FFXIV – Live Letter 51 – Shadowbringers Combat Adjustments

This presentation, even without its technical problems, was extremely long, It was approaching the three hour mark. I’ve got an image of most of the slides here, I believe, and I’ll simply be providing some precision and commentary as we go. This post is crazy long. I believe I have around 30 individual images and right around 1500 words. If you want to watch the whole presentation yourself, good luck. I could not locate a link to the video. [UPDATE: I did find a transcript somebody made though].

I like the idea of trying to give people a reason to actually do fates, but the last thing we need is another currency…

Okay, this is one of the weird ones. Historically, each job has had specific quests to do at certain levels that tied into a job specific storyline. It looks like the only version of this we’re getting this time around is the level 80 quest, and instead, the quests will be role specific instead of job specific and connected to past heroes of the world we’re visiting and/or correcting. It’s also not optional, you must complete one of them.

I, uh, typically ignore side quests, but, y’know, whatever. Sounds good.

Much like the job quests on the combat side, the crafting and gathering jobs are being lumped together into categories. I’ve wondered how what the pacing is since the primary reason to do this is to save the development time of creating multiple narratives. I would hope for at least six quests each (70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80) with a fairly engaging story. Same goes for the roles as well.

I… look forward to trying this? I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. I mean, aesthetically I like it, but after so much time with the old one it feels… weird.

Apparently, they felt like 1% lasted too long with the HP numbers we’re getting in to, and wanted to provide some feedback for raid progression so people could see where within that last percent they were. This way, you can see that you wiped at 0.1% instead of just 1%

I was trying to remember which other game I’ve played does this with some abilities, GW2? I think it’s a reasonable system, but they didn’t really provide any information on which abilities will have this and which ones won’t, so I don’t really have an opinion. At the least it should reduce the occurrence of “sorry, kick was on cooldown.”

This is a nice little quality of life change. It was always typically the tank that interrupted these things, but the melee DPS classes could too. It was generally the tank who was taking the brunt of the damage anyway and most encounters seemed designed to get by with kick. I like the feedback that an ability is interruptable (not shown) and successfully interrupted. No more guessing.

We knew that TP was leaving, but the MP cap seemingly came out of nowhere. The purpose, though, is to make the math in rotation planning more obvious. Instead of people being able to meld, and spec, and have different amounts of MP, you’ll just have a known and static cap to plan with.

Kinda saw this coming, since they already opened the system up so you could use any and all of the ones your role had available instead of picking and choosing. They’re taking that a step further and simply giving specific abilities to every role at specific levels. I suspect the most obvious change here is that you’ll lose access to those abilities in lower level dungeons, something that did not occur previously.

This is pretty good, I think. It’s designed to solve problems like tanks using lower level accessories for Strength, to boost DPS, instead of higher level ones that have less desirable stats. This could result in some tanks being locked out of party finders that have an iLvl cap set. People also felt forced into the crafted piece because they had more meldable materia slots, so the raised the raid gear up to match. Oh, and no more melding primary stats, because you’ll use what we give you and you’ll like it.

Overall, not pet damage is a positive change I think, though a blow to the Summoner’s solo abilities. Still, having to constantly watch your idiot Scholar pet and immobile Machinist pet eat anything that pops near them is irritating. Something they would talk about later is how Summoners are also having their pet moved to instant cast so they can switch as battle conditions change. The ability unification is nice too. One of my hotbars originated when I was maining Summoner and needed a place to put the 12 buttons, 4 for each pet. Now it will simply be four buttons.

Most of these are misc changes to address specific meta problems or head off future problems. The biggest thing for me was that last one. As a shielding healer, the ability to see a visual representation of shield strength will be nice.

This is the paydirt, what we came to see. Job action video (no discussion) is here.

Their goal here was to try and break the raid meta that currently exists in the game, where you must have a Ninja and absolutely can’t have a Samurai. This was, of course, not the actual reality, but it’s the way people treated it. Of course, people will still min-max and there will still be a preferred meta party composition, but E for Effort.

I was wondering about the whole MT/OT dynamic, as it was slightly implied that certain jobs were meant for certain roles, but that seemed a little weird considering most of the content only gets one tank. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they won’t be more useful in one or the other, only that they are technically capable of either.

The team has been saying for a while that tanks need to focus on being tanks and not on DPS. They seem to be taking this into account by simplifying the overall ability load of tanks. Removing the DPS stance, removing the threat combo, and separating out the defensive buffs from tank stance. This will have a large impact on jobs like Dark Knight, where we would often turn off the tank stance and use the enmity rotation to hold threat. This will no longer work, but you won’t lose damage by toggling tank stance on either.

Image of the Gunbreaker job gauge and abilities. That hotbar layout is really weird, but it makes sense when you see one of their last announcements.

This is an interesting shift in the game. It also implies damage done by mobs is about to go crazy and require constant effort in order to be not dead. The removal of protect is a good thing, I think. After all, it was an ability everyone waited for and expect 100% uptime on because it cost nothing and reduced damage. There was literally no reason to not use it. The White Mage is getting Lilies that regenerate over time instead of when you cast cure, and they can be used to instant-cast those spells instead. Scholar didn’t look like it was changing much. Non-shielding potency increase and a temporary pet upgrade ala bahamut-egi. Astrologian looks like it’s changing a good deal, with all cards offering some sort of damage increase to the party. They didn’t really speak about the stance changes.

Machinist changes look pretty good. Very different, focuses on using a variety of different tools rather than using your gun. Gauss Barrel goes away entirely. In the video it actually reminds me of Edgar from FFVI. Also gets a temporary robot pet thing. I didn’t quite catch all of the Bard changes, but it sounded like they were trying to simplify the way the job works overall. Summoner is getting some wonderful quality of life updates to how pets work, but didn’t see a whole lot of information on how their rotation will work. It does, however, only have two aetherflow stacks now instead of three, and we see them transition from Ifrit-egi to Pheonix-egi after only burning two stacks, so there’s hope!

Dancer job gauge and abilities. I’m not sure I like the Dancer, personally, but we’ll see.

Little over two until their E3 presentation. I’m expecting to hear a little bit about the raid tier here, though it may end up in the next life letter instead.

Which is literally only a few days after E3. I’m curious to see what additional information they plan to bring to the table.

They showed off this thing, too, though they only had a foam prototype. I think it’s a great idea, moving button to the left thumb and freeing up the three “normal” movement fingers for abilities. I highly suspect I’m not willing to pay what they’re going to be asking for it, as I’d say it’ll be in the $80-$100 range. That weird hotbar setup vaguely resembles the button layout here and I can only assume that was intentional.

Okay, this post is long enough, y’all take care and enjoy your long weekend, if you get one that is.