Apparently Arcanist classes aren’t doing so smart. A new post on Final Fantasy 14’s Lodestone explains that certain passive Traits for Scholars and Summoners weren’t working, causing players to lose damage, healing, and shielding protency. However, FFXIV’s developers will hold off on implementing fixes, as these devs believe these potency shifts didn’t drastically worsen the experience for these players
The post explains that certain high-level passive Traits that normally grant higher values for healing, damage and shielding weren’t actually activating for certain abilities.
For Summoners, this is the Arcane Mastery Trait at level 94, with affected abilities Inferno, Earthen Fury, and Aerial Blast.
For Scholars, this is the level 85 Trait called Enhanced Healing Magic, and the affected abilities lacking healing and shielding, respectively, are Embrace and Seraphic Veil.
However, the developers claim these values’ issues weren’t significant enough to make these classes entirely irrelevant in practice.
“After investigation, we confirmed that due to this issue, incorrect values were being used in battle balance adjustment in the dev environment for the jobs in question, since potency and healing/shielding effects were not being enhanced for these abilities,” the blog reads. “However, since the issue is not having any direct impact to battle balance as it is now with its current values, it will instead be fixed in tandem with job adjustments in Patch 7.1.”
Basically, developers were testing the abilities and adjusting values for the abilities without considering the potency raise—which means that they were raising the ability potency already to compensate. For instance, they probably saw Inferno’s current 600 potency attacks and thought it was fine as it was, as opposed to the 800 potency it would have with Arcane Mastery actually working.
Therefore, there won’t be a fix until the job sees full adjustments in the upcoming Patch 7.1—though they’ve near-guaranteed that this will happen.
Some players are pretty upset, especially for Scholars, because every bit counts in content in order to help players survive hard-hitting attacks. But if this issue is as it’s explained, and developers still saw these classes as balanced in test environments, they’re likely not entirely wrong in thinking adjustments will need to come alongside these fixes.
