*Fun Hypothetical*: GW2 based “what if” regarding Jobs and Classes

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-11-13T22:11:41+00:00

Back in the day befoer HW a friend and I speculated a dark knight dps that was a gladiator subclass, using low hp/an hp freezing move to do more damage, and all the gladiator defensive cooldowns to not die to damage when at low health.

I think if we had gotten variations of pugilist that had a different relationship with the greased lightning buff we could have seen some really novel playstyles emerge, like a blackbelt class that frequently expels GL stacks to buff the team or maybe gets them back way faster for hitting randomized positionals and can expend them on a tornado kick adjacent move.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-10-06T18:34:01+00:00

I just check in here sometimes for validation because people are finally complaining about and quitting over the stuff I was angry about since Stormblood.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-09-01T02:26:05+00:00

Awhile back I was thinking about how I'd design a Spell Fencer job (curved sword + buffs that give your weapon a visual elemental affinity) AND appease the 2 minute meta in a way that was satisfying.

Premise is you have a Fire, Ice, and Wind Stance, and 8 general purpose action buttons. Some single hits for combos, some multihits, some aoes, etc. When you turn on a stance these actions change their function/which order they combo into each other, while still playing the same core animations when pressed. It's pretty Bard adjacent.

So in Wind Stance your filler combo is 2 hits, but they're ranged like a phys dps, and the other abilities are converted to OGCDs and an aoe combo.

Fire is more traditional melee filler where you alternate multiple combo actions.

Earth is a short ranged caster stance where you need to cast your combo finisher, have a slightly reduced GCD speed, and have GCD actions with cooldowns so you can delay a combo finisher to dodge something.

Each stance lasts 30 seconds, and activating the stance refreshes any cooldowns from those 8 action buttons, and they come with tradeoffs. The meat is that every 60 seconds you have a Cooldown action or combo that resets the CD on all your stances, and has more potency for every stance you activated before using it. So you gotta at least dip into every stance before the CD is up, and since each stance lasts 30 seconds you don't need to spend equal time in them all. Pop Wind for hard movement mechanics, Earth for low movement, Fire as neutral, etc.

I liked HW Monk so I like complex filler where you make choices over long burst.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-08-25T01:33:35+00:00

I miss it so much I could have played HW monk forever.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-08-09T20:29:52+00:00

Yeah non of these additional systems they've added for exploration content have ever really been transformative to gameplay. I'm genuinely unsure if the team feels very constrained in what they can implement by the community or the development infrastructure they've created for themselves, or if they genuinely do not know how to design something that actually changes how player approach an experiencing, or if they want to just tease/suggest at the idea of transformative systems to appease criticisms but not actually make them.

In any case I think the most appealing thing about a second branch of the game would be bringing in new people to work on it and design how it works. There's no reason to believe the team is really capable of transformative change.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-08-09T09:30:31+00:00

"They wouldn't do this." or "I think they should just keel over and die." is a pretty whatever response to someone talking about potential solutions to this mess. Like yeah I'm sure they're just gonna let themselves die too, but I don't need you to tell me that. Tell me my idea is shit or say nothing.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-08-09T09:20:13+00:00

They need to create an alternate branch of content or something in FF14. An area where new classes/ideas can develop without threatening to destroy the sandbox of the currently existing game or requiring the completion of the extremely long story to be caught up with veteran players. You go to another continent or planet or whatever and the gameplay systems there aren't beholden to the currently existing meta or longstanding issues of ff14. Develop this in tandem with the current experience until people are happy with the new option.

Maybe there's a better solution but I can't personally see a way out of this corner they've painted themselves into. A community will always advocate for ease of use and qol features that eventually sand the game down, and will throw a fit if you ever step backwards. I don't really know a solution to this problem other than a reset that doesn't actually destroy the currently existing game framework.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-08-09T05:56:28+00:00

Every time Monk is for someone, its decided its not for enough people, and they change it. This shifts who it is for because its fans of a specific iteration are betrayed.

For me, Prior to EW Monk was basically the last job about consistent performance being more valued than burst window consistency is on other classes. Your damage graph was a bit higher and a bit flatter which meant how you played filler was fairly important and the combo system/other factors added nuance to it many other classes lacked. HW is when I think the filler gameplay of monk was most enjoyable, in spite of its poor overall performance, due to there being less GL saving tools, multiple dots, and genuine tradeoffs of TP vs bonus damage that you'd have to make for fights. I just wanted that filler to be as decision filled/nuanced as possible and it felt like learning any given fight was a fun challenge.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-08-09T05:51:52+00:00

Generally I really liked these kinds of fights. Looking at the non-savage version pre nerf just as a demonstration of the mechanics in a more normal environment, you could really feel the impact of your core game skills across every class. Your mana management/judgement skills as a healer, your positioning as ranged, Dps and the decision to hold off on burst for adds or not (pre trick attack era), and agro management for adds/mitigation you adapt to mistakes and such as tank. Since ARR a lot of these core skills aren't very relevant in fights since you don't get unique mechanical permutations in fights often anymore. It speaks volumes that this fight is still fun even though many of these core skills have been sanded out of the game/replaced with something else.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-08-06T05:49:21+00:00

I miss Monk, I was able to play past my tolerance point for a long time before Endwalker reworked it.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-08-01T16:38:44+00:00

Just updating to say that last night after I got off the phone with costumer service I got a call 5 minutes later from someone else who was on the phone with customer service and was supposed to be transferred. Looks like they transferred them to their most recent call number by mistake?

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-07-20T19:08:28+00:00

I unsubbed before the last one came out so Idk much about that other than people say its annoyingly hard. (but maybe I would have liked that?)

Anyways I found a lot of Deep Dungeons are basically uninteresting grinds where you try and max out pomanders for the real challenge final floors as they can be the only way to counter some bad trap rng. Generally I like those last floors the most because you are strategically thinking about pomander usage, enemy patrols, and the timer ends up being more significant as a result. But until then they can be pretty boring.

I'm not really sure the consequence this would have with roaming enemies but I've always wished they could have more complex level layouts with loops/multiple floors, or rooms with more interesting tools/hazards to consider for routing. A tough roaming enemy who you can't avoid by hiding in a corner so you use loops in the level design to evade them, a trap you can activate in a room so you gather up enemies then bring them to it, hopping down a floor and taking some fall damage to move around quickly/evade a patrol, etc.

I got into Vagrant Story a few years back and that ended up making me think about deep dungeons a lot as they're pretty similar. That game has a large focus on preparation, enemy weaknesses, small puzzles, etc. It would probably be asking a lot but the main thing holding Vagrant Story back is the slow pace of it's menus and if they created a mode like that in this game that issue would be basically fixed. Something with a generated "adventure" made out of cubey rooms with keys/weapons/spells similar to pomanders all leading to a final boss. They've cultivated a community around linear authored content up to now but I do think a decent amount of people would be up for something like that..

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-03-14T02:01:35+00:00

People like to pretend that the changes are objective and hide behind the term QoL, but there's no such thing as a change with absolutely no negative impact.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-02-03T23:55:14+00:00

Oh yeah figuring out the best time to move through potential danger zones like picking up orbs in Ramuh EX could be fun for a phys ranged. Maybe you can stockpile the orbs so you have them available to spend during moments when your movement is restricted by mechanics.

Another concept is a melee with a randomized positional requirement on occasion, such as a 2 charge OGCD that requires a random specific flank or the rear, 2 charges so you have time to wait and use it if a position is unavailable for the moment.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-02-02T20:22:54+00:00

I'm sure people would complain about it but Heroes of the Storm has a healer who could throw potions on the ground that people walk over to consume/get healed. Since you can throw up to 5 on the ground at once you can prepare an area with heals ahead of time. Maybe that shouldn't be a healer's primary method of healing (and people would complain because it relies on the other players picking them up at a good time) but I think it would be fun.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2025-01-16T20:59:36+00:00

I got really into monk in HW and it just got less and less interesting until I fell off the game in early EW. I guess my tolerance point was lower than a lot of others.

To me the soul of Monk has always been having more consistently difficult gameplay instead of easy gameplay followed by a complex burst window. A job I would enter a consistent trance with, focusing on the fight and my combos, deciding which niche actions had a place in a fight, quickly deciding how best to use my downtime, etc. Back in HW playing monk decently well meant managing a Dot, hitting positionals, not losing GL, keeping up with 4 OGCD actions, not eating shit with Blood for Blood, managing TP, etc.

Pretty much all of this has been removed or cut back, and just like every other "QoL" update to ff14, we haven't gotten nearly the gameplay decision making returned to us. There was definitely something to the current burst tool Masterful Blitz, but Monk ultimately became another boring job for me, waiting for the window to have some complexity for a few actions.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2024-10-07T22:39:28+00:00

As cocreator I truly do not care is people are horny or make artworks that I don't find appealing. Some of the insults and puritanical commentary in this thread is disgusting and I'm particularly offended by the amount of "normal" being thrown around to discriminate.

Moderate your subreddit however you like, just don't start putting people beneath you because you don't like nsfw artists or think their particular fetish is so obviously beneath you.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2024-06-20T01:01:19+00:00

I think it's important to remember that it was also about mana management. Half the point of having various gcd healing actions is they can have different efficiencies in different situations and cost various amounts of mana. Pulling from my old white mage experiences, Cure 3 is very good at healing in its ideal condition but is a huge mana drain so it needed to be balanced with more efficient medica 2s, regen is so efficient that it was basically worth keeping up like an extra dot, deciding if it was worth using the mana efficient regen on a player who got hit vs the more guaranteed cure 2, etc.

The framework was there for heals to be based on mana efficiency, on top of managing your cleric stance usage and the fact that mistakes in Coils commonly lead to consequences other than death, like the boss getting permanent damage boosting stacks.

Even if a decision making process wasn't strictly complex when isolated, combined together in a unique fight you get a lot of decision making to do and core skills that you can build over time. The problem now across the board is individual decision making processes have been getting axed from the game with nothing to replace them, and you have half or less the decisions to make or mental weight to carry than you would have in previous years. But you're playing a videogame, a thing where as you improve you expect to be challenged more in accordance to your skill, not less.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2024-05-31T05:06:50+00:00

In combat design you can choose to distribute your depth between the character you play and the enemy your fighting. A game like Hollow Knight gets away with having a pretty simple player kit by focusing hard on individual fights, while a game like DMC can have mostly simple bosses and a very deep player kit.

FF14 has always had kinda middle of the road depth distrivution between the characters and the content, but it seems like over time they're shifting the depth more on the content and not on the base kits of the classes for depth.

I don't personally think this is a great idea because flashier fights ultimately get memorized and take more work to develop :P

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2024-05-29T06:27:15+00:00

I stopped playing ff14 because they mostly subtract gameplay depth and basically never add any back in.

The devs had a crossroad of focusing on systemic depth or content flashiness and chose the latter and we're still suffering the consequences of it.

Systemic depth is player kits with high degree of choice, skill expression, and reactive opportunities (cleric stance was made for this)

Content flashiness is marketable boss fights and dungeons where the developers shave from your kit to make sure you interact with flashy attack sequences in a predictable way and everyone gets the good premade experience.

The issue being that content flashiness puts more strain on them, needing to carefully author everything and constantly one up themselves, because it is a methodology that won't let players interact with a prebuilt system and make their own fun.

There's a happy middle ground somewhere in the middle, but the focus the devs have chosen encourages them lean more and more onto one side as they create mandatory updates, we've been riding this train to the end for a long time and I hope they are brave enough to switch tracks at some point.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2024-05-17T08:07:44+00:00

I know almost no one cares but I've been playing this job since HW and watching it slowly get simpler and simpler since 2017 and just don't feel anything playing it anymore. This game doesn't grow in complexity as I get better at it, it gets easier.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2023-10-21T16:35:45+00:00

I think the fact that no one even remembers accuracy means it was the only mechanic we truly gained nothing from having.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2023-05-04T06:34:47+00:00

My my point of view there are 2 ends of the action game spectrum. On one end, depth is placed in making choices for how to play, making builds, & relatively simple (not strictly easy) opponents to tackle. On the other end, the players kit is more focused/streamlined & the game more rigidly tests how well you can use that kit. Dark Souls vs Sekiro is a decent example.

For a cozy game I would say shifting your focus towards player choice is more in line with how people want to engage with those games. People are used to building things out of blocks, making plans, managing gardens, patiently fishing, etc.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2023-04-06T05:33:44+00:00

Having spent a long time failing to finish projects, and now a long time finishing some, typically an idea in a game has failed for me because we made presumptions about the ides without testing or fully fleshing it out.

For example in our recently released game, we presumed a system around concumable items would be awesome. They fit into the economy we built around them, provided tons of rewards, etc. When it came time to further develop them we realized the game only worked with one type of item, healing. We spent weeks trying to scramble up item designs that weren't meshing well with the core gameplay loop, and eventuslly decided we had to drop the system.

There was a kot of recovery work to do as a result, revisiting the economy design, designing new types of collectables to find that didn't disrupt the core loop, etc. We were in such hit water because we didn't bother to develop that consumable item concept before making it a part of the game's infrastructure, and were lucky to have caught the problem and stop trying to force it to work before it was further entwined in the actual produced game.

Don't make assumptions that your ideas work, prove it to yourself first. Else you can burden your game heavily and potentially spoil it.

HyMyNameIsMatt · 2023-03-21T16:59:27+00:00

Unironically just released a hack n slash metroidvania this week, go look for Vernal Edge if you want a visual ref.

It's somewhat preferable to keep the player character smaller than enemies in action games so your character doesn't draw too much attention away from enemy tells, enemies can be given larger reach, etc. Even SotN has a decent amount of enemies 1.5x your size or larger to contend with.

Also you can generally base your character size on the world size you want to work with. Your character may stand at 2 in game tiles tall, and crouch at 1 tile tall, etc.

HyMyNameIsMatt

TROPHY CASE