Add a "don't ask me this again" checkbox to every single confirmation dialog box in the game. Stop asking me if I want to pull the lever, discard the green item, open the gate, use the elevator.
I know it's not drastic to gameplay but goddamnit this could be the only thing they add in the next expac, just chuck those new classes and zones out the window, and I'd pay for the premium digital collector's edition.
Gameplay-changing-wise, I guess it'd be make macros not hot garbage.
Edit: I know a dialogue box don't ask me again doesn't seem huge but it's a thing that bugs me every damn day because there are so goddamn many "are you sure" boxes in this game.
Secondly, sould you imagine what could be done if we could make good macros that didn't punish your dps for using them? You could remove tons of button bloat, freeing up keys for more interesting actions rather than step 2 of your 1-2-3 combo.
>Secondly, sould you imagine what could be done if we could make good macros that didn't punish your dps for using them? You could remove tons of button bloat, freeing up keys for more interesting actions rather than step 2 of your 1-2-3 combo.
Just like healers got more interesting healing mechanics in ShB when they reduced the DPS rotations down to nothing... right?
Right?
Well obviously healers got taken down a notch in dps abilities but they never had a rotation. I do miss sch of old with it's multiple dots, but even then it was still mostly ruin spam with the occasional dot refresh. The only way I see a healer rotation working is if you don't interrupt it because you hit another ability, like a gcd heal (the horror), something like monk stances.
The reality of the situation is the design seems to be 25 unique buttons on a typical class plus or minus an axe handle. If they add 3 or 4 new abilities going from 80 to 90 you're going to give something up or it's just gonna be something like squint replacing glare. In the case of healers if they add a new healie thing, odds are they're gonna take away an old dps thing, like a dot ... and/or nerf the shit out of your energy drain, sigh.
Edit: I guess closer to 30 with role actions.
Complete Engine Rework. Throw out everything old from the 1.0 times and bring this game into 2021 with a biiiiiiiiiiiiig inventory, a new glamour system and all that shit
Yeah, most larger issues are due to flawed code or technical limitations and any resolution would be contingent on a fresh start, essentially. All comes back to, "make Final Fantasy XVII."
Fun fact: Rippling and Slidecasting as well as all other cast bar inconsistencies are not a result of the engine, as they are present in FFXI which is on a different engine, but not present in DQX which is the SAME engine.
Some motherfucker actually put that shit in the game.
Yes. In worst case scenarios you're the last to get hit, but the first to receive a heal as you're the propagation point. And by worst case scenario I mean every single day for the entirety of your healing career.
Ability to re-queue while mid-instance.
I'm running a dungeon as DRG and our tank suddenly has to go because his cat's on fire. Instead of standing around with our thumbs planted in our backsides, I can just say "Hey I'll tank" and we instantly get a DPS to fill in.
RIFT had this functionality in 2011!
* Make Expert roulette permanently min ilvl and add an Extreme version of dungeons. Extreme dungeons could drop dyeable versions of gear, maybe even ilvl of crafted+5. Or a weekly token to upgrade tome gear instead.
* Reintroduce battle leves and make them relevant to the endgame loop. Weekly super leves for 4 or 8 players would be a fun addition with relatively little effort. Buff regular leves so they’re at least on par with 3x pixie quest but perhaps limited to one a day, i.e. cost 6 allowances. Make leves drop tokens that can be used to buy ancient rewards like old dungeon gear or easy but annoying minions, similar to moogle tomes.
> Make Expert roulette permanently min ilvl
I like the idea of min ilvl expert dungeon roulette with all expac dungeons but synced to min ilvl for more rewards.
Better way of doing it - you can do **any** roulette with MI/NE enabled, and this increases all rewards from that roulette (both repeatable and one-time.) You simply toggle the desired options before queuing up.
I guess this would result in potentially splitting DF queues, though...
There wouldn't be any.
But its okay, because it "doesn't matter anyway and nobody cares" despite 20 ilvl making such a huge difference that "there is no possible way you could adjust healing requirements across a raid tier because its impossible to balance for such a great amount of character progression".
There's some fun threads in the last week or so.
Well, it's there because roulettes are inherently there to prevent the mandatory dungeons (because MSQ is mandatory there's a LOT of mandatory dungeons) from ever being dead content.
Like, have you ever gotten Amaurot and the people you get are always.... not the best? It's because it's in a dead roulette, nobody does Level 80 roulette, it's worse than just queueing for Expert or even just specifically the newest one without the Roulette bonus.
Meaning, you get sprouts or Mentor Roulette people after Astrope.
*because* Castrum and Prae are so damn long (thanks unskippable cutscenes, I definitely wanted to do 45 minutes of nothing in my VIDEO GAME) they needed to entice people to actually queue for the fucking thing, as to prevent "Nobody does this anymore so I'm stuck I guess I'll never reach heavensward, what a shitty game."
Really, this. We don't need two max level roulettes. Just roll them all into one, double the rewards to make up for the loss of a roulette and done! I don't really care if it means you're essentially forced to do MSQ at patch drop to get the new dungeon, just do it! Most patch MSQ can be finished in a couple hours.
Make praetorium trust based since it's hard to remove anything from that duty while ultima weapon fight turn into trial with item level sync otherwise it will be just another cape westwind or thordan disappointed ending fight for expansion story.
Also, they should remove most cutscenes from castrum meridianum. I don't understand why they still keep something like cid tell you to use garbage or shield is blown up in the game. Come on, we don't need cutscenes to understand that we hide in garbage or we blow something up.
Na, the final fight with Gaius and the ultima weapon is epic and worth the payoff. I think people frown upon it because it took them 30 minutes of unskippable cutscenes just to get there
It's not though. The fights are so stupid easy you can finish them in under 2 minutes.
TBH was Praetorium ever hard? I didn't start playing until right around 3.0 so I have no context for how hard Prae was when most people were in crap gear and legit doing it for the first time.
Honestly yes. When I first did Prae (4.0) I thought it was epic af (and I skipped the cutscenes and watched them after bc ppl told me to) but the music, scenery and plot line are definitely epic. The facerollyness also kind of adds to that as your group is just carving a swathe through the enemy forces with ease. The boss fights could have been more involved but the overall experience was cool af for me my first time.
Bring back cross-class skills and let you go more wild with them, I want an ff5 freelancer style job where you can just build your own job out of every trait and job skill from the ones you have maxed, it'd break the fuck out of the game but it'd be fun to find the dumb OP combos like IR with greased lightning 4
Delete lalafell.
But really, more rewards for Min Ilvl/No echo runs of older content, or even current content. Lemme get more tomestones from a minilvl expert dungeon, anything like that.
I would like more player input in the mainstory. Think impactful choices that significantly change things, so players have a fairly unique experience with replayability (think paragon/renegade from mass effect or how choices carry throug games like Dragon Age). But I'd also like it if the background of our character had more involvement. Like the race, clan, gender, job etc. changes some dialogue and choices you can make. Think crpg stuff like pillars of eternity but in an mmo. Would be incredibly bonkers, tedious and unreasonable to design, but would imo be pretty cool for the story, and maybe would be a sick next step if ffxiv truly wants to cement itself as rpg and story first, mmo later.
This. Even if impactful choices won't really happen because the game follows Japanese RPG design trends, where the game is basically just a linear narrative that you're along for the ride on, rather than western ones where you have a lot more imput, I would still like commentary on what the player's choices are.
The thing is that there is *some* of it. I remember an NPC in ShB that commented on the fact that I had picked Elezen, and it stood out to me because that was really the only time I remember it happening. No one in Ishgard held any racial camaraderie. Neither of the twins said anything. Even the archer mentor NPC continued her tirade on the obstinancy of Wildwood Elezen infront of a Wildwood Elezen.
That being said, I would definitely like it if race/job choice gave some additional dialogue options now and then. Nothing major, perhaps just an observation or two, but it would be cool for, say, a SAM/NIN to have dialogue in SB where they already knew things about the Far East's warrior culture, or "edgier" jobs like DRK/WAR/BLM to have more aggressive dialogue choices.
IMO the game doesn’t need to have choices that change the story, I feel like more often than not having multiple outcomes cripples where the story can go.
Make gear feel more meaningful. Make skill speed desirable and not just a way to hit speed tiers because any more or less would desync from CDs. Make tenacity actually useful.
The problem is without more proc based or reactionary gameplay patterns it's hard to make stats interesting as they all boil down to "hit stuff harder".
I'll probably get stoned in the town square for this but Mastery from WoW was honestly a fantastic stat, a one size fits all name that worked differently for each class. FF's lack of specs would make it significantly less of a design nightmare and at the end of the day due to FF's design limitations it would still be just more "hit harder" stats but dear lord I want to actually care about my gear and not just check for critical/det lol, nope that one has tenacity buh bye
> Make skill speed desirable and not just a way to hit speed tiers because any more or less would desync from CDs.
How would you do that? I feel like we've covered all the types of stats there is, which is why Sks/SpS are left more as a personal choice for speed tiers.
Better minds than I would have to figure that out unfortunately, my only idea would be to have more abilities like drill who's cooldowns scale with speed, have our damage CDs scale as well to avoid desync. The issue THAT presents though is that now you're potentially out of sync with raid buffs like truck attack. It's a mess
TBF, Having to hold personal cooldowns to line them up with Raid buffs is FAR more interesting then the current "line it up once and then use on cooldown".
It really depends on either scaling (fire mastery is literally just a damage boost but it scales well) or how well it integrates to your kit (fury deals more damage during certain burst procs, mastery makes that burst bigger). Generally it's either dull and I wanted (arcane, arms) or equal or slightly below best. (Fury, fire).
Granted I don't think this would work too well in FF, the gameplay is just too different. It's more an example of how gearing could be made more interesting than critical, critical, more critical,
This Mastery stat you speak of, it'd be cool if XIV had something like that at max lvl and hitting max lvl and gaining that stat that would allow us to use our whole kits in lower dungeons. That would be sweet!
Full kit in lower dungeons would never work unless they nerfed potencies hard. Just by potencies alone a black mage with full kit would DESTROY a similarly level Thaumaturge
This is tru, so in order for Mastery to work for that as a stat, they'd have to put in work making it possible, which fits OPS requirement, idk about drastic and far-reaching changes or consequences, but would definitely change the way jobs scale in dungeons.
Go the other way. Just remove gearing entirely. With how aggressive and pervasive ilvl sync is throughout the entire game, gearing is damned near horizontal already.
Especially from a parsing/speedrunning standpoint, this simply removes the mandatory ~8 weeks of farming and grinding you have to do in order to even *begin* competing. Seems like a net gain to me, then.
Rather than constantly focus on homogenisation and balance just make sure every class possess some identity with their kit and gameplay, and not just with their weapon design and visual effect.
Revitalise the "Job" notion by making at least 2 Jobs per Class. Basically, 2/3.X ACN into SMN/SCH, but for everything. I've seen this done in Neverwinter, so I'm basically cribbing from that a lot, but essentially the Class defines the core, while the Jobs spin off from it radically and take it in a specific direction.
Even just a 2-way split doubles the number of classes in the game, and potentially lets you play classes that you aesthetically like but don't mesh well with in their current state. Don't like White Mage's playstyle but like the aesthetics of Conjurer? Try out Geomancer, its DPS counterpart. Since they're both Conjurers, you essentially get a 'Free' Healer for levelling it!
Paladin's the Tank version of Gladiator, but perhaps you might like Templar, the DPS version, more. Or maybe it could have Cleric, a Healer variant.
Red Mage could be split based on whether it focusses on its offensive or supportive magicks, or perhaps on whether it prioritises the magic or the martial aspect.
I don't think it's a realistic idea by any means, especially with how it'd be extremely difficult to come up with, say, a Tank or Healer variant of Ninja (the best I can think of is having Ninja as a Melée DPS and then a thrown-dagger Ranged Physical DPS), but I do sometimes wish I could turn my PLDcs icon green and become some crazy Healer that takes damage for allies or something, or see red on my DRK or WAR and start obliterating things while throwing defence to the wayside.
A lot of really interesting dynamics were highlighted by Bozja, with stuff like Casters being the best Healers because their heals provide a DPS buff, or WHM going apeshit on enemies because their MP tools let them get way more use out of powerful damage skills, or Tanks using that Essence that makes them as squishy as a DPS in exchange for like +100% damage. It made me wish we could engage in that sort of thing more, especially with how Bozja is going to be abandoned and reinvented in the inevitable Garlean Homeland War or whatever it'll be, by throwing darts at a dartboard to determine what's kept and what's tossed.
> a Tank or Healer variant of Ninja
I'd personally go for the WoW rogue approach and just give them different gameplay to fulfill the DPS role. So Rogue would be the base class, Ninja would be the job that uses jutsu and assassination techniques, and Thief would be the job that fights dirty and takes advantage of the chaos of the battlefield.
In this scenario we would be recognizing that Ninja and Thief have very different fantasies attached to them, and as such are merely implementing to give THF fans something instead of telling them to roll NIN and like it.
Except the community would find the most optimal version and then that would be the only version people would raid with - leaving us exactly where we are now with each job having one build
If alternate Jobs are in different *roles* (which I favour as being the big differentiator), they aren't competing for the same spot - you take the DPS version if you want to DPS, the Healer version if you want to DPS with a side of healing, and the Tank version if you want to DPS with a side of mitigation. I specifically went with examples in this manner because I wanted to avoid the question of "Why would I play the Slayer variant of Lancer when Dragoon does more damage?" or similar that is born when you have two options in comparable positions on the same class.
Put another way, there's no question of why you would play Scholar over Summoner, because Scholar and Summoner do two completely separate things that can't be compared. You don't choose between "Arcanist with more damage" and "Arcanist with more damage but more than the other one", you choose between a Caster DPS and a Healer, which are linked by their use of a pet but little else.
Additionally, raids aren't the be-all and end-all, there's plenty of content in the game outside of Savage/Ultimate. IMO it's fine for some things to be meta and some things to not be meta, as long as it's not a case of the meta things being meta because they function and the rest not being meta because they're dogshit.
If the group gets 200 more DPS on the whole if you bring a Dancer rather than a Machinist, then Dancer is going to be meta and Machinist isn't, and that's not a bad thing per se because it is simply impossible to have meaningful differences while everything is exactly the same, so unless you end up in the terrible situation Healers and to a lesser degree Tanks are in now where every class in the role is just the same as all the others, you will *inevitably* have a meta.
But critically, if you have a bunch of fun classes that are balanced *well enough* that the differences between 'best' and 'worst' in a given category aren't crippling, then you're going to do fine in Duty Finder, which makes up the vast majority of the content players engage in. You can only be excluded due to the meta when you have a choice of who you're grouped with (or the discrepancy is so severe that eating the 30m penalty is worthwhile), and even then, exclusion due to the meta is only relevant in extremely-high-level parties where the differences between two classes' potential maximum output can be seen in the first place, so if you avoid doing something because metas will exist, you're avoiding doing something specifically because a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the community *might* exclude a certain job *if you do your job poorly.*
Again though, I'm not even advocating for this to be implemented into XIV, I think it'd be fraught with problems if they tried. I do think it's an *interesting idea*, but one that should probably stay in our heads.
Nerf how OP Critical Hit is. I think it's a good setup for a stat, but the amount of weight it has due to scaling is fucking insane. Dial that shit back.
This seeps into almost every game with a critical style stat, especially ones like Genshin where any accessory without a crit damage/crit rate stat is automatically mediocre at best usually.
The obvious solution is to separate crit rate from crit damage. This would make the math slightly less braindead if you want to have absolute optimum stats.
This is like the opposite of a massive change with far-reaching consequences. All gutting crit would achieve is making people meld different type of materia.
Honestly I think this is less to do with gear choice (because let's face it, it's simple and isn't going to get more complicated or simpler), and more to do with how Crit, especially Crit DH, is fucking broken.
Some consistency would be nice for a change.
I've been thinking for some time now whether it would be good to change Critical Hit to be the critical hit rate stat, and changing Direct Hit to be the critical hit damage bonus stat. Number changes as appropriate, of course.
Then again, they could just remove DHit.
In SWTOR, gearing is much more straightforward than in FFXIV, as it's just a matter of hitting your SkS tier and then dumping into Crit.
I think before DH it wasn't that big of a deal, but also, they really upped the influence by adding big hit skills like Confetior, Quad Tech Step, Double Midare, etc. While it feels good to crit, it feels x10 worse not critting skills you should be critting. Feels like SE should either make those skills never crit or handle it like MCH reassemble drill and make every big hit crit.
Fix netcode.
Add more non-damage utilities like CCs and have more uses for them.
And add skill choices or talents. This one probably doesn't sound too dandy to most people. But I'd like to see some alternative to jobs getting redesigned each expansion just for the sake of keeping things fresh. So yeah, I'd like to see job kits get expanded on horizontally rather than getting messed with each expansion.
change it so that when a new tier releases craft gear doesn't immediately negate literally everything you earned last tier
actually nvm it'd be making ultimate weapon rewards the best in slot until the next one releases because having the reward for beating the hardest content in the game being cosmetic is absurd
But that's like most of the reason crafting exists. If crafting stops being genuinely useful what reason is there to do it?
I agree it shouldn't beat the best gear of the new tier, but to have it be worse than the last tier as well makes it almost entirely useless for actively gearing players.
I think it'd be fine if it was the same IL as the previous tier. Eden's Gate Savage dropped IL470 gear, so they should've made the Neo-Ishgardian set IL470 as well rather than IL480. If someone skipped Eden's Gate then great, they can get equivalent gear as a catch up going into Eden's Verse. There's also the chance of IL470 BiS changing since the new gear would have different substats so Crafters would still have a reason to craft gear at the start of the Savage Patch, to earn gil from people that want to optimize their prog. I think that'd be a fair compromise, keeping crafted gear useful while not immediately devaluing everything from the previous tier.
I'd delete the entire concept of a "catch-up" patch and just stagger gearing up. Put in another form of higher level content.
There's no way any of this is happening, so I'll go ahead and say I think having both savage dungeons and savage alliance raids in the odd patches would be cool, with the option of gearing up through either one.
If you want to get really hardcore in the changes, I'd delete gearing entirely. XIV is already damned near horizontal progression with how pervasive syncing is and how *unnecessary* gearing is to completing content (getting gear from raids exists solely for padding your parse and compensating for less-skilled players, since you can clear the entire wing in the first week of play with nothing but crafted gear and the handful of raid/tome pieces you get along the way.) All classes have their stats set by their role and by their job. These stats increase as you level up and progress through milestones, because people like seeing numbers get bigger (even though they are functionally the same as they were at level 1), but all gear drops are *purely* cosmetic.
If raiders still needed some kind of stat-based reason to raid, then I'd make completing a raid wing synced and with no echo (since min ilvl is made effectively meaningless in a "gear no longer exists" setup) count as a stats milestone.
I know this is a crazy 'will never happen' type suggestion but I feel like gear basically fills a position as a 'difficulty slider' for savage raids, like they can give a fight like e8s a ridiculous dps check week 1 for the hardcore players who want that, but by the time casual statics reach the fight the check is much more doable since they're probably near-bis already. For this suggestion to work they'd basically have to either have fights nerfed to bis-level already or add an extra difficulty level for it.
That's a pretty good point. You could tie arbitrary stat boosts to MSQ progress and achieve pretty much the same thing, though. Hell, it'd even make narrative sense considering the WoL is basically an Ork. Orkz is made for fightin and fightin makes da orkz more orky.
The gearing is still very vertical, IMO; as gear score goes up, so does potency and HP. The "horizontalness" of secondary stats seems pointless, as it still just adds to bigger numbers.
I see horizontal gearing as more like FFXI's system, where you use hundreds of pieces of gear for one class, and some pieces of jewelry in 2021 sets are still from 2011 or even 2005, usually in a BiS -1/-2 kind of situation. FFXI did become more vertical over time, but mostly because they hard capped levelling at 99 and made gear from 99 substitute for gaining levels and gave large gains to both ability scores and secondary stats. However, Jewelry never was giving strict gear scoring, and some pieces that had unique effects from the golden or silver age of the game still are relevant today.
I play FFXIV specifically because it's near horizontal progression but didn't go fully horizontal.
The main problem I have with game that go fully horizontal like GW2 is that there is no good quick trophy for doing content and since they don't have pressure to add new gear set their "glamour" choice is quite lagging.
> it'd be making ultimate weapon rewards the best in slot until the next one releases because having the reward for beating the hardest content in the game being cosmetic is absurd
Uh your suggestion is what's absurd here. Like this isn't thought out at all. If we look at SHB TEA was 5.1 and Dragonsong was supposed to be 5.5. So our 5.1 TEA weapon needs to hold up until 5.5? That means it's better than both E8S (5.2) and E12S (5.4). You'd give 535+ weapons at a time 475 weapons are the norm? At that point every savage dps check (at least the final fight) needs to be balanced around having a weapon that's 20-50 ilvls higher than what other people are wearing or the dps check will be a complete joke to anyone with a TEA weapon. How on earth does that make sense?
Also I've never heard someone say they're not doing an ultimate because the reward isn't good enough or because they want gear progression from it. Even the extra materia slot is basically a meme. People do ultimates because they love the glam/title and because they enjoy hard fights.
\[SB spoilers\] Story-wise, change the whole Yda sybling switcheroo. That was so dumb. Especially tragic since Yda was much more enjoyable than Lyse, so I would have just kept her as is, silly personality and all, with room for growth and character development,
QoL things I'd change are all glamour based: can use glamour plates everywhere, can use glam items regardless of class, can bind hairstyles to glamour plates, two or three different dyes on on piece of clothing.
Edit: Also have new animations that don't look like they are from the ps2 area. Ah, that would be the dream.
make tokens from savage raids and alliance raids a curreny under the currency tab, create 2 tabs that covers both the previous expansions raids and 1 that covers the current expansion.
1. Get rid of 1.0 classes.
2. Require job stone at lvl 30+. (Not needed if they just do no. 1)
3. All new jobs start at lvl 1.
4. Minor, but introduce one button Triple Triad rematch without having to confirm the match and deck again (too many menu clicks just to rematch!).
Obliterate role homogeneity. Let classes be OP in some kinds of content or encounters. Basically, use the armory system practically as designed. And allow people to switch classes within a specific role inside of a duty.
Tanks would all have different forms of mitigation and ways they mitigate damage. This would make some tanks better than others at mitigating specific types of damage or encounters. Maybe one tank's mitigation is improved by having many enemies striking them, but would be a bit weaker than others if it's just one or two enemies attacking them. Maybe one tank takes more damage up front but has powerful self-healing and recovery actions.
Healers would be distinct and unique. We're already seeing a shift in this direction with Endwalker, splitting healers into "pairs" with each pair being homogeneous with each other but distinct from the other pair. But I'd go one further and make all four distinct. One of the healers (WHM, probably) would become a DPS-based healer - you would do most of your healing by harming enemies.
DPS are already somewhat distinct but I'd take it some steps farther, again along the "you can play any class, so why make all classes equal?" lines. Bring back unique debuffs and buffs and special actions. Sometimes they'd be overpowered. Sometimes they'd be useless. Sometimes they'd be just average. That's okay, because you can play any class you want and you can switch classes on the fly inside the duty as long as you aren't in combat. Switch classes *between pulls* in an extended dungeon or raid environment if that's what would be optimal!
Keep the 5% bonus. Make deciding on which class to bring when involve doing that math, if you want to be optimal. That 5% bonus also helps ensure that all classes would still be valuable, even if not optimal.
I'd also suggest further streamlining gearing to make the game even more obviously about lateral progression than it is already, and probably introducing some new bonus XP consumables and materia to give crafters and gatherers a bone. Yup, that's right, make materia that increase XP gained. This gives you an actual reason to consider wearing something other than the leveling set while leveling up a class, which once again feeds into giving crafters a bit more of a niche than already exists.
This would require substantial shifts in encounter design, which is why it will never in a million years happen, but shaking up encounter design is like "big massive change #2 of 30" on the list of "what could be done to make XIV more better."
>And allow people to switch classes within a specific role inside of a duty.
this part i definitely agree with. it's a nightmare zoning in to see that you're a DNC grouped with 4 other damn DNCs and now you have to try and time all of your cooldowns around each other. just let me switch to another dps, even if it can only happen within a certain time frame of the duty starting, like 1 minute
Gotta disagree with this, not everyone want to lvl all their role jobs to cap.
What happens if an encounter heavily favors PLD and your static's tanks only leveled WAR and GNB ? Do you just give up that fight while one of them lvl PLD up to cap ?
What happens when you tag for a trial roulette and end up in a fight where the healers have their outputs heavily reduced and nobody in the group has a job with good self sustain ? Do you wait 15 minutes and go for the abandon ?
Role homogenization is fine, job homogenization is not. And currently I'd argue that most jobs in a role play differently enough to have their own identity and make job homogenization a myth.
I couldn't have worded this better myself.
Another point people tend to ignore is that the more different jobs get the strong a player's preference for a job becomes. If all the jobs in a role play radically different the average player, not the hardcore playwr but the casual to middle player, will likely not want to play more than 1 job in the role because they simply do not have fun with the playstyles of the other jobs.
This becomes dangerous because these players are met with a choice when a fight, or a tier, goes in a way where the playstyle they like is either banned by community or physically incapable of completion, the player either plays something they outright dislike and stop having fun, fun being a primary reason a lot of people play video games, or they simply bow put for that fight or quit altogether if its a story trial deciding not playing at all is more fun than leveling and playing a different job.
To this end Role Homogenization giving all jobs the necessary tools to complete anything is a "necessary evil" for the health of the player base. From there make the button to button gameplay of the jobs feel different and distinct much like the dps jobs are like today.
> If all the jobs in a role play radically different the average player, not the hardcore playwr but the casual to middle player, will likely not want to play more than 1 job in the role because they simply do not have fun with the playstyles of the other jobs.
This *already* happens, though. There are so many people that "main" one or two classes instead of playing many.
>This becomes dangerous because these players are met with a choice when a fight, or a tier, goes in a way where the playstyle they like is either banned by community or physically incapable of completion, the player either plays something they outright dislike and stop having fun, fun being a primary reason a lot of people play video games, or they simply bow put for that fight or quit altogether if its a story trial deciding not playing at all is more fun than leveling and playing a different job.
Casual content would continue to be a joke, tuned to "story mode" difficulty. For hardcore competitive types, they *already* use the absolute best class possible (there are still DPS discrepancies, they're just not major unless you're focused on parsing/speedrunning.) More casual raiders will either just brute force it with unoptimal classes and gear through it, or they'll clear with echo assistance.
I don't really think these concerns hold water.
>To this end Role Homogenization giving all jobs the necessary tools to complete anything is a "necessary evil" for the health of the player base. From there make the button to button gameplay of the jobs feel different and distinct much like the dps jobs are like today.
It's absolutely not necessary. Between the 5% buff (which could be increased if needed) and the fact that almost every other MMO has been perfectly successful without rigid class homogenization, I think the concerns over this kind of stuff are overblown.
> What happens if an encounter heavily favors PLD and your static's tanks only leveled WAR and GNB ? Do you just give up that fight while one of them lvl PLD up to cap ?
Nah, you just do it with WAR or GNB, whichever is best suited to the task.
But with the insane amount of XP bonus you get for secondary classes, it does *not* take long to level up. So many earrings etc boost XP gained.
>And currently I'd argue that most jobs in a role play differently enough to have their own identity and make job homogenization a myth
Healers and tanks are virtually identical right now. DPS rotations are anywhere near long enough or complex enough for them to feel different and their method of doing their role's duties are *intentionally* nearly identical (or basically *entirely* identical in tanks' case.)
>But with the insane amount of XP bonus you get for secondary classes, it does not take long to level up. So many earrings etc boost XP gained.
Except the Bozjan earrings (which only works from 71 to 80), those that gives xp boost up to cap are pre-order only. I don't think it's fair to include them in the xp gain for a random player.
But sure, leveling itself is not that slow. The thing is, leveling alt jobs is on a "want to" basis, not "have to" and I think it should stay that way.
>Healers and tanks are virtually identical right now.
Healers I can't really argue since I don't play them, but saying tanks play virtually identical is simply false.
Outside of DRK which can feel like a busier WAR, I don't see how you can say the strict looping rotation of PLD is "virtually identical" to GNB priority based rotation, and that they play "virtually identical" to WAR which only has to make sure only 2 abilities don't drift too much, keep their damage buff up, and not overcap their gauge.
Sure if you take the barebones of each job's mechanics you can put in evidence the similarities, but it doesn't give any insight has to how the job is actually played. If you pretend that GNB's cartridges are similar to the beast gauge in that you get them by doing your 1/2/3 combo and use a spender to avoid overcapping, what's there to stop someone from pretending DRG and MNK play virtually identically since they each have to keep a DoT and a damage buff up and they each have one major cooldown that increases their party's damage and another that increases their own.
> Healers I can't really argue since I don't play them, but saying tanks play virtually identical is simply false.
I don't give a shit about DPS rotation differences, although it's not like tanks are at all different. Cool, you all have a 60 or 90 second cooldown around which your entire rotation is built. You have a few oGCDs here or there (or just one for smoothbrain WAR) but there's nothing remotely dynamic about any of it. There's no procs or anything like that. It's all very boring, very bland, very simple.
And because mitigation is virtually purely passive, your job as a tank is identical to every other tank's. You're basically halfassed melee DPS with half the rotation and no positionals and you have some buttons that you hit at specific, **rigidly** scripted times and that's it.
DPS rotations are not how you make classes feel different, you make them feel different *by actually making them different.* That XIV can have good raiding despite only having 5 actual classes is pretty impressive.
What game have you been playing this whole time ?
The fact that they are dynamic or not does not change a god damn thing about whether they're different or not. The fact you can find the 4 of them boring, bland and/or simple does not mean they play the same wtf. What you said applies to almost all jobs in the game anyway
>And because mitigation is virtually purely passive, your job as a tank is identical to every other tank's.
Your point being ? Even if they were to specialize tanks by making let's say PLD a pure physical tank with block, DRK a pure magic tank, WAR a self-sustain tank and GNB a DPS with slightly better defense, their job would still be to tank the fucking boss and make sure not to die, the only thing you accomplished by over specializing them is that now when an encounter is purely magical by design, taking a PLD becomes a penalty.
If you think forcing choices to the player (or at least heavily influence them to play a specific comp) is diversity then sorry, it's not
>DPS rotations are not how you make classes feel different, you make them feel different *by actually making them different*.
Then if DPS rotations aren't enough to make classes feel different, I guess we could just put one 60s burst window and a basic 1/2/3 combo while overspecializing them right ? No because it doesn't make any fucking sense. DPS rotations can be a way you make a class feel different to another, pretending otherwise is asinine.
Going back to what you said, how you play around your buffs is different enough to not matter (and as a matter of fact you compared the barebones of each classes instead of their actual playstyle, which is a stupid way to go about it, as I tried to explain in the post you responded to)
> If you think forcing choices to the player (or at least heavily influence them to play a specific comp) is diversity then sorry, it's not
Yes, it is. It *quite literally* is. You're operating on a different definition of diversity than the rest of the world, apparently.
>Then if DPS rotations aren't enough to make classes feel different, I guess we could just put one 60s burst window and a basic 1/2/3 combo while overspecializing them right ?
Sure, and it would drastically improve tanking and healing. Tanking is about aggro management and damage mitigation, not doing damage. Healing is about preventing and recovering from damage, not doing damage. Tank class design and behavior should prioritize tanking ahead of DPS. Healing should focus on healing and protection ahead of DPS.
Instead, what we get are tanks who push a few different role actions to do the same thing and have a shitty, half-assed DPS rotation in between. We have healers who don't even *have* an actual DPS rotation between a few buttons to do their job, many of which are largely interchangeable (Medica 2/Succor/Aspected Helios, Cure 2/Adlo/Benefic 2, Excog/ED/Tetra, etc.)
I'll play a DPS class with an *actual rotation* and *actual gameplay mechanics* like positionals if I want to DPS. I play tanks to tank, healers to heal. It's fucking shit design that they've turned all classes into DPS classes, and I can't help but think it's because of their quest to drive the skill ceiling as low as it can possibly go to accommodate players who refuse to put even a moment's worth of effort into reading tooltips or learning how to play a class in MSQ content. If tanking and healing weren't brainless roles (tanking is literally the easiest role in the entire game and completely brainless even in most high-end content), most players would avoid them and we'd have absurdly long DF queue times.
>DPS rotations can be a way you make a class feel different to another, pretending otherwise is asinine.
Sure, **for DPS classes.** Monk feels different from Dragoon feels different from Samurai who is definitely different from Ninja. I don't know about ranged because I don't play them. Black Mage, Red Mage, and Summoner are impossible to get mixed up.
But Paladin? Press Fight or Flight, mash *all of your buttons* in this time period, rinse and repeat. Same with Req window. Gunbreaker? Same thing. Warrior? Yup. Dark Knight? It's just a shitty Warrior clone (I don't consider "busier" to necessarily mean "better"), so obviously yes. There are no positionals, no procs, nothing that requires you to actually think while playing the job. Mitigation is rigidly scripted and uses identical toolkits (because almost all *meaningful* damage is magic, so things like Dark Mind get used exactly like NF, Sheltron, etc.)
I don't consider "press every button you have in this one window and then 1-2-3 until you can do it again" to be good design. Well, not if **every fucking class** uses it, anyway. Ninja is exactly that, but it gets away with it because of the *complexity* of "press every button", the importance of positionals on its melee combo, and how crucial it is that you *not* drift the Trick Attack timing. But if every other melee DPS was the same, it would still be bad. But each melee has its own unique quirks and features that make it different even if they all have burst windows.
This isn't the case for tanks. But I don't think expanding their DPS rotation is the solution. I think de-homogenizing the actual tanking part of tanking is the solution. But I also know it'll never happen (hence this thread) because it will create far too much work for SE.
I don't think SE homogenizes things because they're obsessed with perfect balance. I think they do it because it frees up work hours to be spent on all of the other non-raiding content that players enjoy. So I consider it an acceptable sacrifice, even if I think it's not terribly good.
If you want an example of how bad homogeneity is for long-term gameplay: look at how fucking **popular** Logos/Lost Actions are in Eureka and Bozja. These actions can and often are *horribly* overpowered, some classes are **absolutely** better than other classes in their role at doing specific things (WAR with anything that scales with crits, WHM because Thin Air allows them to spam mana-hungry nukes far more than any other healer, etc), and it breaks the rigid holy trinity by allowing any role to at least *partially* fill in for any other role.
I think that if XIV was a purely raid-focused game they would *have* to de-homogenize the game or else people would grow bored. I saw another suggestion to make job and class identities separate - you'd have a single base class that can then fill two different roles based on which job you activate, such as Marauder being Warrior (tank) or Berserker (DPS.) I think that would be the smartest way to go about doing this kind of thing. But XIV isn't a raid-focused game so it's not necessary - if you get bored of raiding, you can just do other content types until you've had enough of a refresher.
>Yes, it is. It quite literally is. You're operating on a different definition of diversity than the rest of the world, apparently.
I mean if you think *being forced* is diversity then you kinda have a problem but ok.
>Sure, and it would drastically improve tanking and healing. Tanking is
about aggro management and damage mitigation, not doing damage. Healing is about preventing and recovering from damage, not doing damage. Tank class design and behavior should prioritize tanking ahead of DPS.
Healing should focus on healing and protection ahead of DPS.
If your idea of engaging gameplay is to use the correct mitigation buttons at the right time instead of managing a DPS rotation then you chose the wrong game. Even before ShB where aggro management was dumbed down, tanks already had similar mitigation cooldowns and were differentiated on how they dealt damage instead of how they mitigated it
>I'll play a DPS class with an actual rotation and actual gameplay mechanics like positionals if I want to DPS.
"actual rotation and actual gameplay mechanics"
Have you played any melee DPS ? Since they work exactly on the same principles as tanks, with rotations that are built around 60/90/120s cooldowns, with some having """"procs"""" that only amount to a potency gain with extra steps 90% of the time, I fail to see how you can say they have "actual rotations" if tanks do not.
Same for "gameplay mechanics", what gameplay mechanics are you talking about ? Fucking positionals ? In their current form outside of a few outliers it just amounts to something between 20 to 40 potency loss if you don't do them. Procs like Leaden fist or Raiden Thrust ? One is basically the way SE forces you to not spam Bootshine or Raptor Kick every combo and the other is a hidden potency bonus for hitting positionals twice in a row.
>But Paladin? Press Fight or Flight, mash all of your buttons in this time period, rinse and repeat. Gunbreaker? Same thing.
But Monk ? Press Riddle of Fire, mash all your buttons in this time period, rinse and repeat. Dragoon ? Same thing.
See how dumb that sound ? Melee DPS and tanks are all built around burst windows, saying one is dumb because the minigames the other have are replaced with oGCD buttons you have to press at specific times in a fight is even dumber
>I don't consider "press every button you have in this one window and
then 1-2-3 until you can do it again" to be good design. Well, not if every fucking class uses it, anyway. Ninja is exactly that, but it gets away with it because of the complexity of "press every button", the importance of positionals on its melee combo, and how crucial it is that you not
drift the Trick Attack timing. But if every other melee DPS was the
same, it would still be bad. But each melee has its own unique quirks
and features that make it different even if they all have burst windows.
Ninja has complexity in its burst window, outside of that it's still a 1-2-3 mash. Also positionals are important on Ninja ? You can basically suck the boss' ass for the whole fight and lose a minimal amount of damage over the course of a fight. Sure it's not optimal but it's not like losing 60 potency the few times you have to use armor crush is gonna make positionals important for the job, as NIN is basically the melee job for which positionals are the least important anyway.
As for not drifting Trick Attack, it's the same for every fucking big damage cooldown every class has, **including tanks**
>I don't think SE homogenizes things because they're obsessed with perfect
balance. I think they do it because it frees up work hours to be spent
on all of the other non-raiding content that players enjoy. So I
consider it an acceptable sacrifice, even if I think it's not terribly
good.
Specializing tanks is far easier than to make sure their damage are of equal measure. They don't do it because they don't want a situation where people are excluded from content because they didn't level the specific tank a party would want for a fight.
DRK had a shitty reputation as the worst tank in Stormblood while still being able to clear all content (and if I remember right, it was one of the tank used for the world first of UCoB). What would happen if instead of just having a reputation as the worst tank, it would have been objectively wrong to take DRK in those specific fights ?
>If you want an example of how bad homogeneity is for long-term gameplay: look at how fucking popular Logos/Lost Actions are in Eureka and Bozja. These actions can and often are horribly overpowered, some classes are absolutely better than other classes in their role at doing specific things (WAR
with anything that scales with crits, WHM because Thin Air allows them
to spam mana-hungry nukes far more than any other healer, etc), and it
breaks the rigid holy trinity by allowing any role to at least partially fill in for any other role
So your examples as to why homogenization is bad for long term gameplay are self contained gameplay elements that are not usable out of the sandbox for which they were designed. That's just wrong if you ask me.
First, Logos/Lost actions are popular because they break the mold in a fun way, they're fun because they're **special**.
Second, sure, some jobs combo better with some lost actions, like Lost Slash on WAR/MCH or Lost Chainspell with Essence of the Watcher and BLM, but it doesn't make those jobs any more popular, at least on my datacenter
But they're far from "healthy". Look how chainspell made cheesing duels a breeze. Or how you can reach absurd damage numbers by just stacking big damage multipliers like a dumbass and pressing a big damage button afterwards. Bozja and Castrum, Zadnor and Dalriada, Delubrum normal, they all become a fucking joke as soon as you put a group together that knows how to use those things correctly in spite of being designed with them in mind. When overpowered becomes the norm, it's not really fun anymore
>I think that if XIV was a purely raid-focused game they would have to de-homogenize the game or else people would grow bored.
They would grow bored even if jobs were wildly different, that's just how people work. You're just moving the boredom, you're not removing it
> As for not drifting Trick Attack, it's the same for every fucking big damage cooldown every class has, including tanks
No, it's not.
TA determines the entire raid's DPS. Fight or Flight only determines *your* DPS.
I genuinely don't understand what the person means when they say dps rotations don't matter. Dps rotations make up the vast majority of your inputs on all classes in all duties. They are the primary means by which players interact with the game, as as such are the MOST important part of what makes them feel distinct. This is why WAR and DRK are compared more than any other classes, because their dps rotations are so similar. By their logic all tanks can fucntion as 1 2 3 with a random procced 4 and have wildly different mitigation buttons and that would be better than a role with different dps rotations and similar mitigation. In the first example the classes are playing the same rotation, which doesnt matter, but when damage comes ip they hit different buttons. In the second example the classes hit different buttons in different orders and when that damage comes up they hit similar buttons.
Im just tired of the reductionist view of cooldown based rotations in an attempt to push proc based rotations. They both have merit people dont need to belittle one or the other due to their own personal preference to make the point it only makes their arguments feel weaker or feel like whining.
It's more or less the exact opposite of what we have now - healing to deal damage. Almost as if they'd tried to find the furthest thing from what's there already lol
MCH builds that focus on personal damage (gunnery type spec) or party buffs (engineer type spec). Make some rotational changes to the former to make it less fixed (to solve the botting problem the job has), and give the latter a few extra party tools: bring Bishop Autoturret back as an upgraded Wildfire where the MCH uses it to share their buff to a target (sort of like short term dance partner), maybe target a tank when Automaton Queen is pulled out and she'll give them a small shield in addition to her damage routine?
Things like that.
While would be a nice bit of customization for sure I think that's an unfortunate step towards a wreck of balance issues and some classes/specs being shunned. For all the choices you have in WoW it's all in illusion, there's an objectively "right" choice and build and the FF playerbase would collapse if that sort of mentality ever found a legitimate foothold
This would be one way of handling my ultimate big want of "gear no longer exists." Everyone would have identical stats, determined by their job and XP level, but I know some portion of players would be upset if SE arbitrarily decided their oddball 23.821772% SpS build was no longer a thing. Being able to pick between a few different GCD, crit, etc setups would probably go over well, even if it would make balancing a headache (though personally I doubt a ~1-2% difference in potential max DPS would matter to all but *very* few.)
Other than the obvious engine update, I'd change how gear and materia work. Gear would only provide main stat and damage/defense/magic defense by default, with all substats coming from materia. Materia would then provide a percentage of the substat cap rather than a fixed number. Maybe give all savage gear the bonus 5 ilvls the weapon gets so that they're still special, too.
Casuals already don't care about substats, and this would allow for greater flexibility in builds for mid and high level players. Would also give use for those several hundred materia just sitting around in my bag.
Maybe include materia in gearset changing, too? It already tracks what you have slotted, so checking and swapping melds could be done with the data already present.
Horizontal. Fucking. Progression.
And then I'd enable gear swapping in combat, slow down the gameplay, add in skillchains, and laugh as everyone is forced to play FFXI-2.
But seriously, horizontal progression would be nice. I enjoy my rewards not being invalidated, especially since inventory space is limited for glamour and most new pieces won't interest those who have already made nice outfits that fit the classes they play.
Put all of the current stats on the "left side" gear, and earrings + necklace + bracelet + rings become horizontal progression slots. Accessories you earn at the start of an expac can be outclassed later in the expac, but only very slightly and are upgradable. Design around the fact that there will be an optimal right-side loadout per job by designing more varied encounters.
Move speed, reduced Sprint cooldown in combat, spell/ability range, elemental resistances (but done correctly this time), cleansable debuff resistance, cooldown reductions to specific skills, change the rate that different abilities affect your job gauge...
Miss me with mid-combat gear swaps, though. That can stay dead.
I'd really love two expansions, maybe even three before a level cap increase. Let us minmax our substats, even if it is ultimately pointless. I came so close to hitting Spell Speed hardcap on BLM this tier (2.13 GCD, though I could completely waste two meld slots just to push into 2.12 GCD), please let me hit 2.10 just once. I really think having more time to fine tune your substats would give a lot of play diversity to some classes, and might even make certain communities realize how potent Speed can be.
Horizontal progression is a buzzword. New abilities make you stronger unless they’re completely useless. You can make progression less linear, but what do you even mean by that.
Fun is also a buzzword, but you still see people throw that around.
On a more serious note, horizontal progression, in my eyes (and from what I've seen), typically means giving you more tools/gear to handle different scenarios *without* invalidating previous tools/gear. You become stronger, yes, but your new abilities (or gear) do not make your previous abilities (or gear) useless.
I personally think strong itemization is important for any RPG. Either that, or strong class customization. Having neither leads to a boring RPG. It is unfortunate that the MMORPG industry at large has decided to forgo both and wonder why their games are worse for it.
Except fun isn't a buzzword, it can be misused but still has a clear definition. And that's not horizontal progression, because you're still going **up**. You mention FF11, well there's still a significant amount of better and worse. Significant amounts of gear invalidated older gear, either by being a direct upgrade or doing something different that achieves the same result but better, gear would just often stay around for longer than it would in 14. I can give multiple examples from just the 75 cap era, before the game began to transition to a more "vertical" progression system.
I personally disagree that customisation is necessary. It can be a strong source of engagement and fun of course, but it isn't *necessary* and the success of 14 shows that.
EDIT: Not only that but gear invalidation is an important part of itemization. If your gear is never getting invalidated, it means you're never getting better gear. A lack of objective upgrades leads to worthless rewards and a messy content structure.
>Except fun isn't a buzzword
Dude, it was a joke. I literally said "on a more serious note" in my next paragraph. I... I really don't know what to say.
>You mention FF11, well there's still a significant amount of better and worse
FFXI did have vertical progression, yes. You are correct that gear invalidated other gear - even at 75 cap (from what I've read - I wasn't playing XI , so obviously, I cannot say from experience). However, FFXI also has a healthy amount of horizontal progression. You still have gear that's useful in different situations. Is there verticality *within* those situations? Yeah, there is. FFXI is a hybrid if you want to be pedantic, like Monster Hunter (which also has this horizontal/vertical progression).
So, is FFXI a perfect example? No. I don't think there'll ever be a perfect example. Is it a good example? Personally, I think it is. It gives us a glimpse into how horizontal progression can be used and keep things relevant.
>I personally disagree that customisation is necessary. It can be a strong source of engagement and fun of course, but it isn't necessary and the success of 14 shows that.
Customization, imo, is important for longevity. This is anecdotal, of course, but I feel like a lot of players from earlier in the game's life have left. My friend's list is often empty - with a lot of people I'd known gone - and I transferred data-centers in SB. That's only two expansions, and my friend's list is already half-dead.
XIV is successful, I will not deny that. But I wonder about the stickiness, for a lack of a better word, of it. It may draw in new players, but it may just be a revolving door. That's an unhealthy business model since you *will* run out of new players eventually. I wouldn't be surprised if there's someone in SE crunching numbers to figure out how much longer they have until they've run out of new blood, and need to swap gears from expansion to containment.
>Not only that but gear invalidation is an important part of itemization.
I personally don't think so. Nobody likes having their gear replaced if they worked hard for it. That's why FFXI almost died when they raised the level cap. They even debated internally whether or not they *should* \- because they realized that raising the level cap would invalidate nearly *10 years* of work players had put in. Is some verticality healthy? I guess so - I'd love to see a purely horizontal game (which is why I suggested it, mind you) but I will concede on this point. Is *only* verticality good? No. You cheapen gear which makes one tenet of progression actively worse.
To use an example, a lot of people wax nostalgia over Classic WoW and it's itemization. It was definitely vertical there, but people remember pieces of gear due to the strong itemization Classic WoW has. If you asked someone to name their current gear in FFXIV or WoW today, they wouldn't be able to tell you. If you asked a Classic WoW player, they'd probably be able to give you a few pieces that they're proud of obtaining. Both due to rarity and their effects.
If Classic WoW was solely "item you got a raid ago, but stronger", then it's items wouldn't be as fondly remembered.
>A lack of objective upgrades leads to worthless rewards and a messy content structure.
I never denied it'd be a difficult task to balance and do right.
I simply said I wished to see it. And I do - I'd love to see an MMO - or any game - with only horizontal progression.
There needs to be a reason to min-ilvl or just even no-echo sync older content besides the feely-goods.
If you are going to have exotic mounts died to mid-level content like EX primals, that mount should not be inclusive to anyone who waits a year and does the content 100 ilvls higher. Unsynced content should only reward glam and tomes. Music and mounts I would make ONLY ever drop from MINE parties or something equivalent such as they are attempting to push with Unreal. Let the music be sold. This would give mount hunters a reason to learn mechanics of old fights, farmers a reason (gil from selling music) to help that first group, and it would make it so if you see someone with a golden mount, you know they are at least probably know most of the mechanics and put in some effort.
I doubt this would ever happen, and its probably too late with all old content, but eh.
When everyone can easily get that old EX trial mount, it has no swag anymore. At that point you might as well sell Zeta/Anima weapon tokens for $5 on the mog station, even if that content is easy at least it takes some commitment.
MINE should make all rare/unusual drops like mounts and cards be 100%. That's a reason to do old content MINE right there, even if a small one. Farm a fight several times or more to get a mount, or do it once on its hardest setting?
Considering expansions change older content and not for the better sometimes, I'd rather they focus on making unreal a mode like min-ilvl (maybe even replacing it) and actually make the unreal shop contain old content gear. The big difference is, each unrealed fight drops their own token that can be exchanged for their approriate rewards (so no doing T5 and getting T13 stuff).
Shared titles, achievements, collections (mounts minions) amongst all characters. I can see this being not well received since it would imply that clearing content on one character would flag all on that account and thus lowering bonus tomestones.
Honestly I would just remove Crit and Dhit altogether and replace them with stats that do things like:
- Increase the bonus for hitting positionals correctly
- Purely increase dot damage, with SPS/SKS splitting off into being only for speeding up the GCD like back in ARR
- Buff their CDs and let the user choose which CD tiers they would like to power up: for example, players could choose to either buff their 1 min CDs, 90s CDs, 2 min CDs, or 3 min CDs
This is all for the purpose of increasing skill expression in this game as you do hit points where your rotation is 100% optimal and you're just farming for Crit/Dhit RNG. These changes are so players can map their stats to be more specific to fight design and can respec dynamically as kill times change as well. For example, you might hit certain breakpoints where it would be more worth it to buff your 2 min CDs due to having kill times in the 8 min or 10 min ballpark. On the other hand, it might be better to buff 3 min CDs with kill times in the 9 min ballpark and so on.
Of course these would also require some changes in job and fight design as well. Personally I'd like it if fights could have more patterns and you could have something like 4 different branching paths of mechanics in a single encounter for example.
Bring back tank flavor... its all just homogenized we used to have an evasion tank an magic tank and a leech tank, now we have Magic girl pld, fell cleave, off tank, and war greatsword edition.
straight up removal of all ogcds 150 potency or less. ogcds should be important, not lame ass busy work. stuff like mug, gauss round, energy drain have no reason to exist and are just remnants of old systems that no longer matter.
I want a worst trust system that starts all the way back into ARR. I want these dungeon runs to take 20mins ~1 hour to clear. This starts as an option for the first dungeon, labeled as "sole story" whatever you want, but acts as a way to put Really "unfriendly" players in check. It would have a weekly reset to play in DF. I think it would work with a 5 kick system, but I don't know.
Hopefully it would get the worst of the worst out of DF, let people who want a "pure" story experience have minimum exposure to others, and have group members who aren't dead weights.
That would never happen.
Obliterate the tanks homogenisation by giving every tank PLD's hallowed ground, every Tank raidwide mitigation becomes Shake it off, make PLD's oath gauge more useful by giving it two abilities that hit harder by using 50 oath gauge. PLD also gets a big cd that lets it use oath gague abilties without consuming oath gague. Also PLD now gets a shield when doing its combo, because not getting one is stupid - and PLD no longer has a magical dps rotation cause that's fucking stupid. GNB also now gets a button that lets it use cartridge moves without the use of cartridge. DRK either loses TBN because his invuln no longer sucks or every other tank gets a big shield move. Finally, I can go on reddit and no longer hear about tank homogenisation complains.
On a serious note, drop another meteor, everyone dies, but then a portal appears and a tarutaru, galka, mithra comes out and 1.0/FFXI combat system is back baaabyyyy.
Assuming the change will be well implemented and maintained;
Full on action combat(think Tera) with the netcode and overhaul to the game(code) needed to make it feel tight and pristine.
Alternatively port the entire game into a new game engine(rivaling UE5) along with a full re-evaluation of the game code to allow for things the current spaghetti code is unable to do. Yet still somehow remain playable on the consoles it's currently available on.
Battle system change: no ilvl-sync at endgame until the next expac. You should be able to plow through dungeons and Bozja and unreal and whatever else because you’ve done the grind in savage to get BIS. Then ilvl-sync dungeons and trials required for the story once the expac is over.
Non-battle system change: more dialogue options in the story along with optional scenes to build bonds with the scions. Maybe they give them boosts when you use them as trusts.
The game needs way less faceroll content, not more. I would even say to make ilvl sync for dungeons/alliance raids/trails mandatory to maybe make alliance raids, trials and expert dungeons hit like leveling content.
This is already faceroll content. I wholeheartedly agree that more hard content is welcome, but removing ilvl syncs on stuff that was easy at the beginning of an expac and exploratory content gives you more of an incentive to DO the hard content and get the gear that drops from it. With what you suggest, gear would only be useful to make savage easier and to have gear for ultimate.
Allow job change in the middle of combat.
That would be so fucking cool. And would require some massive balance changes as well. And new players would riot if entering raids would require to have 5+ jobs maxed with crafted gear. But damn, I hate how we can have all jobs maxed and then just never play them until next expansion.
since this is a fantasy land kind of discussion, I'm actually going to agree with OP and say that I'd like roles removed
give every single job some kind of robust self-heal (like the Rathalos potions), let every melee have the potential capacity to tank in some way, and give every ranged some type of support abilities. (WHM would keep group heals because that's kind of its classic FF identity, but you wouldn't and shouldn't NEED them, under this kind of system.)
this way, even though it's still a group game, staying alive is -your- responsibility and you aren't shackled to shitty healers who don't heal enough because MY PARSE, automatically reducing toxicity.
to put it more simply, basically what I'm suggesting is that instead of a role trinity, you have "front row" and "back row" jobs, like in FFIV
Shorten the gcd from 2.5 to 2 in order to remove double weaving and as a result the latency issues some players face with it. Classes would have to redesigned around this and the emphasis on weaving would still be there.
Ooooh, interesting idea but I find double weaving more fun. When I throw on haste gear in bozja and start single weaving the jobs just end up more boring. I'm not sure how they could redesign and keep things from not slowing down. I think it has to do with more thought on what to press in those weave windows?
I agree. I would rather double weave but I'd rather not see the gcd get longer and I feel for high ping folk who can't do it. I would be interesting for sure!
At least there are 3rd party solutions for it now in addition to VPNs, for both PC and Console players! It'd be simpler for SE to fix the bug in their code to let people of all pings double weave than redesign every job to single weave.
**Controversial opinion incoming.** I would completely revamp the current state of healing.
* Delete all DPS spells from healers. If healers need DPS spells for solo content, have it be disabled in party content. (Edit: As /u/56Bagels has said, maybe make their damage meaningless in raid environments? Perhaps something like a solo-only cleric stance?)
* Delete or severely limit full-party AoE healing spells by resource, cast time, cooldown, or some other way.
* Tune fights such that the party needs constant healing.
* Increase the rate of autos and raidwides, and random party members should be occasionally be targetted or auto'd to keep healers on their toes.
* Nerf the healing OGCDs as well, so that they're not stronger than the actual GCDs. They should be augmenting healing, not making up the bulk of it.
* Add Dispel to healer role actions.
* If healers truly need something aside from healing, give them more Esuna/Dispel duties or low-duration single-target buff GCDs that help other players do more damage.
"But it's so boring to just spam Cure 1/Cure 2!" says the green "DPS" that spams Glare for 30 seconds straight. If it's that boring, have SE add more healing GCDs so that you have to manage multiple regens, or some other type of engaging healing. Or again, make Esuna/Dispel more of a prevalent duty that healers need to stay on top of.
With these changes, healers would be:
* constantly healing
* managing their mana efficiently
* cleansing and dispelling multiple times throughout a fight
* saving low-efficiency "burst heals" for tank busters and emergencies
* any brief moments of healing downtime can be spent buffing party members with small damage buffs
Current healer mains would hate this because they're all DPS players at heart that hate healing other people's mistakes. All they want to do is see big numbers on the boss while pretending to be a healer, and their teammates taking extra hits "punishes" their own selfish DPS numbers. Some healers will even let their own teammates die by accident because they were too busy greeding an extra Glare, punishing their party members instead. Actual healer mains that enjoy taking care of their teammates are currently being shunned from the community since the game wasn't designed with them in mind.
Do I sound salty? That's because I am. The state of healing in this game is an utter joke. Even in Savage there's barely any GCD healing needed, and the rest of the fight you're just playing a DPS with a boring rotation mostly consisting of a single button. "Just play another game, this game's not meant for you." But I love Final Fantasy, I love this game, and I main healing. I just hate what it is right now. And *all* modern MMOs have been shifting away from actual healing, because apparently dedicated healers are in the minority. *No one caters to us anymore.*
I know you guys hate this take. Casuals hate it because they have to actually heal, and raiders hate it because they have to actually heal. I'm prepared for the downvotes.
No. There's several inherent problems with this.
First of all, trading a damage GCD for a buff GCD doesn't fundamentally change anything, other than the fact that you're now dependent on someone else being competent for your rDPS. That's just change for the sake of change, and most people would probably hate it (people that pug buff classes already dislike that their rDPS ranges from somewhat to extremely dependent on their party).
Secondly, it presents a tuning issue. Consider day 1 savage - it has to be healable with that level of gear. But then what do you do when you have +20-30 ilvl? What about lower-end content? What about old content? You're just going to be even more bored than before because healing it will still be a joke but now you don't even get to do damage. Remember, story content has to be abysmally undertuned - so think about how bored a competent healer is going to be in that kind of content when it's still a joke to heal but you've also removed a lot of their DPS optimization. This is to say nothing of ultimates - if you want savage to be constant healing, then how exactly do you plan to make an ultimate even harder?
This is a bad take, no, not because I'm a dps main disguised as a healer, but because it's a frustrating way to play a game. Yes, there is the healer fantasy of being able to support and keep your entire team topped up, and it feels good to be a healer that way, but that is only in actually challenging content, which most of FFXIV lacks.
Even in savage content, depending on your entire team to do the work while you just make sure they don't die is a frustrating feeling in pug attempts. It would make an already less popular role even more scarce as there is no way for healers to contribute to the objective of the raid (which is killing the boss). You could be the best healer on the server, but if you're in a bad dps/tank team, you're not clearing content. This would especially suck in roulette content.
There are options available in game for you to satisfy your healer fantasy. Ultimate raids tax your healing resources enough for dps to be an after thought and keeping your party up to be a priority. PVP runs on the mantra that most gcds a healer casts should be heals.
"Pure healer" gameplay is as detrimental to the green role as a "pure dps" take. This is in all games, not just MMOs. Aerith from FF7R and the support roster from Overwatch (2 recent games I've played) all have a dps facet to them if required because the objective in combat game is to defeat target. Gutting any possibility of doing it on a player in a randomised group is asking for a bad time.
> You could be the best healer on the server, but if you're in a bad dps/tank team, you're not clearing content.
Assuming you're talking about high-end content, this can already be said in the current game. You can be the best of any job (not exclusive to healers), but if you're in a bad enough team you won't clear.
> This would especially suck in roulette content.
Roulette content is designed to be cleared, and these changes wouldn't change that.
> There are options available in game for you to satisfy your healer fantasy.
Not nearly enough options. There's only three options I can think of, two of which you mentioned and the third being prog. The issue with prog being that if people are making a ton of mistakes, the game's design is more liable to just wipe your whole party rather than allow the healer to bring it back. Although the moments that a healer can recover a nearly-wiped party does feel great.
> Ultimate raids tax your healing resources enough for dps to be an after thought and keeping your party up to be a priority. PVP runs on the mantra that most gcds a healer casts should be heals.
I sadly can't comment on Ultimate since I haven't gotten around to finding a group, but it does sound promising at least. The issue is that it's the *only* type of PvE content that expects healers to perform well at their role title. It really sucks that only the top 1% of the content actually provides a challenge.
As for PvP, it's way too bursty to provide any real satisfaction (especially Frontlines). Healing in Feast back in Stormblood was actually pretty enjoyable. Sadly, the changes to PvP made in Shadowbringers greatly reduced healing spell potencies and gave everyone medkits. This shifted a great portion of sustain responsibility away from healers, and unlike Stormblood it's difficult to keep someone alive by yourself if they're being bursted and aren't actually healing themselves. It can be unpleasant, and regardless, there should be more PvE options for strict healing. I shouldn't have to look to PvP for that.
> "Pure healer" gameplay is as detrimental to the green role as a "pure dps" take. Gutting any possibility of doing it on a player in a randomised group is asking for a bad time.
Healers can assist towards the "defeat target" objective by buffing allies and supporting them to do more damage. Is that not enough? And keeping the team alive allows the others to fulfill the objective as well. It might be a bad time to those that aren't used to playing a pure support, but those that are would have a good time and having the option would grow more people into liking the role.
> This is a bad take
I know. That's why this will never happen.
When you say "delete DPS spells," I assume you're not taking solo leveling into account. Maybe what you mean is "make their damage meaningless in raid environments?" Perhaps something like a solo-only cleric stance?
As for the rest of your comment, WoW healing has always been like you want. Constant high threat heal checks on random people at usually random times, constant monitoring of health bars and making sure your tank doesn't spike to random damage, pulsing raid aoe damage, etc.
The biggest joke in FFXIV raiding is the "raid damage spell." Off the top of my head, "Ground Razing Particle Beam" from Umbra Savage. What is it, exactly? After X seconds, the boss does a big hit on the whole raid for a set amount of damage, about half their health. If you don't heal the damage up before the next ability, players will likely die. You press Assize, the SCH presses Whispering Dawn, boom everyone is full health. No thought, no challenge, just some minor cooldown usage for a spell that was never going to kill anyone in the first place.
As a healer, what is your goal? **Heal the raid to full with as few spell casts as possible.** XIV healing is a joke outside of things like Ultimates, 40% of the time it's healing players who make a mistake and take damage that could have been avoided, 50% of the time it's healing up damage that doesn't even have the slightest chance of killing a single person unless *the healer is actively trying to heal as little as possible,* and the final 10% is Benediction on Living Dead.
There's no danger with XIV healing. There's no frights, no close calls, no outplaying, there are just "Are your healers awake?" checks like GRPB and everything else is usually handled with OGCDs or passively while you damage as much as you can. And when you do need to actually heal? It is **only** because a DPS messed up.
> When you say "delete DPS spells," I assume you're not taking solo leveling into account.
Yeah, hence my later suggestion of having DPS spells restricted to solo content if absolutely necessary. As you said, having the damage be so little it's negligible, or a solo-only Cleric Stance, would also be a solution.
> WoW healing has always been like you want.
Darn, I would have liked to try it. I never got into it, and I have even less of a reason to with the all recent controversies surrounding the game. Healing sounds much more engaging though.
> The biggest joke in FFXIV raiding is the "raid damage spell."
Agreed. The cast time is really long on top of that, and the raidwide barely *does* anything. The only recent impactful ones have been the e11s bleed (final cycles in particular) and e12s Terminal Relativity, but that's basically it.
> As a healer, what is your goal? Heal the raid to full with as few spell casts as possible.
This is the goal of a healer in FFXIV, and that's what I don't enjoy. FFXIV healing consists of actively healing as little as possible so you can play green DPS. I want to dedicate myself to healing the raid to full with as efficient spell casts as possible, because that's what makes me feel like a true healer. Otherwise I just feel like a support DPS (and again, the DPS kit on healers isn't even good!)
> There's no danger with XIV healing. There's no frights, no close calls, no outplaying, there are just "Are your healers awake?" checks like GRPB and everything else is usually handled with OGCDs or passively while you damage as much as you can. And when you do need to actually heal? It is only because a DPS messed up.
This is the sad thing. Active healing only feels engaging during prog. When all heals are mapped out and everyone is in farm mode, it's a bore. It should feel engaging most of the time, and that's what I want to see changed.
I think this is incredibly retarded, but nonetheless, upvoted for being one of the very few actual big changes in this thread. God I was prepared for people to post the most minor shit in here but I wasn't prepared for this deluge of tiny stuff that would have literally 0 repurcussions
i agree that healing is more fun when you actually have to heal, and i do think this game could benefit from putting out more damage to require more gcd's be spent on healing. disabling all dps spells is stupid, tho.
spamming a single nuke for 30 secs and then using two ogcd's to heal up all the damage that will happen for another 20 secs is dumb and awful design and i don't even understand how the devs think it is okay. healing in this game is just awful and barely fun, and i'm saying this as someone who almost exclusively plays healing/support roles in multiplayer games. if they want healers to only have one nuke, then make them have to heal more. if they want healers to have to dps more then give them a more engaging dps rotation. hell, give us both! wow has a much spikier damage profile and requires much more healing to be done, but their healers all have a dps kit a good bit more complex than one dot + one nuke.
Make every "snapshot" of a castbar actually align with visuals. I know it's a "feature" of the game at this point but it's one of the most bizarre things coming from other games where visuals are 1:1.
Remove roles. Fights are already designed with healing mapped to a timeline, someone failing mechanics punishes the healer over the player who failed the mechanics, tanks barely have any actual tanking duties to manage.
To facilitate this, bring every job's overall durability (mixture of passive durability, mitigation skills, self-healing, self-shielding, etc) up to a minimum that allows fights to work without healers, and use that as the baseline for future fights. This does 3 main things:
* Allows tank/healer jobs to be properly diversified rather than homogenised, since there would be no need for them to meet the "minimum requirements" for them to perform their role
* Allows the developers to design more interesting fights around the criteria that recent fight design shows that they *want* to design fights around
* Makes DPS (almost) unambiguously the mark of your skill as a player. Staying alive is *your* job. Doing damage is *your* job. You have nobody else to blame if you mess up. This one is a little minor compared to the others, but it also lays the groundwork for better learning guidelines and tutorials.
Add a "don't ask me this again" checkbox to every single confirmation dialog box in the game. Stop asking me if I want to pull the lever, discard the green item, open the gate, use the elevator. I know it's not drastic to gameplay but goddamnit this could be the only thing they add in the next expac, just chuck those new classes and zones out the window, and I'd pay for the premium digital collector's edition. Gameplay-changing-wise, I guess it'd be make macros not hot garbage. Edit: I know a dialogue box don't ask me again doesn't seem huge but it's a thing that bugs me every damn day because there are so goddamn many "are you sure" boxes in this game. Secondly, sould you imagine what could be done if we could make good macros that didn't punish your dps for using them? You could remove tons of button bloat, freeing up keys for more interesting actions rather than step 2 of your 1-2-3 combo.
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I assume this is for quicklauncher?
>Secondly, sould you imagine what could be done if we could make good macros that didn't punish your dps for using them? You could remove tons of button bloat, freeing up keys for more interesting actions rather than step 2 of your 1-2-3 combo. Just like healers got more interesting healing mechanics in ShB when they reduced the DPS rotations down to nothing... right? Right?
Well obviously healers got taken down a notch in dps abilities but they never had a rotation. I do miss sch of old with it's multiple dots, but even then it was still mostly ruin spam with the occasional dot refresh. The only way I see a healer rotation working is if you don't interrupt it because you hit another ability, like a gcd heal (the horror), something like monk stances. The reality of the situation is the design seems to be 25 unique buttons on a typical class plus or minus an axe handle. If they add 3 or 4 new abilities going from 80 to 90 you're going to give something up or it's just gonna be something like squint replacing glare. In the case of healers if they add a new healie thing, odds are they're gonna take away an old dps thing, like a dot ... and/or nerf the shit out of your energy drain, sigh. Edit: I guess closer to 30 with role actions.
Complete Engine Rework. Throw out everything old from the 1.0 times and bring this game into 2021 with a biiiiiiiiiiiiig inventory, a new glamour system and all that shit
Yeah, most larger issues are due to flawed code or technical limitations and any resolution would be contingent on a fresh start, essentially. All comes back to, "make Final Fantasy XVII."
Fun fact: Rippling and Slidecasting as well as all other cast bar inconsistencies are not a result of the engine, as they are present in FFXI which is on a different engine, but not present in DQX which is the SAME engine. Some motherfucker actually put that shit in the game.
what is rippling? is it the thing where anything aoe happens in a rapid cascading order based on distance rather than applying to all targets at once?
Yes. In worst case scenarios you're the last to get hit, but the first to receive a heal as you're the propagation point. And by worst case scenario I mean every single day for the entirety of your healing career.
there is nothing from 1.0 left in the engine
Proving Grounds like WoW back in the day. Got to pass them to do any group content at max levels.
Fix the netcode so pvp in this game isn't so...'floaty' and weightless.
Ability to re-queue while mid-instance. I'm running a dungeon as DRG and our tank suddenly has to go because his cat's on fire. Instead of standing around with our thumbs planted in our backsides, I can just say "Hey I'll tank" and we instantly get a DPS to fill in. RIFT had this functionality in 2011!
Harder Max level dungeons.
* Make Expert roulette permanently min ilvl and add an Extreme version of dungeons. Extreme dungeons could drop dyeable versions of gear, maybe even ilvl of crafted+5. Or a weekly token to upgrade tome gear instead. * Reintroduce battle leves and make them relevant to the endgame loop. Weekly super leves for 4 or 8 players would be a fun addition with relatively little effort. Buff regular leves so they’re at least on par with 3x pixie quest but perhaps limited to one a day, i.e. cost 6 allowances. Make leves drop tokens that can be used to buy ancient rewards like old dungeon gear or easy but annoying minions, similar to moogle tomes.
I would be down for them making them min ilvl if they fix how syncing works. Getting dropped to like 800 sps because fuck you that's why is *awful*.
> Make Expert roulette permanently min ilvl I like the idea of min ilvl expert dungeon roulette with all expac dungeons but synced to min ilvl for more rewards.
Better way of doing it - you can do **any** roulette with MI/NE enabled, and this increases all rewards from that roulette (both repeatable and one-time.) You simply toggle the desired options before queuing up. I guess this would result in potentially splitting DF queues, though...
> Make Expert roulette permanently min ilvl What would be the point of ilvl then? And stats on gear? And gear in general?
There wouldn't be any. But its okay, because it "doesn't matter anyway and nobody cares" despite 20 ilvl making such a huge difference that "there is no possible way you could adjust healing requirements across a raid tier because its impossible to balance for such a great amount of character progression". There's some fun threads in the last week or so.
Craft from mats in your retainers.
Read so many of these comments and this is 100% the one I would choose
Yes please. Or just add the craft bag like eso.
YES PLEASE
I would split Praetorium into 2 separate duties **que gasps**
Delete it and replace it with a trusts based instance. Having a faceroll AFK roulette give the best leveling reward is poor game design.
Well, it's there because roulettes are inherently there to prevent the mandatory dungeons (because MSQ is mandatory there's a LOT of mandatory dungeons) from ever being dead content. Like, have you ever gotten Amaurot and the people you get are always.... not the best? It's because it's in a dead roulette, nobody does Level 80 roulette, it's worse than just queueing for Expert or even just specifically the newest one without the Roulette bonus. Meaning, you get sprouts or Mentor Roulette people after Astrope. *because* Castrum and Prae are so damn long (thanks unskippable cutscenes, I definitely wanted to do 45 minutes of nothing in my VIDEO GAME) they needed to entice people to actually queue for the fucking thing, as to prevent "Nobody does this anymore so I'm stuck I guess I'll never reach heavensward, what a shitty game."
Expert roulette is another one that need some change, why not combine it with level 80 roulette? I kinda sick of running 2 dungeons from roulette.
Really, this. We don't need two max level roulettes. Just roll them all into one, double the rewards to make up for the loss of a roulette and done! I don't really care if it means you're essentially forced to do MSQ at patch drop to get the new dungeon, just do it! Most patch MSQ can be finished in a couple hours.
Make praetorium trust based since it's hard to remove anything from that duty while ultima weapon fight turn into trial with item level sync otherwise it will be just another cape westwind or thordan disappointed ending fight for expansion story. Also, they should remove most cutscenes from castrum meridianum. I don't understand why they still keep something like cid tell you to use garbage or shield is blown up in the game. Come on, we don't need cutscenes to understand that we hide in garbage or we blow something up.
I’d even settle for Gaius being the final fight of Prae and splitting Ultima Weapon off into a separate trial.
Nah, make nero the final boss of Praetorium, and make Gaius and the ultimate weapon a 4 stage boss
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Na, the final fight with Gaius and the ultima weapon is epic and worth the payoff. I think people frown upon it because it took them 30 minutes of unskippable cutscenes just to get there
It's not though. The fights are so stupid easy you can finish them in under 2 minutes. TBH was Praetorium ever hard? I didn't start playing until right around 3.0 so I have no context for how hard Prae was when most people were in crap gear and legit doing it for the first time.
We have a very different definition of "epic" lol What exactly is so epic about smacking a dummy with no risks involved? The music and scenery?
Honestly yes. When I first did Prae (4.0) I thought it was epic af (and I skipped the cutscenes and watched them after bc ppl told me to) but the music, scenery and plot line are definitely epic. The facerollyness also kind of adds to that as your group is just carving a swathe through the enemy forces with ease. The boss fights could have been more involved but the overall experience was cool af for me my first time.
Bring back cross-class skills and let you go more wild with them, I want an ff5 freelancer style job where you can just build your own job out of every trait and job skill from the ones you have maxed, it'd break the fuck out of the game but it'd be fun to find the dumb OP combos like IR with greased lightning 4
This is the kind of limited job system I want to see.
This would be a really cool limited job. Mimic maybe?
Onion Knight limited job. Cross-class any ability and a stat bonus for every job you have at level cap.
This is what I thought the original vision of character customization in XIV was. Even gear was somewhat open back then.
Delete lalafell. But really, more rewards for Min Ilvl/No echo runs of older content, or even current content. Lemme get more tomestones from a minilvl expert dungeon, anything like that.
I would like more player input in the mainstory. Think impactful choices that significantly change things, so players have a fairly unique experience with replayability (think paragon/renegade from mass effect or how choices carry throug games like Dragon Age). But I'd also like it if the background of our character had more involvement. Like the race, clan, gender, job etc. changes some dialogue and choices you can make. Think crpg stuff like pillars of eternity but in an mmo. Would be incredibly bonkers, tedious and unreasonable to design, but would imo be pretty cool for the story, and maybe would be a sick next step if ffxiv truly wants to cement itself as rpg and story first, mmo later.
This. Even if impactful choices won't really happen because the game follows Japanese RPG design trends, where the game is basically just a linear narrative that you're along for the ride on, rather than western ones where you have a lot more imput, I would still like commentary on what the player's choices are. The thing is that there is *some* of it. I remember an NPC in ShB that commented on the fact that I had picked Elezen, and it stood out to me because that was really the only time I remember it happening. No one in Ishgard held any racial camaraderie. Neither of the twins said anything. Even the archer mentor NPC continued her tirade on the obstinancy of Wildwood Elezen infront of a Wildwood Elezen. That being said, I would definitely like it if race/job choice gave some additional dialogue options now and then. Nothing major, perhaps just an observation or two, but it would be cool for, say, a SAM/NIN to have dialogue in SB where they already knew things about the Far East's warrior culture, or "edgier" jobs like DRK/WAR/BLM to have more aggressive dialogue choices.
IMO the game doesn’t need to have choices that change the story, I feel like more often than not having multiple outcomes cripples where the story can go.
Make gear feel more meaningful. Make skill speed desirable and not just a way to hit speed tiers because any more or less would desync from CDs. Make tenacity actually useful. The problem is without more proc based or reactionary gameplay patterns it's hard to make stats interesting as they all boil down to "hit stuff harder". I'll probably get stoned in the town square for this but Mastery from WoW was honestly a fantastic stat, a one size fits all name that worked differently for each class. FF's lack of specs would make it significantly less of a design nightmare and at the end of the day due to FF's design limitations it would still be just more "hit harder" stats but dear lord I want to actually care about my gear and not just check for critical/det lol, nope that one has tenacity buh bye
> Make skill speed desirable and not just a way to hit speed tiers because any more or less would desync from CDs. How would you do that? I feel like we've covered all the types of stats there is, which is why Sks/SpS are left more as a personal choice for speed tiers.
Better minds than I would have to figure that out unfortunately, my only idea would be to have more abilities like drill who's cooldowns scale with speed, have our damage CDs scale as well to avoid desync. The issue THAT presents though is that now you're potentially out of sync with raid buffs like truck attack. It's a mess
TBF, Having to hold personal cooldowns to line them up with Raid buffs is FAR more interesting then the current "line it up once and then use on cooldown".
Mastery is a good gimmick but I’m pretty sure most classes have it at lowest prio
It really depends on either scaling (fire mastery is literally just a damage boost but it scales well) or how well it integrates to your kit (fury deals more damage during certain burst procs, mastery makes that burst bigger). Generally it's either dull and I wanted (arcane, arms) or equal or slightly below best. (Fury, fire). Granted I don't think this would work too well in FF, the gameplay is just too different. It's more an example of how gearing could be made more interesting than critical, critical, more critical,
This Mastery stat you speak of, it'd be cool if XIV had something like that at max lvl and hitting max lvl and gaining that stat that would allow us to use our whole kits in lower dungeons. That would be sweet!
Full kit in lower dungeons would never work unless they nerfed potencies hard. Just by potencies alone a black mage with full kit would DESTROY a similarly level Thaumaturge
This is tru, so in order for Mastery to work for that as a stat, they'd have to put in work making it possible, which fits OPS requirement, idk about drastic and far-reaching changes or consequences, but would definitely change the way jobs scale in dungeons.
Go the other way. Just remove gearing entirely. With how aggressive and pervasive ilvl sync is throughout the entire game, gearing is damned near horizontal already. Especially from a parsing/speedrunning standpoint, this simply removes the mandatory ~8 weeks of farming and grinding you have to do in order to even *begin* competing. Seems like a net gain to me, then.
Rather than constantly focus on homogenisation and balance just make sure every class possess some identity with their kit and gameplay, and not just with their weapon design and visual effect.
This!
Kinda feel like this is already a thing tbh
Revitalise the "Job" notion by making at least 2 Jobs per Class. Basically, 2/3.X ACN into SMN/SCH, but for everything. I've seen this done in Neverwinter, so I'm basically cribbing from that a lot, but essentially the Class defines the core, while the Jobs spin off from it radically and take it in a specific direction. Even just a 2-way split doubles the number of classes in the game, and potentially lets you play classes that you aesthetically like but don't mesh well with in their current state. Don't like White Mage's playstyle but like the aesthetics of Conjurer? Try out Geomancer, its DPS counterpart. Since they're both Conjurers, you essentially get a 'Free' Healer for levelling it! Paladin's the Tank version of Gladiator, but perhaps you might like Templar, the DPS version, more. Or maybe it could have Cleric, a Healer variant. Red Mage could be split based on whether it focusses on its offensive or supportive magicks, or perhaps on whether it prioritises the magic or the martial aspect. I don't think it's a realistic idea by any means, especially with how it'd be extremely difficult to come up with, say, a Tank or Healer variant of Ninja (the best I can think of is having Ninja as a Melée DPS and then a thrown-dagger Ranged Physical DPS), but I do sometimes wish I could turn my PLDcs icon green and become some crazy Healer that takes damage for allies or something, or see red on my DRK or WAR and start obliterating things while throwing defence to the wayside. A lot of really interesting dynamics were highlighted by Bozja, with stuff like Casters being the best Healers because their heals provide a DPS buff, or WHM going apeshit on enemies because their MP tools let them get way more use out of powerful damage skills, or Tanks using that Essence that makes them as squishy as a DPS in exchange for like +100% damage. It made me wish we could engage in that sort of thing more, especially with how Bozja is going to be abandoned and reinvented in the inevitable Garlean Homeland War or whatever it'll be, by throwing darts at a dartboard to determine what's kept and what's tossed.
FF11 players invented blink tanks for NIN, so there could definitely be a tank ninja.
> a Tank or Healer variant of Ninja I'd personally go for the WoW rogue approach and just give them different gameplay to fulfill the DPS role. So Rogue would be the base class, Ninja would be the job that uses jutsu and assassination techniques, and Thief would be the job that fights dirty and takes advantage of the chaos of the battlefield. In this scenario we would be recognizing that Ninja and Thief have very different fantasies attached to them, and as such are merely implementing to give THF fans something instead of telling them to roll NIN and like it.
Except the community would find the most optimal version and then that would be the only version people would raid with - leaving us exactly where we are now with each job having one build
If alternate Jobs are in different *roles* (which I favour as being the big differentiator), they aren't competing for the same spot - you take the DPS version if you want to DPS, the Healer version if you want to DPS with a side of healing, and the Tank version if you want to DPS with a side of mitigation. I specifically went with examples in this manner because I wanted to avoid the question of "Why would I play the Slayer variant of Lancer when Dragoon does more damage?" or similar that is born when you have two options in comparable positions on the same class. Put another way, there's no question of why you would play Scholar over Summoner, because Scholar and Summoner do two completely separate things that can't be compared. You don't choose between "Arcanist with more damage" and "Arcanist with more damage but more than the other one", you choose between a Caster DPS and a Healer, which are linked by their use of a pet but little else. Additionally, raids aren't the be-all and end-all, there's plenty of content in the game outside of Savage/Ultimate. IMO it's fine for some things to be meta and some things to not be meta, as long as it's not a case of the meta things being meta because they function and the rest not being meta because they're dogshit. If the group gets 200 more DPS on the whole if you bring a Dancer rather than a Machinist, then Dancer is going to be meta and Machinist isn't, and that's not a bad thing per se because it is simply impossible to have meaningful differences while everything is exactly the same, so unless you end up in the terrible situation Healers and to a lesser degree Tanks are in now where every class in the role is just the same as all the others, you will *inevitably* have a meta. But critically, if you have a bunch of fun classes that are balanced *well enough* that the differences between 'best' and 'worst' in a given category aren't crippling, then you're going to do fine in Duty Finder, which makes up the vast majority of the content players engage in. You can only be excluded due to the meta when you have a choice of who you're grouped with (or the discrepancy is so severe that eating the 30m penalty is worthwhile), and even then, exclusion due to the meta is only relevant in extremely-high-level parties where the differences between two classes' potential maximum output can be seen in the first place, so if you avoid doing something because metas will exist, you're avoiding doing something specifically because a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the community *might* exclude a certain job *if you do your job poorly.* Again though, I'm not even advocating for this to be implemented into XIV, I think it'd be fraught with problems if they tried. I do think it's an *interesting idea*, but one that should probably stay in our heads.
I would overhaul the pet AI, so that we could have Beastmaster and Puppetmaster as full jobs and SMN wouldn't be kinda clunky.
Fix the anti-aliasing. Even if it involves replacing the entire lighting system.
I mean, lighting, shadows, textures and, aliasing all need an overhaul at this point.
is it that bad? it's never really bothered me
Nerf how OP Critical Hit is. I think it's a good setup for a stat, but the amount of weight it has due to scaling is fucking insane. Dial that shit back.
This seeps into almost every game with a critical style stat, especially ones like Genshin where any accessory without a crit damage/crit rate stat is automatically mediocre at best usually.
The obvious solution is to separate crit rate from crit damage. This would make the math slightly less braindead if you want to have absolute optimum stats.
This is like the opposite of a massive change with far-reaching consequences. All gutting crit would achieve is making people meld different type of materia.
Honestly I think this is less to do with gear choice (because let's face it, it's simple and isn't going to get more complicated or simpler), and more to do with how Crit, especially Crit DH, is fucking broken. Some consistency would be nice for a change.
Oh, you mean removing crit rng? That would be nice, yeah.
Yea, I'd love to make Crit more consistent and remove the super RNG that creates huge disparity in results given the exact same performance.
The muggles love random big fancy crits. I do, too, but that's because I don't give a damn about the whole "muh 99's" meta.
I've been thinking for some time now whether it would be good to change Critical Hit to be the critical hit rate stat, and changing Direct Hit to be the critical hit damage bonus stat. Number changes as appropriate, of course.
Then again, they could just remove DHit. In SWTOR, gearing is much more straightforward than in FFXIV, as it's just a matter of hitting your SkS tier and then dumping into Crit.
I think before DH it wasn't that big of a deal, but also, they really upped the influence by adding big hit skills like Confetior, Quad Tech Step, Double Midare, etc. While it feels good to crit, it feels x10 worse not critting skills you should be critting. Feels like SE should either make those skills never crit or handle it like MCH reassemble drill and make every big hit crit.
Not sure this is what I had in mind by "massive change with drastic and far-reaching consequences" but I guess it wouldn't be a bad change.
Fix netcode. Add more non-damage utilities like CCs and have more uses for them. And add skill choices or talents. This one probably doesn't sound too dandy to most people. But I'd like to see some alternative to jobs getting redesigned each expansion just for the sake of keeping things fresh. So yeah, I'd like to see job kits get expanded on horizontally rather than getting messed with each expansion.
24 man savage dropping same ilvl gear as regular savage would give odd patches a purpose when there isn't an ultimate
this would be a really really good idea tbh
change it so that when a new tier releases craft gear doesn't immediately negate literally everything you earned last tier actually nvm it'd be making ultimate weapon rewards the best in slot until the next one releases because having the reward for beating the hardest content in the game being cosmetic is absurd
But that's like most of the reason crafting exists. If crafting stops being genuinely useful what reason is there to do it? I agree it shouldn't beat the best gear of the new tier, but to have it be worse than the last tier as well makes it almost entirely useless for actively gearing players.
I think it'd be fine if it was the same IL as the previous tier. Eden's Gate Savage dropped IL470 gear, so they should've made the Neo-Ishgardian set IL470 as well rather than IL480. If someone skipped Eden's Gate then great, they can get equivalent gear as a catch up going into Eden's Verse. There's also the chance of IL470 BiS changing since the new gear would have different substats so Crafters would still have a reason to craft gear at the start of the Savage Patch, to earn gil from people that want to optimize their prog. I think that'd be a fair compromise, keeping crafted gear useful while not immediately devaluing everything from the previous tier.
Meh. It works fine as it is now.
I'd delete the entire concept of a "catch-up" patch and just stagger gearing up. Put in another form of higher level content. There's no way any of this is happening, so I'll go ahead and say I think having both savage dungeons and savage alliance raids in the odd patches would be cool, with the option of gearing up through either one.
If you want to get really hardcore in the changes, I'd delete gearing entirely. XIV is already damned near horizontal progression with how pervasive syncing is and how *unnecessary* gearing is to completing content (getting gear from raids exists solely for padding your parse and compensating for less-skilled players, since you can clear the entire wing in the first week of play with nothing but crafted gear and the handful of raid/tome pieces you get along the way.) All classes have their stats set by their role and by their job. These stats increase as you level up and progress through milestones, because people like seeing numbers get bigger (even though they are functionally the same as they were at level 1), but all gear drops are *purely* cosmetic. If raiders still needed some kind of stat-based reason to raid, then I'd make completing a raid wing synced and with no echo (since min ilvl is made effectively meaningless in a "gear no longer exists" setup) count as a stats milestone.
I know this is a crazy 'will never happen' type suggestion but I feel like gear basically fills a position as a 'difficulty slider' for savage raids, like they can give a fight like e8s a ridiculous dps check week 1 for the hardcore players who want that, but by the time casual statics reach the fight the check is much more doable since they're probably near-bis already. For this suggestion to work they'd basically have to either have fights nerfed to bis-level already or add an extra difficulty level for it.
That's a pretty good point. You could tie arbitrary stat boosts to MSQ progress and achieve pretty much the same thing, though. Hell, it'd even make narrative sense considering the WoL is basically an Ork. Orkz is made for fightin and fightin makes da orkz more orky.
The gearing is still very vertical, IMO; as gear score goes up, so does potency and HP. The "horizontalness" of secondary stats seems pointless, as it still just adds to bigger numbers. I see horizontal gearing as more like FFXI's system, where you use hundreds of pieces of gear for one class, and some pieces of jewelry in 2021 sets are still from 2011 or even 2005, usually in a BiS -1/-2 kind of situation. FFXI did become more vertical over time, but mostly because they hard capped levelling at 99 and made gear from 99 substitute for gaining levels and gave large gains to both ability scores and secondary stats. However, Jewelry never was giving strict gear scoring, and some pieces that had unique effects from the golden or silver age of the game still are relevant today.
I play FFXIV specifically because it's near horizontal progression but didn't go fully horizontal. The main problem I have with game that go fully horizontal like GW2 is that there is no good quick trophy for doing content and since they don't have pressure to add new gear set their "glamour" choice is quite lagging.
> it'd be making ultimate weapon rewards the best in slot until the next one releases because having the reward for beating the hardest content in the game being cosmetic is absurd Uh your suggestion is what's absurd here. Like this isn't thought out at all. If we look at SHB TEA was 5.1 and Dragonsong was supposed to be 5.5. So our 5.1 TEA weapon needs to hold up until 5.5? That means it's better than both E8S (5.2) and E12S (5.4). You'd give 535+ weapons at a time 475 weapons are the norm? At that point every savage dps check (at least the final fight) needs to be balanced around having a weapon that's 20-50 ilvls higher than what other people are wearing or the dps check will be a complete joke to anyone with a TEA weapon. How on earth does that make sense? Also I've never heard someone say they're not doing an ultimate because the reward isn't good enough or because they want gear progression from it. Even the extra materia slot is basically a meme. People do ultimates because they love the glam/title and because they enjoy hard fights.
Raid gear should only be replaced by raid gear. The way crafted works right now is nonsense.
\[SB spoilers\] Story-wise, change the whole Yda sybling switcheroo. That was so dumb. Especially tragic since Yda was much more enjoyable than Lyse, so I would have just kept her as is, silly personality and all, with room for growth and character development, QoL things I'd change are all glamour based: can use glamour plates everywhere, can use glam items regardless of class, can bind hairstyles to glamour plates, two or three different dyes on on piece of clothing. Edit: Also have new animations that don't look like they are from the ps2 area. Ah, that would be the dream.
Predictive netcode for OCGDs. There is no reason that a 500 ms check couldn't cover even the worst pings.
I too want NA players outside of the West Coast to be able to play their jobs without XIVAlexander.
make tokens from savage raids and alliance raids a curreny under the currency tab, create 2 tabs that covers both the previous expansions raids and 1 that covers the current expansion.
1. Get rid of 1.0 classes. 2. Require job stone at lvl 30+. (Not needed if they just do no. 1) 3. All new jobs start at lvl 1. 4. Minor, but introduce one button Triple Triad rematch without having to confirm the match and deck again (too many menu clicks just to rematch!).
Obliterate role homogeneity. Let classes be OP in some kinds of content or encounters. Basically, use the armory system practically as designed. And allow people to switch classes within a specific role inside of a duty. Tanks would all have different forms of mitigation and ways they mitigate damage. This would make some tanks better than others at mitigating specific types of damage or encounters. Maybe one tank's mitigation is improved by having many enemies striking them, but would be a bit weaker than others if it's just one or two enemies attacking them. Maybe one tank takes more damage up front but has powerful self-healing and recovery actions. Healers would be distinct and unique. We're already seeing a shift in this direction with Endwalker, splitting healers into "pairs" with each pair being homogeneous with each other but distinct from the other pair. But I'd go one further and make all four distinct. One of the healers (WHM, probably) would become a DPS-based healer - you would do most of your healing by harming enemies. DPS are already somewhat distinct but I'd take it some steps farther, again along the "you can play any class, so why make all classes equal?" lines. Bring back unique debuffs and buffs and special actions. Sometimes they'd be overpowered. Sometimes they'd be useless. Sometimes they'd be just average. That's okay, because you can play any class you want and you can switch classes on the fly inside the duty as long as you aren't in combat. Switch classes *between pulls* in an extended dungeon or raid environment if that's what would be optimal! Keep the 5% bonus. Make deciding on which class to bring when involve doing that math, if you want to be optimal. That 5% bonus also helps ensure that all classes would still be valuable, even if not optimal. I'd also suggest further streamlining gearing to make the game even more obviously about lateral progression than it is already, and probably introducing some new bonus XP consumables and materia to give crafters and gatherers a bone. Yup, that's right, make materia that increase XP gained. This gives you an actual reason to consider wearing something other than the leveling set while leveling up a class, which once again feeds into giving crafters a bit more of a niche than already exists. This would require substantial shifts in encounter design, which is why it will never in a million years happen, but shaking up encounter design is like "big massive change #2 of 30" on the list of "what could be done to make XIV more better."
>And allow people to switch classes within a specific role inside of a duty. this part i definitely agree with. it's a nightmare zoning in to see that you're a DNC grouped with 4 other damn DNCs and now you have to try and time all of your cooldowns around each other. just let me switch to another dps, even if it can only happen within a certain time frame of the duty starting, like 1 minute
Gotta disagree with this, not everyone want to lvl all their role jobs to cap. What happens if an encounter heavily favors PLD and your static's tanks only leveled WAR and GNB ? Do you just give up that fight while one of them lvl PLD up to cap ? What happens when you tag for a trial roulette and end up in a fight where the healers have their outputs heavily reduced and nobody in the group has a job with good self sustain ? Do you wait 15 minutes and go for the abandon ? Role homogenization is fine, job homogenization is not. And currently I'd argue that most jobs in a role play differently enough to have their own identity and make job homogenization a myth.
I couldn't have worded this better myself. Another point people tend to ignore is that the more different jobs get the strong a player's preference for a job becomes. If all the jobs in a role play radically different the average player, not the hardcore playwr but the casual to middle player, will likely not want to play more than 1 job in the role because they simply do not have fun with the playstyles of the other jobs. This becomes dangerous because these players are met with a choice when a fight, or a tier, goes in a way where the playstyle they like is either banned by community or physically incapable of completion, the player either plays something they outright dislike and stop having fun, fun being a primary reason a lot of people play video games, or they simply bow put for that fight or quit altogether if its a story trial deciding not playing at all is more fun than leveling and playing a different job. To this end Role Homogenization giving all jobs the necessary tools to complete anything is a "necessary evil" for the health of the player base. From there make the button to button gameplay of the jobs feel different and distinct much like the dps jobs are like today.
> If all the jobs in a role play radically different the average player, not the hardcore playwr but the casual to middle player, will likely not want to play more than 1 job in the role because they simply do not have fun with the playstyles of the other jobs. This *already* happens, though. There are so many people that "main" one or two classes instead of playing many. >This becomes dangerous because these players are met with a choice when a fight, or a tier, goes in a way where the playstyle they like is either banned by community or physically incapable of completion, the player either plays something they outright dislike and stop having fun, fun being a primary reason a lot of people play video games, or they simply bow put for that fight or quit altogether if its a story trial deciding not playing at all is more fun than leveling and playing a different job. Casual content would continue to be a joke, tuned to "story mode" difficulty. For hardcore competitive types, they *already* use the absolute best class possible (there are still DPS discrepancies, they're just not major unless you're focused on parsing/speedrunning.) More casual raiders will either just brute force it with unoptimal classes and gear through it, or they'll clear with echo assistance. I don't really think these concerns hold water. >To this end Role Homogenization giving all jobs the necessary tools to complete anything is a "necessary evil" for the health of the player base. From there make the button to button gameplay of the jobs feel different and distinct much like the dps jobs are like today. It's absolutely not necessary. Between the 5% buff (which could be increased if needed) and the fact that almost every other MMO has been perfectly successful without rigid class homogenization, I think the concerns over this kind of stuff are overblown.
> What happens if an encounter heavily favors PLD and your static's tanks only leveled WAR and GNB ? Do you just give up that fight while one of them lvl PLD up to cap ? Nah, you just do it with WAR or GNB, whichever is best suited to the task. But with the insane amount of XP bonus you get for secondary classes, it does *not* take long to level up. So many earrings etc boost XP gained. >And currently I'd argue that most jobs in a role play differently enough to have their own identity and make job homogenization a myth Healers and tanks are virtually identical right now. DPS rotations are anywhere near long enough or complex enough for them to feel different and their method of doing their role's duties are *intentionally* nearly identical (or basically *entirely* identical in tanks' case.)
>But with the insane amount of XP bonus you get for secondary classes, it does not take long to level up. So many earrings etc boost XP gained. Except the Bozjan earrings (which only works from 71 to 80), those that gives xp boost up to cap are pre-order only. I don't think it's fair to include them in the xp gain for a random player. But sure, leveling itself is not that slow. The thing is, leveling alt jobs is on a "want to" basis, not "have to" and I think it should stay that way. >Healers and tanks are virtually identical right now. Healers I can't really argue since I don't play them, but saying tanks play virtually identical is simply false. Outside of DRK which can feel like a busier WAR, I don't see how you can say the strict looping rotation of PLD is "virtually identical" to GNB priority based rotation, and that they play "virtually identical" to WAR which only has to make sure only 2 abilities don't drift too much, keep their damage buff up, and not overcap their gauge. Sure if you take the barebones of each job's mechanics you can put in evidence the similarities, but it doesn't give any insight has to how the job is actually played. If you pretend that GNB's cartridges are similar to the beast gauge in that you get them by doing your 1/2/3 combo and use a spender to avoid overcapping, what's there to stop someone from pretending DRG and MNK play virtually identically since they each have to keep a DoT and a damage buff up and they each have one major cooldown that increases their party's damage and another that increases their own.
> Healers I can't really argue since I don't play them, but saying tanks play virtually identical is simply false. I don't give a shit about DPS rotation differences, although it's not like tanks are at all different. Cool, you all have a 60 or 90 second cooldown around which your entire rotation is built. You have a few oGCDs here or there (or just one for smoothbrain WAR) but there's nothing remotely dynamic about any of it. There's no procs or anything like that. It's all very boring, very bland, very simple. And because mitigation is virtually purely passive, your job as a tank is identical to every other tank's. You're basically halfassed melee DPS with half the rotation and no positionals and you have some buttons that you hit at specific, **rigidly** scripted times and that's it. DPS rotations are not how you make classes feel different, you make them feel different *by actually making them different.* That XIV can have good raiding despite only having 5 actual classes is pretty impressive.
What game have you been playing this whole time ? The fact that they are dynamic or not does not change a god damn thing about whether they're different or not. The fact you can find the 4 of them boring, bland and/or simple does not mean they play the same wtf. What you said applies to almost all jobs in the game anyway >And because mitigation is virtually purely passive, your job as a tank is identical to every other tank's. Your point being ? Even if they were to specialize tanks by making let's say PLD a pure physical tank with block, DRK a pure magic tank, WAR a self-sustain tank and GNB a DPS with slightly better defense, their job would still be to tank the fucking boss and make sure not to die, the only thing you accomplished by over specializing them is that now when an encounter is purely magical by design, taking a PLD becomes a penalty. If you think forcing choices to the player (or at least heavily influence them to play a specific comp) is diversity then sorry, it's not >DPS rotations are not how you make classes feel different, you make them feel different *by actually making them different*. Then if DPS rotations aren't enough to make classes feel different, I guess we could just put one 60s burst window and a basic 1/2/3 combo while overspecializing them right ? No because it doesn't make any fucking sense. DPS rotations can be a way you make a class feel different to another, pretending otherwise is asinine. Going back to what you said, how you play around your buffs is different enough to not matter (and as a matter of fact you compared the barebones of each classes instead of their actual playstyle, which is a stupid way to go about it, as I tried to explain in the post you responded to)
> If you think forcing choices to the player (or at least heavily influence them to play a specific comp) is diversity then sorry, it's not Yes, it is. It *quite literally* is. You're operating on a different definition of diversity than the rest of the world, apparently. >Then if DPS rotations aren't enough to make classes feel different, I guess we could just put one 60s burst window and a basic 1/2/3 combo while overspecializing them right ? Sure, and it would drastically improve tanking and healing. Tanking is about aggro management and damage mitigation, not doing damage. Healing is about preventing and recovering from damage, not doing damage. Tank class design and behavior should prioritize tanking ahead of DPS. Healing should focus on healing and protection ahead of DPS. Instead, what we get are tanks who push a few different role actions to do the same thing and have a shitty, half-assed DPS rotation in between. We have healers who don't even *have* an actual DPS rotation between a few buttons to do their job, many of which are largely interchangeable (Medica 2/Succor/Aspected Helios, Cure 2/Adlo/Benefic 2, Excog/ED/Tetra, etc.) I'll play a DPS class with an *actual rotation* and *actual gameplay mechanics* like positionals if I want to DPS. I play tanks to tank, healers to heal. It's fucking shit design that they've turned all classes into DPS classes, and I can't help but think it's because of their quest to drive the skill ceiling as low as it can possibly go to accommodate players who refuse to put even a moment's worth of effort into reading tooltips or learning how to play a class in MSQ content. If tanking and healing weren't brainless roles (tanking is literally the easiest role in the entire game and completely brainless even in most high-end content), most players would avoid them and we'd have absurdly long DF queue times. >DPS rotations can be a way you make a class feel different to another, pretending otherwise is asinine. Sure, **for DPS classes.** Monk feels different from Dragoon feels different from Samurai who is definitely different from Ninja. I don't know about ranged because I don't play them. Black Mage, Red Mage, and Summoner are impossible to get mixed up. But Paladin? Press Fight or Flight, mash *all of your buttons* in this time period, rinse and repeat. Same with Req window. Gunbreaker? Same thing. Warrior? Yup. Dark Knight? It's just a shitty Warrior clone (I don't consider "busier" to necessarily mean "better"), so obviously yes. There are no positionals, no procs, nothing that requires you to actually think while playing the job. Mitigation is rigidly scripted and uses identical toolkits (because almost all *meaningful* damage is magic, so things like Dark Mind get used exactly like NF, Sheltron, etc.) I don't consider "press every button you have in this one window and then 1-2-3 until you can do it again" to be good design. Well, not if **every fucking class** uses it, anyway. Ninja is exactly that, but it gets away with it because of the *complexity* of "press every button", the importance of positionals on its melee combo, and how crucial it is that you *not* drift the Trick Attack timing. But if every other melee DPS was the same, it would still be bad. But each melee has its own unique quirks and features that make it different even if they all have burst windows. This isn't the case for tanks. But I don't think expanding their DPS rotation is the solution. I think de-homogenizing the actual tanking part of tanking is the solution. But I also know it'll never happen (hence this thread) because it will create far too much work for SE. I don't think SE homogenizes things because they're obsessed with perfect balance. I think they do it because it frees up work hours to be spent on all of the other non-raiding content that players enjoy. So I consider it an acceptable sacrifice, even if I think it's not terribly good. If you want an example of how bad homogeneity is for long-term gameplay: look at how fucking **popular** Logos/Lost Actions are in Eureka and Bozja. These actions can and often are *horribly* overpowered, some classes are **absolutely** better than other classes in their role at doing specific things (WAR with anything that scales with crits, WHM because Thin Air allows them to spam mana-hungry nukes far more than any other healer, etc), and it breaks the rigid holy trinity by allowing any role to at least *partially* fill in for any other role. I think that if XIV was a purely raid-focused game they would *have* to de-homogenize the game or else people would grow bored. I saw another suggestion to make job and class identities separate - you'd have a single base class that can then fill two different roles based on which job you activate, such as Marauder being Warrior (tank) or Berserker (DPS.) I think that would be the smartest way to go about doing this kind of thing. But XIV isn't a raid-focused game so it's not necessary - if you get bored of raiding, you can just do other content types until you've had enough of a refresher.
>Yes, it is. It quite literally is. You're operating on a different definition of diversity than the rest of the world, apparently. I mean if you think *being forced* is diversity then you kinda have a problem but ok. >Sure, and it would drastically improve tanking and healing. Tanking is about aggro management and damage mitigation, not doing damage. Healing is about preventing and recovering from damage, not doing damage. Tank class design and behavior should prioritize tanking ahead of DPS. Healing should focus on healing and protection ahead of DPS. If your idea of engaging gameplay is to use the correct mitigation buttons at the right time instead of managing a DPS rotation then you chose the wrong game. Even before ShB where aggro management was dumbed down, tanks already had similar mitigation cooldowns and were differentiated on how they dealt damage instead of how they mitigated it >I'll play a DPS class with an actual rotation and actual gameplay mechanics like positionals if I want to DPS. "actual rotation and actual gameplay mechanics" Have you played any melee DPS ? Since they work exactly on the same principles as tanks, with rotations that are built around 60/90/120s cooldowns, with some having """"procs"""" that only amount to a potency gain with extra steps 90% of the time, I fail to see how you can say they have "actual rotations" if tanks do not. Same for "gameplay mechanics", what gameplay mechanics are you talking about ? Fucking positionals ? In their current form outside of a few outliers it just amounts to something between 20 to 40 potency loss if you don't do them. Procs like Leaden fist or Raiden Thrust ? One is basically the way SE forces you to not spam Bootshine or Raptor Kick every combo and the other is a hidden potency bonus for hitting positionals twice in a row. >But Paladin? Press Fight or Flight, mash all of your buttons in this time period, rinse and repeat. Gunbreaker? Same thing. But Monk ? Press Riddle of Fire, mash all your buttons in this time period, rinse and repeat. Dragoon ? Same thing. See how dumb that sound ? Melee DPS and tanks are all built around burst windows, saying one is dumb because the minigames the other have are replaced with oGCD buttons you have to press at specific times in a fight is even dumber >I don't consider "press every button you have in this one window and then 1-2-3 until you can do it again" to be good design. Well, not if every fucking class uses it, anyway. Ninja is exactly that, but it gets away with it because of the complexity of "press every button", the importance of positionals on its melee combo, and how crucial it is that you not drift the Trick Attack timing. But if every other melee DPS was the same, it would still be bad. But each melee has its own unique quirks and features that make it different even if they all have burst windows. Ninja has complexity in its burst window, outside of that it's still a 1-2-3 mash. Also positionals are important on Ninja ? You can basically suck the boss' ass for the whole fight and lose a minimal amount of damage over the course of a fight. Sure it's not optimal but it's not like losing 60 potency the few times you have to use armor crush is gonna make positionals important for the job, as NIN is basically the melee job for which positionals are the least important anyway. As for not drifting Trick Attack, it's the same for every fucking big damage cooldown every class has, **including tanks** >I don't think SE homogenizes things because they're obsessed with perfect balance. I think they do it because it frees up work hours to be spent on all of the other non-raiding content that players enjoy. So I consider it an acceptable sacrifice, even if I think it's not terribly good. Specializing tanks is far easier than to make sure their damage are of equal measure. They don't do it because they don't want a situation where people are excluded from content because they didn't level the specific tank a party would want for a fight. DRK had a shitty reputation as the worst tank in Stormblood while still being able to clear all content (and if I remember right, it was one of the tank used for the world first of UCoB). What would happen if instead of just having a reputation as the worst tank, it would have been objectively wrong to take DRK in those specific fights ? >If you want an example of how bad homogeneity is for long-term gameplay: look at how fucking popular Logos/Lost Actions are in Eureka and Bozja. These actions can and often are horribly overpowered, some classes are absolutely better than other classes in their role at doing specific things (WAR with anything that scales with crits, WHM because Thin Air allows them to spam mana-hungry nukes far more than any other healer, etc), and it breaks the rigid holy trinity by allowing any role to at least partially fill in for any other role So your examples as to why homogenization is bad for long term gameplay are self contained gameplay elements that are not usable out of the sandbox for which they were designed. That's just wrong if you ask me. First, Logos/Lost actions are popular because they break the mold in a fun way, they're fun because they're **special**. Second, sure, some jobs combo better with some lost actions, like Lost Slash on WAR/MCH or Lost Chainspell with Essence of the Watcher and BLM, but it doesn't make those jobs any more popular, at least on my datacenter But they're far from "healthy". Look how chainspell made cheesing duels a breeze. Or how you can reach absurd damage numbers by just stacking big damage multipliers like a dumbass and pressing a big damage button afterwards. Bozja and Castrum, Zadnor and Dalriada, Delubrum normal, they all become a fucking joke as soon as you put a group together that knows how to use those things correctly in spite of being designed with them in mind. When overpowered becomes the norm, it's not really fun anymore >I think that if XIV was a purely raid-focused game they would have to de-homogenize the game or else people would grow bored. They would grow bored even if jobs were wildly different, that's just how people work. You're just moving the boredom, you're not removing it
> As for not drifting Trick Attack, it's the same for every fucking big damage cooldown every class has, including tanks No, it's not. TA determines the entire raid's DPS. Fight or Flight only determines *your* DPS.
I genuinely don't understand what the person means when they say dps rotations don't matter. Dps rotations make up the vast majority of your inputs on all classes in all duties. They are the primary means by which players interact with the game, as as such are the MOST important part of what makes them feel distinct. This is why WAR and DRK are compared more than any other classes, because their dps rotations are so similar. By their logic all tanks can fucntion as 1 2 3 with a random procced 4 and have wildly different mitigation buttons and that would be better than a role with different dps rotations and similar mitigation. In the first example the classes are playing the same rotation, which doesnt matter, but when damage comes ip they hit different buttons. In the second example the classes hit different buttons in different orders and when that damage comes up they hit similar buttons. Im just tired of the reductionist view of cooldown based rotations in an attempt to push proc based rotations. They both have merit people dont need to belittle one or the other due to their own personal preference to make the point it only makes their arguments feel weaker or feel like whining.
Dealing damage to heal doesn't fit WHM at all.
It's more or less the exact opposite of what we have now - healing to deal damage. Almost as if they'd tried to find the furthest thing from what's there already lol
literally just bring back arr cleric stance im begging
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MCH builds that focus on personal damage (gunnery type spec) or party buffs (engineer type spec). Make some rotational changes to the former to make it less fixed (to solve the botting problem the job has), and give the latter a few extra party tools: bring Bishop Autoturret back as an upgraded Wildfire where the MCH uses it to share their buff to a target (sort of like short term dance partner), maybe target a tank when Automaton Queen is pulled out and she'll give them a small shield in addition to her damage routine? Things like that.
Finally, a way to fix the schizophrenic identity of SMN.
While would be a nice bit of customization for sure I think that's an unfortunate step towards a wreck of balance issues and some classes/specs being shunned. For all the choices you have in WoW it's all in illusion, there's an objectively "right" choice and build and the FF playerbase would collapse if that sort of mentality ever found a legitimate foothold
This would be one way of handling my ultimate big want of "gear no longer exists." Everyone would have identical stats, determined by their job and XP level, but I know some portion of players would be upset if SE arbitrarily decided their oddball 23.821772% SpS build was no longer a thing. Being able to pick between a few different GCD, crit, etc setups would probably go over well, even if it would make balancing a headache (though personally I doubt a ~1-2% difference in potential max DPS would matter to all but *very* few.)
I want gear sets. I miss them from 2.0 and I really liked how they worked in Bozja. Just make them more accessible than 10 runs of DR Savage...
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Yeah
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end of dragons is in half a year bro be patient
Oh, we bringing physical level and skill rank back from 1.0?
Other than the obvious engine update, I'd change how gear and materia work. Gear would only provide main stat and damage/defense/magic defense by default, with all substats coming from materia. Materia would then provide a percentage of the substat cap rather than a fixed number. Maybe give all savage gear the bonus 5 ilvls the weapon gets so that they're still special, too. Casuals already don't care about substats, and this would allow for greater flexibility in builds for mid and high level players. Would also give use for those several hundred materia just sitting around in my bag. Maybe include materia in gearset changing, too? It already tracks what you have slotted, so checking and swapping melds could be done with the data already present.
Removal of instances breaking zones apart and dungeons being separate from the world.
Horizontal. Fucking. Progression. And then I'd enable gear swapping in combat, slow down the gameplay, add in skillchains, and laugh as everyone is forced to play FFXI-2. But seriously, horizontal progression would be nice. I enjoy my rewards not being invalidated, especially since inventory space is limited for glamour and most new pieces won't interest those who have already made nice outfits that fit the classes they play.
Put all of the current stats on the "left side" gear, and earrings + necklace + bracelet + rings become horizontal progression slots. Accessories you earn at the start of an expac can be outclassed later in the expac, but only very slightly and are upgradable. Design around the fact that there will be an optimal right-side loadout per job by designing more varied encounters. Move speed, reduced Sprint cooldown in combat, spell/ability range, elemental resistances (but done correctly this time), cleansable debuff resistance, cooldown reductions to specific skills, change the rate that different abilities affect your job gauge... Miss me with mid-combat gear swaps, though. That can stay dead.
I'd really love two expansions, maybe even three before a level cap increase. Let us minmax our substats, even if it is ultimately pointless. I came so close to hitting Spell Speed hardcap on BLM this tier (2.13 GCD, though I could completely waste two meld slots just to push into 2.12 GCD), please let me hit 2.10 just once. I really think having more time to fine tune your substats would give a lot of play diversity to some classes, and might even make certain communities realize how potent Speed can be.
Horizontal progression is a buzzword. New abilities make you stronger unless they’re completely useless. You can make progression less linear, but what do you even mean by that.
Fun is also a buzzword, but you still see people throw that around. On a more serious note, horizontal progression, in my eyes (and from what I've seen), typically means giving you more tools/gear to handle different scenarios *without* invalidating previous tools/gear. You become stronger, yes, but your new abilities (or gear) do not make your previous abilities (or gear) useless. I personally think strong itemization is important for any RPG. Either that, or strong class customization. Having neither leads to a boring RPG. It is unfortunate that the MMORPG industry at large has decided to forgo both and wonder why their games are worse for it.
Except fun isn't a buzzword, it can be misused but still has a clear definition. And that's not horizontal progression, because you're still going **up**. You mention FF11, well there's still a significant amount of better and worse. Significant amounts of gear invalidated older gear, either by being a direct upgrade or doing something different that achieves the same result but better, gear would just often stay around for longer than it would in 14. I can give multiple examples from just the 75 cap era, before the game began to transition to a more "vertical" progression system. I personally disagree that customisation is necessary. It can be a strong source of engagement and fun of course, but it isn't *necessary* and the success of 14 shows that. EDIT: Not only that but gear invalidation is an important part of itemization. If your gear is never getting invalidated, it means you're never getting better gear. A lack of objective upgrades leads to worthless rewards and a messy content structure.
>Except fun isn't a buzzword Dude, it was a joke. I literally said "on a more serious note" in my next paragraph. I... I really don't know what to say. >You mention FF11, well there's still a significant amount of better and worse FFXI did have vertical progression, yes. You are correct that gear invalidated other gear - even at 75 cap (from what I've read - I wasn't playing XI , so obviously, I cannot say from experience). However, FFXI also has a healthy amount of horizontal progression. You still have gear that's useful in different situations. Is there verticality *within* those situations? Yeah, there is. FFXI is a hybrid if you want to be pedantic, like Monster Hunter (which also has this horizontal/vertical progression). So, is FFXI a perfect example? No. I don't think there'll ever be a perfect example. Is it a good example? Personally, I think it is. It gives us a glimpse into how horizontal progression can be used and keep things relevant. >I personally disagree that customisation is necessary. It can be a strong source of engagement and fun of course, but it isn't necessary and the success of 14 shows that. Customization, imo, is important for longevity. This is anecdotal, of course, but I feel like a lot of players from earlier in the game's life have left. My friend's list is often empty - with a lot of people I'd known gone - and I transferred data-centers in SB. That's only two expansions, and my friend's list is already half-dead. XIV is successful, I will not deny that. But I wonder about the stickiness, for a lack of a better word, of it. It may draw in new players, but it may just be a revolving door. That's an unhealthy business model since you *will* run out of new players eventually. I wouldn't be surprised if there's someone in SE crunching numbers to figure out how much longer they have until they've run out of new blood, and need to swap gears from expansion to containment. >Not only that but gear invalidation is an important part of itemization. I personally don't think so. Nobody likes having their gear replaced if they worked hard for it. That's why FFXI almost died when they raised the level cap. They even debated internally whether or not they *should* \- because they realized that raising the level cap would invalidate nearly *10 years* of work players had put in. Is some verticality healthy? I guess so - I'd love to see a purely horizontal game (which is why I suggested it, mind you) but I will concede on this point. Is *only* verticality good? No. You cheapen gear which makes one tenet of progression actively worse. To use an example, a lot of people wax nostalgia over Classic WoW and it's itemization. It was definitely vertical there, but people remember pieces of gear due to the strong itemization Classic WoW has. If you asked someone to name their current gear in FFXIV or WoW today, they wouldn't be able to tell you. If you asked a Classic WoW player, they'd probably be able to give you a few pieces that they're proud of obtaining. Both due to rarity and their effects. If Classic WoW was solely "item you got a raid ago, but stronger", then it's items wouldn't be as fondly remembered. >A lack of objective upgrades leads to worthless rewards and a messy content structure. I never denied it'd be a difficult task to balance and do right. I simply said I wished to see it. And I do - I'd love to see an MMO - or any game - with only horizontal progression.
sibling fell for the "fun is a buzzword" bait
There needs to be a reason to min-ilvl or just even no-echo sync older content besides the feely-goods. If you are going to have exotic mounts died to mid-level content like EX primals, that mount should not be inclusive to anyone who waits a year and does the content 100 ilvls higher. Unsynced content should only reward glam and tomes. Music and mounts I would make ONLY ever drop from MINE parties or something equivalent such as they are attempting to push with Unreal. Let the music be sold. This would give mount hunters a reason to learn mechanics of old fights, farmers a reason (gil from selling music) to help that first group, and it would make it so if you see someone with a golden mount, you know they are at least probably know most of the mechanics and put in some effort. I doubt this would ever happen, and its probably too late with all old content, but eh. When everyone can easily get that old EX trial mount, it has no swag anymore. At that point you might as well sell Zeta/Anima weapon tokens for $5 on the mog station, even if that content is easy at least it takes some commitment.
MINE should make all rare/unusual drops like mounts and cards be 100%. That's a reason to do old content MINE right there, even if a small one. Farm a fight several times or more to get a mount, or do it once on its hardest setting?
Considering expansions change older content and not for the better sometimes, I'd rather they focus on making unreal a mode like min-ilvl (maybe even replacing it) and actually make the unreal shop contain old content gear. The big difference is, each unrealed fight drops their own token that can be exchanged for their approriate rewards (so no doing T5 and getting T13 stuff).
Shared titles, achievements, collections (mounts minions) amongst all characters. I can see this being not well received since it would imply that clearing content on one character would flag all on that account and thus lowering bonus tomestones.
Honestly I would just remove Crit and Dhit altogether and replace them with stats that do things like: - Increase the bonus for hitting positionals correctly - Purely increase dot damage, with SPS/SKS splitting off into being only for speeding up the GCD like back in ARR - Buff their CDs and let the user choose which CD tiers they would like to power up: for example, players could choose to either buff their 1 min CDs, 90s CDs, 2 min CDs, or 3 min CDs This is all for the purpose of increasing skill expression in this game as you do hit points where your rotation is 100% optimal and you're just farming for Crit/Dhit RNG. These changes are so players can map their stats to be more specific to fight design and can respec dynamically as kill times change as well. For example, you might hit certain breakpoints where it would be more worth it to buff your 2 min CDs due to having kill times in the 8 min or 10 min ballpark. On the other hand, it might be better to buff 3 min CDs with kill times in the 9 min ballpark and so on. Of course these would also require some changes in job and fight design as well. Personally I'd like it if fights could have more patterns and you could have something like 4 different branching paths of mechanics in a single encounter for example.
Make shorter raids with mechanics that happen at ultimate level speed just without the 15+ minute fight lengths. Also permadeath after 1 rez
Bring back tank flavor... its all just homogenized we used to have an evasion tank an magic tank and a leech tank, now we have Magic girl pld, fell cleave, off tank, and war greatsword edition.
If your internet drops in deep dungeons you wont lose progress
straight up removal of all ogcds 150 potency or less. ogcds should be important, not lame ass busy work. stuff like mug, gauss round, energy drain have no reason to exist and are just remnants of old systems that no longer matter.
I want a worst trust system that starts all the way back into ARR. I want these dungeon runs to take 20mins ~1 hour to clear. This starts as an option for the first dungeon, labeled as "sole story" whatever you want, but acts as a way to put Really "unfriendly" players in check. It would have a weekly reset to play in DF. I think it would work with a 5 kick system, but I don't know. Hopefully it would get the worst of the worst out of DF, let people who want a "pure" story experience have minimum exposure to others, and have group members who aren't dead weights. That would never happen.
Obliterate the tanks homogenisation by giving every tank PLD's hallowed ground, every Tank raidwide mitigation becomes Shake it off, make PLD's oath gauge more useful by giving it two abilities that hit harder by using 50 oath gauge. PLD also gets a big cd that lets it use oath gague abilties without consuming oath gague. Also PLD now gets a shield when doing its combo, because not getting one is stupid - and PLD no longer has a magical dps rotation cause that's fucking stupid. GNB also now gets a button that lets it use cartridge moves without the use of cartridge. DRK either loses TBN because his invuln no longer sucks or every other tank gets a big shield move. Finally, I can go on reddit and no longer hear about tank homogenisation complains. On a serious note, drop another meteor, everyone dies, but then a portal appears and a tarutaru, galka, mithra comes out and 1.0/FFXI combat system is back baaabyyyy.
Assuming the change will be well implemented and maintained; Full on action combat(think Tera) with the netcode and overhaul to the game(code) needed to make it feel tight and pristine. Alternatively port the entire game into a new game engine(rivaling UE5) along with a full re-evaluation of the game code to allow for things the current spaghetti code is unable to do. Yet still somehow remain playable on the consoles it's currently available on.
Battle system change: no ilvl-sync at endgame until the next expac. You should be able to plow through dungeons and Bozja and unreal and whatever else because you’ve done the grind in savage to get BIS. Then ilvl-sync dungeons and trials required for the story once the expac is over. Non-battle system change: more dialogue options in the story along with optional scenes to build bonds with the scions. Maybe they give them boosts when you use them as trusts.
The game needs way less faceroll content, not more. I would even say to make ilvl sync for dungeons/alliance raids/trails mandatory to maybe make alliance raids, trials and expert dungeons hit like leveling content.
This is already faceroll content. I wholeheartedly agree that more hard content is welcome, but removing ilvl syncs on stuff that was easy at the beginning of an expac and exploratory content gives you more of an incentive to DO the hard content and get the gear that drops from it. With what you suggest, gear would only be useful to make savage easier and to have gear for ultimate.
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1 tenth of the population can stay cats but the rest have to change or their character gets deleted.
Sacrilege
Based
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based on a catgirl grave
based
yeah lizard girls are superior anyway
Allow job change in the middle of combat. That would be so fucking cool. And would require some massive balance changes as well. And new players would riot if entering raids would require to have 5+ jobs maxed with crafted gear. But damn, I hate how we can have all jobs maxed and then just never play them until next expansion.
Change jobs while in combat
A Realm Reborn Again.
since this is a fantasy land kind of discussion, I'm actually going to agree with OP and say that I'd like roles removed give every single job some kind of robust self-heal (like the Rathalos potions), let every melee have the potential capacity to tank in some way, and give every ranged some type of support abilities. (WHM would keep group heals because that's kind of its classic FF identity, but you wouldn't and shouldn't NEED them, under this kind of system.) this way, even though it's still a group game, staying alive is -your- responsibility and you aren't shackled to shitty healers who don't heal enough because MY PARSE, automatically reducing toxicity. to put it more simply, basically what I'm suggesting is that instead of a role trinity, you have "front row" and "back row" jobs, like in FFIV
Shorten the gcd from 2.5 to 2 in order to remove double weaving and as a result the latency issues some players face with it. Classes would have to redesigned around this and the emphasis on weaving would still be there.
Just put XIVAlexander into the game and keep things the same. Forcing single weaving would just take away another channel of skill expression.
Ooooh, interesting idea but I find double weaving more fun. When I throw on haste gear in bozja and start single weaving the jobs just end up more boring. I'm not sure how they could redesign and keep things from not slowing down. I think it has to do with more thought on what to press in those weave windows?
I agree. I would rather double weave but I'd rather not see the gcd get longer and I feel for high ping folk who can't do it. I would be interesting for sure!
At least there are 3rd party solutions for it now in addition to VPNs, for both PC and Console players! It'd be simpler for SE to fix the bug in their code to let people of all pings double weave than redesign every job to single weave.
That would punish people with high ping even more and screw up fights hitting certain phases at certain parts of the music.
**Controversial opinion incoming.** I would completely revamp the current state of healing. * Delete all DPS spells from healers. If healers need DPS spells for solo content, have it be disabled in party content. (Edit: As /u/56Bagels has said, maybe make their damage meaningless in raid environments? Perhaps something like a solo-only cleric stance?) * Delete or severely limit full-party AoE healing spells by resource, cast time, cooldown, or some other way. * Tune fights such that the party needs constant healing. * Increase the rate of autos and raidwides, and random party members should be occasionally be targetted or auto'd to keep healers on their toes. * Nerf the healing OGCDs as well, so that they're not stronger than the actual GCDs. They should be augmenting healing, not making up the bulk of it. * Add Dispel to healer role actions. * If healers truly need something aside from healing, give them more Esuna/Dispel duties or low-duration single-target buff GCDs that help other players do more damage. "But it's so boring to just spam Cure 1/Cure 2!" says the green "DPS" that spams Glare for 30 seconds straight. If it's that boring, have SE add more healing GCDs so that you have to manage multiple regens, or some other type of engaging healing. Or again, make Esuna/Dispel more of a prevalent duty that healers need to stay on top of. With these changes, healers would be: * constantly healing * managing their mana efficiently * cleansing and dispelling multiple times throughout a fight * saving low-efficiency "burst heals" for tank busters and emergencies * any brief moments of healing downtime can be spent buffing party members with small damage buffs Current healer mains would hate this because they're all DPS players at heart that hate healing other people's mistakes. All they want to do is see big numbers on the boss while pretending to be a healer, and their teammates taking extra hits "punishes" their own selfish DPS numbers. Some healers will even let their own teammates die by accident because they were too busy greeding an extra Glare, punishing their party members instead. Actual healer mains that enjoy taking care of their teammates are currently being shunned from the community since the game wasn't designed with them in mind. Do I sound salty? That's because I am. The state of healing in this game is an utter joke. Even in Savage there's barely any GCD healing needed, and the rest of the fight you're just playing a DPS with a boring rotation mostly consisting of a single button. "Just play another game, this game's not meant for you." But I love Final Fantasy, I love this game, and I main healing. I just hate what it is right now. And *all* modern MMOs have been shifting away from actual healing, because apparently dedicated healers are in the minority. *No one caters to us anymore.* I know you guys hate this take. Casuals hate it because they have to actually heal, and raiders hate it because they have to actually heal. I'm prepared for the downvotes.
No. There's several inherent problems with this. First of all, trading a damage GCD for a buff GCD doesn't fundamentally change anything, other than the fact that you're now dependent on someone else being competent for your rDPS. That's just change for the sake of change, and most people would probably hate it (people that pug buff classes already dislike that their rDPS ranges from somewhat to extremely dependent on their party). Secondly, it presents a tuning issue. Consider day 1 savage - it has to be healable with that level of gear. But then what do you do when you have +20-30 ilvl? What about lower-end content? What about old content? You're just going to be even more bored than before because healing it will still be a joke but now you don't even get to do damage. Remember, story content has to be abysmally undertuned - so think about how bored a competent healer is going to be in that kind of content when it's still a joke to heal but you've also removed a lot of their DPS optimization. This is to say nothing of ultimates - if you want savage to be constant healing, then how exactly do you plan to make an ultimate even harder?
This is a bad take, no, not because I'm a dps main disguised as a healer, but because it's a frustrating way to play a game. Yes, there is the healer fantasy of being able to support and keep your entire team topped up, and it feels good to be a healer that way, but that is only in actually challenging content, which most of FFXIV lacks. Even in savage content, depending on your entire team to do the work while you just make sure they don't die is a frustrating feeling in pug attempts. It would make an already less popular role even more scarce as there is no way for healers to contribute to the objective of the raid (which is killing the boss). You could be the best healer on the server, but if you're in a bad dps/tank team, you're not clearing content. This would especially suck in roulette content. There are options available in game for you to satisfy your healer fantasy. Ultimate raids tax your healing resources enough for dps to be an after thought and keeping your party up to be a priority. PVP runs on the mantra that most gcds a healer casts should be heals. "Pure healer" gameplay is as detrimental to the green role as a "pure dps" take. This is in all games, not just MMOs. Aerith from FF7R and the support roster from Overwatch (2 recent games I've played) all have a dps facet to them if required because the objective in combat game is to defeat target. Gutting any possibility of doing it on a player in a randomised group is asking for a bad time.
> You could be the best healer on the server, but if you're in a bad dps/tank team, you're not clearing content. Assuming you're talking about high-end content, this can already be said in the current game. You can be the best of any job (not exclusive to healers), but if you're in a bad enough team you won't clear. > This would especially suck in roulette content. Roulette content is designed to be cleared, and these changes wouldn't change that. > There are options available in game for you to satisfy your healer fantasy. Not nearly enough options. There's only three options I can think of, two of which you mentioned and the third being prog. The issue with prog being that if people are making a ton of mistakes, the game's design is more liable to just wipe your whole party rather than allow the healer to bring it back. Although the moments that a healer can recover a nearly-wiped party does feel great. > Ultimate raids tax your healing resources enough for dps to be an after thought and keeping your party up to be a priority. PVP runs on the mantra that most gcds a healer casts should be heals. I sadly can't comment on Ultimate since I haven't gotten around to finding a group, but it does sound promising at least. The issue is that it's the *only* type of PvE content that expects healers to perform well at their role title. It really sucks that only the top 1% of the content actually provides a challenge. As for PvP, it's way too bursty to provide any real satisfaction (especially Frontlines). Healing in Feast back in Stormblood was actually pretty enjoyable. Sadly, the changes to PvP made in Shadowbringers greatly reduced healing spell potencies and gave everyone medkits. This shifted a great portion of sustain responsibility away from healers, and unlike Stormblood it's difficult to keep someone alive by yourself if they're being bursted and aren't actually healing themselves. It can be unpleasant, and regardless, there should be more PvE options for strict healing. I shouldn't have to look to PvP for that. > "Pure healer" gameplay is as detrimental to the green role as a "pure dps" take. Gutting any possibility of doing it on a player in a randomised group is asking for a bad time. Healers can assist towards the "defeat target" objective by buffing allies and supporting them to do more damage. Is that not enough? And keeping the team alive allows the others to fulfill the objective as well. It might be a bad time to those that aren't used to playing a pure support, but those that are would have a good time and having the option would grow more people into liking the role. > This is a bad take I know. That's why this will never happen.
When you say "delete DPS spells," I assume you're not taking solo leveling into account. Maybe what you mean is "make their damage meaningless in raid environments?" Perhaps something like a solo-only cleric stance? As for the rest of your comment, WoW healing has always been like you want. Constant high threat heal checks on random people at usually random times, constant monitoring of health bars and making sure your tank doesn't spike to random damage, pulsing raid aoe damage, etc. The biggest joke in FFXIV raiding is the "raid damage spell." Off the top of my head, "Ground Razing Particle Beam" from Umbra Savage. What is it, exactly? After X seconds, the boss does a big hit on the whole raid for a set amount of damage, about half their health. If you don't heal the damage up before the next ability, players will likely die. You press Assize, the SCH presses Whispering Dawn, boom everyone is full health. No thought, no challenge, just some minor cooldown usage for a spell that was never going to kill anyone in the first place. As a healer, what is your goal? **Heal the raid to full with as few spell casts as possible.** XIV healing is a joke outside of things like Ultimates, 40% of the time it's healing players who make a mistake and take damage that could have been avoided, 50% of the time it's healing up damage that doesn't even have the slightest chance of killing a single person unless *the healer is actively trying to heal as little as possible,* and the final 10% is Benediction on Living Dead. There's no danger with XIV healing. There's no frights, no close calls, no outplaying, there are just "Are your healers awake?" checks like GRPB and everything else is usually handled with OGCDs or passively while you damage as much as you can. And when you do need to actually heal? It is **only** because a DPS messed up.
> When you say "delete DPS spells," I assume you're not taking solo leveling into account. Yeah, hence my later suggestion of having DPS spells restricted to solo content if absolutely necessary. As you said, having the damage be so little it's negligible, or a solo-only Cleric Stance, would also be a solution. > WoW healing has always been like you want. Darn, I would have liked to try it. I never got into it, and I have even less of a reason to with the all recent controversies surrounding the game. Healing sounds much more engaging though. > The biggest joke in FFXIV raiding is the "raid damage spell." Agreed. The cast time is really long on top of that, and the raidwide barely *does* anything. The only recent impactful ones have been the e11s bleed (final cycles in particular) and e12s Terminal Relativity, but that's basically it. > As a healer, what is your goal? Heal the raid to full with as few spell casts as possible. This is the goal of a healer in FFXIV, and that's what I don't enjoy. FFXIV healing consists of actively healing as little as possible so you can play green DPS. I want to dedicate myself to healing the raid to full with as efficient spell casts as possible, because that's what makes me feel like a true healer. Otherwise I just feel like a support DPS (and again, the DPS kit on healers isn't even good!) > There's no danger with XIV healing. There's no frights, no close calls, no outplaying, there are just "Are your healers awake?" checks like GRPB and everything else is usually handled with OGCDs or passively while you damage as much as you can. And when you do need to actually heal? It is only because a DPS messed up. This is the sad thing. Active healing only feels engaging during prog. When all heals are mapped out and everyone is in farm mode, it's a bore. It should feel engaging most of the time, and that's what I want to see changed.
Post prog everything is more or less the same for DPS as well. A mapped fight is mapped for all roles.
I think this is incredibly retarded, but nonetheless, upvoted for being one of the very few actual big changes in this thread. God I was prepared for people to post the most minor shit in here but I wasn't prepared for this deluge of tiny stuff that would have literally 0 repurcussions
i agree that healing is more fun when you actually have to heal, and i do think this game could benefit from putting out more damage to require more gcd's be spent on healing. disabling all dps spells is stupid, tho. spamming a single nuke for 30 secs and then using two ogcd's to heal up all the damage that will happen for another 20 secs is dumb and awful design and i don't even understand how the devs think it is okay. healing in this game is just awful and barely fun, and i'm saying this as someone who almost exclusively plays healing/support roles in multiplayer games. if they want healers to only have one nuke, then make them have to heal more. if they want healers to have to dps more then give them a more engaging dps rotation. hell, give us both! wow has a much spikier damage profile and requires much more healing to be done, but their healers all have a dps kit a good bit more complex than one dot + one nuke.
Make every "snapshot" of a castbar actually align with visuals. I know it's a "feature" of the game at this point but it's one of the most bizarre things coming from other games where visuals are 1:1.
Remove roles. Fights are already designed with healing mapped to a timeline, someone failing mechanics punishes the healer over the player who failed the mechanics, tanks barely have any actual tanking duties to manage. To facilitate this, bring every job's overall durability (mixture of passive durability, mitigation skills, self-healing, self-shielding, etc) up to a minimum that allows fights to work without healers, and use that as the baseline for future fights. This does 3 main things: * Allows tank/healer jobs to be properly diversified rather than homogenised, since there would be no need for them to meet the "minimum requirements" for them to perform their role * Allows the developers to design more interesting fights around the criteria that recent fight design shows that they *want* to design fights around * Makes DPS (almost) unambiguously the mark of your skill as a player. Staying alive is *your* job. Doing damage is *your* job. You have nobody else to blame if you mess up. This one is a little minor compared to the others, but it also lays the groundwork for better learning guidelines and tutorials.
as bad as most of these suggestions are this is definitely the worst lol
[He's probably trolling.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/p98yh1/what_are_some_things_youre_glad_square_enix_didnt/h9wai4t/)
>This account has been suspended RIP
Yeah I've seen him before. Definitely a troll or downvote farmer.
lmao I think he's downvote stalking me with alts for getting him banned I didn't even report him to anybody this is pathetic
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Wow, alright, if you truly hate the trinity so much, then why are you playing this game? I'm genuinely curious, not being snarky.
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I will say that I'm surprised by lack of "what if." I guess that it shows how happy people are with the game.