Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker, going over the good and bad points of accessibility, with my conclusion at the end and a something like special.
First attempt at a documentary style video so its probably rough around the edges, just wanted to try something new so go easy on me! But feedback is also appreciated, I hope you enjoy though!
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Agreed, especially about the point of third eye, which is why I am a bit sad they added another second to it. While I in no way think it was necessarily bad, third eye introduced a decent amount of skill that was in no way required and the change just makes it easier. Keeping kaiten also made third eye harder to use since it would require a double weave as usually, it meant you forgot to use it a GCD before.
Also on button blot, many other people have said this but there are a lot of new buttons they introduced that are not necessary and could have been just been an upgrade on an old button.
(Shoha + Shoha 2) ( Hissatsu Guren and Hissatsu Senei) (Ogi Namikiri on Ikishoten),
as a WHM main i feel pretty bad SAM us healers have lost quite a bit, RIP aero 3 and fluid aura and literally everything else we have lost, and even if for example aero 3 wasnt a good move at least it was another button to press. as WHM you only press like 6 buttons anyways so its not like I fully understand button bloat but i think id rather have a long rotation and more buttons than a short rotation and few buttons. just my thoughts but ive only played healer(WHM & SCH) and DNC and i wouldn't say either suffer from button bloat too much so i havent really seen the "other side if the coin" so to speak
I feel like the patch and job changes were a net positive (pld/drk/whm ect.), I've only really played samurai casually so i don't mind the change but i can understand why people are upset about it.
It's pretty hard to have 5 melee dps while making each feel different from one another, i feel like all of them are way similar. Compared to something like the difference you'd find in casters or healers. That a lot of dps are lacking a strong support other then "give party more damage and do slightly less damage then sam, to make up for that". That with stuff like Ninjas trick attack being changed and mugs a 120… really bugs me it feels like they want all the jobs to feel very similar because that's far easier to balance.
I just think there are enough jobs now that they should have 1 accessible option and 1 high skill, high reward job with the rest falling in between. I've played for a long time, since ARR, so seeing stuff like the SAM or SCH changes that almost penalize the small differences they had in the name of button bloat for the former or just because SCH is the only healer with an interesting utility, it sucks. Accessibility should mean there are easier options, it shouldn't mean every player should be able to play every job well at all costs, like RDM exists, we don't need SMN to be so braindead in the name of accessibility, we have jobs like DRG and RPR, SAM doesn't need to be cut down when most players find enjoyment from the simple act of managing Kenki with Kaiten. I really do not like how many things are being changed in the name of accessibility when none of the jobs are so hard any player can't learn them if they actually play it a while and either way, you only even need to have the rotation super down in Savage content so if random casuals can't grasp Kaiten, it really doesn't matter most of the time because they're not gonna be out here doing Savage if they can't even learn a rotation.
As getting older to pick up a mmorpg, i choose a job that i comfort of playing higher than it represents myself…
You only know you improved through ACT lol. which is illegal btw
Why wasnt Tsubame integrated into iajutsu? it was the most logical solution instead of removing kaiten
Healers ran into this issue in 5.0. Easy to learn, but boring to master.
Take this with a grain of salt as my highest job is 66 and only just getting into storm blood content so it might not be relatable to people at end game.
I feel how ff14 handles level syncing is the main problem. I've had this issue while leveling my alt job ninja that's level 46 where every time I do a roulette my rotation changes. A vast majority of my dungeon runs I've not even had access to my 3rd combo skill let alone any of my mudra. How exactly is someone going to learn how to play their job if more often than not you lose access to the things you should be learning? I've done 1 dungeon that I could use the ten mudra even though I have access to chi and jin.
On my level 53 samurai I did a leveling roulette and only had access to two of my Sen stickers, so unless I'm wrong I was putting up my dot(1 sen) and spamming my 2 sen aoe ability on single target, which felt wrong.
Always add to the rotation never take away, if level scaling changed I think there would be less to worry about in regards to accessibility.
They honestly seem very concerned with keeping the skill ceiling low, which I think is stupid because I’m fairly sure all normal content can be accomplished with even awful dps and even the best DPS player cannot carry a group if the tank and healer are awful. I really have no idea why they want minmaxing to be accessible to everyone.
As a SAM main my biggest issue with the changes is that they didnt need to happen, the job was in a good place and had no need for skills to be taken away in order to "eliminate bloat". My two cents in all this is that most of these type of decisions are made with PS players in mind since they are limited to how many buttons they can fit into a controller before it becomes unmanageable which is the crux of having a dual platform cross play game, this also hinders graphics updates, engine reworks…etc. As Im sure many have mentioned before in threads and in your video they could have eliminated this issue by combining skills into one button which they have done for other jobs before and its the direction the devs will be forced to follow as the game continues to develop; since with each new expansion the players have come to expect changes to their job, whether it be animation changes or new skills to learn and weave into their respective rotations they will be forced to remove or consolidate and both options carry an inherent risk of changing/removing the core identity of any job and possibly taking away what drew people to it in the first place.
Zenos saw this coming that is why he doesn't main SAM anymore
I saw that double higanbana <.<
This video really made me want rdm to be a much more complicated job
Give me some choice, maybe some white/black magic paths that lead to different combo finishers. Imagine doing a combo with 30/70 instead of 50/50 and you get a certain buff. Same for 70/30 and even 100/0. Could be crit, haste, etc.
Obviously I see the problems with this, but that'd be a fun concept.
hot take: this game has a bigger problem: people getting to end game raids and not knowing things like a stack marker, a gaze attack, the game literally telling you "its head comes off?!" and players still failing to perform the mechanic.
too many times i see players run with a stack marker at level 90, or not be able to LOOK around the arena to see the attack coming, i thought that Shadowbringers did a good job teaching players that you NEED to watch the CAST BAR and learn the animations, but players reacted with " that AoE casts too fast, how can i avoid it?!"
EDIT: this shit is why i REFUSE to heal randoms, SE lost a healer because i will not heal while they allow players to get to the end game and die to basic and easy to avoid attacks, too many times i've got raged by players who died because THEY messed up.
I'm gonna miss that Kaiten flourish animation…
Everyone is talking about Kaiten, but 4 second third eye is the true thing that took away depth. Kaiten is very easy to manage and usually lines up automatically. Third Eyes bring longer now means that it is pretty much expected now that a SAM play sucks up every raidwide.
When there is an objective, “best” opener or rotation it can be hard to see variations to that rotation as just that- they become mistakes. I know that is a big stop gap for me personally, as a more casual player
The goal imo should generally be "low skill floor, high skill ceiling", aka "easy to learn, hard to master"
People are so upset about the loss of a singular button from SAM, claiming that there's a loss of complexity and decision making. Pressing one button when it's available before Iajutsu is really that big of an accomplishment? It lowers the skill ceiling? Really? Let's talk about the level of accomplishment from fitting a 9th GCD into a No Mercy window on GNB by properly fitting gear with materia and timing your skills perfectly, before we go into how the loss of a singular OGCD that is literally a single button in the SAM rotation destroys the entire player experience.
I don't think the comparison to souls like really works here. The big difference being tough Souls enemies have different ways you can approach the fight where as a class in an MMO only has one optimized rotation that you must follow or you risk not getting the numbers you need to beat the boss's enrage timer. The challenge in Souls games are much more flexible than MMOs in nearly every aspect except one thing which is memorization of boss mechanics through trial and error which has little to do with the class.
It honestly feels like they are shifting away from class complexity and moving towards having more complex fights.
Abilities and rotations in FFXIV are honestly really overcooked, first and foremost for DPS. I can't think of another MMO that has overdesigned their kits the way FFXIV has. And honestly these changes are so conservative and minimal the hysterics are themselves maddening. Like, there are 0 out 1000 instances where, with Mirage Dive up, a DRG would use Jump/High Jump over Mirage Dive. So there's literally no reason for them to be separate activated abilities in lieu of the change they made. Same with Bard – Pitch Perfect is a button with literally no purpose without Wanderer's up, so what is the point of needing to set and memorize separate binds for them? None. At all.
The SAM change is one I'm pretty agnostic on. In hindsight what they might have wanted to do is merge Kaitan and Shinten and make one proc the other. Yes, a proc. Square Enix, you are allowed to incorporate those in job design. They aren't cursed. You've done it recently, DNC has it, there's a couple conditions where they come up, Bard has it under one of the song buffs can proc a CD reset on an action, etc. But you could use this a lot more liberally. Like, what if Shinten had a chance to proc Kaiten and Kaiten was available for, I dunno, 6 seconds or 8 seconds in which you could plan on getting it off on whatever the most potent ability you can use in that time? And it's the same action, if it procs, Shinten becomes Kaiten?
Stubid bastards just killed job.
I HOPE things like button bloat or how busy the job play is some kind of optional experience players get to choose for themselves (for example a merge buttons setting so people can decide they want to be busy moving their fingers a lot or not) but I heard that they're trying to reduce button bloat for controller players anyway right? an MMO mouse user like me welcome the changes 'cause moving my thumb too much hurt sometimes LMAO
Bloat is def a problem for some jobs. I don’t think taking out a few abilities makes them easier. It just makes them flow more in combat. I think most difficult content is not primarily memorizing the buttons, it’s memorizing the boss patterns. I’ll never understand why people want a job to feel like you need to study it for a long time just to get good. Since we have access to all jobs and some people want to play them all, I think simplifying some stuff is fine. Some people want this to feel like a fighting game. Btw, Kaiten ain’t gone forever, it’s in PVP now. 😉
Yeah, we are starting to creep into wow territory where everything feels the same except one or two jobs. It's a shame because I don't even think the jobs need that much work to improve them. Using SMN as an example, since many are saying it's much more accessible, especially indicated by the triple growth in players for the job instead of being a niche dot job
SMN literally just needs one or two things that increase the flexibility and options using the already existing mechanics. Which will allow it to have a more open ended rotation. Still keeping a simple rotation available, but allowing optimization at the top end. This would come in the form of spell speed being even more impactful on bahamut and phoenix cooldowns and allowing you to build more than one crystal for each of the three basic summons. Basically allowing you to skip one in that rotation and save it for later, opening up options for other ability's to be weaved into the rotation. Add maybe one or two OGCDS and a second basic attack and you essentially make SMN actually use the differences in each of the summons. With one having super long cast, but high damage, the other two having insta casts but drastically different cooldowns. You don't really take advantage of how they implemented it as much as we should. You can kind of take advantage of it situationally atm but the rotation is always 3 summons in-between a big burst summon. Which the only thing that didn't change for SMN was aether flow. So basically just expand how aether flow works and you have a better class. Applying this same thought process to every class I think would solve the accessibility problem, but I just don't think they are even making the attempt and instead focusing on homogenizing everything and lowering APM requirements to get the higher ends of damage. Which I understand to a point but they've been taking it to far as of recent.
Instead of separating casual and high skill jobs you can have both in one. I just think people assume that it's too hard to balance or make but then we look at BLM and it's obviously not. Obviously the meme that Yoshi Ps class has the best development behind it exists but unironically. I wish every class got the same care as BLM.
Edit: Just as a side. They really need to kill the whole one aoe counterpart for every single target attack thing they've started putting on every class. It's honestly garbage and unneeded the majority of the time. That's where the major ability bloat problem comes from, not having tons of unique OGCDS or abilities. I think it's leading to poor design decisions as well like adding more trash that doesn't really do anything but have a lot of health and adding adds to mechanics where it just feels like an excuse to use the AOE rotation. Using Mt. Gulg as an example because I did it recently. There is an abundance of trash that you just crowd around the door trash and aoe them down. It just looks like a mess when doing it and almost seems a way to justify the winding paths to each boss. They could instead keep the door trash but have it progressive move backwards as we damage it down. It's an actually unique mechanic that justify the path to each boss and is visually interesting
I actually miss the cross class skills. Like goddamn. How watered down are the jobs gonna be?
BLM imo is best job design but it wont make it my favorite. Many factors affect on job enjoyment.
imo not every job should be accessible to everyone or new players like i do think some jobs should be inaccessible because you cant make 1 job fit every single player and i think verity in job accessibility or difficulty is key some jobs should be easy some hard some in between and some jobs should be hard to learn easy to master or easy to learn hard to master or both hard or both easy and tbh if they keep dumbing down everything whats the point to even play anymore the fun will simply disappear and the game will become really repetitive
"Is hard and you think of giving up."
Exactly this happened by me with all caster classes at lvl 75.
I started as a black mage. First, i thinked he was a little boring. Because of the lack of skills, the need to stand still and the lack of aoe (you had fire 2 to the third doungen, by the first two, you had only ice 2, what ws useless). Later one, he was ok, when i had more skills to use.
Because of my fast leveling, i began to lvl up the summoner/scholar to and later on the dancer. But the black mage was the class, i liked the most (even, when i used the other classes more for the story).
Than came lvl 75 and the 75er doungen and i died each time by the first boss for many times. Simply, because i has lost the overview of my skills. I was more busy to lock, wich skills had a proc, and i can use, than i had time to watch the fight and what was happened around me.
This problem was by each caster at that point. And even when i liked the caster, i gived them up and started the ninja and later the monk. Because, they was easier to managing and was faster.
I came only back to the casters, after i had a break of ff and reorganized the skill positions of each caster.
Intimitading jobs are for me the tanks and healers.
Because, that are the jobs, wher you can easily screw up the whole run by playing bad. And, because i dont like to stand in the spot (what i do as the tank^^).
Personally I am one of those who really enjoys complexity and decision making. I find great satisfaction of learning and mastering complex rotations and playstyles simply because Im wired that way and get bored when its too easy. With that said I also understand that not everyone likes this approach and gets frustrated rather than motivated.
couldnt agree more….. they really ruined the SAM for everyone that wanna play it at high level… they just thing about those casual players, they wanna make everything playable by 10 years old kids, but they are gonna ruin the experience of a more "dedicated" playerbase
In case of kaiten, the reason given by yoshi p in latest translations was never accessability.
He cited design space for futureupdates and too much variance in crit dps as the reasons to remove kaiten.
Some of the dedicated mmo players do love to make themselves feel superior by blaming unwanted class changes on less experienced players, with little supporting data.
Fuck the dev's for removing Kaiten, idc what reasons they have it's removing job identity and satisfaction.
Fuck the dev's for removing Kaiten, idc what reasons they have it's removing job identity and satisfaction.
I'm one who enjoys class rpg so naturally i'm against making them homogenous. We still have a few left, few left from few dozen. Maybe in 7.0 that will be gone.
Best design is one with a low skill floor and high skill ceiling. There have been too many changes lately that have lowered skill ceilings which were strange (Kaiten for example).
Low skill floor let's anyone jump in and high skill ceiling keeps people coming back to improve.
Now, they did mention their goal was to shift difficulty to the content. Make playing the jobs somewhat simple and make the content be the thing that determines the difficulty. There are pros to that because people can essentially "choose" the difficulty they want by doing the content they want. The downside to that though is that people like me want to be challenged but don't have the time to invest in the challenging content. I need the job to challenge me. Hopefully if they're continuing down that path that Criterion dungeons will fill that "quick but hard" void
It looks like i'm in the minority, but I hate the button bloat. This game has lots of buttons that you have to read multiple times to figure out how it's different from the button next to it. I hate spending hours at the dummy to "learn" to play a game so some A$$hat running a meter isn't screaming at you to learn to play. I remember when playing games was about having fun not learning rotations and memorizing mechanics. I really like the pvp button system.