On February 5th, 2021, Final Fantasy XIV executive producer Naoki Yoshida officially announced the next expansion to their hit MMO. Titled Endwalker, this expansion is set to take the Warrior of Light to Garlemald and end the battle between Hydalen and Zodiark once and for all. The expansion will come complete with two new jobs and a collection of new content.
As with past expansions, there will likely be many changes to the core of the game. They've already announced a squishing of stats and numbers, which will have cascading effects on the rest of the game. This is a welcome change, but there's still plenty of room for the game to grow. Hopefully, in the next expansion, new and long-standing issues will be addressed and fixed.
10 Compressing Tank Skills
The various jobs in FFXIV all contain a wide variety of skills. At the highest levels of play, the number of abilities ranges from manageable to daunting. The worst culprits of button bloat, as it tends to be, are the tanks. These jobs require a number of situational techniques to counteract catastrophic damage, but it's reaching a point where some players will struggle to manage all of it.
For PC players, hotbars loaded with abilities to play like a piano are a minor annoyance at worst. For players on controller, it's a challenge to manage so many different buttons that are all vitally important. Tanks are gifted with a number of high cooldown, situational defensive buffs that must all be available at a moment's notice. However, it feels like there's plenty of room to shrink the number of buttons down, especially if they intend to add new abilities in Endwalker.
9 Further Differentiate The Healers
One of the new jobs to be added in Endwalker, Sage, is a long-anticipated healer job. Since Heavensward, the three healers have been battling each other to remain relevant in raid content. Unfortunately, one of the issues with healers in the game is that they aren't functionally very different. This means that the most effective healer will always be the one outright best at healing and nothing else. Currently, that job is White Mage, which is much more common than Astrologian or Scholar.
With Sage, Yoshi-P has announced that the team plans on creating a divide between barrier healers and potency healers. Sage and Scholar will focus on negating damage, while Astro and White Mage will focus on healing it back up. This is a nice change, but healers could still use more than fancy particle effects to make them all feel worth playing.
8 More Utility For DPS Jobs
A good DPS will make sure to deal consistent damage to a boss, not dropping combos or skills. A great DPS makes use of every tool on their belt to enable their team as a whole to succeed. Utility is an important part of a great DPS, and the best DPS are able to use a number of tools. This, of course, makes some DPS jobs feel lacking for raid content.
The two biggest culprits are Black Mage and Samurai. While both apply damage-over-time abilities, that's the extent of their "utility" in helping allies. It would be fine to have some DPS focus harder on raw damage numbers, but they don't even deal much more damage than jobs with more utility. If they aren't going to have insane numbers, give them the ability to help their allies in a tangible way.
7 Updated Tutorial Content
As a live service game, FFXIV is constantly evolving and changing in major ways. However, a lot of the older content in the game has hardly changed to fit the evolutions of the various jobs. More importantly, the game design philosophy of the team has changed since A Realm Reborn, leaving the classic tutorial content lacking.
With each expansion, new players are going to get drawn into the game. Now that the A Realm Reborn experience has become more compact, perhaps it's time to revisit the Hall of the Novice. While there are certainly useful tips to learn, the guides could use some fine-tuning to teach players techniques they're more likely to use in later dungeons and raids.
6 Populating Queues For Mid-Level Content
Raids are an incredible part of FFXIV. The amount of love and care that goes into both Normal and Alliance raids is staggering, with new locales and incredible music to accompany challenging battles. Every player should get the opportunity to experience this content at least once in their playthrough of the game.
The duty roulette is designed to keep players cycling through older content, allowing new players to experience it as well. Unfortunately, it's quite easy for high-level players to tank their item level and guarantee they get the easiest (and fastest) alliance raid. For Heavensward and Stormblood raids, it can take an extraordinarily long time to find 23 other players. This needs to be fixed in some way during Endwalker to give the new players the opportunity to experience everything the game has to offer.
5 Better Visual Clarity During Hectic Battles
FFXIV is a stylish game. Every game in the series is loaded with a focus on aesthetics, sometimes at the cost of gameplay. While the MMO doesn't lose any of its soul in service of aesthetics, there is a bit of an issue in larger raid battles. As jobs get flashier and more impressive particle effects and animations, that visual clutter can be a detriment for players new and old.
Battles require players to be on their toes at all times. Players need to be ready to dodge incoming attacks, adapt to the mechanics of the fight, and fulfill their combat role. With all of the huge numbers and flashy particle effects, it can be hard to track when mechanics are incoming. There are settings to reduce the visual clutter, but they make the game feel empty as a result. There ought to be a better way to balance between visual flair and practical design.
4 Accessible Gearing Up For Crafting and Gathering Jobs
This is admittedly a personal gripe, but when compared to the amount of catch-up gear for combat jobs, crafting and gathering jobs get pretty much nothing. Crafting is expensive and time-consuming to do optimally. At the same time, fast levels mean that the jobs will quickly reach a new expansion, but not have the gear to measure up.
There are bits and pieces of catch-up gear to collect, but they require either a pretty penny or a sizeable amount of the player's time. For players without a lot of either, they get to just struggle onward or bite the bullet of costs to reach a good tier of gear. In the next expansion, making this process of going between expansions for crafters smoother would be helpful for newer players.
3 More Inventory Space
Inventory management, like in real life, is important in any MMO. The amount of space in your character's backpack may seem infinite, but those limited slots tend to fill up fast. In FFXIV, this is still a problem. There are inventory expansions, including the Chocobo Saddlebag and two full retainers to hold items, but even then it doesn't take long to fill that space up completely.
Joining a Free Company or navigating the housing market is a way to solve this problem. However, for players looking to fly solo and still do crafting and gathering, it can be brutal throwing valuable materials out. Giving the players more inventory space hurts nobody, and at this point, players will need extra space.
2 Spicing Up Formulaic Dungeons
Dungeons are an important part of the main scenario. These stepping stones serve to house challenging bosses in unique locales and are often the most memorable part of the game. They're expansions to the gorgeous zones in the game. However, dungeons in the game tend to all feel very similar when broken down to their basics.
Dungeons in FFXIV go in a set pattern of battling enemies, then a boss, then enemies, another boss, more enemies, and a harder final boss. The path of these dungeons is fairly linear, leaving little deviation between dungeon runs. The solution to this problem is not making them winding mazes, like Toto-Rok. A bit more spice in giving players extra objectives during dungeons might help make them a bit less predictable.
1 Better Detection For Bots and Goldspammers
FFXIV has a bot problem. This is nothing new for an MMO; botted accounts and gold spammers will always exist. The problem comes when these bots start to plague low-level dungeons or flood the overworld. When they've finished their missions, they yell their hearts out in Limsa until they're silenced permanently.
Gold spammers are an annoying problem, but the bots are even worse. The disappointment a new player would feel seeing an army of identical clones teleporting between locations with no regard to the rules of the game isn't difficult to imagine. It seems to have gotten noticeably worse, so it's time to get the exterminator to clear this infestation once again.