A change in philosophy in FFXIV's design that I think would be easy to do and very popular

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Hello everyone! I've been playing this game since 1.0 and like many of you, have rode wave after wave of content in this game. With Yoshi-P's recent comments about the next expansion being "reborn again", and with the criticisms towards Dawntrail (some legitimate, some not, I'll leave that for other discussions), I had a thought on a strategy that would win a lot of good will and faith in the community.

Make the little things better.

Like a lot of MMOs, FFXIV has years of content, some supported more than others. Obviously they have their hands full with all the new content that will be expected with the launch of a new expansion. Of course. But there's many medium-small development items that I think would improve and vary the experience for existing players in a meaningful way, and I wanted to post those thoughts here for discussion.

1. Improve Yellow Quest rewards. This could be super easy, and I know SO many players who skip these entirely. Just 3x-5x the rewards on these yellow quests. There aren't actually that many of them when you consider how many jobs there are now, so giving players another avenue to legitimately bump up exp and gil while leveling is an EASY win. Also, cmon, incentivize players to engage with these small cute stories, some are really wonderful. This is a win/win just by adjusting some numbers up.
2. Bring Back DOTs (meaningfully). This would be more of a "medium" level development effort, but it would be worth doing and would improve variety in class design which is a common complaint. The BIG issue here is bosses that go non-targetable making DOTs a trap. My proposed fix is to allow DOTs to continue to tick while a Boss is not visible. Right now, the current design allows for phase skips with burst damage, so scripted scenes are not "sacred". By allowing DOTs to still tick during non-targetable sequences, you are basically trading the burst damage potential for more consistent damage over time (and imagine the drama of watching the bosses health bar slowly tick down during a scene to see how much health you'll have left to get through when they return. From a code perspective, perhaps DOTs can only bring a boss to 1hp during a scene to let that scene finish playing out before they return and die. Yes, I know that this would require some class reworking, but a new expansion is the time to do it. Please SE please.
3. Continue the effort to combat button bloat. EW and DT both made strides to increase complexity while combining actions in single buttons, I'd like this to be continued, in particular for scenarios where classes don't use lower level spells later, but still need them on their bars for when doing level-sync content. Big offenders here are things like Fire 1 and Blizzard 1, Cure 1, etc. Also, can we please figure out a way to have some systems like Ninja Mudra's not require 4 different buttons? Couldn't each Mudra action turn into "Ninjutsu" after being pressed? To be clear, I do NOT want the bars to get down to the level of the current PVP design, that's too much, but as someone with an MMO mouse, I still have trouble making a couple of jobs work mentally, I can only imagine players who are just using their keyboard.
4. Levequest Improvements.
   • Increase the levequest bank to 1000, and instead of earning 3(?) every 12(?) hours, homogenize with weekly timers to just give 50 every week, so people who enjoy doing weekly reset stuff can knock out all their Leves for the week at once if they wish.
   • Increase the rewards on combat levequests (only affects ARR but again, like the Yellow Quests, this would be a win/win and get new players engaged with the system. These are criminally underused.)
   • Show all available levequests at all times. This whole "I have to take one I've already done to refresh the list" is just gamey and stupid and a pain for achievement hunters, and doesn't impact non-achievement hunters at all. Just. Change. It. It isn't meaningful friction.
5. Make S-Rank Hunts/Special Event Fates a big deal. Experienced players know how to engage with the Hunt system, but for newer/casual players, it's actually kind of intimidating to engage with S-ranks and the special event fates. Give them more pomp and circumstance! Announce S-rank/Special Fate spawns in the capital city for that expansion and in the zone where they spawn. Add an NPC called the huntmaster who can be talked to and give you the status of alive S-Ranks for that expansion. Yes, people will still organize in linkshells/discords, but add more in-world reason to engage with this and capture the imagination of players who are often surprised to see hunt trains go by and have no idea how to even start engaging with that system. I'd also like to see Challenge Log entries for these as well.
6. Show ARR Sightseeing Log Vistas in the world. Simple change, they already do this from HW onward. Don't change the requirements to redeem them (maybe have the floating orb greyed out or something if it's the wrong time) but show them to excite players when they see them. Again, a criminally under engaged with system.
7. Add Zone Specific Achievements. This suggestion is to help improve engagement with the open world more, and goes with the improving Yellow Quest rewards and others. Add zone-by-zone achievement series with sub-achievements for getting all the sightseeing logs in the zone, doing all the quests, killing all the hunt spawns, completing each fate at least once, etc. This change could be entirely in the achievement log and would require no actual gameplay logic changes and would do wonders for incentivizing players to go out and engage with each zone meaningfully.

I'm not saying that these changes are "all that is needed" to improve FFXIV, but I do hope they'd be a good, quick, relatively small effort to meaningfully change the experience for most players in game and make the game feel refreshing and immersive again.

submitted by /u/Amazingsleep
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