Unfortunately, we’ve already started seeing people crying that the sky is falling and that Stormblood will be the worst thing ever, because now we know about the abilities. And… yeah, that’s downright bad.
Look, you all know how much I love speculating about things. I speculated about which abilities various jobs were losing or getting compressed (and wound up at about 65% accuracy, which I think is pretty good), I’ve speculated about what we’d hear at the various fanfests, I’ve speculated about jobs we’re likely never to get. But there’s good speculation and bad speculation, and your speculation about what the jobs will look like in terms of performance at 70 right now? It’s bad. Let’s talk about why.
Reason 1: You don’t have final numbers
You may notice that in every single piece I wrote, I mentioned at least once that everything previewed therein was still under development and therefore not final. That does not mean it wasn’t playable, of course, but I can definitely confirm it was not the final build. Tooltips had wrong highlighting. Translations were inaccurate. Certain attributes were not fully locked down. This was a very late-development build, but it was not a final build.
Obviously, at this point the odds of a wholesale delay are low to nonexistent. But despite that fact, there is stuff which is still not finalized. Numbers in particular are incredibly easy to tweak, even at late stages of development, since they’re mostly about substituting in a different variable. Heck, even things like which abilities trigger a skill are pretty easy to change. If you’re thinking “hey, Dream Within a Dream should trigger extra Ninki gain!” and the developers agree, it can be added without too much trouble.
This is why I wasn’t worried about potencies, costs, and so forth. Those elements are all pretty easy to tweak, either before launch or shortly after launch, and if something is actually underperforming I have complete confidence it will be tweaked.
Of course, some people will argue that the developers clearly don’t see these things as underperforming. Which brings us to our next point.
Reason 2: It’s not about your job
Amidst all of the Summoners being very happy about summoning Bahamut, there are some Summoners who instead are using Summon IV to bring a whole bunch of salt into the conversation. As the tooltips captured it, Bane is being tuned down; the diseases it spreads are now less potent! Gosh! What a terrible change! It’s the sort of thing that you only see on, oh, almost every other AoE damage skill.
Seriously, this is universal. Flare and Holy work that way. The new SAM AoE skills work that way. Gravity works that way. This is a downright universal facet of the game’s design, and changing Bane is less a matter of “screw Summoners and Scholars” and more a matter of “let’s not give these two jobs access to more potent AoE tools than everyone else.”
Heck, the fact of the matter is that spamming AoE skills is not supposed to be the most efficient way to do things. The game has not been subtle about this. When spamming BLM AoEs became too powerful, it got tuned down for Heavensward. People found other ways to make that work, so now some of those workarounds are getting tuned down as well. These changes aren’t targeted at you; they’re targeted at the ecosystem of the entire game, to make it more fun for everyone.
FFXIV is a really damn complicated game. The game has to create engaging content for players to work through using any combination of jobs; even if you just limit balance to dungeons alone, that means Stormblood will have 729 different potential party compositions (Heavensward already has 441) which all have to be capable of getting through the same content. Keeping all of that balanced, fun, and organic is hard work. And the developers do an astonishingly good job of it, because there are no classes which outright cannot clear certain content.
I’m not saying the team is magic; I’m saying that they work hard and make decisions aimed at the long-term health of the game as a whole and cover every angle, not just the numbers on your personal job. You may be losing some abilities, but that doesn’t mean other jobs aren’t also losing some abilities, nor does it mean that the team isn’t aware of the changes having a larger overall effect.
Yes, that will make for a very different top-level experience than what currently exists. But that’s part of the point, and it’s downright callous to assume you know what that new experience is going to look like ahead of time.
Reason 3: You don’t know the endgame
It’s not too difficult to figure out how these changes will shake out if you’re taking on, say, Alexander 12 Savage with the numbers scaled up. I haven’t seen anyone actually do that yet, of course, since pretty much every analysis seems based around “let’s toss in the changes to Job X in this content without taking into account the changes to every other job at the same time,” but it is within the realm of theoretical possibility.
Of course, you won’t be running A12S scaled up. You’ll be running Omega, and the new dungeons, and Return to Ivalice, and a new Deep Dungeon, and whatever other new sorts of content await as we work our way through the expansion. Now, take a moment and explain out loud what mechanics you’ll encounter in the first four segments of Omega.
Got it?
You can do so silently, if it’s easier. I can’t hear you either way.
But of course you can’t do that, because you don’t actually know. I don’t actually know, either. I know the broad strokes of the mechanics for one leveling dungeon because I’ve played through it, and in all likelihood that’s more of the expansion content than you have currently played through. It is also, again, not the endgame. It’s not even close to the endgame.
Context changes a lot. It’s entirely possible for the mechanics which you think are pointless now to matter a whole heck of a lot when the expansion goes live. You can even guess about some of the mechanics coming with the endgame based on the new abilities, and lo and behold, most of them speak to a new endgame in which party-wide damage is less common but big hits for individual players (not always the tank) are definitely in play. Two different tanks have the ability to shield a party member, each healer has a new tool to help bolster and heal a specific party member, and there are some pretty solid defensive cooldowns on deck for existing jobs as well.
Speculating about what the endgame will look like based on the tools we’re being given is much more solid than speculating on how useful our tools are based on an endgame they will most definitely not be used for. But even then, you might not be really getting a picture of those tools in the first place.
Reason 4: It’s a set of changes, not a single change
I’ve seen more than a few White Mages complaining about the Lily mechanic, which you’ll remember I found a little bit overwhelming. The argument, in short, is that White Mages rarely cast Cure and Cure II, usually relying on Medica II spam and Regen to keep everyone healed up. There’s no reason to cast Cure and Cure II!
This despite the fact that this expansion literally gives you two more reasons to cast Cure and Cure II.
Looking at part of the changes and not the whole is missing the forest for the trees in the extreme. Instead of seeing a set of abilities which now play off of one another in different ways, you’re seeing an ability to don’t use very frequently being changed. The assumption shouldn’t be “but I don’t use that,” it should be “oh, perhaps now I have more reason to use that more frequently.”
Seriously, I rarely use Raiton or Shukuchi as a Ninja, the former for clipping issues and the latter for general speed and utility issues. Seeing them work together and have synergy and motivation doesn’t make me think that these things aren’t useful; it makes me think “ah, Raiton is more encouraged, and I’ll probably want to have Shukuchi going off more often.” The functionality change is part of a large scheme of things.
I’m going to have to relearn my Wildfire rotation on Machinist, I’m going to have to adjust my opener and attack patterns on Ninja, I’ll need to change how I tank things on Paladin and Dark Knight. But that is, in short, the point of these changes. They work together in a larger ecosystem, rather than just being a single change to one ability.
Reason 5: You may be basing it off of incomplete assumptions
If you’re evaluating class performance based on Savage performance, your analysis is bad and you should feel bad. If your list of which jobs are best is based solely on progression groups trying for world or server firsts, same thing. This is not the content most players are going through, and it’s not even at the intensity most players will experience it.
The US playerbase has settled into an accepted method of trying to push through new ultra-challenging content with sub-par gear, and it mostly comes down to pushing DPS with an intensity that would make an Iwo Jima veteran ask if you could dial it back a bit. Japanese players have a different strategy, and I’m willing to bet the European community has another one as well. But gauging jobs based on which ones perform in these intensely narrow strategies is like gauging jobs based on how many vowels are in the name. You can do it, but it doesn’t give you much useful information.
Most players are going to run normal mode Omega, Return to Ivalice, Expert dungeons, and maybe a few Extreme primals. Some won’t even clear all of that. Some will clear a little bit more. Some will work through Savage at a more leisurely pace. A job’s performance should be evaluated based on how well it performs in all of those circumstances, not just how it manages when you’re in the latest crafted gear with full melds and trying desperately to race down the health of a new boss.
If, say, BRD is better than MCH in every single context, than that’s a real issue. But if BRD is more desirable for your world first clears of Extreme primals but matches up with MCH just fine in all other contexts, BRD isn’t really better.
Reason 6: You might just be wrong
I mean, you haven’t even played the expansion yet. You may not be as smart as you think you are. You could, in fact, be misreading something or making assumptions which are just plain wrong.
Forming hypotheses is all well and good, but until you actually test them they’re just ideas. I don’t assume that as a Ninja player, I’m smarter and know more about the job’s design than every single person who’s developing the game. So I might see thing which make me raise an eyebrow, but until I actually try them it’s just so much speculation. And, you know, I could be totally wrong.
Feedback, like always, is welcome in the comments or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. (I would hasten to point out that if your feedback is to explicitly ignore one or all of the listed points, you are in fact proving me right.) Next week, it’s time for your last-chance expansion checklist to make sure you’re ready when Stormblood takes the world by storm. Blood. Bloodstorm.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
