Dawntrail, the latest expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, has only been officially out for three days, arriving earlier this week after a brief Early Access release. Despite the story and extra 10 levels spanning dozens of hours of playtime, that’s apparently been enough time for players to complain loudly enough about one of the expansion’s brand new tasks – so much so that Square Enix have already announced a set of incoming changes planned in the game’s next series of patches.
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In a blog post that also dropped the tidbit that Dawntrail’s release saw the MMO reach its highest number of concurrent players since the release of the main 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 onwards.
The title changes will change the Viper, the dual sword class introduced in Dawntrail. Players have spent enough time with the new job to raise concerns about the skill rotation being too “crowded”, leading to plans to reduce targeting requirements and adjust the effect of various actions. Most of this reduced “busyness” will come with patch 7.05, Yoshida said, although there will be some adjustments to the scope of some actions in the next patch.
Dawntrail’s other new job, the artistic mage Pictomancer, will instead see a minor bugfix that addresses an issue with effects for Subtractive Palette, Aetherhues, and Aetherhues II being manually disabled by players, which will be included in 7.01 .
An older quest for some fixes is the Monk, which will aim to address what Yoshida called “inadequate performance” caused by wrong potencies for some actions and a rage state stacking issue, both accidentally introduced as part of wider changes to Monk’s basic attacks in 7.0, which the producer said “significantly changed the feel of playing the job”. The following patch will help make AoE attacks better again, with “minor tweaks” to the monk’s HUD as a result.
Elsewhere, Astrologian’s performance has apparently received “significant feedback” from players about it being difficult to use during damage-driven battle phases, which will be addressed by changing Light Speed’s cooldown time. and making it a charged action, as well as removing the redo timing of quest draw actions. The effectiveness of Level 90 Macrocosm will also be changed.
Samurai will similarly see some cooldown timers shortened – specifically for Tendo Setsugekka and Tendo Kaeshi Setsugekka – while the red mage will have an extended Manafication effect time. Black Mages who struggle to recover MP without the Umbral Soul action should also find it easier from the next patch onwards, with other attack potencies being fixed in 7.05.
Tanks in general will also be changed as players have expressed that staying on target with enemies using Enmity has become difficult due to the high damage attacks of other tasks, which is especially difficult for the Dark Knight and Gunbreaker characters who have seen removed damage from their movement abilities. These movement abilities will have the increased enmity effects added in 7.01, with additional enmity also added to area-of-effect attacks.
The changes will roll out over the next few patches, with Yoshida also guaranteeing that “a few issues that may have been a hindrance to your overall experience,” aside from performance complaints, will also be resolved as soon as possible. Otherwise, Dawntrail’s rollout seems to have been much smoother than the hours-long queues suffered by the previous Endwalker expansion, thanks in part to some shiny new servers and other congestion relief measures put in place before launch.
