Final Fantasy 14 Patch 7.4’s Red Mage And Gunbreaker Reworks Have Fans Arguing About Job Identity Yet Again
via Square Enix 
Joshua Robertson is a News Editor for TheGamer. When not writing about breaking news, community stories, or covering industry events, you can find him begging FromSoftware for a Bloodborne remaster.
Over the past year or so, a lot of talk about Final Fantasy 14’s “job identity” has occurred, as Square Enix has tweaked and played around with certain jobs to make them more manageable. It started off with the new Viper job, which was tweaked after the launch of Dawntrail, with Yoshi-P claiming many were struggling with its “busyness.”
It was then the turn of the games more established jobs. Ninja and Dragoon were tweaked in Patch 7.1, again due to how busy they were, while Black Mage underwent a pretty dramatic rework in Patch 7.2, speeding up its cast times while removing the job’s tricky timer management to make it a lot easier to control. Each time, fans of Final Fantasy 14 claimed that the game’s “job identity” was under threat.
Final Fantasy 14 Fans Aren t Happy With Red Made And Gunbreaker Changes
We may have got a reprieve from the controversial job changes in Patch 7.3, but today’s patch has brought them in once again, this time for Red Mage and Gunbreaker. You’ll be able to find plenty of people talking about the changes, with many upset with the change to Red Mage in particular.
Those that know how to play the job should be familiar with its constant switching between melee and magic, but the change to the job in Patch 7.4 has essentially made the melee combo during your burst a ranged combo instead. After using Manafication, Red Mages will no longer need to dart in and attack at melee range, and can now use their burst at range instead.
Gunbreaker is a little bit trickier to explain, as an ability called Bloodfest has been changed so it will give you three cartridges every 60 seconds instead of 120 seconds, but you’ll also be able to overcap to six cartridges instead of three. It makes the job a lot busier, and gets rid of a lot of its resource management stuff that people liked about the job.
While both of these changes have their fans (I quite like the change to Red Mage as it was a pain of a job to use in some extremes), the topic of job identity has arisen again. In a post by a Twitter user called EksuPlosionXIV, a user called TomboyKnights says that they don’t trust the game with jobs any more as the devs react to friction by “mangling the job”.
Complaints aren’t as intense this time around, most likely because they’re not all that severe, but it does raise the question of how exactly Square Enix can alter jobs and make them more efficient in meaningful ways without damaging so-called “job identity”. It also makes me wonder if people are actually ready for this proposed job rework in 8.0. I guess we’ll find out.
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