The Final Fantasy 14 development team detailed some new features for the upcoming expansion, Endwalker, focusing on changes to the various jobs, in a Friday evening livestream.
The developer noted that changes to jobs will expand upon the systems built in the Shadowbringers expansion, rather than create new systems. As the game gets more complex and jobs can hit higher levels, the developer does not want to make jobs overly confusing.
As expected, most jobs are getting additional actions to flesh out combos and add fancy new gauges and resources to use as you fight.
There are several big quality-of-life changes, like ranged attacks from tanks not breaking their weaponskill combos. Lots of jobs are also getting gap-closing abilities or changes to improve the these abilities so players can use them more often to avoid AOE attacks and other obstacles. Healers will also have reduced cast times on their damage-dealing spells.
Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida also showed off the new Reaper job in action, giving an example of its combat. It has two gauges that build up, allowing you to summon your reaper avatar to help you slash and hack enemies to pieces. The new job will require careful resource management and, though it will be easy to learn, it will have a high skill ceiling when it comes to mastery.
The new healing job, Sage, focuses on healing a chosen ally while also dealing damage simultaneously. Yoshida noted that this job is also going to be difficult to master.
Summoner is notably getting “significant changes to job mechanics” including the removal of its notorious damage-over-time skills and the addition of the ability to summon the fuller versions of its primals. (Though Yoshida wanted to stress that they are not the primals themselves, but just their energy.)
For more details about the specific changes, you can check out the VOD on the Final Fantasy 14 Twitch channel. It will be uploaded to YouTube at a later date.
