michaelbowman6684: Yoshi said it himself when he said that a platformer with no pits to fall into would be very boring. Having the capability to "choose wrong" is necessary for creating an environment where players value the ability to "choose right." If you can't choose wrong, then there is nothing to learn from the experience, and learning is what is supposed to be the fun part!

EDIT: The primary issue is that they are heavily simplifying Jobs in order to put that removed complexity into the boss fights, if all the Jobs are the same then it becomes easier to design more difficult encounters with those simpler Jobs in mind, yeah? But it turns out releasing complex Jobs, people getting attached to those Jobs for their complexity, then removing said complexity from those Jobs, makes the people who enjoyed those Jobs for their complexity unhappy because what they enjoyed no longer exists. Learning a boss fight isn't the same as learning a Job, especially when the boss fights are not dynamic and are just fancy "DDR" memorization checks. Before we had at minimum an "illusion" of variety and simple(r) boss fights, now the illusion of variety is shattered but at least the bosses are a bit

pkmnswampmaster: Reminder that you always have the option to use Physick as a Summoner, just like you have the option to remove it from your hotbars.

Nemuriss: The removal of mistakes is basically why the old black mages hate the newest update. It's easy. You can move around, and more importantly, you aren't blatantly punished for not managing your fire stance anymore. The issue is. . . when the whole game ends up homogenized

1- it gets boring, and

2- When people have next to no mistakes to make, they play worse for it. Because no matter how easy you make something, you will ALWAYS find someone that will play it wrong or not to the best of their abilities because "well, there's no punishment, so why do i care?"

We saw this at the start of Dawntrail when people freaked out because the raids and the dungeons were "too hard!"

We took mistakes away. They weren't used to being challenged anymore, so now they're complaining that they can't do anything.

javi7636: I actually think that thinking about "optimal performance" distracts us from the real problem. There's always talk of skill expression, but IMO what FF14 combat is struggling with right now is personal expression. To me, it's not about having options just for variety, it's about being able to make choices about how I play the game and what's important to me.

If you compare the combat design to the fashion design, the difference in personal expression is glaringly obvious. In any populated area you see tons of variety, and lots of people proud of what they've put together. And in fashion, what do people complain the most about? No hats for viera and hrothgar. We all know that the core issue isn't hats

Matthew-he6id: Every job should get a bunny on their head like ninja so that everyone can see when you mess up or use something you shouldnt lol

17Master: I miss the option to play Diurnal Sect or Nocturnal Sect.

F for Spineshatter Dive and Jugulate. Gone but not forgotten o7

armorparade: Back in the early days of Magic the Gathering, the folks making it would intentionally try to make sets with subpar cards, not specifically to have undesirable picks in there, or because they didn't know they were weak- but because having bad options helps players gain context for why the good ones are good. It's easier to understand why one spell is better than another when you can hold one with a terrible mana cost-to-effect next to one that does something similar but better.

DPS have a lot of utility and optimization shaved down, tanks lost their stances and now a lot of buttons that provided choice either don't exist or became ogcds you always hit on cooldown, and healers have an inscrutable slurry of powerful ogcd heals that dilute the core design of their job.

With healers in particular, WHM was the regen god, SCH planned far ahead with shields, SGE translated damage output to healing, AST juggled buffs and supplied whatever manner of healing necessary.

All of these jobs have been made STRONGER by being handed super powerful ogcds but so much of their core identity has been watered down to Press Big Heal.

This is a long, long post to say that I desperately miss old Cleric Stance. WHM has not felt like a coherent job since it got changed and then later removed.

gazel7424: Having ways to choose wrong makes choosing the correct options feels more satisfying

Boyzby: Not only did Jugulate silence before, it also could stun. You made the choice on what it did by applying either poisons "Kiss of the Wasp" or "Kiss of the Viper" to your daggers. Having options like that were super nice.

raarasunai4896: “Players will find ways to disagree anyway.” Truer words have never been spoken. People lately trying to tell me I’m wrong for liking XYZ when it’s “so obviously bad” is beginning to sour me on the game because of these toxic players.

callbackspanner: I do miss enmity management, but what hurts more than removing "options" is the removal of friction that comes with it. There may only ever be one "correct" order to things, but cutting more and more things out of that until there is only one thing left to press just kills all engagement. When you have multiple things to manage, it becomes a list of priorities for you to keep in mind as the fight goes on. That's good gameplay, and the interaction between priorities creates friction. "I want to press this, but right now it's more important to press that. But I do need to find a space to press it before it comes time to press the other thing, or else I'll have to miss out on pressing that, and that's even worse."

It also goes back to skill expression. The more things there are to manage, the more opportunities there are to not press the best one, and keeping these priorities straight while dealing with a fight is absolutely a skill. A skill that no longer sees any use when all the competing priorities have been condensed into a single button and the only "option" is press it (correct) or don't (wrong). Sure it's technically still possible to do that wrong, and a lot of more casual players still will. But it removes the entire spectrum of variance from anyone who knows the fundamentals, as there is nothing left to improve on. And when there is no more variance to be had via your own skill, trying to improve its now at the mercy of things largely outside your control.

Especially in this 2 minute meta, if the rest of the party isn't in sync, your performance suffers significantly. If you don't crit at the right times, the difference is sizable. Anything that throws you off sync becomes a much bigger penalty. Because there's no more value to be gained from doing things right. There's nothing you can adjust and flex around the situation. There's just the only option reworks left you with. You press the only option. That's it. You are not in control of your own performance. The game plays you now.

IosLocarth: I'm not against jobs having more complexity and options, but as a lot of other people have said, people are gonna figure out whats optimal (read: highest DPS) and then bully others for not doing that, making these new options effectively useless. And even besides that, as someone who's been doing a lot of Mentor Roulettes, I don't think making every job way more complex and harder to play correctly would be that good of an idea. For the echo chambers most people hang out in, yeah the game seems easy. You do extreme and savage content and have been playing for years and probably only do content with people you know and communicate with. The actual average skill level is quite a bit lower than people would assume.

Now, im not saying that the devs need to cater towards uber casuals. All im saying is that what a lot of people are asking for likely wouldnt be a good thing

davidhunter1555: I just want tanks to use mit every now and then, dear god.

BenderLens: I think a lot of this is just because of meta, people find the optimal rotation, the optimal play style and that becomes to abundant that other skills aren't used as much, and bam, they remove or change them because that's how people are playing.

MallowJam: Really good video, some of your points are things I haven't even thought about

After listening all the way through I am even more convinced that discussions about how jobs are designed only touch on half of the topic. Encounter design, or in other words the environment the jobs exist in, is the other side of the coin that needs to be given love and attention too.

Having many options that do different things at different tradeoffs are only relevant if these choices actually have any impact on the environment they're in. Status effects being completely irrelevant in boss fights is one big way to ensure that only the highest dps is the correct option.

The other day I was playing Granblue Relink with friends and our Katalina brought a freeze skill. Bringing that skill means she can't bring a higher damaging skill in its place, but most bosses in that game CAN be affected by status effects, so we ended up clearings fights faster because the damage windows for the entire team were longer.

I just woke up, train of thought wrecked, I hope i got my point across

TheAngelLewis5: I think it's a bit of a mixture of making the jobs more efficient from a development standpoint, and the mentality of the majority of the playerbase. I think the mere sentiment of having the "options to choose wrong" inherently removes options from being more than an illusion as it is. As the efficiency mindset of most players will always say that you must do what is the most optimal for damage's sake and nothing else. A healer spending one gcd to apply a regent to the whole party because they are afraid that one or two of their party members might get hit by a boss mechanic I think can be seen as an option for playstyle, as then the regen can take over healing those players mistake so the healer can focus on damage. Though I'm sure there are many that might disagree with that entirely as well. But that seems to be the epitome of choice or options the game has to offer. Like the examples you gave in the video, they don't REALLY matter.

If efficiency and 'max deeps' is the highest priority for a player then any other option is immediately removed. I used Monster Hunter as an example in the last video but this reminds me of a friend of mine who has this mindset and so does very well in his raid group in FFXIV. However he found the lack of options in weapon choices in Monster Hunter Rise upsetting because from a purely math standpoint, the set up he was using was the most efficient and did the most damage in general. I had to personally build a completely different armor set using a much weaker weapon stat wise to show him that this game doesn't work like FFXIV, and that depending on what you are hunting (and your skill at playing the game) this other set can out damage his "most efficient" set by quite a bit! Even though the weapon was weaker in all stats.

It WOULD be nice to have some fun options for play in FFXIV but I feel like the game is too far gone and the community too set in its ways for us to ever truly have that.

aoifet3396: It's complicated. In an oldschool MMO, I am completely on the side of more complexity. There's no random group creator, there's a server community where you can figure out who actually knows how to play, there's social factors in place that filter people into different categories. But in a more modern MMO, having too many "wrong" choices massively warps what the developers can create. There's already a problem with ending up in level 50-60 instance and meeting a red mage hard-casting veraero or just spamming melee attacks. There are plenty of videos of people joining parties where the party damage is so low it's almost as fast as soloing it. That problem would be even worse. It's a trade-off of frustration in random groups vs satisfaction of "figuring it out". I would argue that mastery satisfaction still very much exists in the game, at least for more average players. Pulling off a perfect rotation still feels great to me, especially through mechanics.

For an example in another MMO, GW2, of what can happen if the gap between average players and skilled players becomes too vast I want to talk to you about Dragon's End in GW2. It's a zone that has a large world boss which takes ~40min to complete for a pretty substantial reward. It requires on average about 7k DPS per player to beat the boss, low enough that an entire group of people with only a weapon equipped could win. For reference in GW2 a good player easily pulled 30k dps, it's probably higher now. This encounter regularly failed. As in, it would almost always fail if you didn't find a group of players on party finder to beat it. This is because an average open-world player was probably doing about 5-10k dps, while they were alive and hitting the boss, which they weren't very good at doing. Many players trying their hardest wouldn't even hit 3k. This obviously led to a lot of angry people. The devs have responded by shifting more of the power of a class to its auto attack in an attempt to make it so that a skilled player is doing only 3x the dps of someone who's not very good instead of 10x, because the devs basically couldn't make any content that wasn't either impossible for below average players or laughably easy for skilled ones.

Overall I personally lean towards prefering simpler jobs and harder fights, as this does make random groups much more bearable. I feel like the game is currently in a relatively good spot, but I would really encourage a lot more randomisation of mechanics in higher level content, stuff that people have to actually react on the fly to. There's an amount already, but I like chaos. :)

LuneKnight1221: I don't think there is anything wrong with streamlining, as long as it doesn't ruin the class identity, I think imo that the class identity is important, and if something doesn't really add to it, then it's not necessary. But that's just my opinion

LordMidichlorian: I'm always for more choices and options. As well as for variability of viable ways to play a job. But every game has an unsurmountable obstacle: the players. Yes, it's the players who make lack of choices and lack of viable classes and rigidity to what to do. Because, even if they were not the majority, invariably enough piece of the playerbase flocks to YouTube or blogs to watch guides to tell them what's the most efficient way to play a job, instead of finding out themselves what's more efficient or enjoyable to them, and will be telling them which jobs or builds or whatever is the best. And then most of those players will buy it acritically and go around asking, even demanding, the rest of the players to follow those guides. Even if a game made two classes perfectly equal and with two perfectly equally strong ways to play them, there would be a guide maker who would tell, perhaps just because of his taste, "this way to play this job is the best" and then that will become the mantra of the playerbase and then they will begin to raise in arms that the devs have made a game in which that class played that way is the optimal and everyone does that, as if it hadn't been themselves who made it by blindly following that guide or whatever.

IosLocarth: You know the fact that people are still demanding that we remove cure 1 and then in the same breath demand that there be more complexity and options in jobs is just fucking baffling. I know that seems like an unequal comparison but it's going to end up amounting to the same thing where people are going to find what's the optimal rotation and then do exclusively that anyway.

C.Cer.: Nuance/Complexity in Jobs is satisfying when you execute it right to provide a positive Feedback Loop cause you do it right/better when the Game doesn't ask of you to do so. If we can never fk-up playing our Jobs through streamlining/simplifications? It kills that feeling of " Yes!! I did it!! " its just " to be expected " it becomes " Faceroll ". Job Gameplay should amplify Content like a good handmade crafted item that feels like its made for you... instead of something that's massively manufactured... cause it doesn't feel as " Special " as it could be or as it used to. It gets " Boring "

RagnarokiaNG: People keep saying they want these old things back, but considering most of them would result in effecting their damage in some way, I doubt they would actually want to use them if they did get them

TrollOfReason: I started playing last November, so I have no firsthand knowing about what was or how it used to be, only how it is in every accessible combat class up to the level 70 capstone, & I gotta say...

Having heard & seen how some things used to be, from the perspective of an amateur game designer, (DMing D&D) I can appreciate the intent to remove traps for the players, while the remaining traps (piety/perception/CP/craftsmanship beyond IL-45 materia) are all the more glaring.

Kpsla: Something about people today is that they are afraid of failure. That the developers need to protect us from failure.

It is OK to fail. It is fine. It's normal. Failure should encourage you to fail less, not to lower the bar for success.

snadows: >holding blood for blood cause i will die from the next raidwide otherwise.

healers adjust.

invenblocker: Honestly, I think a better way to fix the "damage and utility in one button means optimizing one loses out on the other" issue is not to remove the utility, but rather to take the damage and move it somewhere else.

Case in point, Dawntrail removed the damage from DRK and GNB's gap closers, which means they can now use them as... gap closers, instead of needing to choose between spending them in burst and then not having them when mobility is needed, or saving them for mobility but then losing damage (i.e. the dilemma WAR and PLD still have).

Removing the utility instead, or axing the skill entirely just means "here's another button for you to press to do damage and nothing else," which is not really all that interesting.

I only started playing during the Endwalker patch cycles, but having an interrupt on Ninja sounds really cool, but needing to include it in your "optimal" damage rotation just sounds... like then you don't really have an on demand interrupt anyways, so it might as well not be there. Not that I'm a fan of it going away entirely, but I think I'd have liked it if it stayed but just didn't deal damage, like Interject and Head Graze.

Deepseeanenemy: I think simplifying the problem with streamlining jobs to “losing options” kind of misses the point. The problem with streamlining jobs is not the “trimming of fat”, it’s lowering the barrier to mastery, and mistaking that for lowering the barrier to entry.

I’ve always felt that jobs “ceilings” shouldn’t need to be lowered to make them more accessible.

I personally found EW BLMs “non-standard” gameplay was less of an “100% optimal you must play like this” and more of a bag of tricks you could use to make a slightly less favourable position more favourable. You never NEEDED to use or even understand it, in fact for most BLM players it was much more worth practicing and playing “standard” well than it was playing “non-standard” poorly.

On paper I do like the idea of removing some of the “jank” like moving from an MP tick system to an MP on cast system, especially because it could be really frustrating trying to manage MP ticks with higher spell speed unless you used third party plugins.

Making that change to make the job’s “skill floor” lower seems reasonable but I don’t think it needed to be implemented in a way which removed many of the tricks which were able to be used by people who were invested in learning every aspect of the job.

A number of the changes made in DT to BLM seem to have been made less with the intention of making it easier to pick up, and more like making it easier to master.

By removing failure states from the job which has its punishing consequences of poor planning a core part of how people understand it to be, it damages the identity the job had. By removing the small moments of tension it makes playing the job well feel less “earned”.

I can understand the desire to have some jobs which are very friendly for new players, but I don’t think that having a low barrier to entry and a high barrier to mastery are mutually exclusive.

The overwhelming majority of content in this game doesn’t require mastery, only adequacy. Many players won’t ever need to approach mastery. But to remove the journey to that point, to streamline playing jobs so much that you “can’t fail” you remove a means of keeping people interested in the game, making the players whom strove for mastery of a complex job “think less” about the job-centric aspect of the gameplay. This in turn places greater emphasis on the fight-centric aspects to carry the weight left behind by streamlined jobs. This seems a reasonable explanation for why so many people have been noticing just how “easy” casual and even extreme content is presently, with jobs requiring less focus on mastering, and fights not picking up in intensity, people who aren’t learning are left bored.

Not every job needs to be complex, but not every job needs to be simple either.

Apr 04 2025

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