FFXIV Patch 2.1 Press Interviews with Yoshida

[Tyrath]

50% boost to dungeon xp? Looks like FATEs are still gonna be more efficient timewise. Something that requires less effort shouldn't award faster xp

[Kachiko]

50% boost to dungeon xp? Looks like FATEs are still gonna be more efficient timewise. Something that requires less effort shouldn't award faster xp

Quests are easier then dungeons, even easier then FATES, but rarely, if ever, do people ever say it shouldn't be a faster way to level then dungeons. The problem is that FATE have a limited amount of 'fun' built into it because the way the current FATE are implemented; they have no impact on the world, so it's just static repeat add nauseum. This is something GW2 got right, at least so far as FATE changed the world enough so that there was always a good chance to stumble into a different FATE branch and experience a changing world, even if there's only so far you can take that type of model.

[Tyrath]

Quests are also a 1 time thing per character. That doesn't really make sense in a FATE vs dungeons for leveling multiple jobs.

[Niiro]

Recast time of Power Surge will be shortened by 30 seconds.

Can they please just get rid of Power Surge, bump Jump's potency to 250 or something, and give us a different ability that's not so ridiculously dull and pointless.

[Kachiko]

Quests are also a 1 time thing per character. That doesn't really make sense in a FATE vs dungeons for leveling multiple jobs.

In the scope of FF14, sure, but in general, nobody ever complains that questing should be a slower way to level then dungeons just because quests are easier content.

[Tyrath]

In the scope of FF14, sure, but in general, nobody ever complains that questing should be a slower way to level then dungeons just because quests are easier content.

Well I'm talking in the context of FF14 so I don't give a shit how the normal MMO audience complains or doesn't lol.

My point was if dungeon xp isn't significantly better than FATEs nobody is going to bother to do it. I can turn my brain off and watch a movie while doing FATEs while dungeons require paying attention and often run the risk of failure or a slow run if you have a bad group and whatnot.

[Toth]

Yay for Bane finally getting its range fixed.

[Slycer]

New interview appeared on another JP video game news site today. Reading through it now, I'll post some translations if I find any new tidbits.

[Slycer]

Here's the first part. This is about 1/4 of it, so there are three more parts. There's some overlap in the information provided, of course, but he goes into a great deal of what I found to be rather interesting detail on a couple of the points, so I just did a full translation.

He seems super defensive about BLM btw, lol.

Highlights:
-Yoshida's detailed defense as to why BLM isn't overpowered and general discussion about job and class balancing.
-In-depth discussion about PLD vs. WAR and reasoning behind WAR adjustments

---------------

We watched the 10th Producer Letter LIVE broadcast the other day and saw a lot of responses. The reactions on the forum were mostly good, although some people had no problem tossing out a few insults (laughs).

Yoshida: It's exciting to do these live letters, and I'm grateful for all of the feedback.

Yeah, as an online game you'd rather have some user feedback than just silence.

Yoshida: As a bit of a side note, before we did the 10th LIVE letter, there's been a disproportionate amount of feedback comparing the game to the original FFXIV, and we'll be reviewing our policies based on that feedback.

And you're going to work on that?

Yoshida: For a lot of players who are just starting with the new FFXIV, they're going to be more interested in the current state of the game than comparisons to the old FFXIV. There's been a trend with a lot of threads comparing the game to old FFXIV, so we're looking at changing up the way the forum is setup so that these new players don't get discouraged.

Got it. Are you expecting to get a lot of feedback to the LIVE letter summary that was posted?

Yoshida: Yeah, to some extent. We've discussed a lot of the changes on Twitter so we don't receive so many questions live. For the most part, people are just tweeting their impressions of the broadcast, and I'm thankful for and encouraged by all of the positive feedback that we received.

That's surprising. There are tons of posts with questions, so I expected there'd be a lot on Twitter too.

Yoshida: Yeah, that's something else that's changed since old FFXIV.

Interesting. You're still getting the feedback, just in a different way.

Yoshida: People are posting their opinions all over the place, like on 2chan. Since it's a game, it falls into a lot of entertainment discussions. On the forum, though, the discussion can definitely get a bit more heated. With respect to the LIVE letters, we're looking to the community to come up with ways to make the broadcasts more enjoyable while still conveying meaningful information.

What are your future plans for the forum?

Yoshida: Conversations about the UI are very typical on a day-to-day basis, but it's not always possible for Minigawa (lead UI artist Hiroshi Minagawa) to be able to respond to all of these posts, so we're planning on having others be involved with the discussion as well.

In the LIVE letter the other day, you had a bit of feedback in defense of black mage. From the perspective of the poster feedback on the forum, there seems to be a lot of frustration from DPS other than black mage.

Yoshida: Well, we're basically leaving it intact.

Since black mage can't do anything once it has no MP, managing MP becomes part of the balance, but when you look at the other casters and ranged DPS, in a longer battle when you run out of TP you can no longer perform actions, and it becomes difficult to recover MP once you run out since they have no way to manage MP like black mage, so this might be a little unfair?

Yoshida: Looking at TP and MP alone doesn't tell the whole situation. We have to balance things like the role of the job, its characteristics, HP, and MP. In the case of a MMORPG, there will be a lot of theorycrafting and discussion about the fairness or unfairness of one job vs. another. When we consider the solutions, we have to be careful in making any adjustments, because there's never a simple solution. By the way, while you said that black mage can essentially maintain infinite MP, if you're trying to completely max out your DPS, player skill is needed as well.

Yes, but then that should probably be a difficult technique, not something that everyone can do relatively easily once they become familiar with the job.

Yoshida: Do you really think so? Look at a fight like Titan where you're trying to avoid Weight of the Land and Landslide while managing your timed buffs before they expire. You need to make sure you dont waste procs when they happen, use your MP to its full limit, keep your cast time down by using level 3 buffs, all while continuing to avoid the boss's attacks and recovering your MP without reducing DPS. I don't think this is something that just anyone can do easily, so that's what I meant when I said that player skill is a factor.

So when you said "please try out black mage," your point was that it was a completely different playstyle that required mastery?

Yoshida: When we previously talked about the battle system, during the beta test, for example, the items on their own don't make much sense. There will always be players that feel like some jobs are too strong or some job is the best. But with FFXIV, you can raise multiple jobs and classes with the same character with the armoury system, and leveling is relatively easy compared to a lot of other games. Additionally, it doesn't take much to become strong... Darklight equipment and a hard mode Garuda or Ifrit weapon is enough to get a real feel for the job.

Some users might say that they want to play dragoon but it seems like there's a conflict between ranged and melee DPS.

Yoshida: Yes, but I think that jobs and classes can often be envious of one another.

In other words, you should use whatever job you feel is the strongest?

Yoshida: I think as human beings we get the same feelings. People look at a good summoner and they might say "wow, they're that strong?!" and become a little envious. It could be the job or class alone or it could be the player, but it feels the same either way.

For black mage, we received a lot of questions from different points of view. I wasn't intending to provoke anyone with my comments (laughs). I know that maintaining MP and maximizing DPS are not as simple as everyone thinks, so I was just saying "if you really feel black mage is that strong, you should try it out." And if you try it out, and you still think it's that strong, why not continue playing as black mage? We've gotten feedback that black mage is too strong compared to dragoons, and in regards to those players, we would rather see constructive discussion about the strength of dragoon, rather than about black mage.

Jobs A and B are not the same job. It does not make sense for the characteristics of jobs A and B to be the same. Each of the jobs should have their own unique features, strengths, and weaknesses. However, if jobs A and B fill the same role, if there is a difference between them in how well they serve the basic function of that role, then there is a need for adjustment.

Similar to the difference between melee and ranged DPS, there's been a lot of discussion about the difference between paladin and warrior. The goal of the adjustments we've made are to reduce the differences by strengthening certain jobs or characteristics, rather than weakening them.

For example, constantly rotating MP is a constraint for black mage. We've set a longer recast time on Convert as an emergency use ability with the basic premise that if you mess up switching stances, you can still recover one time (or maybe use an ether or elixir to recover once more). The constraints of Astral Fire as you continue to cast fire spells can be cumbersome in many cases. This is all part of the job by design.

Many people have come to the wrong conclusion that just because the job can recover MP that it is too strong. The right way to think of it is that a feature of the job is that when it is played well, it can continually recover MP without sacrificing DPS. Keeping Thunder active without running out of MP and without stopping casting is also an important part of the role to maximize DPS.

The development team uses a DPS meter to check the balance and it does not appear that black mage has a significantly different output. This is just one example, by the way, there are risks and rewards associated with all classes and jobs.

That's pretty much what you said with the LIVE letter, but I think I get what you mean now.

Yoshida: Yeah, I hope people understand. We talked about it for about 40 minutes or more, and we could have gone on even longer. Black mage is pretty well balanced as a job currently, they also have some defensive abilities such as Manawall and Aetherial Manipulation that they can use when they are taking a break from DPS, as well as some they can apply to other party members, but all of these must be used within the constraints of the MP rotation while balancing offense and defense.

Got it. So people may just have seen that black mages have outstanding performance after level 50, and combined with what you said they might have gotten the idea that black mages are too strong.

Yoshida: There's also a bug with being able to cast flare with half the casting time that black mages have been using to their advantage.

SE Rep: From the point of view of a healer, in a place like Wanderer's Palace, having a black mage is also nice to make their work easier.

Yoshida: The burden to cast Repose is reduced, but there may be some cases where a white mage is used to pinpoint sleep certain targets since black mage is focused on damage. However, it depends on the tactics of the group, so it's really a case-by-case basis. In content with four people, when considering particular tactics, it's definitely true that some roles will have advantages or disadvantages over others.

I rememember that Tanaka (Hiromichi Tanaka former producer of FFXI and the original FFXIV) had similar issues with job balance, with red mages and paladins considered overpowered and warriors considered less useful in the heyday of FFXI when Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia were released.

Yoshida: Yeah everyone has their own perspectives with a MMORPG (laughs).

You also must know that the more information you provide, the more anxious we get as gamers. For example, you've provided a lot of information about warrior, but paladins might be a little upset. Also, bards are probably going to get a heart attack from the suspense of finding out which ability was removed (laughs).

Yoshida: There was a lot of discussion about it and I thought for this first update it was necessary to talk about some of the balance adjustments in advance. Bard, for example, is able to put out a lot of high instantaneous DPS. We thought that the risk/reward of the job would be balancing enhancing through songs with all-out DPS for boss content; however, when we looked at the time it took to clear content with bards, we found that the DPS was higher than we expected. Additionally, a number of very important roles to parties were concentrated to bard, so we're planning on fine tuning this. I will go into more detail with the next LIVE letter, but for all you bards out there, please don't worry about this as it won't be an extreme change.

I want to confirm one point of your stance on this. When TP is depleted over a longer battle by a physical DPS, is your thought that they are overusing techniques and should adjust TP consumption by relaxing their attack frequency and utilizing abilities that do not consume TP?

Yoshida: I have a few reservations, but basically "yes" is the answer to your question. I believe that as player skill develops, they will adjust their timing to be ideal, as balancing the TP consumption plays a role in their overall DPS output. We could make fine tuning adjustments to overall DPS output by slightly adjusting the activation frequency of certain procs.

Well, those are my basic feelings on player skills and TP depletion, so we'll continue to watch the situation in the future as you make fine tuning adjustments.

Yoshida: These adjustments won't be limited to just this update, we'll be making tweaks with every update. However, because people will be thinking "that job? what about my job?" whenever we bring up job adjustments, we won't be going into a high level of detail until the patch is ready to implement. The issues with warrior were pretty large, though, so we wanted to get those details finalized and let people know about them in advance.

For warrior, you mentioned that the job is actually strong but difficult to manage.

Yoshida: We wanted to make some large changes to make the job useful in the Binding Coil of Bahamut where there are already a lot of complex battle elements.

Will the job still be balanced outside of the Binding Coil?

Yoshida: I think that right now there's not much problem with warrior and most players have the impression that they are a valuable party member up through hard mode Titan. The development team, including myself, played through all five turns of the Binding Coil of Bahamut using a warrior and paladin tanking combination. However, we made some adjustments to tweak the difficulty higher than originally planned. The way paladins tank right now, however, was not what we had originally intended, and created a situation where warriors simply cannot survive by the numbers.

As a result, all of the DPS of the party could focus on defeating the enemies and players have cleared these areas faster than we anticipated. Please understand that we admire all of the tactics that players have come up with, and we're glad that people are getting through it, but these tactics have created a situation where warrior is no longer useful, and that was a big miss on the development end.

It's certainly possible to make content adjustments in the future, but once we start reducing the performance of individual actions it will just become a cat-and-mouse game, and the development team will get a negative image from nerfing certain abilities. Instead of making modifications to the Binding Coil to discourage certain tactics and encourage others, we decided to make a rather sweeping modification to warrior.

Another impression that we heard was that, from a healer's perspective, it was difficult to determine when a warrior needed to be healed compared to a paladin because warrior was a job that was designed to be able to self-heal. However, when viewed from the healer's perspective, they see the HP going up and down and heals recovering more or less HP and are trying to figure out exactly what's going on (laughs).

Warrior was originally intended to have a design like a Berserker, and was intended to be a fun to play job where you could recover HP by damaging an enemy, and would leave a lot of room for player technique to play a role. When viewed from a healer's perspective, however, they get the impression that their defense is not really stable at any given time like a Paladin, and it is hard to judge the specific actions. Because of this, it was difficult to understand when is best to recover HP and they found it difficult to appreciate warrior in general.

Up through Titan, it's really about the different features of certain jobs. However, starting with what seemed like a large advantage to Paladin on hard Ifrit with being able to stun frequently, and continuing through the Binding Coil, when combined with the healer's impression that the job was unstable to heal, the overall impression became that warrior was too weak. Because of this, we planned some major changes to warrior and presented them in advance. While warrior was already a strong job before, I think these changes should get people to consider the job again.

So part of this strengthening of the warrior is also about changing the negative reputation that they received in the past.

Yoshida: Yes, that's part of it. However, we also think that the self-recovery role that warrior was originally intended to play may have been overkill and made the job too technical, so we do regret that.

[Obsidian]

I like that they would rather buff things than play whack-a-mole with the nerf bat. It still would have been nice if they'd outlined the kinds of adjustments they were planning for everyone and not just specifically WAR though. However, this stance seems a little contradictory to the way they've gone about buffing WAR:

Jobs A and B are not the same job. It does not make sense for the characteristics of jobs A and B to be the same. Each of the jobs should have their own unique features, strengths, and weaknesses. However, if jobs A and B fill the same role, if there is a difference between them in how well they serve the basic function of that role, then there is a need for adjustment.

It seems a little weird to say this while simultaneously just supplanting PLD's passive defense onto WAR and calling it a day.

[Slycer]

I like that they would rather buff things than play whack-a-mole with the nerf bat. It still would have been nice if they'd outlined the kinds of adjustments they were planning for everyone and not just specifically WAR though. However, this stance seems a little contradictory to the way they've gone about buffing WAR:

It seems a little weird to say this while simultaneously just supplanting PLD's passive defense onto WAR and calling it a day.

Actually I think he kind of addressed it near the end of my post there. He pretty much implied that WAR was fine at is and, for the most part, working as intended, but unless something changed then people would have continued ignoring WAR for high end content, so their hand was kinda forced. I'm not saying this was the right way to go; I think I would rather have seen them change Coil to make it more WAR friendly and/or less PLD friendly, but I'm not sure what exactly that would entail (and I have a feeling they weren't sure either).

[Voyage1970]

He seems super defensive about BLM btw, lol.

Pretty sure Yoshida plays BLM on his incognito account so take that for what it's worth.

Actually I think he kind of addressed it near the end of my post there. He pretty much implied that WAR was fine at is and, for the most part, working as intended, but unless something changed then people would have continued ignoring WAR for high end content, so their hand was kinda forced. I'm not saying this was the right way to go; I think I would rather have seen them change Coil to make it more WAR friendly and/or less PLD friendly, but I'm not sure what exactly that would entail (and I have a feeling they weren't sure either).

WAR needed a buff there are no two ways about that, but I think the point Obsidian was making is how they went about the WAR buff. They could have kept the style of reactive self-heals and mitigation for WAR instead of just slapping on proactive DR mitigation from PLD, but because in their view WAR was fine as is and people kept comparing it to PLD they just figured people wanted it to do what PLD does. It just seems lazy on their part that instead of coming up with something new they just used something that already worked for another job.

Edit: Also the entire issue probably wouldn't even exist if they had not underestimated PLDs defensive cooldowns. If Titan/Coil had been as hard for PLD as it was for WAR from the get go people would just say the content was hard, instead of WAR just has trouble with it.

[Spider-Dan]

A hybrid "healer/anything" or "tank/anything" would also be exceptionally pointless seeing as all current 4man content is designed to be cleared with 1 tank and 1 healer anyways.

Not really; hybrid tank/DPS or healer/DPS is usually better than full tank or full healer for faceroll content (see: fulltime Cleric Stance SCHs in WP/AK).

P.S. Blunt Arrow being moved from BRD to DRG. Mark the tape.

[Niiro]

WAR's mitigation doesn't scale with damage taken, that's a fact and a fatal flaw in it's design and the reason it falls behind PLD on harder content.

There's also mention of how WAR's self-healing is so inconsistent, which is another good point. It's not really feasible for a healer to be able to constantly monitor a WAR's Wrath stacks and try to anticipate when they'll use IB. Not to mention the obvious flaw with tying Wrath to WAR's healing bonus, you constantly have to choose between a single self heal and a consistent healing bonus and it's very rarely clear which would benefit you the most at any given moment (and it's something that both the tank and the healers need to be on the same page about, otherwise you're wasting Wrath, MP, or both).

[Elcura]

Not really; hybrid tank/DPS or healer/DPS is usually better than full tank or full healer for faceroll content (see: fulltime Cleric Stance SCHs in WP/AK)..

Because everyone wants to dedicate themselves to a job that's only worthwhile on trash content. Yep.

[Voyage1970]

I want to confirm one point of your stance on this. When TP is depleted over a longer battle by a physical DPS, is your thought that they are overusing techniques and should adjust TP consumption by relaxing their attack frequency and utilizing abilities that do not consume TP?

Yoshida: I have a few reservations, but basically "yes" is the answer to your question. I believe that as player skill develops, they will adjust their timing to be ideal, as balancing the TP consumption plays a role in their overall DPS output. We could make fine tuning adjustments to overall DPS output by slightly adjusting the activation frequency of certain procs.

If we are supposed to relax our attack frequency to reduce TP starvation to compare to BLM infinite MP then why is Skill Speed even a stat? Also I'm pretty sure the only DD that uses TP and has activation on proc abilities is BRD isn't it?

[Lucavi]

It seems a little weird to say this while simultaneously just supplanting PLD's passive defense onto WAR and calling it a day.

He explained why, though. He literally explained that the current way players complete coil gets war straight-up destroyed on certain parts, and two places that can be singled out entirely are double-dreads and TT snakes. War had to get something to both stabilize the incoming damage and minimize the "spikiness" that apparently had healers straight up deciding that it wasn't worth dealing with when you can simply double-pld and blow through the content.

It makes perfect sense, and while there were other solutions they could have introduced (properly scaling IB heal, introducing ways for war to mitigate single or multiple hits - IE. forced parries), they went with giving war flat mitigation to keep the bars relatively stable while still allowing for solid damage and a decent amount of lifesteal.

If anything, I'm curious about the Dev team's initial tactics that allegedly didn't result in DPS going all out for most of the fights and warriors NOT getting outright lamblasted by certain abilities.

[Chamaan]

Yoshi said during launch that his preferred job was Blm, so yeah he's going to have some bias for it.

[Khalil]

Actually I think he kind of addressed it near the end of my post there. He pretty much implied that WAR was fine at is and, for the most part, working as intended, but unless something changed then people would have continued ignoring WAR for high end content, so their hand was kinda forced. I'm not saying this was the right way to go; I think I would rather have seen them change Coil to make it more WAR friendly and/or less PLD friendly, but I'm not sure what exactly that would entail (and I have a feeling they weren't sure either).

Leaving it as is would have rendered it far less useful for progression than its counterpart. The fact that their mitigation doesn't scale or that their heals are very inconsistent means they're much less likely to be chosen for world 1st progression.

It's not that their hand was forced, they had a couple of huge design flaws that would be apparent during high-damaging content like Coil.

If we are supposed to relax our attack frequency to reduce TP starvation to compare to BLM infinite MP then why is Skill Speed even a stat? Also I'm pretty sure the only DD that uses TP and has activation on proc abilities is BRD isn't it?

Playing devil's advocate, they could suggest bringing a bard and would make this point moot. Yoshi-P's logic on this is somewhat dumb.

The simple fact that Sprint is TP-based and allows for casters to use without penalty only further cements my point.

[Spider-Dan]

Because everyone wants to dedicate themselves to a job that's only worthwhile on trash content. Yep.

Perhaps if you tried reading a post before mashing reply, you would see that the person I was responding to specifically cited hybrids in 4-man content.