With this week’s unveiling of the Dawntrail Media Tour information, including tooltips, a preview of the first dungeon, and getting to see actual gameplay in the new setting and graphics engine, there’s a lot of Dawntrail stuff to discuss and a lot of room for theories and speculation that has opened up! In two posts over the next few days, my goal is to do exactly that – speculate a bit on what Dawntrail might look like and what we might be seeing in terms of story, gameplay, and overall design direction.

Today, I want to start with the gameplay side, because it’s the thing I will most engage with beyond the launch window and I think there are some interesting things to note in the changes being made at the game, role, and job levels.

Overall Changes

Big Increases To Incoming Damage?

Across the board, nearly every job received some amount of tuning in defensive and self-healing capabilities. Every enemy-targeted damage reduction effect has been increased in duration to 15 seconds, every physical ranged DPS mitigation ability on the group is adjusted up to 15% reduction, every tank’s 30% mitigation is being adjusted up to 40% and receiving an additional healing or healing-adjacent component, Rampart for tanks is being improved, Second Wind for non-caster DPS self-healing is being massively increased in potency, and every healer’s bread-and-butter GCD AoE heal is being adjusted to a new version with added healing power. The overall picture, based on this overwhelming number of changes, is that incoming damage to the party in most content will be increasing relative to where it is now in Endwalker. That’s an interesting wrinkle, given that YoshiP has gone on-record with some statements about increasing the relative difficulty of the game in Dawntrail. Until we see encounter design and the overall flow of things, we can’t say 100% for sure, but the first dungeon shown in the media tour has a noticeable increase in dodgeable AoEs and a visibly higher level of overall mechanical lethality – which could be down to being on loaner PCs in a crowded media tour meeting room without the comforts of each creator’s home setup, but it seemed pretty noticeable in the runs I watched from the media tour. I’m expecting (and kind of hoping as a healer main) that this signals a directional shift towards requiring a lot of smart healing and increasing emphasis on mitigation team-play.

Continuing Job Simplification (Sort Of)

Final Fantasy XIV’s jobs all have a familiar-enough groove once you settle into them that the noise of massive tooltips, job gauges, and such all start to peel away a smidge and reveal a basic, learnable rotation and gameplay loop. Dawntrail’s additive abilities largely continue a trend that started back in Shadowbringers – rather than jobs receiving a large number of new abilities and massive shifts in gameplay, they get a series of traits that upgrade existing spells to new versions or make an existing button into a new one when a condition is met, and then the capstone of leveling for the expansion is a new ability, meaning most jobs only ever get 1-2 truly new abilities requiring a keybind while everything else just iterates and builds upon the existing kit. This is a good approach overall, I think, but it does mean that the game kind of pushes you in a fixed direction on when you can or cannot use things and makes it slightly harder to have solid skill expression (a bigger topic I might expand upon prior to launch in a separate post).

For Dawntrail, this continues overall. Pretty much every job’s leveling journey is 1 new ability at level 100, with other things filling the gap by upgrading an existing spell or making the use of an existing ability, turning that ability bind into a new and different button. Most reworks or existing job tweaks either remove keybinds (Dragoon losing a major buff and an oGCD jump) or simplify the existing gameplay loop to bring down high-APM jobs (Astrologian no longer needing the cycle of Draw/Redraw that could plague their opener to death, Dark Knight and Gunbreaker losing potency on their gap closers to remove weaving them as a DPS option), and the two new jobs, while sort of hard to wrap my head around from just watching, have loops that seem to be simplified to a high degree (Pictomancer cycles Black and White paint aether while drawing Motifs to keep their major spells rolling while Viper has what amounts to a two-button main rotation that uses transforming buttons to keep those two most commonly pressed while the burst windows push you into pressing other different buttons). Clear effort has been made to bring down weird complexities too, like how some jobs in Endwalker still have winding, long openings, like how Dancer needs a 15.5 second prepull to queue Standard Step, complete the dance steps, then hold until pull to actually complete the dance and blast the boss, or how Dark Knight’s opener is focused on the fastest possible way to generate enough Blood to summon Esteem. The overall amount of oGCD weaving in the game is, if anything, going down in Dawntrail, and a clear effort is being made to put more power back into GCD-locked abilities. Is this a good thing? Well…I guess it depends. In some cases, I think it is good (learning to play Gunbreaker could be very unforgiving and it genuinely made mitigating hard when you were in your burst window to have so many oGCD damage abilities to weave to maximize performance), but in others, I am less convinced. When we get to healers, I’ll detail a more specific trouble I have with this!

On the niche side, some very specific weird gameplay that allowed high skill expression has been clamped down, mostly the non-standard lines and Transpose rotations for Black Mage, with Square Enix adjusting Umbral Ice to only restore MP on Blizzard casts instead of making Umbral Ice specifically increase your baseline MP regen. This removes something interesting from the game, but it was also admittedly a very niche thing that even most Black Mage players I know didn’t really bother with. You could make an argument that as a result this type of change isn’t a big deal, and I’d be inclined to agree a bit, but it does point towards simplification as a factor.

Overall, jobs aren’t changing as much as people expected, and I think that’s kind of iffy. The game remains about the two-minute buff window, has further entrenched simple rotations where most of your major button pressing happens during those windows, and the overall design seems, based on one side of the equation, to be around the same level of overall complexity as Endwalker was.

Reworks That Aren’t Reworks

Astrologian was promised a rework and got arguably the most substantive changes, but even then, the change is just to the card mechanics. It does help the job, and keeps their healing pretty much entirely untouched, but it’s perhaps not quite what people envisioned with the idea of a rework. Dragoon had been promised a rework, but instead received smaller overall changes – some retooling, but not really on the level of a full rework. For those who wanted substantial changes to create new gameplay niches, that really didn’t come – and that is neither good nor bad, it just simply is. It remains to be seen how this feels in gameplay (I think Astrologian will benefit from having a less awful opener especially when card RNG could specifically screw your opener big style), but on paper, it doesn’t seem too tremendously large.

Tank Changes

Bigger Big Mitigations, But Why?

Seeing the 30% mitigations for each tank job upped to 40% and given godly extra healing power of varying sorts makes me incredibly curious to see what Savage will look like. Sure, in dungeons, this should ease some concerns – bad Dark Knights will be less awful to heal, Paladins will be untouchable during their use of new Sentinel – but for raids in particular and especially at the point where the game tunes to require a few brain cells to rub together, I can only imagine the raw damage intake tanks will need to mitigate if they need to take 40% off the top alongside added recovery that’s baked in. Rampart receiving updates as a role action to buff it also lead to some concerns about damage intake. I can see a viable angle being that tanks in Savage will have less need to kitchen sink tank busters, and that might mean tanks can take more frequent big hits to keep things spicy, which could make interesting design. It seems clear that the baseline idea is that tanks will be getting hit harder, and that has some interesting effects for the healer role which we’ll discuss later.

Reducing the Weaving Burden

Dark Knights and Gunbreakers are losing their existing gap closers in favor of new abilities that replace them and have no damage attached. This was an interesting change to see, because it is not happening for Paladins or Warriors, but it makes some logical sense if you think about it as an actions-per-minute reduction to these two tanks, both of whom have huge oGCD damage weaving windows that can sometimes make it so there’s no room to hit a mitigation without clipping your GCD due to animation lock or just raw latency. Gunbreaker especially has it bad as their burst window is full of double-weaves where almost every GCD has to be followed by two weaves to be played optimally, and that is a mess to learn and sucks really bad on higher latency connections. Dark Knight, likewise, has a lot of weaving – less overall than Gunbreaker has now, but their burst and especially opener are so chock-full of double-weaves to optimize around that it can feel pretty bad if you have high ping or get animation locked into drifting your GCD. Meanwhile, Warriors can only literally weave their gap closer and one oGCD damage ability that is up every 30 seconds (single target or AoE version, take your pick!) and Paladins can likewise only weave their gap closer, but also have their DoT, Requiescat, Expiacion, and Fight or Flight, which means they have about 6 weaves per minute offensively plus gap closers while Warrior has two plus gap closer (they get an extra charge of their gap closer, though). This will likely still keep Gunbreaker and Dark Knight higher on total weaves per minute, but it should bring parity to that race. Thinking on it very lightly, Dark Knight is going to be around 8-11 weaves per minute (depends on how many Edges/Floods you can hit on MP economy) and Gunbreaker at around 14-15 – which is still high and should still be interesting to the people who like Gunbreaker for it, but it will also pull the requirement to double and even attempt to triple-weave down and create naturally-paced openings for more defense.

Healer Changes

AoE GCD Heal Upgrades – What For?

Every healer is getting an upgrade to their bread-and-butter AoE GCD healing spell that will allow them to do larger amounts of healing with those spells. This is fine and good news to a point – who doesn’t want more potency? – but there is a potential downside. This change runs afowl of the most common balancing conundrum in FFXIV – this is a fantastic change for a majority of the playerbase in dungeons and normal content where your average healer isn’t optimizing for damage (and you can sometimes even be lucky if your healer is doing damage at all), but it also doesn’t feel particularly interesting for Savage and Ultimate. Now, granted, in a prog scenario and at certain points in those modes, you will absolutely GCD heal and even use an AoE in that capacity, but it’s not entirely a thing you want to do on reclears and even in prog, you start reaching a point where you’re cutting those GCD healing casts down in order to do damage and meet the DPS check of a given encounter. It also fits as a component of a larger fear about just how much damage high-end content is going to dish out, because the most consistent theme of the job changes overall is around empowering healing and defensives. If healers will need to use AoE GCDs more often in more scenarios and further into prog, that might be a weird shift for a metagame that has long been about optimizing healers almost entirely around damage output.

AoE DPS Makes A Triumphant Return!

Prior to Shadowbringers, the healing jobs save for Astrologian had additional forms of AoE DPS through AoE DoTs – Aero III, Miasma II, and Bane all allowed the original two healer jobs to put their DoTs onto multiple targets. This was taken away as a part of the action streamlining that came in Shadowbringers and those jobs have felt a little meh for it – multi-dotting a pack in dungeons just isn’t that fun when you have to tab-target, and indeed in many cases the optimal behavior is to not do that if you have better AoE DPS you can do (if a pull is big enough, any healer AoE spell will usually do more damage than spending the GCDs to apply DoTs one at a time). Dawntrail says enough – healers get more AoE DPS options! Two jobs are getting AoE DoTs in a new form – Scholar gains Baneful Impaction, which is a combo action with Chain Stratagem that applies a pretty big DoT to all targets in a 5 yard radius of your current target, at 140 potency per tick, making it very nearly double that of Biolysis. Likewise, Sage gains Eukrasian Dyskrasia, which allows you to use Eukrasia to augment your AoE nuke and turn it into a DoT instead, which ticks for 40 potency per tick over a full 30 second DoT duration – this makes it a gain even in single target, assuming you can apply it and Eukrasian Dosis together. For White Mage and Astrologian, they get combo actions off their DPS buttons in a similar form to Scholar, but as straight nukes – Presence of Mind for WHM turning into Glare IV, which is an instant-cast, GCD AoE that has 3 charges per PoM and a massive 570 potency (with AoE falloff), and for AST, Divination gives them access to Oracle, which can be cast after Divination and is a massive 600 potency AoE with no falloff as an oGCD, which adds some much-needed offensive power to AST. All of these fit a common theme – big AoE damage, mostly tied in to the buff window and/or opener rotations such that you can maximize their use under raid buffs, powerful in dungeons but still gains and very useful in single-target for bosses and raiding scenarios. How great these end up being depends on balance concerns, like if the Sage AoE DoT is exclusive with the single target DoT or not (I would say default to only being able to have one up, but at the same time, Sage basically loses huge on damage potency if that’s the case), so we just have to wait and see.

Big Healing Cooldown Capstones

Every healer gets some form of big healing cooldown at level 100. Again, this ties into a central theme that emerges across the Media Tour build – a consistent high availability of huge healing, not just from healers but from everyone. Some of these abilities are cool, really cool, but a lot of judgment cannot be passed until we see what Extremes and especially the first Savage tier holds.

DPS

Second Wind Is Big

All DPS with Second Wind (so physical ranged and melee) are seeing a potency increase to 800 from 500 on this self-healing role action. Nothing much to add here that hasn’t already been a part of the earlier points on healing potency increases across the board, so hey – look at that, and on we go.

Simplification and Standardization

Most new DPS abilities are big cooldowns at level 100 or upgrades to existing buttons, keeping bloat tamed while granting new stuff. For as much talk as there was in the last Live Letter about reducing maintenance buffs, the truth is murkier – most existing maintenance buffs are still there, especially annoying ones like Death’s Design on Reaper, and even Viper gets its own maintenance buff in the same vein! Still, the overall direction of DPS design in Dawntrail is taking what already exists there and adding little enhancements, little consolidations, and then new capstones to take those freed-up keybinds and replace them with the new shinies. This is potentially contentious, because for some, the game could stand to be simpler, especially as modern ability tooltips for the game end up being somewhere near 5x the size and text of older abilities, while other players feel the game crushing down on unique gameplay and skill expression. My opinion is kind of down the middle – I think that complaints of homogenization are often overblown, but I do think that the team is slowly moving out ways that players could differentiate themselves or show unique skill expression and that feels kind of bad. Speaking of…

Crushing Non-Standard Black Mage Is Silly

Look, I only know about non-standard BLM as a meme thing, but it is a genuine thing that very high-end players do to optimize the job in scenarios where they might get stuck with bad uptime or prolonged, forced downtime, and I think it’s cool that in a game that is often quite rigid that these things found a way to exist. For the uninitiated, non-standard Black Mage lines often used Transpose to force Umbral Ice instead of casting between it and Astral Fire, which could have some benefits to gameplay, especially in Endwalker where Paradox is castable in Umbral Ice as an instant and where Umbral Ice grants an immediate, per-tick benefit to MP regen, which can then be stacked with Lucid Dreaming to create some insanely weird lines that deviate from standard play substantially. In Dawntrail, the team is killing this specifically in two ways – firstly by simply removing ice Paradox, and then secondly by removing Umbral Ice baseline MP regen, instead tying the MP regen to casts of Blizzard under Umbral Ice, with the level of UI determining how much MP is regenerated by a given Blizzard cast.

This is…kind of a weird approach to take, in some ways. Sure, I wouldn’t expect the team to come out in favor of weird, hard-to-balance rotations that consist largely of voodoo magic (and often require third-party tools like MP tick triggers to track properly), but at the same time, Black Mage is often a hard job to enjoy in high-end content and I think that having some unique forms of skill expression available as a reward for learning that level of play is pretty cool. Given that Black Mage’s new ability kit isn’t exactly amazing (a low-potency capstone to your Astral Fire phase in Flare Star and the admittedly-good ability to move your ley lines once per cast), and that they’re also messing with the Thunder concept by removing Sharpcast and changing the conditions to cast Thunder spells, changing those spells, and then also mucking about with the AoE rotation in such a way that Black Mage once again changes drastically over the course of 10 levels – it seems kinda bad. Not worth dooming over much yet given that adjustments can still come, but the core philosophy doesn’t seem too great!

New Jobs, New Ideas

Viper is a very oddball job that does the vast majority of its rotational gameplay from two buttons that shift in accordance with buffs on the character, which is kind of neat. Viper’s job gauge is also less a pure indicator of available resources and much more a rotation helper, as the light-up indicators on it are often there to direct you to what button you should press next in the main rotation. Pictomancer is a unique caster job that has a lot of high-potency nukes and then a lot of GCDs that do 0 damage and exist as prep spells to setup the next action or combo. Both play with their keybinding space in new ways (Viper by having a small base number of binds and a finisher combo that constitute the majority of the core gameplay, Pictomancer by having a combo setup not unlike a melee job for their filler casts and then using motifs and renders to pull together the big hits), and that looks really cool and interesting. Viper also looks incredibly fast-paced, especially for FFXIV – I think it might be fair to say that the critique of the base gameplay feeling slow finally made the team pop-off with a job that looks like it is constantly hitting a button. Very excited to see how these land in just over two weeks!

Overall Thoughts

One thing I will say a lot when discussing this type of thing before release on the FFXIV side is that we can only really see one part of the equation for now, which is job design. A lot obviously hinges on the fights and combat scenarios that these new and retuned toolkits will go up against and how they will stress the limits of them. We can make a broad assumption about damage output given the large number of healing increases to every role consistently being a theme, but that assumes that these changes are targeted at specific content design scenarios and are not instead just broad changes made to ease the larger casual content base of the game. Every healer’s AoE GCD heal getting upsized might mean that Savage will hit like a truck and ask us to make that choice…or it might mean that your friendly 0 DPS neighborhood White Mage can spam Medica III instead of II and the memes will need to be updated when we steam roll through some relatively easy dungeon gameplay. We gain early access in just over two weeks as I write this and so until then, we can’t really say more than to point out these changes and ponder them aloud.