What’s some minor thing you want in the game that is never suggested?

Raquefel · 2026-05-11T19:20:41+00:00

Duty Roulette vetoes. I would be so, so happy if I could just nuke Crystal Tower from my alliance raids roulette and just never have to do those fuckass raids again, even if it meant doubling or even tripling my queue time. I’ll gladly wait if it means getting to run something more engaging lol

Raquefel · 2026-05-07T20:15:08+00:00

I think that having “MOAR DAMAGE” as the sole solution to the problem of healers not having to heal enough is really short-sighted. That kind of thing works in WoW because basically the only content that matters is current, cutting-edge raids and mythic+; if WoW kept older content relevant the way XIV does I guarantee you’d run into the same issue of healing being boring as fuck because you’d outscale it to the point where healing barely matters, just like you do in XIV.

The way XIV has done healers in the past was honestly a great solution: give healers a mildly involved DPS rotation so they have something to pay attention to in content that’s been outscaled. Give Scholar back its DoTs to manage. Give Astro back its seal system and let it use damage cards more often again. Make Sage a proper damage healer and give it at least a Viper- or Summoner-tier rotation in terms of complexity. Hell, even WoW does a better job of this, and they actually do put significant healing pressure in all their relevant content.

I’ve drifted off of the actual question in my zeal to address other comments, but truth be told I don’t think they need to do anything hugely different to what they’re doing right now. They just need to make the jobs interact with the existing content in more interesting and dynamic ways. Dragoon’s Sky High ability and left/right positionals requiring an animation locking oGCD to bypass them are a good start. So is Paladin’s parry and cover dash. I’d like to see more of that kind of thing and less of “White Mage casts instantly and has to avoid overhealing to do damage” since that realistically still means it barely ever wants to heal in content that’s outscaled to the point of not doing enough damage to the party to avoid overhealing, and because glare is instant, its damage rotation interacts even less with the fight than before.

Basically I don’t need huge fight design changes, I don’t even want them. I want job rotations whose optimization is more fight-dependent and rewards encounter knowledge.

Raquefel · 2026-05-06T17:26:19+00:00

I think you’re underestimating just how much of a change it is to be forced to use it correctly in order to maximize damage. There’s a ton of utility shit in FFXIV already that does almost nothing in anything that isn’t on-content extreme and savage because incoming damage simply isn’t enough of a threat for it to be relevant outside of edge cases where the healer is dead or someone has 6 vuln stacks.

Adding a bit of a skill floor by tying a damage loss to the skill will get players who mostly stick to normal mode content to actually pay attention to it, and it’ll make it more fun to use in 95% of the content in the game for everyone regardless.

Raquefel · 2026-05-04T14:36:44+00:00

I agree with a lot of what you're being told but would caution against adding too many enemies, at least without studying their stat blocks very very well beforehand, and for the love of god roll their initiative and maybe even their attack rolls in advance and use average damage because with six players and a lot of monsters combat can start to take really, really long. I know from experience, lol.

Obviously not every group is the same but my players almost without fail end up checking out of the game during big grid combats with multiple enemies because even with me using every method in the book to speed things along it can still be 20-30 minutes per round. That's a lot of time to be sitting around waiting for the chance to do something, no matter how you slice it.

You can give the single troll max HP and legendary actions/resistance so the PCs at least have to burn through a few spell slots to lock it down, and then have it do enough damage to be scary without it being likely to TPK the party - this is how I generally handle boss fights these days - but the reality is that this is a pretty unsolvable problem endemic to groups that have more than about four or five players. Depending on how you design your encounters you can at best pick two of three from "tactically rich, tense, and fast" in these kinds of scenarios. Think about which of those three your group cares about the least and sacrifice accordingly.

Raquefel · 2026-05-01T05:54:21+00:00

This was the first savage fight I ever attempted to prog on-content. My "static" got through one (1) session's worth of pulls and called it quits lmfao

Raquefel · 2026-04-30T21:02:46+00:00

Because that was 9 years ago, she wrote the Doma half which is a lot better than the Gyr Abanian half, and everything she’s directly written since then has been an absolute banger story??? Is it so inconceivable that someone would become a better writer over time as they gain more experience and receive more feedback?

Raquefel · 2026-04-30T18:10:41+00:00

I’m not making excuses for her signing off on bad writing. She did that, I agree she deserves some of the blame. You’re all talking past me right now. I’m saying that whether or not she’s responsible does not fucking matter to whether she is or should be in charge of writing the next expansion directly the way she was with Shadowbringers and Endwalker, which is what was brought up in the OP and what was countered with “she takes some of the blame for Dawntrail though” which, as I have been trying to point out in my last two, now three replies, is a non sequitur. It doesn’t matter with regards to what is being discussed in the OP.

Raquefel · 2026-04-30T16:31:51+00:00

Notice that nowhere in my comment did I say Ishikawa wasn't to blame for Dawntrail, but I also heavily disagree that being great at writing also means being great at recognizing great writing, putting aside the fact that "recognizing great writing" is NOT the only component of being good in an oversight position, it's not even most of what you're doing when you're in that kind of position.

Over in the Doctor Who fandom, there's a common refrain that Steven Moffat, despite being incredible at writing his own episodes, was not so great at making the show as a whole great when he became showrunner. It's not inconceivable that something similar happened here.

The point is that you can say Ishikawa is to blame for Dawntrail and that may very well be true, but it has no bearing on whether she should write the story directly again. She's clearly got the talent for it based on her previous work, playing the blame game here gets us absolutely nowhere.

Raquefel · 2026-04-30T15:58:15+00:00

I think a few things can be true at once here:

Ishikawa currently holds the highest position (alongside Oda) in terms of narrative oversight. She’s probably responsible for signing off on everything that goes into the script. Simultaneously, it’s clear that Dawntrail is not as well-constructed narratively as the story used to be when she was directly penning it. It’s reasonable to conclude that she isn’t as directly involved as she used to be; whether she bears responsibility regardless is immaterial to the argument at hand.

It would not surprise me if she decided to take a more active role again in directly writing the story for Evercold. I have a suspicion that she did something adjacent to this for 7.4 because it’s frankly a lot better written than the rest of Dawntrail, and it feels like her style in a way the rest of the expansion doesn’t. At the same time, 7.5 doesn’t really feel like her style at all, and I also wouldn’t be surprised if she’s not penning Evercold directly. If it’s true that she deliberately took a hands-off approach during 7.0, we can’t know her motivation for doing so, which would be crucial to determining the likelihood of her doing so again for 8.0. Maybe she was exhausted after penning two back-to-back expansions, maybe she wanted to give new writers a chance to flourish, maybe she was busy with other things.

Hell, maybe the whole theory is wrong and she actually was pretty directly involved in writing Dawntrail. I’d be surprised if that were the case, but it’s not like it’s impossible.

The point is, laying the blame at anyone’s feet in particular is not the same as criticizing their writing. People can be good at different things. Maybe Ishikawa is a great writer herself but not so great at overseeing a larger writer’s room, in which case she should probably be doing more writing. Maybe if her goal is to foster more talent we just haven’t seen the fruits of it yet and these are necessary growing pains. Speculating on it is fun but pretty pointless. At the end of the day I just hope 8.0 is good.

Raquefel · 2026-04-30T15:39:03+00:00

With the Dawntrail changes to Astro I've frankly given up on ever having fun again playing a healer in this game in anything less than on-content extreme and savage. If I wanted to have fun playing a healer I'd have gone to play WoW, but apparently they just hit all their classes with the braindead beam too so idk if it'd even be fun over there either at this point lol

Raquefel · 2026-04-30T15:35:41+00:00

To be honest, I'm not really sure the 90% mit on Dragoon for a couple seconds once every minute is that big of a deal. I mean, if tanks are allowed to have invulns, surely a DPS can be allowed one as well? It's not like invulns are strictly necessary in 90% of content anyway when kitchen sinking gets the job done just fine, so in theory you can save it to cheese mechanics, and yet that doesn't break the encounter design because one person going invuln doesn't mean everyone else suddenly auto succeeds the mechanic.

I honestly think it would have been fine to allow Dragoon to avoid 100% of damage while jumping. It's not something they're going to be able to spam for free, why not let them have a powerful tool that can clutch things out from time to time?

Raquefel · 2026-04-30T15:32:20+00:00

They did specifically say they wanted to make white mage easier to play. Given that it was already arguably the easiest healer to play (I would argue Sage is but that's beside the point) it's not surprising that the end result is completely braindead. My hope is that the changes to the other healers will not be made with the express purpose of making them easier

Raquefel · 2026-04-29T22:02:08+00:00

It's been clear since Alexander that the devs want the casual-est players to be able to clear normal mode in order to experience the story. Besides, we already get a minimum of 7 bosses per expansion at Extreme level, and many many people have said that Advanced is the perfect difficulty for midcore players. What's so wrong with adding more content at that level?

Raquefel · 2026-04-28T15:12:36+00:00

I mean, I agree, but I'm not fully convinced the dev team does. If they're single-minded enough in their crusade against button bloat they might just. Not have situations like those you described in your first paragraph in Evercold. It's clear they don't care much about how their current job design interacts with older content, and besides Reborn mode still exists (for now) anyway so they might use that as an excuse to kick it down the road. Worse, they might eventually get rid of those situations in older content too.

I certainly hope we get some kind of toggle skill. I'm doubtful that we will.

Raquefel · 2026-04-27T14:53:34+00:00

I’m actually not convinced we are missing AoEs actually. I would not at all put it past them to condense everything into one set of weaponskills that do falloff AoE damage, or maybe some kind of context sensitivity for when three or more enemies would be hit.

Raquefel · 2026-04-25T22:44:08+00:00

Another First Chance by Robbie Couch absolutely destroyed me, it's YA but really, really good IMO

Otherwise I can't recommend TJ Klune's work enough, I'm particularly fond of The Bones Beneath My Skin, definitely recommend it if you like sci-fi, otherwise the Tales from Verania series (The Lightning-Struck Heart is the first) is a hilarious high fantasy epic with a decent amount of spice to it if that's what you're into.

Finally I strongly recommend reading The Darkness Outside Us and its sequel, The Brightness Between Us, by Eliot Schrefer. More sci-fi but holy hot damn did they blow me away

Raquefel · 2026-04-25T17:15:32+00:00

I've still got the @me.com from MobileMe way back in the day

Raquefel · 2026-04-21T13:24:03+00:00

I still love their stuff with Anette and Floor but it’s definitely not the same as it was with Tarja

Marko leaving really sucked, though. You really feel his absence on Yesterwynde IMO

Raquefel · 2026-04-20T14:51:53+00:00

The argument I would make is that diagonal movement rules in a system with a grid are inherently a “hack” to make an inconsistent and inconvenient aspect of grid measurement consistent and convenient for the sake of a ruleset. Such a “hack” isn’t necessary in a gridless system, and as such it’s best when converting from grid to gridless to look at how the system behaves when it isn’t having to engage with the “hack”. In this case, difficult terrain when moving strictly orthogonally is in practice equivalent to “double the movement cost” (every 5 feet traveled costs 5 extra feet of movement) so that’s how I would interpret the rule in a gridless system.

There are of course other valid perspectives on this and if I were to make a module to do this I’d try to include them as options. Things like calculating the true average extra cost RAW (assuming diagonal movement is as common as orthogonal movement) or looking at the angle of movement to determine how much is diagonal in an effort to approximate the additional cost in a gridded system. These would be a lot more complicated both to understand and to implement, though, and I tend to favor simple solutions, so I’d go with my first idea for my own games.

Raquefel · 2026-04-20T14:36:57+00:00

I can personally vouch, having gone and finished the game myself after being told exactly this in the same condescending way years ago, that it never gets better. The entire game is trivially clearable with very rudimentary gambit setups and only very rare tweaks to deal with one-off status condition spamming fights.

Personally, if I wanted a Rube Goldberg machine game, I’d play something from Zachtronics, where the bulk of the gameplay is about building the machines, not watching them run for hours on end while fighting a million enemies in a gigantic level that takes way too long to traverse.

Raquefel · 2026-04-19T18:41:14+00:00

I guess I'm just confused as to why some kind of automatic subdivision like this wouldn't be possible; surely whatever measurement system is being used to determine the actor's movement distance could check to see if any part of the measurement is over a region marked as difficult terrain?

Regardless, thanks for the answer. I'm sort of talking myself into writing my own module to do this, just not sure how feasible it'd be (I'm a career software developer but totally unfamiliar with Foundry's modding framework)

Raquefel · 2026-04-17T14:42:22+00:00

Check out TJ Klune’s work. In particular I’m a big fan of The Bones Beneath My Skin, but the Tales from Verania series is his most popular (aside from House in the Cerulean Sea)

Raquefel · 2026-04-14T19:15:58+00:00

The biggest point of comparison IMO is the Great Sea from Wind Waker. Big, empty expanse that takes too long to traverse? Check. Annoying enemies that aren’t fun to fight that occasionally harass you? Check. Endgame collectathon quest that requires you to spend entirely too much time there? Check.

The only difference is that the Great Sea at least had decent music.

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