meant to switch up your comp fight to fight. And I think raideide damage buffs ahould go, because they force all the jobs to have the same timings and basically all the the jobs except BLM are burst jobs now. If they all didn't need to sync up, they could have very different feeling rotations and a lot wouldn't have this feeling of "What can they even add?" since they wouldn't need to fit this 2 minute burst, filler, minor burst, filler formula.
19:09 This is what I have been saying. I got pretty tired of people saying the level 100 dungeons were "soooo much harder" this time around. Once people got even the slightest bit of gear it has all been trivialized again.
Boss design and job design are intrinsically tied.
If jobs have more interesting tools, boss mechanics can be more varied and interesting.
So I truly started in DT and have played a few things into the 50s and 60s but really only 3 or 4 job into the 90s and 100. I started the game knowing I wanted to do high end raiding (progging m4s!) So I'm not the best to talk about long term game mechanics. BUT! One thing worth considering is the new player experience. I've been saying it since before I played 14: this game won't die because of a bad expansion and a mass exodus, it will die because it can't bring in new players. The MSQ is the single biggest barrier to entry with this game. I tell friends all the time NOT to play it unless they want to buy a skip or spend 500 hours in single player before they can start working on current content. "The old content is still good!" Yeah but no one is progging the eden raids and by the time you got a group you could be halfway through EW. The only solution I can come up with that they MIGHT do is to give 1 story skip per account with each expansion. (They're never going to shorten the msq) so that loops back into making the jobs TOO complex. I understand that as long term players it gets boring when the next 10 levels aren't game changers but that has to be balanced with new player experience. I dont have a solution to this or even an idea really, just something that I think is worth keeping in mind.
There needs to be a middle ground between homogenization and uniqueness because they cant be to unique to be alienated like hw or too ultra homogeneous like shb – ew
Biggest thing holding a Job design back is raid design. They decided to build every single extreme, savage and ultimate behind the same design: DPS check.
When the raids have DPS check, it automatically force devs to make jobs on par DPS wise and that is the only deciding factor if Job is good or bad.
They could make some jobs have more interesting skills like giving paladin more party shields and heals or make GNB ultimate dmg dealer, but ofc the GNB is going to be number one pick every single time bcs it has more DPS. Its just dumb when in the game with holy trinity tanks and healers are compared trough their dmg and not how they fill their specific role.
Hard to say how DPS jobs could be made more interesting. Maybe have some pseudo tank/healer Jobs? I dont know.
As MMORPG, FF14 is failing so hard. Don’t get me wrong, the story up till EndWalker is great, one of the best, but in terms of RPG elements, the game has removed so many elements and homogenised things that it just feels like an arcade game now
Jobs all feel and play the same with just different effects. Stats does not matter when all you chase is iLvl, no way customise skillsets. Character development is just boring af. Even the boss fights feel so bloody repetitive, again feels like an rhythm game than an RPG.
Itemisation sucks so bad, every gear is replaced in 3 months, there are NO aspirational, long term goal gear that lasts for years. Even ultimate gear is just flashy shit.
It’s gonna die if nothing is done, the game is wayyyy too simplified and dumbed down. YoshiP keeps making wrong decision, he needs to pass the baton to someone else to helm the game. Homogenising and systems and gameplay elements in name of BALANCE is stupid.
Or heck, even maybe couple it with a controller vibration for direct hits? Personally i think that would be cool, as a toggle of course.
"What if everybody was a DPS?" well take a look at Guild Wars 2, they did that at launch and then on the first expansion introduced specs that where specialized at healing and then eventually rebalanced the game into having healing and buffing roles.
I think what FFXIV could do is introduce per role per expansion skill choice, like imagine if they introduced for the next expansion something where they give you 6 skills to choose from where you can only pick 2 and is only usable on that expansion and on that specific role you are playing.
So like for Healers there could be:
– DOT
– Direct Damage
– Barrier Skill
– Pure Heal
– Mobility skill
– Mitigation skill
And then you could pick 2 of them, so with White Mage/Astro you could pick the barrier skill, and Scholar/Sage could pick the Pure Heal skill if you like you needed the extra healing. Or if you are playing dungeon and feel like you don't need any utility you could pick the extra damage skills.
So you could pick something that could patch a hole in your job or double up on what makes your job strong.
This is just a brief example and hopefully the devs could introduce things that are very interesting, and something that brings a bit of customization for the player without overwhelming their own workload for future expansions.
24:00 – "What if everyone was a DPS" – This would be the absolute worst idea possible, and I hate it every time anyone mentions it, you aren't the first. Some of us like playing Healers/Tanks and not DPS, so "everyone's a DPS Job" doesn't work. I tried GW2 and the lack of the Trinity actually put me off. Everyone being a DPS was boring, bland, and annoying, so I didn't bother sticking with it for that reason. (Yes yes, I know at high levels they adopted it in some expansion, but it wasn't baseline, so hated it). Specs could be interesting, but I'm not sure how it would work well, especially since they removed AST's stances (which KINDA were specs…)
30:30 – I don't get the SMN hate. It's the only DPS Job in the game I really enjoy. I dabble in RDM and want to get better at it, but it's just so hard to actually track with the UI unless you smack the Job gauge in the middle of the screen. SMN is the one DPS Job in the game I like since there's little to track and the rotation is a closed loop that's easy to keep your place in. It's more like playing an ARPG like Zelda games or something where you aren't constantly looking at your hotbars at CDs or gauges or debuff/buff timers. You just can play the game. That's so fun to me and I wish there were more Jobs like it. The only other similar ones are Healers (Healer main here) and PLD, specifically, which also has a modular rotation like SMN, though you still have to monitor FoF/Req CDs. I don't want to say you guys have bad takes…but some of you guys' takes I…don't like. XD Like 33:20 he says Tanks and Healers are boring, but they're what I like. That said:
I 100% agree the pure/barrier Healer split has been an utter failure and needs to be revoked. AST is half a barrier healer with Collective and Neutral Sect, so WHM is the only one that's left out in the cold at this point. And it happens to be the most played healer in the game, meaning when it can't do that, it means lots of parties are waiting one a barrier healer. It's just dumb. It's not like they even need a LOT, just 1 more party mit for AST and 3 for WHM would get them close to SGE.
THAT SAID: I will say I don't play SCH much anymore, but it's because I hate Energy Drain optimization. Most players who really get into healers say SCH is the only one that's still complex enough to keep them going. So if you made the changes you suggest, it would kill a lot of healers as a role in this game.
I…really think you guys need to talk to more people with more viewpoints, because some of your takes are…out there. Your DPS takes are probably fine, as I suspect you guys are DPS mains, but you REALLY need to talk to Tank/Healer mains about Tanks/Healers.
Cannoner from ffta2
I had similar thoughts on the materia system. I kind of think they need to take advantage of that. Take some of the materia from ff7 and make news ones. Could be as simple as a special materia slot in the weapon. Like a double slash materia that modifies your auto-attack or a reflect materia that has a chance to proc whenever you use a defensive skill.