Square Enix recently held another video Q&A on upcoming changes to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Among the topics discussed was what sort of changes Square intend to make to some of the game’s classes. Producer Naoki Yoshida discussed the Dragoon, Monk, Bard and Black Mage.
Here are the questions (and answers) pertaining to the jobs/classes in the game:
Q: Please tell us about the adjustments planned for dragoon. Also, you mentioned that dragoons won’t be made invincible while jumping. Why is this the case when other classes like black mage have damage-mitigating abilities?
A: As mentioned during the previous LIVE letter, Jump is an attack ability. Abilities such as black mage’s Manawall, on the other hand, can only be used to mitigate damage. Furthermore, regardless of whether you get attacked or not, the effect of these mitigating skills will wear off after a set amount of time. They also use up an action slot. Because dragoon’s jump is an attack-based ability, it would be unbalanced to allow dragoons to attack and mitigate damage with a single skill. If we were to do this, we would have to greatly reduce the damage of Jump or increase the cool-down timer to five minutes or so.
We recently released details outlining adjustments for warrior, but this was mainly to address an imbalance in the Binding Coil of Bahamut where paladins are heavily preferred. Rather than rebalancing the Binding Coil, we will make changes to warriors so that they are on par with paladins. Since these adjustments are quite extensive, we wanted to announce them before the patch. Please keep in mind, however, that announcing these adjustments was an exception to our normal plans for releasing job adjustment details, as this usually results in requests for details regarding other jobs soon after.
With that said, however, we’d like to touch on a few of the changes we have planned, and to start off I’ll talk about dragoon. We’ll be reducing the cooldown timer of Power Surge by 30 seconds and increasing the damage of their standard three action combo. Also, Jump will be adjusted so that execution is quicker, animation lock is reduced, and landing point is changed. Overall DPS will be increased by approximately 10%, so burst damage will greatly increase.
[The video shows footage of the three different jumps.]
As you can see in the video, players will be able to move right after using jump, making it possible to quickly dodge after using it. We’ve also confirmed a bug where Leg Sweep’s stun effect is not being activated after a certain combo, and we will be fixing this.
Q: Please tell us about adjustments planned for jobs other than dragoon.
A: As I mentioned during the previous LIVE letter, there are a lot of cases where melee combos and chains are interrupted making burst DPS difficult, so dragoon and monk will be receiving roughly a 10% increase in damage per second. Rather than reducing the effectiveness of other classes, we will be making adjustments to increase certain elements this time.
Monk’s Greased Lightning effect, for example, will be increased. Also, we’ve noticed that because there are so few damage bonuses for attacking from an enemy’s rear, players generally focused on attacking from the side. We’ll be increasing bonuses for rear attacks, so if you use monk the way we had intended, your DPS will increase significantly.
Q: Please tell us about the changes being made to bard.
A: During the previous LIVE letter I made a comment about adjustments to bard, which I think many of you are worried about. The reasoning for adjustments, as mentioned previously, is that bards tend to take away from other jobs that could be used in certain instances. This is due to their ability to deal steady damage in addition to supporting using job abilities. As such, we will be making adjustments to their cross-class abilities. There will be no changes made to archer or bard themselves. Please also rest assured that we will not be removing their ability to silence enemies.
Q: I feel that black mage is a bit overpowered.
A: In contrast to bard, which offers great party utility such as silencing and reducing enemy resistances, black mage doesn’t really possess any advantageous skills or abilities for bosses. For example, they can’t stun and they don’t have any abilities that silence. Black mage has been designed as a specialized DPS job, and compared to other jobs there are some aspects that are balanced in their favor. To remedy this, we’ll be making adjustments so that melee jobs can catch up to the DPS that black mage puts out, as well as balancing the advantages and disadvantages for each job depending on the situation. Also, we’ll be fixing a bug where Flare can be used twice in a row when Umbral Ice is active.
The first post-release patch, version 2.1, will be released for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn on December 17th. The most notable new feature the patch will introduce is the implementation of housing, which you can read more about here.
