But I do think that the masses are largely going to be disappointed with whatever comes out and changes are going to be minimal. I'm just hoping that won't be the case.
Their talk on the matter has been the kind of carefully worded PR stuff where whatever they do, their prior statements won't technically be wrong, and that's one of the variety of reasons I am intensely pessimistic about the idea that they are going to do anything substantial to fix the state of jobs and gameplay at large.
But I also am just highly doubtful that current day CBU3 has it in them to fix this game. Most of the reason I think this is FF16, where they had basically a free hand and a massive budget to make whatever game they wanted, because they'd been riding high on making SE's golden goose and the execs were clearly hoping for them to repeat the miracle. And what they made was singleplayer 14, with the exact same quest format, and 3-button gameplay that basically plays itself as long as you stay out of the orange floor markers and press the prompts when they come up.
This made it click for me, the whole game at the moment feels like it's designed for twitch parsetrannies. Because the fights are always scripted, it's possible to optimise, so you get a hardcore fanbase obsessed with individual performance and job balance. This makes jobs with unique toolkits a liability, which streamlines skill expression, making fights even easier to script, and reinforcing the cycle to the point where even hardcore raiders are complaining. Whatever new mechanics a boss has, the actual profile of damage done and damage taken is functionally the same.
It's been going this way for a while (since Shadowbringers at least, since 5.0 is when they ripped out stuff like aggro management completely), and I wouldn't
entirely blame it on the raiders (I think the homogenization is also done because it's just easier for SE that way - every job has the same capabilities, no need to worry about whether any job might be worse at one thing), but yeah, not wrong. A big part of what led to the current state of jobs is that the "muh ebin colored number" faggots freak out when their favorite job is 2% behind on FFlogs for a given fight, even though this is one of the few MMOs on the market where hotswapping jobs on the fly is not only a thing, but an explicit selling point. That literally happened just now, after all, when all the raiders shat their pants in 7.1 because PCT was a little better in
one fight.
But I wouldn't entirely pin it on the raiders, because a lot of the stuff that SE did that led to the current state of gameplay is also just straight up stuff that no one asked for. People had lots of complaints about various things, like E6S making 90s buffs feel bad because of mechanic timeline alignment. But no one actually asked for them to smash all the buffs together on a 2m CD timer and then start designing fights entirely around 2m buff timelines, or to gut the fun part of half the jobs in the game, or half of the other stuff they've done that has led to the current state of the game.
The game back in HW/SB was not perfect, but SE instead of fixing the problems people had with reasonable measures, just ripped everything out and left nothing in its place.
1. Make vulnstacks during dungeons/EXs more frequent but less punishing, so that everyone can reasonably clutch and heal through 2 or 3
2. Give bosses more unique damage profiles. For example say you had a boss who's every auto-attack was a mini-meteor that did damage based on proximity, so healers will be focusing on the melee, melee DPS can sacrifice uptime to avoid damage, etc. Give players reasons to adjust their play mid-fight
3. Give bosses phases where they take or deal more damage, so players can sensibly focus on optimising damage at certain points and play it safe at others
4. Make DPS defensive and healing abilities GCD rather than OGCD; maybe Second Wind could be a GCD with 2-3 charges for example. A melee then has to sacrifice damage to stay alive, and good healers are now contributing to damage by keeping the DPS topped up
5. Demolish the 2 minute meta. Optimisation should be for parse-freaks, not everyone. I've mentioned the idea before that ranged DPS should be given the role of managing full-party buffs and coordinating when a burst goes off, so you could reasonably make adjustments to your rotation without throwing off the entire group's damage
6. Make scripted fights more of a flowchart than a straight timeline to enrage, say you fail to hit a certain damage threshold or fail to kill adds, the boss can use mechanics in a different order
7. Give players more feedback when they die. A lot of mechanics even at EX level rely on status effects that most players can't read during the fight. Players looking up guides is inevitable but you could give casual or blind players a lot of info by just dumping a quick timeline of status effects/boss actions that led up to their death and make teaming up with randoms more manageable
Some of this stuff is things that sort of used to exist - boss attacks that could crit, for instance, provided some interesting damage variation. I think some older fights could also vary their timelines a bit because of DPS output, since they had health % triggers and stuff.
3 is already
kind of a thing that happens - basically every fight has timeline sections where nothing happens (maybe there's tank autos, or a TB, or a raidwide, but no actual mechanic) and you just pump DPS for like 30 seconds. In a game with more group optimization and job variety, trying to organize your buffs and bursts around these opportunities would be an interesting aspect of optimizing a fight.
5 absolutely needs to happen. I frankly think everyone except the ranged DPS should lose their party buffs, honestly. The ultimate reason we got the 2m meta is that buff stacking is objectively the best possible way to use them because they're multiplicative, and that means everything needs to be in sync. Remove everything except personals and
maybe targeted buffs for everyone, and let the ranged DPS have the role that NIN with Trick used to have: coordinate group bursts by deciding when to use tech/finale/MCH equivalent. It would give ranged DPS an actual role, something SE has clearly been trying to find for them for ages, and also maybe finally provide a solution to the fact that MCH's "selfish ranged DPS" gimmick doesn't fucking work by finally giving up on it.
7. Feedback in general is a thing the game needs to figure out. Not just in-fight fuckups (I remember "wtf just happened" being a common refrain when me and some friends were doing blind prog of the first criterion dungeon), but the very basic aspect of "are you playing your job correctly", basically demands TOS-breaking outside tools to figure out. The game has SSS, which is extremely poorly signposted that it even exists, but that doesn't actually provide any feedback whatsoever as to what you are doing wrong or how to fix it, only that you are doing badly. This is admittedly less relevant today given most jobs now are impossible to fuck up as long as you press the glowing buttons in order and roll your GCD, but the game is still extremely bad at informing you how to play it properly at any point before you step into endgame and are suddenly expected to be competent in a way that not a single piece of content in 500 hours of MSQ has required before.
I also think one big thing that needs to be done, and this is specifically for healers, is that their toolkit needs substantial slimming down. Every healer right now has an absolutely insane amount of on-demand, free, OGCD healing, to such an extent that they rarely if ever even touch a GCD heal. Which means that instead of optimizing a fight to figure out how many GCDs you can spare to throw more attacks, you are just pressing 1 over and over and occasionally choosing which of your 15 "feed the party to bursting" buttons to use to completely trivialize the next damage instance.
8. If the game detects addons, "YWNBAW" flashes on screen in neon letters as a tranny soyjak bounces on a rope across your screen
No comment, this is perfect and needs to happen right now.
