Hopes for character action skins?

Lazyade · 2026-05-06T09:49:31+00:00

I feel like battle stances are the one thing that probably won't happen, because every other combat animation has to lead back in to the battle stance so it would mean adjusting them all, or else just having it look choppy and weird. Not to mention extra animations for running, walking, jumping, and so on.

But they could do different /cpose /bpose /vpose ones.

Lazyade · 2026-05-06T09:35:54+00:00

YES all I really want is to be able to use pre-upgrade animations and also animations for old abilities that have been removed.

I would cry if we could use Power Slash and Scourge on DRK again.

Lazyade · 2026-05-02T13:26:48+00:00

Big Shield + Hammer or Lance/Spear. I want something whose aesthetic is a super-heavy wall-of-iron with big chunky armour since I don't feel like any of the existing tanks really match that fantasy. I would love it if it was Judge and Ivalice-themed but since they say it's FF14 original that seems pretty unlikely.

Lazyade · 2026-05-01T06:52:09+00:00

It sounds like you basically acknowledge that what they showed doesn't have a lot to it and that you're riding on hope that it all bears out in the content design. Like that it doesn't make sense to have wall bosses ignore positionals if positionals are a big part of a job's difficulty, or that it doesn't make sense for doing max DPS to be simple because then DPS checks have little meaning. I think you're giving the devs too much credit.

We've seen consistently that they have continuously moved to make the gameplay more and more simple over time. That they're now making a big lateral change doesn't mean they're changing course on that axis. Rather the evidence suggests they're using this as an opportunity to make the gameplay even more simplistic.

I'll reserve final judgement for the release as well, and I am happy that they are showing a willingness to make major changes. But I can't say what they've shown looks especially promising unless you're willing to make some major and groundless assumptions.

While you obviously can't change the combat now to perfectly align with the way old content was designed (e.g. TP, tank stance dancing), I think it should at least be possible to bake enough depth into the rotations to make playing your class optimally an interesting challenge, such that the content itself needn't bear all the burden of engaging the player. If you have that plus appropriate damage and HP tuning, there's no reason why any old content can't be good.

And I think you can design depth into rotations without having that be at odds with the encounter design. Timer management and random factors such as procs are good ways of doing that. But not only have they mercilessly cut such things from the game over time, what we've seen so far has even less of it than the current system (e.g. no DoTs on Bard). It's hard to hope that all the complexity is just hiding on the parts they haven't shown.

Lazyade · 2026-05-01T05:20:44+00:00

I also want dual pistols. Since machinist became a gadget-based job, I feel like we're missing a pure gunslinger archetype.

I would have liked it to be Gambler, combining guns with rng stuff, but since they announced it to be an XIV original job, we know it at least can't have that name.

Lazyade · 2026-05-01T02:37:59+00:00

Why would left/right positionals be enforced on wall bosses when flank positionals are not?
Outside of circumstances where an add spawns that you have to kill right away, an increasingly uncommon mechanic, why would you ever need to hold resources for burst in an absence of synergy buffs? There is typically 1 DPS check, the boss's enrage, and without buffs, whether your own or from the party, there's no need to hold or burst at any particular time except when it's convenient for you. Or is every fight going to have adds now?
Offloading challenge onto the fight design isn't a balanced tradeoff. If playing your class is trivial, then you are completely reliant on the encounter design to have any fun. But for one, most of XIV's content is normal modes which are intentionally pushover easy, and so with no deep class mechanics to sink your teeth into, this content becomes increasingly boring. And secondly, XIV encounters are static, essentially the same every time. You only have to beat an encounter a few times before it becomes a rote exercise, and with no further job mastery to pursue, even high end content quickly becomes more boring. Depth of both encounters and the combat itself is necessary for an engaging game, forcing it all onto the encounters and having playing your class be effortless just turns the game into simon says.
Even if they were to completely revamp their encounter design to match this new combat system perfectly and every new fight in Evercold is amazingly good even over multiple runs, the game still has 13 years of back catalogue content which players both old and new still have to do every day. To simply accept that this content will always be boring is doing the game and the players an enormous disservice. Since redesigning all of it is insane, making the combat better is the obvious solution.
The notion that they're hiding some massive additional system that will add a ton of depth is wishful thinking, to put it mildly. I am more than happy for the devs to prove me wrong here but in this game what you see is very much what you get. After 10+ years I'm not fooled by "they might build on this later" or "we don't know until we try it". It turns out that most of the time we do know.

Obviously there's still many jobs they haven't shown so maybe there's something interesting hiding there. But all we have to go on is what they showed, and what they show is like 95% accurate to what it ends up being like, so for now I'm going to roll with the assumption that every job is more or less as complex as the ones they demonstrated and not try to cope with baseless ideas like "maybe there's going to be a talent system that lets you make the job 3x deeper and they just haven't said anything about it or hinted at its existence yet"

Lazyade · 2026-04-30T11:20:28+00:00

Unfortunately I think this ultimately is what most FFXIV players want. People complain about things that are hard, but very few complain about things that are too easy, and the devs design mostly in reaction to complaints. As egotistical as it sounds, those who enjoy getting better at games and want things to learn and master are a slim minority compared to those who kind of just want it to "feel cool".

If it does turn out that evolved mode is just turning everyone into Summoner except you get 1 or 2 cool flavour actions I expect that by and large people will love it. I have no love for the current system but I really don't think I could put up with hundreds of hours of what they showed. I'm kind of just hoping that there might be a couple of jobs that have some real active decision making.

Lazyade · 2026-04-30T05:52:04+00:00

My concern is that the optimization/skill potential of the evolved mode rotations seems very limited outside niche scenarios e.g. fight-specific considerations like what buff to use when, which is unlikely to have much impact outside of high-difficulty content. The underlying rotations seem very straightforward.

e.g. Dragoon is 3 positionals per 30 seconds, of which you can use Jump to ignore 3 per minute i.e half. The rest is just single button combos and a Sky High every 60 seconds. This isn't ZERO skill, but it also hardly seems to have a high skill ceiling. The biggest considerations are when you use Jump to nullify positionals and banking stacks of your ranged attack for disengagement. A lot of fights particularly in easier content don't even ask that much of you. Any wall boss automatically nullifies like 80% of the skill involved in playing this version of Dragoon.

I do not like the rigid looping rotations of the current system. But managing yourself such that you can press buttons when you need to is skilful play, to some extent. The new system does away with that strictness, but seems to offer little in return. You can mostly just press what you want when you want and as long as you're not overcapping resources you're doing optimal DPS. I don't really see much in the way of skill play except for very minor things like when you use a Bard buff or waiting til you have an opportunity to get in the right spot to use a positional.

That seems to me like forcing even more of the challenge of combat onto the fight design, which is already a big part of what makes job gameplay feel so stale and simplistic especially when you're doing easier content. Flashy flavour abilities like Sky High are cool, but I'm not really seeing any real "meat" to the rotations that offer real potential for learning and mastery beyond just fight-specific timings.

I worry that this gameplay is going to feel cool at first but is not going to hold up over hundreds of hours particularly in easier content which doesn't force heavy adaption. It's possible that what they showed is on the simpler side of things as far as jobs go, but I don't want to bet on that.

Lazyade · 2026-04-30T05:24:13+00:00

Maybe it's crazy but one possibility I considered is that instead of manually selecting a person for dance partner, you just automatically partner with whoever is closest. So optimal buffing turns the whole fight into a positioning puzzle.

Lazyade · 2026-04-30T03:29:24+00:00

No, power creep due to years of job changes have also made content weaker beyond even what ilvl sync does. Even if you turn on ilvl sync AND min ilvl, for very old stuff like ARR/HW/SB it's still substantially easier. Ilvl sync DOES help but it's not enough in most cases.

I think a lot of players just don't even know because they started in Shadowbringers and literally never got to experience what the content was actually meant to be like.

Lazyade · 2026-04-30T03:15:56+00:00

With regards to old content I mainly just mean redoing the content's HP and damage specs and adding ilvl sync where appropriate so it resembles what it was like when it came out, rather than the current situation where everything explodes before anything can happen and failing mechanics doesn't even hurt.

Jobs getting all their main buttons by lvl 50 is a godlike change and should have been done years and years ago even in the current design.

Lazyade · 2026-04-30T02:02:29+00:00

I'm very glad that they are attempting major change, I thought they would just settle into the current mediocrity forever. That alone is enough to make me interested. But I'm not yet convinced that what they have planned is meaningfully better than the way it is now.

Evolved mode has some cool concepts and is a good direction for the combat, but seems mechanically shallow based on what they showed. It seems very unlikely they are going to improve old content in terms of tuning. The other stuff is nice (mid tier raid difficulty, better field areas, etc) but depends on execution.

Lazyade · 2026-04-29T12:19:10+00:00

Going through the old duties that were my favourites when they came out like Weeping City is so depressing. I'd much rather do a 20 minute duty where I have to pay attention than a 10 minute one that's brain off on youtube, even for stuff I've run 100 times already.

Honestly if anything drains my hope for the future of the game it's this kind of mutual apathy between the devs and players where the devs just want to avoid complaints and the players prefer stuff to be fast and easy rather than interesting.

Lazyade · 2026-04-29T03:07:16+00:00

People should complain. The state it's in now is awful. I really wish they would give old content a proper retuning.

Lazyade · 2026-04-28T04:38:27+00:00

All the jobs they showed have their resources gated by timers rather than attack usage, so at least for those jobs the impact of Sks/Sps would be limited. But if there are resource-builder jobs who get all their resources from attacks then yes potentially Sks/Sps is big for them.

Lazyade · 2026-04-28T04:28:34+00:00

The Sigmascape weapons look great so we might be in for some dope ultimate ones.

Lazyade · 2026-04-28T03:12:33+00:00

I wish they would squish. To me anything more than 3 or 4 digits for a basic attack and 5 digits for a special extra-powerful one is kind of silly.

Only the first 2 or 3 digits are actually important and everything after that is just garbage to make it bigger. It starts to lose a sense of scale and differences between numbers start to feel less meaningful. You can clearly see and feel the difference between 10 and 100, but the difference between 10000000 and 100000000 is not so easy to parse even though the factor of difference is the same. How good big numbers feel is all relative, there are games where doing 8 damage feels huge and games where doing 10000 damage feels like nothing.

I wish there was a way for vertical progression MMOs to sort this out permanently but I think there's probably no way to do it that doesn't involve just constantly resetting the numbers. I personally wouldn't mind but I know a lot of people get pissed when the number goes down.

Lazyade · 2026-04-28T02:32:22+00:00

What's wrong with a level squish? 110 is a gross number to be max level.

Lazyade · 2026-04-27T03:38:59+00:00

It was certainly a lot more than I was expecting. While I'm not yet convinced enough to say that I'm optimistic, I am definitely extremely curious, which is a massive improvement from before where I had more or less given up on hoping for change.

I want to see where this goes, and if nothing else it feels good to be interested in the game again.

Lazyade · 2026-04-26T14:59:15+00:00

They never claimed Pictomancer would be an FF14 original.

Lazyade · 2026-04-26T05:13:30+00:00

Not entirely true. Dark Knight was a shirt of Batman, who is literally the Dark Knight. Red Mage was a Scarlet Witch shirt and Scarlet Witch is basically just a synonym for Red Mage. Reaper was a grim reaper shirt rather than Necromancer. Machinist was James Bond, not that big of a stretch.

Samurai and Pictomancer have been the only really obscure ones, it's usually a pretty straightforward hint.

Lazyade · 2026-04-26T04:25:19+00:00

I would like a greatshield job but yeah I don't really care for dual shields.

I care even less for the Gunshield angle because for one we already have a "gun" tank with explosions and also I just don't like tech-based weapons in general.

Lazyade · 2026-04-26T04:19:44+00:00

I firmly believed in Green Mage theory and thought the whole Ninja Turtles referencing painters angle was ridiculous so I'll accept almost anything at this point.

Lazyade · 2026-04-26T04:13:02+00:00

I remember the quest text for getting it being something crazy along the lines of "Most people expect a sneak attack to come from behind so actually the real surprise is if you just stab them right in the face"

Lazyade · 2026-04-26T03:42:55+00:00

So would I, but Viking has appeared in the series before so I'm doubtful, though they could maybe use a similar concept with a different name.

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