If there is one lesson this community should learn by now, it is that you can NEVER just wait and see how a change pans out. By the time you actually get to see the changes fully fleshed out, it is already too late for the developers to change anything.
This has been the case again and again throughout this game's history: MCH in ShB and SMN in EW are prime examples. SE's workflow management is genuinely so archaic that they cannot flexibly incorporate feedback until the next expansion or something.
I've looked at their WIP on evolved jobs and I can't say I'm impressed, especially on WHM. Condensing actions should in principle give them leeway to be make each action impactful and unique but I fear that they have not done so. In principle they could be showcasing the simplest jobs right now, but I don't get the feeling that that is a good assumption to make based on their history.
I think the fundamental problem with evolved jobs is that each individual action is not very effectful beyond deterministically opening up another action to use for damage or unlocking a combo. Furthermore, their philosophy at this point in time is to make every single job flow naturally, where there is a single, linear sequence of actions to press in order, with very minimal adjustments required depending on the fight. This has been the case since ShB and I fear at this point less than 10% of players even remember what a "non-linear" job looks like anymore.
As a result, while the concept of modernizing jobs and stripping them down to their core so that each action feels more impactful is good -- in fact, this is exactly what the game needs -- their WIP implementation really seems like it is just rehashing the exact same underlying philosophy with a fresh coat of paint. If that is the case, players will sooner or later discover that for themselves, even if they don't necessarily perceive it by just looking at some WIP tooltips.*
The first issue is that actions are not effectful (beyond damage). Almost all combat actions part of a rotation in FF14 no longer apply significant effects such that it meaningfully changes how you ought to deal with an encounter. I know some people really hated this and much of the current design follows from the repeated complaints players had with effectful actions (e.g. position locks), but we're now down to 80% of actions being just "damage". I partially blame the community for this, and, just as an example, the "your first job as a healer is to maximize damage" mentality (which The Balance really, really leaned into during SB) was, in hindsight, catastrophic for how it affected the expectations of the playerbase. But nevertheless, we have reached a point where we're pressing 20 buttons all being permutations of applying damage. There is no fundamental difference between pressing Riddle of Fire and Reply of Fire, because both are just damaging actions. One is indirect, and the other direct. They have no other effects, such as increasing your movement speed, applying a position lock, etc. You don't meaningfully adjust how you do your rotation outside of downtime. And because rotations are so rigid these days, you don't really play around downtime so much as just spamming your ranged attack until you can get back in.
Sky High is a step in the right direction, but if they're going to consolidate actions they frankly need to make at least half of all actions effectful. Now here's one way you can make monk effectful: make many of its actions meaningfully affect the player's position. For example, you can make it so that Twin Snakes charges you forward by 2 yalms, Demolish gives a 2 yalm backstep, and perhaps Rising Phoenix could be a gap closer, and have the rotation be positionally idempotent so that if you're on a striking dummy on Monk just doing your rotation, you would be just looping your position on net. To pair with this, you'd want to change the animations so that it looks like the Monk is launching itself off of the boss (for a mild backstep) or the monk is punching forward (for a charge in). This makes it feel far more dynamic and physical, like you're actually moving around doing real hand-to-hand combat instead of just staying at a fixed spot.
Of course, there are other ways to do effectful actions. Another is for example by playing with your HP (HP effect). You could, for example, have Dark Knight (which is now an off-tank) slowly drain its own HP to charge up attacks but be able to heal itself back with some planning before a raidwide. You could have Machinist being able to deploy multiple automatons on the battlefield so that once you deploy 3 they form a triangular zone that constantly deals a DoT to the boss (effectful props). I am not saying SE needs to do any of these in particular, but we can't just have most of our actions be just damage with no side effects at all.
The second issue is that jobs are all extremely linear. But the solution isn't necessarily to just put random procs everywhere, which is an extremely lazy way to make each run feel different. One way to make jobs feel fresh (or at least, feel different across different fights) is to make the real rotation be functionally unmemorizable by humans. For example, if you have 5 actions with cooldowns of 11s, 19s, 23s, 29s, and 31s, a full rotation will be 1200 hours (take the lcm). With any level of disengagement required, you would need to actually think on the spot on what you should be doing once you re-engage. The second way to make rotations feel different in different fights is to introduce effectfulness in reverse. These are the classics like Ley Lines or positionals, but they should be introduced at a far more granular and impactful level than what we have right now. For example, on Machinist, we could have different guns that the machinist can use, which requires different distances from the target to the machinist. The machinist could have a headshot that requires hitting from the front, a long-range shot that requires charging from, optimally, 15 yalms from the boss, and a shotgun shot that requires being on the rear within melee range, and optimal play requires going through each cycle. This also means that even in Machinist's underlying rotation could be straightforward, the actual gameplay would be very different from fight to fight because of knowing when the boss would cleave, when they can stay in melee range, etc.
If they want to go all in on evolved jobs I also think they need to make combat encounters have far more irregular downtime. This naturally forces each fight to induce different rotations on each job.
Then there's of course the standard arsenal devs use to make rotations feel nonlinear, like procs, random reductions in cooldowns, etc. I think these should be used sparingly and devs should focus more on making actions naturally have different optimal uses in different encounters.
*And I don't mean this to be smug, but historically and repeatedly, we keep seeing this again and again: a first wave of people complained based on just tooltips, without actually playing with the jobs, such as patch notes SMN. These people voice their concern, but they're shouted down even though FF14's design means that you can deduce much of the feel of a job just from the tooltips due to experience. Then once the job actually releases and players play with it for a while and the shine wears off... guess what, they agree with the initial wave of complainers in the end.
Continue reading...
This has been the case again and again throughout this game's history: MCH in ShB and SMN in EW are prime examples. SE's workflow management is genuinely so archaic that they cannot flexibly incorporate feedback until the next expansion or something.
I've looked at their WIP on evolved jobs and I can't say I'm impressed, especially on WHM. Condensing actions should in principle give them leeway to be make each action impactful and unique but I fear that they have not done so. In principle they could be showcasing the simplest jobs right now, but I don't get the feeling that that is a good assumption to make based on their history.
I think the fundamental problem with evolved jobs is that each individual action is not very effectful beyond deterministically opening up another action to use for damage or unlocking a combo. Furthermore, their philosophy at this point in time is to make every single job flow naturally, where there is a single, linear sequence of actions to press in order, with very minimal adjustments required depending on the fight. This has been the case since ShB and I fear at this point less than 10% of players even remember what a "non-linear" job looks like anymore.
As a result, while the concept of modernizing jobs and stripping them down to their core so that each action feels more impactful is good -- in fact, this is exactly what the game needs -- their WIP implementation really seems like it is just rehashing the exact same underlying philosophy with a fresh coat of paint. If that is the case, players will sooner or later discover that for themselves, even if they don't necessarily perceive it by just looking at some WIP tooltips.*
The first issue is that actions are not effectful (beyond damage). Almost all combat actions part of a rotation in FF14 no longer apply significant effects such that it meaningfully changes how you ought to deal with an encounter. I know some people really hated this and much of the current design follows from the repeated complaints players had with effectful actions (e.g. position locks), but we're now down to 80% of actions being just "damage". I partially blame the community for this, and, just as an example, the "your first job as a healer is to maximize damage" mentality (which The Balance really, really leaned into during SB) was, in hindsight, catastrophic for how it affected the expectations of the playerbase. But nevertheless, we have reached a point where we're pressing 20 buttons all being permutations of applying damage. There is no fundamental difference between pressing Riddle of Fire and Reply of Fire, because both are just damaging actions. One is indirect, and the other direct. They have no other effects, such as increasing your movement speed, applying a position lock, etc. You don't meaningfully adjust how you do your rotation outside of downtime. And because rotations are so rigid these days, you don't really play around downtime so much as just spamming your ranged attack until you can get back in.
Sky High is a step in the right direction, but if they're going to consolidate actions they frankly need to make at least half of all actions effectful. Now here's one way you can make monk effectful: make many of its actions meaningfully affect the player's position. For example, you can make it so that Twin Snakes charges you forward by 2 yalms, Demolish gives a 2 yalm backstep, and perhaps Rising Phoenix could be a gap closer, and have the rotation be positionally idempotent so that if you're on a striking dummy on Monk just doing your rotation, you would be just looping your position on net. To pair with this, you'd want to change the animations so that it looks like the Monk is launching itself off of the boss (for a mild backstep) or the monk is punching forward (for a charge in). This makes it feel far more dynamic and physical, like you're actually moving around doing real hand-to-hand combat instead of just staying at a fixed spot.
Of course, there are other ways to do effectful actions. Another is for example by playing with your HP (HP effect). You could, for example, have Dark Knight (which is now an off-tank) slowly drain its own HP to charge up attacks but be able to heal itself back with some planning before a raidwide. You could have Machinist being able to deploy multiple automatons on the battlefield so that once you deploy 3 they form a triangular zone that constantly deals a DoT to the boss (effectful props). I am not saying SE needs to do any of these in particular, but we can't just have most of our actions be just damage with no side effects at all.
The second issue is that jobs are all extremely linear. But the solution isn't necessarily to just put random procs everywhere, which is an extremely lazy way to make each run feel different. One way to make jobs feel fresh (or at least, feel different across different fights) is to make the real rotation be functionally unmemorizable by humans. For example, if you have 5 actions with cooldowns of 11s, 19s, 23s, 29s, and 31s, a full rotation will be 1200 hours (take the lcm). With any level of disengagement required, you would need to actually think on the spot on what you should be doing once you re-engage. The second way to make rotations feel different in different fights is to introduce effectfulness in reverse. These are the classics like Ley Lines or positionals, but they should be introduced at a far more granular and impactful level than what we have right now. For example, on Machinist, we could have different guns that the machinist can use, which requires different distances from the target to the machinist. The machinist could have a headshot that requires hitting from the front, a long-range shot that requires charging from, optimally, 15 yalms from the boss, and a shotgun shot that requires being on the rear within melee range, and optimal play requires going through each cycle. This also means that even in Machinist's underlying rotation could be straightforward, the actual gameplay would be very different from fight to fight because of knowing when the boss would cleave, when they can stay in melee range, etc.
If they want to go all in on evolved jobs I also think they need to make combat encounters have far more irregular downtime. This naturally forces each fight to induce different rotations on each job.
Then there's of course the standard arsenal devs use to make rotations feel nonlinear, like procs, random reductions in cooldowns, etc. I think these should be used sparingly and devs should focus more on making actions naturally have different optimal uses in different encounters.
*And I don't mean this to be smug, but historically and repeatedly, we keep seeing this again and again: a first wave of people complained based on just tooltips, without actually playing with the jobs, such as patch notes SMN. These people voice their concern, but they're shouted down even though FF14's design means that you can deduce much of the feel of a job just from the tooltips due to experience. Then once the job actually releases and players play with it for a while and the shine wears off... guess what, they agree with the initial wave of complainers in the end.
Continue reading...