Dawntrail, the latest expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, has officially been out just three days, arriving earlier this week after a brief early access release. Despite its story and extra 10 levels spanning dozens of hours of playtime, that’s apparently been ample time for players to complain loudly enough about one of the expansion’s brand new jobs – so much so that Square Enix have already announced a set of incoming changes planned across the game’s next run of patches.
In a blog post that also dropped the tidbit that Dawntrail’s release saw the MMO reach its highest concurrent player count since the release of base game A Realm Reborn over a decade ago, director Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida detailed various fixes and changes planned for multiple classes from patch 7.01 onward.
The headline changes will tweak the Viper, the dual sword-wielding class introduced in Dawntrail. Players have spent enough time with the new job to raise concerns about its skill rotation being too “busy”, leading to plans to reduce its demand for directional requirements and tweak the effect of various actions. Most of that reduced “busyness” will come in with patch 7.05, Yoshida said, though there’ll be some adjustments to the range of some actions in the next patch.
Dawntrail’s other new job, the artistic mage Pictomancer, will instead see a smaller bug fix that solves the issue of effects for the Subtractive Palette, Aetherhues and Aetherhues II being possible to manually disable by players, which will be included in 7.01.
One older job in for some fixes is the Monk, which will look to address what Yoshida called an “inadequate performance” caused by the wrong potencies for some actions and an issue with stacking the Fury status, both accidentally introduced as part of wider changes to core Monk attacks in 7.0 that the producer said “significantly changed how it feels to play the job”. The next patch will help make area-of-effect attacks better again, with “minor adjustments” to the Monk’s HUD as a result.
Elsewhere, the Astrologian job has apparently received “considerable feedback” from players about being hard to use during damage burst phases of battles, which will be addressed by changing the recast time of Light Speed and making it a charged action, as well as dropping the recast time of the job’s draw actions. Level 90 action Macrocosmos will also see its potency tweaked.
The Samurai will similarly see some recast timers shortened – for Tendo Setsugekka and Tendo Kaeshi Setsugekka, specifically – while the Red Mage will have the effect time of Manafication lengthened. Black Mages struggling to recover MP without the Umbral Soul action should also find it easier from the next patch on, with other attack potencies being adjusted in 7.05.
Tanks as a whole will also be changed, as players have expressed that remaining the target of enemies using Enmity has become difficult due to the high-damage attacks of other jobs, made particularly difficult for Dark Knight and Gunbreaker characters who have seen damage removed from their movement abilities. Those movement abilities will have increased enmity effects added in 7.01, with extra enmity also added to area-of-effect attacks.
The changes will roll out over the next couple of patches, with Yoshida also assuring that “several issues that may have proven a hinderance to your overall experience” aside from the job complaints will also be resolved as soon as possible. Otherwise, Dawntrail’s rollout seems to have been far smoother than the hours-long queues suffered by previous expansion Endwalker, in part thanks to some shiny new servers and other congestion-easing measures put in place ahead of the launch.
