The Downfall of Final Fantasy XIV - It Wasn't Always Like This 

tbh, defending cross-classes and stats is the most hilarious thing anyone who has ever played during that time could have done.

"oh you think button bloat is a problem and putting your 1-2-3 combo on one button would help?? GO PLAY COOKIE CLICKER MR ONE BUTTON" this video was not made by a serious person

A big issue Class design always faces when giving the players options is that some options are often better than other and at that point it's no longer an option.

The entire video really does boil down to "the game isn't for me anymore"

Fully agree with Xeno on the acceptance of what kind of game FFXIV is. Lynx is one of those people that want to turn playing FFXIV to be like their job, and our lord Yoshi-P made it clear that it's not that kind of game. Yoshi-P basically said(not literally), "Pay us to play the game we put out. You run out of stuff to do or don't like the stuff we put out? Play another game. Come back when you want to play OUR game. It's still gonna be there."

As a 1.0 veteran, with raiding and everything, I couldn't hold myself when he talked about the attribute points 😂 Man those points have been so useless for anybody it was ridiculous. Even after over 10 years I like the content cycle, because you have time to play other games and don't have something to farm everyday. Many changes aren't in favor of the hardcore community, but cmon lynx played the game for 6 cute years, so he didn't even know the dark ages, let him be a bitter guy and go to another mmo again ❤ 😂❤

Actually, if they did consolidate things into one button combos you could start having branching combos like you do in many action games. You know like in some later Tales of games with x,x,x,y being different than x,x,y,y. Stuff like that. So you could actually implement further combo complexity while taking up less space on the hotbar if you want to look at that method. EDIT: Oh, I should mention I guess for more clarity for folks not as familiar with what I'm talking about. Those different combinations would of course be better in certain situations. Some for aoe, some for one target damage, maybe even one that ends in a buff/debuff, etc.

1:10 As I saw Arthars put it, your 1-2-3 isn't something that requires skill anyway, so freeing up that hotbar space allows for more buttons to be implemented, either gcds or ogcds because that's 2 less buttons bloating literally everyone's hotbar.

The wildest thing about the actual skill points, is that they still DO exist in the game - on the relics. But wouldn't you know it, you just dump all your points into whatever stat is the best (usually crit and then either det or direct hit) and stop thinking about it. Same level of depth. Its not a choice, its the illusion of choice.

Xenos is on another react level entirely. Making a 15 min vid into a 2 hour essay analyzing and discussing every minute detail. And im here for it 😅😂

Dude acted like warrior's cone aoe attack was the nuttiest shit to use and is mad it's gone, meanwhile DRK actually has to do the dance of hitting everything with a circular aoe then move to hit flood of darkness/shadow's linear aoe

I bet this guy is mad that TP got taken away because not being able to use sprint as a melee or tank was sooooo fun and suuuuuch good design.

people really outting themselves admitting that hitting 2 and 3 after 1 is the pinnacle of difficulty for them when playing

I love how Xenosys broke this rant video down to how bitter and biased the guy is. And still yet was able to agree and point out the general issues with FFXIV that are valid. "There was more growth on my f-ck-ng head than the growth the point allotment gave you" -Xenosys . Love this response. Xenosys right, I was a v1.0 player and a lot of v1.0 sucked. This Lynx guy mentioning that as something desirable? Get out of here!

I don't know how you can talk about moments of glory and not mention that red mage has a nickname that references theirs.

Lynx has some point that i would agree with but the way he talks and he complains shows that he is way too full of himself. The way he talks down when it comes to some aspects of the game, he sounds likes these typical gid gud guys and thinks that everythink has to be to his liking.

9:34 P3S astro. There's a mechanic in which the entire party must take lethal damage X number of times, and then must be healed to full through an infirmity debuff in order to not die. This heal check was rough enough that many parties chose to lb3 it, but if you had an astro, macrocosmos just solo does the entire healing. If that's not a moment of glory, I don't know what is.

Aint no way 15 min video is a 2h+ youtube ract

One thing that sticks out to me is his complaint about Melee directionals and the bosses having massive room wide hit boxes for upkeep, he directly mentions it as a negative... But, and this is the giant big BUT that contradicts his entire perspective, is that that was asked for BY THE COMMUNITY! Players complained about not being able to keep in the fight when doing mechanics, that's why the hit boxes were increased for a near complete upkeep. Everything he complains about is something the community has asked for, the game is simply not for him (as made clear by him deleting everything) but he still feels like he has room to speak here. Don't get me wrong, he's entitled to his opinion on the state of the game, but he's not the core demographic nor is he even part of the community, his video is just complaints about how the game doesn't cater to his tastes. You know what FFXIV needs? It's not more high-end content, it's sustainable fun midcore, you know what else it needs? Overhauls to a lot of it's base features and housing and more story content. You know what FFXIV doesn't need? Another useless video claiming FFXIV is dying because it doesn't have more complex rotations (as if anyone ever thinks a rotation is fun/engaging on it's own). I said it before and I'll say it again, FFXIV has not changed, at it's core it's a casual MMO for casual players that also happens to have high-end content for people that want to do it. This isn't a downfall, it's a lull in content, nothing more and nothing less.

As somebody who plays on controller, I mash the shit out of one button until it activates and then move on to the next button mashing the shit out of it till it activates. So if they added more chain combos and condensed the combos down into individual buttons, it wouldn't bother me as long as by them condensing the buttons down. They added some complexity to the classes

lynx is that one friend we all have who thinks, complex and annoying = fun (however we all know that one friend does not do anything besides afk in limsa💀)

On the moments of glory, the amount of time I clutched it after someone took my tether by mistake using en avant as a dancer without killing anyone definitely felt like one. I don't think it's mandatory, but it sure felt good to save some loop memes once in a while.

In terms of the 1,2,3 consolidated into one button - I agree. If making the game more clean / efficient on your hotbar makes it a little bit easier to play then in this instance that's not a reflection of the difficulty of the game itself but rather the quality of life you have with the UI. I'd rather the boss fights be hard / interesting, the UI be clean / easy to use, and more combos. And the old school "moments of glory" this guy is referring to sucked SO hard back in the day. Your class could be considered utterly useless in a boss encounter, an entire raid, or worse an entire expansion and that was true of both WoW and FFXI back in the day. "Hey I play a DRG prior to FFXI Treasures xpac can I play with you guys?" "Lol, no". Glad those days are gone.

Lynx Kameli doesn't even have a single Endwalker clip from himself lmao, opinion discarded. I can't believe I'm siding with the bald man.

As someone who played DRG during Heavensward, I remember hitting Impulse Drive like 5 times because the boss would just spin, move around, or the tank was just awful resulting in the same difference. There were times I remember I would just full thrust combo because it was near impossible to get off chaos thrust. Never again lol

This guy is completly out of it, thanks god he is gone from the game.

I'm sorta indifferent about positionals but one thing to note, back then your ranged attack would also break your combo. With the more recent change to ranged attacks, going back to heavensward positionals wouldn't be as bad as it was back then because you could still roll your gcd (suboptimally) instead of holding it until you got to the flank or rear.

The good times of God Kefka. The fact despite putting up Diversion on CD near the end of the fight as SAM my threat would end up threatening tank aggro near the end of the fight.

one of the biggest issues for me is the fact that the dumbing down of the classes makes it a real pain to get friends to play since they'll pressing 1 2 3 mindlessly for a hundred hours since the gameplay isn't engaging at all in the early levels

In truth the cross class abilites was one of the major reasons that I didn't try FF14 before Shadowbringers. I did mainly play Wow at the time but I tired other mmos like Wildstar, DC Universe online and so on. When I heard that in order to get all my buttons I would have to play another class I was like nope.

Pressing 1-2-3 combos is barely more engaging than pressing the same button over again- It's insane to me that the solution to healer gameplay being stale is to give them 1-2-3 combos. I might as well bind my glarebroil spell on 3 different slots and press one after the other. WHOA what an amazing and profound change to gameplay, I am not bored out of my mind anymore.

The problem is to assume that giving less buttons will make devs invest more in the jobs to be unique.

The irony. Currently, players are upset at WoW Retail for attempting to cater more to the elite players and that it's too difficult. Meanwhile, FFXIV players are frustrated that it has gotten too much easier in time and stagnant. One phrase friends: You cannot create a perfect median for everyone.

I went through this entire video thinking ''This is just that one Misshapenchair video from like last year'' and it gets to the end and he actually goes and references it, which makes sense. Both videos attempt to glorify past features of the game as good things that were lost and you can immediately tell they didn't play back then. Nobody who actually played a tank on anything highter than expert roulette back in HW and SB actually have this take on Aggro for tanks, it's literally only cunts who didn't play back then have this take. it's my fucking instant SHB baby detector

Guy sounds pretty jaded. Made a few good points but I couldn’t help but get distracted by his obvious anger toward the game in general. Video seemed more of a “hah I told you so” rather than a “hey, look at these points, let’s fix this”.

I want some more classes with the samurai combo system where you chain different buttons together in their combo for different effects and set up for their bit burst button

This guy just sounds like he's ranting because he doesn't enjoy the game anymore, not because the game could be better, save for a few points he's made. That and he also just sounds like he wants the game to be made for him specifically. I'm bet a big reason though was probably bandwagoning on the "I'm quitting/game's dying" trend. Honestly, he just sounds super salty and bitter.

11:00 This was actually in ARR and not even all the way through, it was elimininated during the 2.4x cycle. After that, I remember Trick Attack being the only effect that needed you to hit the positional for it apply, and that survived until 5.1.

I gotta disagree with the lack of “glory moments.” If you know your job inside and out, you’ll know how to respond to events almost instantaneously. One example, my friend was doing the normal Ifrit/Garuda fusion fight in Shadowbringers. They still don’t understand how enumerations work and would run away from the party. As a samurai, i repostionioned around the boss, sprinted, and then back stepped into them to absorb the enumeration, enpi, and dash back in. It was such a fluid motion that my friends understood immediately the cool factor in what i had done. Does every job have that gallant moment; i dunno because im a sam, rpr and dragoon main. But man are there ways to recover crazy moments that others dont see. I also dont want fights where its almost a requirement to bring a specific job because they can hero through it.

I feel like there are so many little moments of glory in FF! Man, every time a dark knight shields someone with a bunch of vuln stacks in a pug just barely allowing them to live... that's so dope! When red mages rez 3 or 4 people back to back. When white mages get to heal a mechanic that's just perfect for Liturgy of the Bell. When dragoons backflip off the edge of a platform and die. I feel like each class has their own iconic moments that occur relatively frequently.

I lost my shit when he brought up the cross class skill. That shit was biohazard man. it was so painful to level back then because dungeon barely gives exp. and it gave no sense of accomplishment doing that. It was just an another horrendous chore.

I'm defo all for consolidating the 123 combo into 1 button, so long as they diversify the rotation to compensate. Also, i find Lynx's point weird considering he cited Guild Wars 2 earlier. That game does that with its 123 combos.

Whenever someone talks about something being empirical or objective and so on when it comes to any entertainment I gotta call BS on their motivation. The reason there are people who are fans of different genres is because gaming is obscenely subjective. The guy who made this video sounds like he has an empathy problem.

For someone that always bitch's about Tanks losing Aggro management, positioning bosses and stuff, you seem a bit naive to think that SE would add any complexity to your job by condensing combos. You're not going to gain a damn thing for the loss of your combo. It's literally going to be 1 button you hit at nauseum and another you hit once every 30s. Signed - a very bitter ex-healer main.

A moment of glory i had was surviving a TB as a healer in Euphrosyne haha

I feel like more irrelevant Lynx had become, more clickbaity or drama seeking his videos have become.

1 button combos wouldn't work for monk

Removing positionals could also open up room for tanks to get more of a job. They can lead the boss into different and more interesting ways without needing to worry about fucking up melees. Turn the boss to make the boss look at a mirror so it hurts itself with it's attack. Now tanks have a mechanic where they need to keep track of where the mirrors spawn. Everyone except tanks gets locked in place. Now tanks need to make the boss look left so it's attack misses the people who are stuck. Then tankswap to make the boss look right so it misses again. The boss is charging up an attack but it takes a lot of energy, hinted at by its voiceline. The tank starts making the boss run around a lot and it makes it fumble it's cast. And so on and so on. Could make tank more interesting to play.

I really like the idea of having multiple combos... At least, if they managed to make them all do something relevant so it doesn't just devolve to one combo being your 'filler' with another being your 'setup' and a third being like the 'utility' combo that you never use.

i'd be fine with 1 button combos only if we get new shit to fill the void on our hotbars...

A moment of glory as a DNC: Was trying to clear P12PS P2 for the first time. Both healers died at the end of Classical 2, and there was an upcoming raid-wide and Crush Helm. The caster revived one of the healers, but we needed to survive the raid-wide first and since we didn't get almost any heals after the Palladian Rays, it was looking grim. I ran in between people and popped everything I had - Samba, Waltz, Second Wind, and Improvisation. The raidwide went off and somehow we all managed to survive with only around 1k health left just as the healer got up. He rezzed the other healer the moment he got enough mana, and the other healer got up not a moment too soon to esuna their tank during Crush Helm, meaning everyone was well and alive for Caloric 2. We actually cleared that pull haha.

Incredibly niche use, but on GNB if you are fighting to stay alive, 1-2-1-2-1-2 does come in handy. If you ever have to do this though your group has serious problems, but that said... knowing the option is there is nice. So what I reckon would be a good way to solve this. To open up combo options, put the 2 and 3 of the combo on one button, and have the 1 as the combo initiator. So you could then launch into either combo that share the first hit. Like old PLD combos did.

I will say, the biggest problem I've had with the introduction of the two minute meta was how much more it made me care about making sure everyone is using their buffs on time since now I can easily keep track of it with a simple glance. Kinda hate that it has made me become a lot more toxic in that regard when I'm doing solo heal/solo tank farms and I see usually a BRD or RDM just popping their buffs whenever they feel like. Before the change, while I would try it was a little harder to keep track off/ not always expected in pf situations.

The issue is not so much that they're reducing the bloat button, the problem is that they probably won't do anything substantial to maintain gameplay depth. Look at the rework of the Summoner, they reduced the bloat button, and most of the abilities are now bound to the same button, the problem is that they didn't add anything to the gameplay to keep it deep, the job has become a glorified instant ruin with 99.9% de kit of a ranged DPS with no resource management ''etherflow suck'', very few (OGCD), and no real strategy choice. If they standardize job combos at 1111, as they did with the Summoner's rework, they need to do it in a smart way that introduces interesting resource management and news spells. If they implement these changes as is, there's a 99.9% chance that jobs won't receive any meaningful additions in return. Because there are very few devs working on jobs in the 3rd division.

The more I listen to Lynx talk, the more I just don't care what he has to say. His lack of experience and breadth of knowledge in gameplay design really shows that he doesn't really know what he is talking about. It's like, "You know what is dumb? Basketball. Why don't we add another basket really high up so you can score 5 points. Wouldn't that be cool? 1 basket is for chumps. It makes the sport easy."

I remember in Mobius FF (gacha game btw), there were ST, Cone, and AOE(all on screen) abilities. Mobius FF basically copied this from FF14, but Cone AOE is not well received and fell off as an ability design very quickly because why would you not want to hit everything on the screen?

30:55 "a game is not going to be made free, and be insanely popular, and continue to deliver content for free" Team Fortress 2 is the only exception I can think to counter that. Even though content has slowed it still gets some.

Valid criticism or not - I wasn't a fan of this dude's attitude 2-3 years ago and not a fan now. Glad Xenos reacted to it so I could hear his points (with level headed commentary) without giving him views

Overpower for Warrior was so bad back in the day people levelled Gladiator to 15 to run Flash as their starter aggro puller just to make Overpower usable.

Why is this guy so angry, he’s fighting the demons in his head fr.

Making combos into 1 buttons really don’t make the game any easier, just freed up hotbar spaces. I don’t get why people thinking pressing 123 is somehow harder than pressing 111. It’s literally same. DRG is my first job, and never, I mean NEVER, even once I loses a 12345 combo cause I “don’t know” what I should press next. Maybe I brain farted and did the same combo twice, or I fat fingered and pressed the wrong button, but no, not because pressing 12345 in order is in anyway “hard”. When you spend enough time on a job, your finger just knows where it should go next. You could say the game is getting easier and easier, which btw I think it should be from what I know about past xiv mechanic, but making combo into one button is just not that.

I don't understand the consolidation of combos in one button drama. Just make it an option. So everyone can use the way they like.

imagine if ninja still had their aggro tools, the trolling potential with those was gigachad tier.

Bah, forgot about the healer issue, too. The job is actually boring and tedious at the same time, because for the healer the MP bar is the old stamina bar from 1.0 and while they are dpsing, they have to also constantly regen MP using Lucid dreaming. It's also a job where it gets increasingly annoying to play the more other people screw up, because raising others costs a lot of MP, and someone has to constantly keep the instant cast CD up for the raise.

1. A "moment of glory" given to you by the devs is not YOUR moment, it's theirs. 2. Sounds like they want something like WoW, where there's a million choices but everyone take the same five. 3. Their entire argument can be boiled down to, here's how I think 14 should be and if you disagree then you're wrong.

the 1-2-3 combo isn't something that requires much skill to do anyway, but at the same time I feel if there isn't something else in its place it will make every job feel like how Healers feel now. I am fine with the 1-2-3 combos being reduced to one button, if some interesting mechanics to each job comes in to take its place. What that is, I don't know. I am no game dev. But one of the PRIMARY reasons why I bounced off Bard was because the filler gcd rotation was basically one button. at least Healers have something else to manage. Something like adding more GCDs or branching combos is a good idea.

tbh I didn't expect much for this exp, because xenos said it : '' square don't love you they love money '' and they've spent some green on hardware so; insert the cup here : revenue , spending , game budget '' you cannot over fill this cup ''

moment of glory? Monk is one huge moment of glory from the 1-st second of the fight to the last one. When u do your rotation perfectly and all timers snapshot and align it is just a straight serotonin injection. Yes it is not what it used to be (i vividly remember clearing Alexander savage tiers and the version of monk from back then) but still u feel engaged more than on any other job in the game (in my humble opinion of course)

Any healer has a moment of glory when most of the party is K.O'ed and they are fighting to stay alive with the tank before lb3 procs.

I do agree with the healer critique, It's why I main Sage now over WHM. Sage you've got to weave abilities together as opposed to just "1 click - done" and makes content more enjoyable and less "I have to keep eating my lillies because blah"

The greatest strength a game can have is BE FUN or ENTERTAINING. Easy to learn and hard to master has nothing to do with a game's strength. It's tangential to what the core of a game should ever be. Now should no games ever be hard? No. Should all games be easy? also no. I think there's a n argument to be made about a game's design where this principle can be a core pillar, but to say that THAT is the greatest strength a game can have (read, a general statement for games as he put it) is so ass-backwards it's not even funny anymore.

So the take away for Lynx's video is that he couldn't use the intro of "I am rank 1 tank in the world" anymore and he took it personally

I like no one talks about Accuracy as a stat and how cringe it was back in ARR and HW.

You get so bewildered on the new player thing but I'll give you an example. There's many people in my circle that come from other MMO's that I have literally bought them the 70 skip and they are new players to 14. And they get disappointed with the simplicity of the combat. There are plenty of players who are looking for complexity in combat. Just because it's a new player doesn't mean it's a bad player who needs the class to be simplified so they can play it. When the game simplifies its combat, it filters away any of the hardcore and midcore new players who are looking for a challenge, far before they even get to ultimate. And then the GCBTW tell them "well you can't judge our game because you haven't cleared ultimate yet" like yea ok, in order to have an opinion of our game they have to suffer with a simplified combat system and a shitty MSQ visual novel pretending to be an MMO and THEN finally get to raids and then FINALLY get their ultimate clear and then judge the game. That's mental, and I'm tired of pretending that it isn't. I cannot express enough how many potential players FF14 scares away with how shit its combat is in the early game.

Red Mage moments of Glory: Anytime the healers die and Red Mage can Rez 4 people one after the other. I've saved many a run with those cheaty-rezzes. (Edit: Also a Dark Side of Glory variant for RDM is stealing LB3 to blind the party and potentially wipe it on purpose or force the multi-rez situation. lol)

Covering a healer so they can healer lb3 feels like a moment of glory for me. Like, recognizing when a wipe is about to occur and using your kit to prevent that is still possible on a lot of jobs. I've had times where i know my party is about to fail a mechanic so i crit shield myself and healer lb3 after, its not something thats tank exclusive. Just be creative with your kit and you'll get moments of glory lmfao.

Even summoner, the posterchild for dumbed down jobs in this game, has the ability to res and save a run as a moment to shine. I have been there ressing a healer when lb3 is up and it’s awesome

On the 3rd boss of criterion I found out you can abuse shukuchi to solo solve the cleaves from the samurais despite being rooted and tether at same time you can buffer it to blink behind, then to the safe spot. Was a moment of glory.

i'm already triggered, i'm only 19 seconds in! I've played MMOs for 23 years now, and whenever i hear someone say "maintaining the difficulty" That is utter complete fking bullsh!t. 99% of the time. Classic WoW was supposed to be difficult, then when people went back to play it they realized its super easy. Because people actually get better at games the more they play. Whenever i hear someone thinking they're criticizing a game based on its difficulty, they haven't seen modern WoW to Classic WoW. the game alienates players. Its BAD and WRONG advice.

Imagine using Cover on a SAM using LB3 and keeping them from getting killed with knockback while in the animation lock. Or in a dungeon using a clutch LB2 as DRK last second to keep the partywide AoE from wiping the party and finish the dungeon.

Anyone who are sad Cross-class abilities were replaced with role and core abilities either A) Never played a crafter pre-rework or B) Didnt play during Heavensward and are trying to stir up drama for points. As a ranged main having to level Lancer to 40 for blood for blood as a primary dps cooldown sucked so much because I HATED dragoon.

The combos on one button should be an option you can turn on. The people who want the extra buttons can have them and the ones who want/need more hotbar space can have it.

On the topic of combos being one button, I personally think it is a great idea as it opens the door for more player error in a way, which in turn leads to more skill expression. Take Warrior for example, if you lose track of your buff and use the wrong combo finisher, that's a pretty significant lose, now imagine if instead of it being 2 different finishers, it was two seperate combo strings. You notice your buff from combo 2 is going to run out after you have already hit the first GCD of combo 1, what do you do? Do you finish the combo for the higher DPS and just get the buff up after? Do you cancel out of combo 1 early to start combo 2 and prevent the buff falling off? And think about if they ended giving you a third combo string as a tank that gave you a small mitigation bonus that lasts as long as a combo on it's finisher to also keep track of to use in prep for raid wides or tank busters? Maybe it's wishful thinking to think they do something like that, but the possibility would only ever be there if they made combos one button.

Just finished part 1 like 20mins ago lol nice. Is it crazy that I am a hardcore raider and I definitely don’t want my rotation going o be any harder

They sort of did the one-button combos for SMN with how different summons change your skills. I absolutely love it, it's so comfortable to use. I don't quite like how simplified the job got, but of all the changes they made, this one I definitely like. The complexity of SMN is a bit weird with how after level 50 you care about positionals, i.e. you need to think about where your summons will appear to maximise aoe spread, then you hit 90 and it doesn't matter any more. It's like they replace positionals with a tighter rotation, so the thing you start looking out for is "will the boss let me stand in place for 3 GCD casts so I can summon Ifrit, or do I have to summon Titan". Anyway point is, I can gripe about a lot of things related to the SMN redesign, but the contextual skills are definitely good. More, please. >You could put it in intelligence! >??? I AM PLAYING A DRAGOON !!! QFT

My thoughts about his opinions that no one asked (me) for because the video and react were super interesting from the head of an average casual player who's been playing for nearly 10 years since it was in alpha and closed beta (it's very long, sorry!): He brings up some interesting stuff and despite most of this being an opinion piece, his feelings are still valid, even if I happen to disagree with most of what he takes contention with in the game, although I think he's letting people on the internet get to him a bit and comes across being bitter for the sake of sticking it to the negative folks but that's besides the point. I'll paraphrase his points. **"Bosses aren't interesting anymore and the homogenized job design just makes everything lazy and boring."** Some of this I can agree with and some of it I can't. Xeno mentions that a balance needs to be struck. You need to make the jobs feel just different enough while also making them viable for all content or else you'd have a situation where people will only accept comps made of what is considered meta and if that's the case, why should we even have more than 3 jobs if everyone is just going to pick the same flavor every time? There's a scale here, make the jobs easier to play with less button bloat and make encounters more difficult. Vice versa, if you make jobs harder to play, than the content should be easier in order to make up for the fact that players will need to pay closer attention to their rotations or do much less damage. Personally, I'm all in favor of making jobs easier to play if it means they can go a little crazy mechanically with fights. But not everyone is going to be happy with having their attention divided so much during a fight. I remember back in the day that if you messed up your rotation, you'd *feel* it and if anyone is like me, it can throw you off massively, you fall out of your groove and then you find yourself getting hit with all types of things because your concentration is in shambles. Or even worse yet, having to stop dpsing altogether to make sure that you execute a mechanic correctly or else in some of the more difficult fights, damn your entire party to a wipe. Melee greeding was a thing back then too. I have a friend who I frequently bump heads with because he believe that the homogenization of jobs is also dumbing down the whole playerbase where the game is being reduced to having the difficulty level of a child's game because players are just simply too dumb or lazy to put in work to play their job. While there is absolutely some truth to that, I'd rather have job homogenization to give all jobs a fair shot. I only ask that fights be made just a tad more difficult to offset how easy jobs are to play these days. Otherwise everything does feel boring and easy. **"The game cut a lot of unique things that added layers and additional character development and now everything feels dead. There aren't options anymore."** I disagree entirely. He's mistaking cut things from the game as cutting character progression when in reality, they were mostly changed to streamline the game as a whole. What I mean is that everything he mentions about the cut abilities and other things in the game were done for a reason. Because it wasn't working or it was changed for QoL reasons. Mana Shift barely did anything on top of it already having a cooldown and taking MP from dps that could use that mp to dps. What they did instead is give healers their own tools to recover their own mana so that magic dps didn't have to drop everything to babysit a healer who is most likely just standing around anyway and also give healers that added responsibility of managing their own mana pools. They didn't even get enough mana back to raise properly, it made no sense to keep it so they got rid of it. The stat allocation system was insanely tedious and there was no point giving players the option to allocate stats if everyone was just going to put them into the main stat of their job anyway. Does anyone remember how annoying it was having to reallocate those stats every single time you had to swap jobs back then? Good Gods it was awful and annoying. It doesn't make sense to give options when realistically, there is only one option. So instead of forcing players through that excruciating nonsense, they changed it to that stats just reassign themselves automatically upon changing jobs. Now people could freely swap jobs on the fly to suit any encounter or situation they wanted. Lastly his point about leveling other classes to gain abilities from them was arguably what I despised the most about the job system back then. There are better ways to incentivize players to play other jobs than forcing them to play a job they don't want to or have no interest in just to gain one ability on their main job. Again, everyone just took the same abilities from the same classes, so what they did was that they just gave those abilities to a shared role so that players would not be forced to break their enjoyment of the game and of playing the job they like by forcing them to go through the chore of leveling a separate class for a single ability. I remember when a REQUIREMENT for being an effective healer was that you NEEDED to have swiftcast in order to raise people faster and instantly instead of having to hard cast. So every healer who wanted to take their job seriously had to go out of their way to level thaumaturge to unlock swiftcast and then shelve the class and never play it again because they got what they wanted. It was annoying and I'm glad they changed it into being a role action shared amongst them. Might as well since that was what people were doing anyway. So him being upset that the tedious leveling of other jobs to unlock an ability was cut to make things easier baffles me honestly. I find it hard to imagine that someone actively wants to make things needlessly harder for themselves because they want to say they worked extra harder for it is kinda weird, but whatever, I digress. **"Bosses have extremely large hit boxes and that eliminates the responsibility tanks have to reposition bosses. I also hate door bosses."** Well okay, this is mostly subjective on his part because I can only say that I don't really mind door bosses. I do agree that bosses repositioning themselves is an annoyance, especially for me who mains Monk, a melee job that ALSO has positionals I have to do. It just grates on my nerves when I move to execute an attack with a positional only to see the boss fly away to the middle of the arena at the last moment and now I have to run over to it like a numpty. In my own opinion, I think this can be rectified by doing 1 of 2 possible things. Either get rid of positional skills altogether OR in boss encounters where there is a lot of movement involved, to simply make the boss omnidirectional. Like what they did with Bozja. I know a lot of people will side eye me and mention true north, which is obviously good, but the problem with that is that you only get 2 charges of it and it has a cooldown, so once you use both charges and it's on cooldown, what then? You'll be right back to square one. Maybe change true north to a stance instead of it being charges on a cooldown. That could work too, I think. Similar to how healers had cleric stance back in the day and you had to juggle it on and off if you wanted to help dps as a healer. Anyone who played back in the day will know what cleric stance was. **"Overpower on warrior was better as a conal aoe than as a circle. It got rid of dynamic movement."** No idea what he's on about here. By dynamic movement, does he also mean how annoying it was that when you pulled larger packs of mobs in dungeons or raids that you couldn't hit everything and a few mobs would break away to attack other party members so you'd have to run back and spam the button in the hope that you could somehow clip it and take aggro back? Because I remember how painful that was and how annoyed I got watching mobs run right past me because my overpower wasn't large enough to hit them. Changing it to a circle was a massive improvement. I don't understand his reasoning on how he thinks nerfing an ability of a job to make it vastly inferior to the options that other jobs have just because he wants to move around a little extra more makes any kind of sense. To conclude, all in all, he just seems to not like the direction the game went and pines for the glory days of when the game was way more tedious than what it is now. Which, he's within his right to want. There are other games that can give him the tedium he's looking for where he can waste his time for what he perceives is more engagement to his heart's content. I do think though that he should stop trying to provoke negative responses from people so that he can have a perpetual reason to resent the game. But I understand that he needs do what he has to do for that sweet revenue. Living expenses are getting higher and higher these says. It was a good video and worth the watch. I hope he has better fortune in whatever future endeavor he's up to.

I can't say that I agree with you that "the biggest strength a game can have is it's ability to make money". I will concede that this is the metric that is currently used to determine the success of a game. I think that games were better before aggressive monetization. I am not saying that games should be free. Everyone deserves to have the means to live as long as they provide something benefit to society. From what I heard you say in this video it feels like you are saying that we should just accept that a marketing team is going to try to trick you out of your money. Why would we accept that? Why do we have to accept the battle pass and 10 dollar "microtransactions" on a game that costs $60 out of the box? I feel like it is giving away personal accountability and basically telling developers and marketing teams "I don't care how you monetize stuff because you need to make money", and then expect them to not take advantage? I guess what I am trying to say is there is a HUGE difference between UNDERSTANDING that a thing is happening and ACCEPTING that a thing is happening. I agree we all need to UNDERSTAND that the fat cats on the top do not care about the game, they only care about money. I would be careful when advising people to ACCEPT these things. I understand, but I refuse to accept, these practices are garbage and they need to change. I think all gamers should be able to agree about that.

You do not need 300 buttons to make a game hard, design the boss mechanics accordingly and game can be fun and engaging with even literally just one button to press. People need to play other games, perhaps they'd stop thinking that adding buttons is the only way to have difficulty and engagement with the game. Now if you want to make each job feel unique, you do need multiple buttons and different approaches but not as many as the game even currently has. Just feels like some MMO players like Lynx may perhaps lack some perspective on what's out there.

Warrior cone I literally remember my reaction when it was changed. Before eh it works NOT INTENSE DYNAMIC MOVEMENTS DO OR DIE IF MESS UP THIS CONE AOE! It simply worked. Then when it was changed to a circle I simply just went, "Huh that's cool. Anyways..." and just continued with my time playing.

come to think of it. a ''moment of glory'' I had was in the second raid fighting the 905P-operated Heavy Artillery Unit in puppets bunker. Most my alliance died other than me and two others, left and one other alliance had 4 peeps and the last alliance had 5. from 35%. we stayed and killed the rest of it. its was probably the most focused i have been and the chat was going crazy lol. praise to the two healers and one red mage we had left with us lol

The moments of glory thing? It's called tight movement mechanics and having a Scholar for Expedience, it's called having an astro in P3S where Macrocosmos made an entire healer mechanic irrelevant, it's called having a Warrior that can heal themselves through most of the fight without any healer input. I also fail to see how saving up instant casts on BLM is a moment of glory, it's what its rotation is like, I don't get it.

NIN "moment of glory" - I've literally saved runs in both savage and ultimate by using Shukuchi to swap spots with someone who was going to the wrong spot. P12S, a player was in my spot on Para 2 with the same color tower buff as me, so I teleported to his spot. Boom. Saved the run. UCOB, a tower soak in Dragonfire Trio went to the stack by mistake -> teleported to his tower to sac for it and saved the run. Boom. Moment of glory.

Out of everything Lynx has said, the Bosses Hitbox is the BIGGEST one I Agree with. As much as I understand, making the bosses hit box big most certainly made it "Easier" for melee's to keep constant uptime, but this did more than just take responsbility away from Tank. It also made Physical Range moot. Physical range's appeal was 2 things. Lots of Party Support/utility buffs AND 100% uptime. Physical Range to this day get's very little damage buff because for some reason Square still thinks that "Well they can keep 100% uptime so, we can't make them too strong?" and everyone is screaming "Bro you MADE the bosses hit box so big, Melee's can keep as much uptime WHILE doing double-damage on ranged. By simply reducing the bosses hitbox, it'll do 2 things. One it will actually give Melee players a old/new challenge. Time their GCD with mechanic timing to keep as much up-time on the boss during mechanic-heavy phases. Do a good job, good damage, do a poor-job, your DPS suffers. And two, it will bring BACK the whole concept that "Physical ranged can keep 100% uptime" arguement.

21:20 I can't even begin to describe how much I miss old style healers. SB Ast was the most fun thing on earth back then with the different ways you could do fights and break them with Ast cards using an Ast and 7 DPS, or 1 tank and 6 DPS. I absolutely HATE w/e the fk Ast is now...

This guy's video is the easiest "I disagree what everything you just said" opinion. I do believe what Vex' said, this guy must have experienced something that traumatized him that he's butthurt

They could condense some actions into one button no problem. Enshroud and Communio, Arcane Circle and Plentiful Harvest, Ikishoten and Ogi Namikiri, stuff like that.

Completely with Xeno on the Warrior stuff and "moments of glory". I love being able to live through things that would make other tanks drop, but even more I love being the reason a whole entire pull was saved. It's one of the things I'm really hating about the anabaseios tier and the body checks and invuln piercing. It's so much more fun to invuln and then cover/nascent a healer and drag the entire party through at a moments notice with no pre-planning than it is to go "someone died, there's a body check, just wipe and start over".

The source video seems like a lot of backwards logic in action. They hate FF14 for whatever reason and tried to work backwards to make this conclusion seem legit. Does he truly want cross class skills and all the others back? or is he just bringing up everything he can to prove a point?

I think I understand Lynx statement about game being bad, less creative, and not unique. its because the majority of player are casuals, then midcore. the hardcore player like Lynx maybe less than 1% population. so why SE bother to make less than 1% happy when they have bigger opportunity to make more money from milking casuals? yeah I think Lynx is just butthurt because this game is not for hardcore player like him

Lemme preface this by saying there are elements I agree with him like healer simplification and also tank responsibilities. I'm also a recent arrival to ff14, starting a few months before Endwalker. That being said, a lot of his complaints make him seem like a disgruntled WoW andy whose upset FF14 isn't WoW. A lot of his points like "moments of glory" are just him whining there's nothing like say Warlock portals that can easily break encounter design and cause class stacking. Like over WoW's history there have been fights where the "moment of glory" abilities just cause class stacking from what I remember. Plus I've had moments of glory on even a job like Machinist where I sacrifice some of my dps (heat) to save an add phase or simply sac myself so the party can live. Heck, don't ppl bring Red Mage to prog for that MoG of chain rezzing to save an encounter? It's about that cup Xeno brought up in the last episode. You have your job design vs encounter vs dps check. You CAN make all these wild abilities to make "moments of glory", but then they gotta design a fight with that in mind to keep it balanced. Heck, this very expansion there was the Abyssos job balance controversy and that was just from the dps difference and in paladin's case their uniqueness worked against them when it came to their mitigation. Heck, remember when you "had" to bring a White Mage if you planned to use Living Dead? I do agree homogenization is getting a bit out of hand, but honestly if they wanna keep that balanced state and have every job be viable they gotta work within a reasonable parameter and not have so many variables. It'd be nice for Healers to get something like a longer casting dps tool for potency gain vs being able to weave (apparently that was Scholar in Shadowbringers?), and maybe they can tone down the boss jumping to center- maybe only doing that at the start of the fight for helping teach the mechanics. I did like how P11 and P12 did require the tanks to aim the boss properly for some mechs, so maybe they're realizing positioning responsibility. Then there are the topics of cross class and stat allocation. Xeno already explained it a good bit, and all I can add on is the point that Xeno made where "Well as a Dragoon, you would put it all in strength." People just spread sheeted that stuff, so there was only one "viable" build. Heck, we still have that to an extent with Materia (with some skill speed build exceptions) and to another extent Blue Mage raiding with the skills you "need". You got so many options, but you're just gonna optimize out most of it. It's a fake layer of depth that you're going to pick the same as everyone else. On combos and positionals and skills, that's something a bit more complex. The option to condense your 1-2-3 I'd like, but that won't work for every job. For positionals I agree there needs to be more reward, but I wouldn't go as far as dropping combo. Maybe back to the Shadowbringers thing of say Dragoon missing positional doesn't grant an eye (I believe that's how it worked, got Dragoon to 80 2 nights before Endwalker). Maybe for Reaper if you don't hit it you don't get your soul gauge. Maybe Monk failing to hit a positional has a skill speed penalty. Ninja maybe you don't gain ninki, and maybe for armor crush you don't refresh huton duration. That's just off the top of my head, but I feel there's room for punishment without being too overly crippling. Anyway, at the end of the day while I agree there are problems: videos like these just seem to come off as jumping on the complaining bandwagon without thinking through what's being said.