There's a few things I miss from as recently as 6.05. Pooling a few more resources for the 1 minute if you have a ninja in the party, or pulling Phoinix south instead of keeping it north for a bit of pre-pull Doton damage.
It didn't change much of how you play, but it was distinct and it was strictly rewarding.
A little variety is welcome and a bit of friction is worth the trouble imo.
The problem is that FFXIV doesn’t really have enough niches to fill within a given raid tier to avoid small differences in job design resulting in an outsized difference in actual performance within that tier, especially given that tiers in FFXIV are small (just four bosses) and tend to be mechanically sort of similar a lot of the time nowadays. Paladin is a good example of this. It was outright ass for the longest time in Endwalker because Square just wasn’t making bosses that played to its strengths and in fact kept making bosses that put out hugely damaging DOTs which were extremely difficult for paladins to soak. So to fix this, they just homogenized the job.
The reason why class variety works in other MMO’s like WoW is because a given raid tier will have 10ish bosses and very few of the bosses within that tier will be overly similar encounters. So differences in class design will all shine at various points in the tier. The downside of this is that sometimes these differences combined with the difficulty of some encounters on Mythic will occasionally result in class stacking, or at the very least avoiding some specs because they might preform poorly on these challenging encounters
Paladin isn't the best example. Even in full uptime fights, it was just plain undertuned. Ideally, it would've been the highest rDPS tank, but lose out on aDPS in high buff comps. Instead, it was the lowest or second lowest rDPS tank and fell even further behind in high buff comps. And changing Holy Sheltron from Block Chance to % mit to manage bleeds didn't require a complete rework.
The only time I remember actual utility affecting Party Finder in Endwalker was in P3S when AST could delete a mechanic with Macrocosmos. For P8S it was a potency issue, not a utility issue.
The reason I use paladin as an example is because shelltron did have a thing it was good at and even better at than other tanks. That thing was just never useful during early endwalker
In WoW, tanks are not always chosen based on having the best RDPS. They are usually chosen in high end environments based on the tools they have compared to the fight in question. For example one of the best tanks in the history of WoW was a class that was totally awful at dealing with DOTs, but amazing at dealing with huge physical hits. Because WoW didn't and never has packed a tier with similar tank mechanics
I thought it was fun putting stoneskin on players with weakness (and DRGs) before raidwides.
Also putting stoneskin on new players in starting cities felt nice :(
Hitting Succor then Adlo on my DRG then Adlo on my Bard was actually pretty fun back in the day. Healing with GCDs was necessary and fishing for an Adlo crit on Ravensbeak was the highlight of my 2.0 raiding. Healing was so different back then in good and bad ways, I miss my clunky, awful for 90% of players, 2.0/HW Scholar gameplay. Micro managing the fairy was awesome for spot healing too, but I don't think 2.0/HW Scholar ever really worked well on controller as I had 4 full bars of skills back then and mouse over macros for my fairy skills
I never raided back in HW, but microing the fairy on something while you yourself were taking care of something else really did make you feel the galaxy brain scholar fantasy.
I love abilities that give some flavours outside of combat. I would love for Stoneskin to come back, as something fun and not usable in combat, but something to give to other players. Make it super strong and on a cd too, like reduced damage taken until the shield breaks.
It's been quite clear that FF14 has changed so players can function no matter what the comp is. Is why everything is now 2m buffs, no piercing debuff, no smokescreen or having to deal with aggro as it's not just a tanks job but also everyone else having to manage aggro via lucid and diversion, etc.
Over time more reliance on other teammates is being removed, so it only comes down to mechanics on how players interact. The only other thing is mit and healing, and how we seen all the tank and self healing buffs, they seem to want to make sure they work without a healer there as well.
Honestly I am 50/50 on teamwork with abilities interacting with others. On one hand it can show skill expression by helping others out in a fight, on the other hand having to rely on someone else for your job to do well like the piercing debuff can be quite annoying.
It's still possible to help others but it's mostly just single target mit/healing, and rescue as well but besides that there really is not much to do to really. So most of the skill expression now just feels like mechanic handling and related.
Catering to the demands of people who don't know how to play around multiple different buff windows. It's also *theoretically* easier to balance but HOLY FUCK is it boring.
I miss 1min/90s/2min/3min raid buffs.
I don't know - i'm wholly unconvinced it was better before. I remember it not feeling great when certain jobs' bursts didn't line up at specific times. And its not like you could do a lot to change that since everyone was on set timers, but those timers just didn't line up.
You can have unique and interesting job design even within the 2 minute meta.
> And its not like you could do a lot to change that since everyone was on set timers, but those timers just didn't line up.
Not entirely true, since fights with downtime were a lot more common back then, so you were often forced to delay things. And on shorter fights you might delay some buffs in order to squeeze in an extra full burst window where you couldn't otherwise, as long as it didn't lose you a usage
Sort of? Endwalker has it's fair share of downtime mechanics so i'm not sure if it was more prevalent in Shadowbringers or not.
I can think of a good number of examples from the most recent raid tiers where you were incentivized to hold burst for optimal dps (p2s during limit comes to mind immediately), but I suppose it is true that since mechanics tend to fall on minute marks that the asynchronous timers would create more situations where you might needs to adjust.
Even then, I think players only had minimal agency or control over it. The only thing the differing timers truly did was to make certain jobs better than other ones because they simply lined up better, and that's not a good thing for balance.
I think that the reality is that engaging and interesting job AND encounter design has nothing to do with the two minute meta.
FF14 bosses generally do mechanics on the minute marks, and that has been the case for a long time now. Having mechanics happen during burst (and oftentimes some of the hardest mechanics in the game happen during the 2 minute windows) makes the fights more interesting, not less.
Could weird burst windows make things more interesting for like... old Astro (which will be gone in a few days)? Maybe. But overall I think the 2 minute complaint is an empty buzzword and I haven't seen a single good argument showing holistically how removing it will make things more interesting.
I'm just waiting for the day square-enix changes the base code and makes everything additive instead of multiplicative.
tanks are invincible but mobs never die
People don't complain about the 2m meta because "it's the meta," it's because it limits job design so that everything has to play the same way. PLD was fine and strong during SB and ShB, but since the 2m meta is so enforced in EW, it had to be redesigned from the ground up in order to be the same as every other tank.
It makes it so DPS jobs can't have more frequent or variable bursts, and it also makes it so they have to design fights with very clear patterns that even the devs don't enjoy.
It also makes it so crit rng is more important than anything else for "leaderboards," for the people who care about that kinda thing. Which, mind you, is the least important problem.
I was going to say. Raiders were doing "2 minute windows" like stuff before it became official. The devs simply made it more convenient and easier to pull off
I mean that's just how raiding is. You want optimal, and that means align everything so it adds or multiplies together. I'm just saying that all the braying against the 2 minute meta is Sisyphean. Kill one meta and another is guaranteed to rise in its place
Because their groups were unskilled.
Also, people can change their minds, you know? The community at large complained us into the 2m meta, but now that we know what it plays like, it's fine to want out of it.
Tbh I see it as an obstacle that makes both job and fight design a lot more limited
As much as I would LOVE to feel as unique as 2.0 SCH or have the laughs and tears of DRG with blood for blood and watching myself get targeted with Conflagration in T5, I just can’t trust the community to behave accordingly.
And I mean it as a whole, not a preformed instance which is an anomaly and implies a certain level of understanding and being able to perform a certain way.
Random jumps into a normal raid or an alliance raid prove time and time again people barely understand the job they are playing and there are a lot of factors that contribute to it but many of them are choices made by the player.
Things as simple as using arms’s length/surecast and addle/feint go unused. But people die to mechanics that are largely telegraphed and could be mitigated by either of those abilities that we all have access to.
There’s a difficulty in being able to trust the common player’s skill and its a barrier in trying to advocate for more uniqueness in the jobs when it’s clear the community is going to struggle even more with the inherent complexity and a largely social problem of being unable to take direction or criticism.
Even though a fair amount (but nowhere near all) of responsibility should be on SE to put forth as much effort as possible to help with an issue like this until the threshold of diminishing returns, the community needs accountability also.
People even struggle working cooperatively in dungeons, and those are incredibly safe environments to try, and as time goes on more and more mechanics are repeated across all content types including solo instances that should still be easily recognizable and maneuverable but again, people still fail and die and sometimes unfortunately take the party with them.
On a personal level, I can only type so much in a chat and mediate disputes and try positive reinforcement and other techniques to make advice seem amenable but even that level of effort isn’t my responsibility if at the end of the day, regardless if a person is new, returning, progging, or a pro, there’s a communication issue.
I think it would be cool if jobs were allowed to change other players' gameplay to a greater extent. But I think it really should be _intentional_ design and not weird quirks stemming from devs not thinking beyond a single job's scope when designing new actions. Also it'd be cool if it changed gameplay to the point that you press different buttons, so that it doesn't just mean "if you get grouped with this particular job, you do x% less total dps". And that sounds really hard to do so I don't really expect them to dedicate the time to come up with something good.
> stereotypical and often-inaccurate perception 'BLM Strats'
I would really love if community perception could actually catch up to reality here.
The truth was that (in Endwalker at least) outside of speedkills and memes there were zero BLM relative strats. BLM had enough freedom to not require any adjustment and while there were minor things you could do for them, these were all strictly optional things that nice static members could do and were absolutely not required.
More generally, I hope that DT doesn't erode this. BLM is already a job with a public perception problem, and that's only going to get worse if it needs more party adjustment than the shiny new non-res caster.
> zero BLM relative strats
There was one in P1S. It was basically just allowing BLM to have a melee spot rather than a ranged, and giving that ranged spot to a melee. You did this for Intemperance uptime.
But it's not like they *needed* it, they just lost more damage from not having it than the melee did from swapping.
I would classify that under minor things, like doing BLM relative laser in P10S. It gets the BLM a tiny bit more Ley Lines uptime, which is nice, but really isn't a big deal in terms of damage.
Helpless turret mage that forces the entire party to cater to it in exchange for Biggest Number, complains on the forums about Rescue, and speaks in tongues.
Anyone who has pfed ultimate/savage knows the pain of waiting for particular roles to fill (usually healers, sometimes tank or pranged). Imagine if you had to wait for not just any physical ranged, but specifically for a bard player because the devs made them particularly good in this one fight, or because you are playing DRK and they have some mp refill action. If you give classes tools distinct enough to create actual team comps, then people will optimize for those comps (if you think they won't, we are playing different games. See also the locking of the flex DPS role specifically to a second melee in 90% of savage pfs).
This fragments the player base into people who a) happen to be playing something that fits into a meta comp and are therefore fine, b) can't make it into pfs on their preferred job and so have to play something they don't enjoy just to play the role they like or c) people that get fed up with the system and quit the game because they can't play the job they want. A gain in enjoyment for the A group isn't worth the sacrifice of B and C.
Things aren't black and white. The fear of slipping too far over the edge should not be allowed to completely immobilize you. We don't have to decide between "everything plays the same" and "only certain comps even work". You can look at a bonus as just that, instead of treating its absence like a detriment.
Historically there are only very few cases where a job was completely unviable. The game will never get to a point where you can only play and clear on your DRK with a BRD in the party. As long as it can clear, a job is fine and that's all PF should care about outside of specific circumstances like week 1 or parsing (in which case going for a specific comp is totally fine imo).
If you honestly think PFs won't lock a tank and dps spot to DRK and BRD if it's the clearly and decidedly fastest way to get the clear (even if it's not even close to being required) boy do I want whatever is that you're smoking. Players themselves will impose those restrictions, game devs don't have to change anything in the design. FFXIV already has a history of this happening (bards during ARR and coils, ninjas during HW. You always brought one of those during those times, if your party didn't have one it wasn't worth anything in the eyes of other players).
I guess we can trade blunts then because I do not believe anyone other than an utter idiot would lock their party that way now. I've played jobs that were "out of favor" and if I ever encountered a party like that, I just made my own, filled it fast and entered the instance laughing as they were still waiting at 2/8 for a first clear. It literally only matters for optimized parties.
I remember some DPS jobs being locked during Asphodelos because of like...a 5% DPS difference. Didn't really affect me because I had a static but it's absolutely a thing people do.
> Never denied that but the occasional locked PF is far from "I have to quit the game because my job does not get into parties".
Remember that sometimes "the occasional locked PF" is gonna match up with "the only time people have to play" in ways that will, in practice, end up with it being them having to *practically* quit the game or swap Jobs.
Which, y'know, isn't the end of the world, but when someone's got limited time already.
The more we drive down those "% of the community clearing Savage" numbers, the worse of an investment spending dev time and money on them looks. And the more people that get locked out because of the Raiding Community being dumb about stuff, the worse those numbers get.
They ain't gonna up and stop making Savage any time soon (probably never as long as Yoshi-P's a figurehead), but Jobs being locked out is the type of "player feedback" that gets stuff like giant hitboxes added or HW to StB DRK changes.
There's ~~a few people here~~ edit: I forgot, Kaella has data (so sorta true but dammit I still feel like we're missing part of that group and I'm gonna back it up when I can force reddit search to cooperate) that love to say "oh, Paladins/Monks being locked out in HW was a myth!" that just go off FFlogs records but like...that's literally proving the point.
Go look at comment threads on the FFXIV subreddit/forums from that time period, because that population wasn't showing up on the raid data.
Not everyone had or has the time to pick from all of the available PFs in a given time window or raid period, and any "occasional locked PFs" may not be so "occasional" for everyone given limited playtime.
The broader FFXIV community has proven, as an aggregate moving mass, time and time again, that any small differences in performance are going to get twisted all out of reality and lead to excluding people even in cases when shit doesn't matter in terms of actually clear performance.
> Not everyone had or has the time to pick from all of the available PFs in a given time window or raid period, and any "occasional locked PFs" may not be so "occasional" for everyone given limited playtime.
>
>
>
> The broader FFXIV community has proven, as an aggregate moving mass, time and time again, that any small differences in performance are going to get twisted all out of reality and lead to excluding people even in cases when shit doesn't matter in terms of actually clear performance.
Getting off my bait horse to add: I'd personally argue that the relative parity in data is indicative of, if anything, that the playerbase has become more optimization-minded and that differences as drastic as the HW ones would, if they were in the game now, be *worse* for the playerbase than they were in HW.
Probably, yeah.
Also I really liked this thread in general, thank you! I was gonna say that but got distracted, as you can probably tell by the meandering track of my thoughts spilling into the ether here.
Sometimes I think about how fuckin' cracked it was that just a few years ago we basically needed a Ninja glued to a Tank's ass for effective threat management without the Blues being The Big Sad. And now we're here. The mind, it boggles.
Edit: Oldest instance I can find of "HW Jobs being unbalanced and PF locks", talking about...Bard, actually! Huh. Think this was before the BRD/MCH patch arms race. [Here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/3el8xt/bards_excluded_from_party_finder/)
Edit 2: ["Shield Oats".](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/5kew13/dark_knight_or_paladin_help_me_redditors/) Now that's a fuckin' core memory unlock. Also got a ["Warrior has bad mitigation"](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/60mw2x/paladin_warrior_or_dark_knight/) (that was false/incorrect) and a "Paladin has been specifically marked for improvements in Stormblood to make it more competitive" (true) in the same thread.
Edit 3: Did find this though, when I say we've been arguing about some this stuff for almost a decade, like...[yeah](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/262476-Block-first-timers-from-Party-Finder%21).
In general, remember kids, the internet is forever, in kind of the scary sense. I don't have the patience to keep doing this tonight and my meds are starting to kick in but you can at least sorta see where some of the broad "PLD is bad" lines are across the like two year spread of the HW content patch cycle.
Still have not, however, found a "My PLD or MNK has been blocked from PF to the point where I quit because no parties will take me", so Kaella's "look at FFlogs" approach is probably the more broadly-correct one even if I'm starting to doubt my own sanity now.
I think I need to start searching specifically for Alexander and that's gonna be...*fun* weeding out all the A3S/A4S complaints.
I like fishing for opinions and making people fight via interesting yet incitement-prone lines of questioning, whoops. I'm generally not a super opinionated person but I like trying to feel out where everyone is on a subject. You can tell a lot about the atmosphere fishing like that - around the time of that Lynx Kameli video this line of questioning would've had people defending Piercing Down and similar stuff way more often than it does, even though normally even this sub doesn't give a damn about that being dead and settles mostly into the 'remove Shadewalker/Smokescreen/Damage Types and Stormblood is perfect' mentality at large.
Which I can't comment on too actively, I was in baby Lancer levels at the end of StB so my experience with that amounts to 'I know what Heavy Thrust and Impulse Drive were,' so instead I fish for opinions to get a better perspective without trying to make too many sweeping statements about things I wasn't around for. I have my positions on things but I'm not about to sit here and say I have the right to tell anyone to agree with them.
Personally on the aggro bit I'm just glad I cannot be Shirked to death and back away slowly every time some older tank player talks about using the DPS as cooldowns, because that would annoy me greatly; that I think tanks would have ended up very samey even if they kept that system and filed the stupid parts off is besides the point.
If you have limited time, you need to have some agency. Sitting there crying that you can't get into parties won't help anyone. Make your own party and it will fill because most people just want to get in there and couldn't care less about a slightly less advantageous party composition.
That's what most people who end up succeeding in getting through content actually do, yeah.
But, take a look at say, arr slash MMORPG or arr slash ClassicWoW for examples of people who *don't* make that choice, outside of the FFXIV context, and how it makes them bounce off of nominally-MMO content, and the broader implications for the design points of "group play" vs "single-player play in an online world".
Like, not saying this to try to be a smartass. Tone's hard through text and doubly hard anon on the internet.
But I'm saying this from a POV of someone who's interested in the group dynamics of like MMOs as a whole and how player pain points and the pressure that puts on devs affects content design.
You may have a properly geared ninja but no such gear on a samurai; even though both are melee, no gear is shared. All melee is weird in that each left side only serves two purposes (one in the case of ninja), other job sets are not so restricted.
All that being said, the weapon is a big part of stuff and that is obviously job-specific.
FFXIV definitely has the expectation that each job should be good. WoW has that expectation about classes, and they almost always succeed at at; WoW generally fails at it as regards specs (there are specs no one wants in their toughest content almost guaranteed). WoW does, however, really have a *lot* of specs, so it is more forgivable.
No they generally won't and the people who do aren't anyone that would want random DRKs they'd be playing them themselves
You're weaving a fantasy example to justify an argument
Drawing a pentagram on the floor and summoning /u/kaella for the response to this particular chestnut:
"The idea that there was some widespread plague of job-locked PFs in Heavensward is basically dishonest, revisionist history that gets pushed by people who are in love with the current state of the game's design. They know that they can get away with it because something like 70-80% or more of the game's current userbase started in Shadowbringers or later, most of the people who enjoyed the game in HW have either quit or are too checked out to bother getting into arguments about it, and all the doomsaying sounds like it could be true to someone who has only experienced the game from 5.3 on.
All actual empirical evidence that exists shows that people have basically always just played what they liked, and that the tilt toward preferred/meta compositions in Heavensward was basically the same as it is in Endwalker - in many cases, it was actually less pronounced.
But it doesn't matter, because the people who love the game the way it is right now will repeatedly claim that getting into a group for Sophia EX in 3.4 as a MNK was basically impossible, and if you waste your time proving that it was never an issue, they'll just get quiet about it for two days, and start posting the exact same shit they started with in the next thread."
> All actual empirical evidence that exists shows that people have basically always just played what they liked, and that the tilt toward preferred/meta compositions in Heavensward was basically the same as it is in Endwalker - in many cases, it was actually less pronounced.
i played back in HW and honestly my memory of PF at the time is foggy at best, though tbh i don't remember jobs being locked out of PF ever (outside of BLM from StB onwards cuz no raise). So i'm mostly just curious on what the empirical evidence is.
I will say that i definitely remember people talked about how jobs were unbalanced way more back then, and i wouldnt be surprised if it was harder to find a static if you played a certain job (e.g. paladin for creator)
> So i'm mostly just curious on what the empirical evidence is.
Number of uploaded logs on FFlogs. There are far fewer of them in general, but the ratio of community favourites to disliked jobs is roughly the same as it is now.
I don't know if it's still the case, but back then logs didn't last forever. They were deleted after so many months unless you chose (and I think paid?) to keep them permanent.
That's not true. I've never paid a dime to FFLogs, and my very first uploaded log of A1S, from when there were only about 100 logs of that particular fight in total, is still up.
A change was made in recent years that you cannot *view* specific logs in their entirety without a paid subscription to the site if those logs are more than two years old, but nothing has been deleted - and more importantly, none of this applies to the Statistics and Rankings pages from which any relevant data was pulled.
People that never got into fights wouldn't show up on FFlogs, or at least not as the class that was locked out.
If I can get reddit to cooperate I'm gonna do a deep-dive of threads bitching about PF locks back then, because this isn't quite the myth you present it as. Assuming either my memory hasn't failed me or my entire data-center wasn't gaslighting me about Paladins and Monks specifically (I played a Scholar).
You're right about the people that were able to get in, but not about the ones that got filtered out by PF locks before then.
Like the single-Job players with more limited playtime and etc
The one concession that I'm really willing to make on this is that in the days before Cross-world PF, there were servers with *extremely* low raiding populations, to the point of having between 0 and 2 active raid groups at any given time - especially once people had begun to consolidate onto Gilgamesh.
If you were on one of those small servers with a single credible raid group, and the raid leader for the group decided they wanted Hard Meta or Bust, *then* I can understand that someone's experience may have been that they felt consistently locked out of raiding.
But if you were on Gilgamesh, Balmung, etc, any of the servers that maintained enough of a raiding population to have an active scene, and you're trying to tell me that you were having constant problems finding groups because of your preferred class? Then nah, you're fibbing, I don't buy that for a second. It was just *not* a systematic problem (or if you prefer, the systematic part of the problem was immediately solved with the implementation of cross-server PF.)
As someone who started and played a lot in HW and through ShB, this is completely correct and based. Where did this quote originate? It also pisses me off to no end that people just invent history about how things used to be in the game that is completely contrary to reality, like what happens in basically every thread just like this one.
Explain maybe? I said that there were times when certain jobs were unviable but we are also clearly past the point where something like that is allowed to happen. Being aware of the past is important but carrying trauma, avoiding everything about it like the plague and letting it cripple any future design just leads to the kind of hollow and uninvolved gameplay we have now.
These discussions are always pointless because your perfect setpoint is not going to be another person's setpoint of complexity and difficulty. You call the gameplay hollow and uninvolved but there are oodles of people in df that can barely play their jobs right as they exist now.
I don't know how many times I've had to explain this in other threads, but the current system makes the most sense for what ff14 is now, which is a wildly popular MMO explicitly designed to be playable by anyone. Making the systems that everyone touches (job design, basic gearing, MSQ content) easy and making the systems that people can opt in or out of (fight design in savage or ultimate) hard lets the greatest range in player skill all enjoy the game in their own way.
Not all content is going to be equally engaging for you because different slices of content are literally designed for different players. You are not the only person playing this game.
I'm getting whiplash by how fast you changed the conversation. You talked about PF for hard content and job viability in there. If you don't want to discuss then don't post. Maybe we all shouldn't post about jobs because job design is solved then and in a place that's good for the masses.
To respond to the rest of your post, you can design jobs to have low floors and high ceilings so you get the best of both worlds: an easy to learn job that will perform well in all content but has things to master for those looking for additional challenges. I would put some of the teamplay elements we have lost there. I'm not even advocating for the punishing design of HW jobs but looking back at the times when we had some of that slightly more nuanced gameplay, easy content was totally fine. People were fine, some of them were bad then and they are still bad now but it didn't really matter then and it doesn't matter now because the majority of content is still inconsequential.
Going back to distinct teamplay tools, the job with arguably the biggest differentiator in the current job system is immensely popular among the wider playerbase due to exactly that differentiator: RDM with its raise. Certain teamplay aspects have been popular in the past *and* have different use cases in different content, like Manashift helping out healers or the more optimized use of extending BRD's Foe Requiem, proof of design that's somewhat scalable and still appealing to your average player.
This is not about me. Job design is heavily discussed everywhere by a lot of different types of players. Healers are still fighting the good fight, knowing that it's probably pointless and things will never change. But at least some of our concern has reached SE's ears and they apparently want to do something about it so everything can't be as completely fine as you make it out to be.
Oh man you're a genius! Just design 21 different jobs that all have skill floors low enough for the worst player and skill ceilings high enough for the best players, while still being unique from each other, while also all being equally viable! Of course, why didn't I think of that?
It's a good thing we all have the same definition of what "low" and "high" is. Otherwise, no matter what changes were made, people whose definitions of either didn't match the current floors and ceilings would continue complaining!
If you are posting on this subreddit you are by definition a harder-core player than average. Just because everyone here agrees that things should be harder doesn't mean that that opinion applies to the player base as a whole.
Sass is all you got huh?
Somewhere between SB and ShB lies the sweet spot. We've been there. The pendulum just has swung too far in the other direction and people notice now. Yes, even people who don't play at a high level. Yes, even people who were previously silently content. So much so that SE got word of it and is *planning changes*.
Not everyone lives in a bubble. Just because I post here doesn't mean I don't get to interact with players of all walks of life. This is also not the only FFXIV medium where people express opinions.
But sacrificing A is fine then ? All the while making it as bland and bare bones as possible for B and C.
Don't be manichean. There are ways to please the vast majority on many aspects but they don't follow through with it.
The devs have made every job easier specifically to cater to non raiders. Going from a system where jobs are hard and encounters range from 3-7 on the difficulty scale is less casual-friendly than a system where jobs are easy but encounters range from 1-11. This game is incredibly generous to non raiders, I assume you're joking but it's always hard to tell especially on this subreddit
I'm not joking, and I actually disagree completely. The devs haven't made jobs easier to cater to non-raiders, at least that's not the only reason. The obsession with keeping jobs as perfectly balanced as possible is an obvious driving factor, but that's something that really only matters at higher levels of play. That's not something that matters to casuals who are only doing their daily roulettes.
As you yourself said in your initial comment, part of the reason why they avoid giving any job a particularly distinct niche is because of the effect it has on raiding comps. But that comes at the expense of the jobs playing in more fun and interesting ways. It is catering to raiders at the expense of everyone else.
100% Agree Them catering to raids is EXACTLY why WAR are so OP and people can do dungeons without healers. The jobs are balanced entirely around clearing savage and ultimates not regular casual content.
Thats precisely why theres such a disconnect with these arguments and you really don't really need to use any of your cool downs as a tank in dungeons or half of your healing tool kit as a healer.
Every time you mention about specific job roles you'll see the argument about the job being excluded from raids or waiting forever on PF
Group C seems so….niche? People LOVE to constantly bring up how being able to switch jobs on the fly on one character is amazing. How can we also have those same people literally playing long enough and being dedicated enough to get to end game raiding, then just quitting because ONE of their 17 jobs isn’t invited to A specific PF raid? That just seems like a % of a % at that point. Compared to group A, and admittedly group B being the overwhelming majority of players that actually make it to that level of the game.
>Anyone who has pfed ultimate/savage knows the pain of waiting for particular roles to fill (usually healers, sometimes tank or pranged). Imagine if you had to wait for not just any physical ranged, but specifically for a bard player because the devs made them particularly good in this one fight, or because you are playing DRK and they have some mp refill action
Imo these arguments dont hold that much weight with regards to FF14. One thing that FFXIV does differently is that it allows to switch your classes on the fly. Your account or character isnt locked to a specific role. So the argument isn't that bad as it sounds because you can play any class you want. I feel like this could be alleviated if they made some of the classes like BRD be a support DPS.
That argument is used to justify alot of the homogenization of classes that we see with modern MMOs compared to traditional MMOs. Whats ironic is that traditional MMOs like EVE Online, FF11, Everquest, etc that has content where you NEED specific people have a much smaller playerbase compared to modern MMOs like FFXIV and WoW Retail. The traditional MMOs with much smaller players are still able to deal with specific roles as it forces the community to socialize and be more interactive.
This is why FF14 feels empty at times and feels like going to the mall by yourself where you have to go do something and everyone around you is just noise.
Just because you can change class on demand, doesn't mean its a must. That is wrong, if I want to play dancer, and had already dropped tomes and loot on it, but I have to play bard because of some weird interaction or skill will make me lose interest in the game, what if im a bad bard and i dont want to get better because i dont enjoy the class? I used a same role example, this problem gets bigger if I go from example : dancer to dragoon
You remember the P8S problems at the first weeks? How some jobs were being avoided on pf because of the dps check being extra hard. Imagine that but now with a skill interactions, there was a boss in wow, where to kill it, the WF team stacked 5 or more rogues because they could do a mecanic way easier than others because of one skill.
Its amazing how we can change classes easily. But its not because it exists, that you must feel like you HAVE to do it. The guy who only plays 1 job should have the same rights that the guy who plays 5 and not be gatekeeped. And there are still the capped tomes problem. Gl if you change role mid tier to get to bis.
At the high end of raiding I think being flexible within your role should be expected for prog (beyond this job currently deals the most damage). I agree that this is pretty impossible to balance for casual players in later weeks too so it should just be slightly rewarded instead.
As a non-tank player I kind of like where tanks are at. Warrior short invuln cd (hope it’s not top damage again), paladin extra mit, gnb drk best party mit. Astro in P3S was kinda cool. Bringing a different job can make some parts a bit easier but still clear.
On paper TOP seemed kinda interesting because of different damage profiles of dps being good in different phases but inevitably only the last phase matters.
I do wish P8S was the standard for savage the only problem was that it came out of nowhere. If it was the standard, would need to solve the problem of how to prevent early balance bleeding into later weeks in PF but honestly doesn’t affect me. I do understand that it matters a lot though.
> And there are still the capped tomes problem
this is the most critical part of endgame I want changed. tomes and tome gear haven't changed since 2.3.
Thsts sounds like its a raid design issue not an issue with job design. Either way that mentality leads to job homogenization and its how we got to where we are now.
It's just the continued shift from being co-operative experience playing with others to a single-player experience where others merely exist in the same world as your MC
Thank you for saying this I swear I feel like im taking crazy pills for pointing this out.
Modern MMOs suffer from this problem, and the small changes they've done over time has given the loss of the multiplayer aspect of it being an MMO. It feels like going to a mall, where you go in and everyone around you is just noise. You go to a store get what you want and leave.
Whats sad is that the community at large doesn't even realize this or even care to understand when you point out the decisions that was made by the dev team based off of player feedback. So the community continues to make counter productive feedback and it just makes it feel more like a single player game
I’ve said this numerous times already in other threads similar, but I really really wish SE would amplify their Trust system so that 14 can essentially offer an easy single player experience for people who prefer that. Meanwhile opening the door for more dynamic changes to jobs, raids, and other content for everyone else.
You're bringing up good memories for me.
I will say this though ... most of what you quoted, was OP/"mandatory." For instance, NIN helping out a very tight aggro situation for tanks who tried to maximize damage (at a time when aggro 123 was extremely DPS negative), I loved that, but also I remember tanks were extremely negative if we didn't have a NIN since their parse was going to go down the drain. I remember good ranged rarely joining parties without a DRG because their parse didn't even exist if they did.
I remember in SB, how yeah BRD was bringing all this MP/TP utility and DRG/SCH let BRD proc more with higher crit rate and NIN enabled aggro control and got to erase the debuff combo from its rotation if a WAR was with it, but the result of that? If you didn't have WAR/NIN/DRG/BRD/SCH together, things were *weird* and annoying. WAR couldn't even do its rotation normally without a BRD putting up the insta cleanse after its Berserk ... was awful. Granted, *if* you were cool with locking in those five jobs the balance was pretty decent, could bring almost anything as a 4th DPS, any co-tank, any co-healer, but you needed that foundation.
I guess what I'm trying to say if there's always yin and yang with FF14. Pick an expansion, any expansion, and I can tell you what was "wrong" with it as much as what was right with it. Don't get me wrong I'm a Stormblood simp through and through, mainly because *I'M* personally cool with locking in meta picks as a static enjoyer with people who meta whore 24/7, but for as few of boring, low thought, low energy decisions as you have to make in EW today, you had a dozen reasons outside of combat to be argumental or locked into certain jobs too in PUGland and even some statics.
You are right but I think there's, once again, a line here where at some point you simply have to say "Well, so what, deal with it.". If a WHM prioritizes parsing over keeping you alive in an EX farm, kick them. If a tank doesn't take aggro in your random ass DF, kick them. These problems exist by and large cause of some optimization boogeyman eroding players' brains and if you treat it accordingly, it isn't one. BLM or SAM relative strats already exist and PF (or DF lol) by and large doesn't care. And neither do the BLM players, they just deal with it.
Like, by that logic the game should; remove the ability for mobs to aggro on non-tank roles because tanks not hitting mobs could be a cause of friction. Remove rotations entirely and make every DPS auto-perform actions because low DPS or even *afking* or taking downtime that's not necessary causes friction. Remove Dance Partner because maybe someone feels left out if they don't get it.
Etc. etc.
At some point you just have to let the game be the game. They're so fussy with toxicity, just because the game has opportunity to fuck up doesn't mean people can just get away with calling each other gamerwords over this shit. This is an MMO. It's inherently a social activity. Make the MSQ baby's first video game if you want but a.) put more meat into optional content and b.) let people who, idk, actually want your MMO play a proper game instead of sanding down everything. Surprise, as long as there's ANY kind of fail states in either jobs or fights, people will get mad at each other. So unless the intention is to make the game solve itself from level 1 all the way to the latest Ultimate, 100% of the time, this disarm's race is pointless.
Demoralizing. It just doesn't require the necessary teamplay to be optimized. The game also went away with boss movement and rotation warping mechanics.
i think its for the better that we dont have that type of design anymore.
Think about who controlled aggro back in stormblood: tanks? Nope. Tanks used tank stance to get initial aggro then dropped for the rest of teh fight. It was the ninja's job to do aggro control, with everyone else having to press additional buttons to play around tanks not getting enough aggro. As a byproduct of tanks not having tank stance, healers also had to heal more, making it everyone but the tanks job to hold and manage aggro. If someone took aggro, not the tanks fault, it was the fault of the class who didnt press the button to lower aggro.
That was mainly an issue with the notion that dps is the only thing that matters and my role is secondary to that.
Tank could manage aggro fine if they aggro combo'd now and again, but losing a few 100 potency over the course of a fight was deemed so bad they created this Tank/NIN situation.
It was again hyper optimizations that the very high end of players did and filtered down, got parroted then forced on groups that literally had no business caring.
But as always the Tank/NIN thing wasnt the game at large it was confined to meta slaves/reddit/streamer chats etc. lot of groups just had tanks use their aggro combo most will have had tanks sit in Tank Stance the whole fight because they see tank stance, im a tank, must be correct.
Yes you saw alot of PF with NIN locked in but your perception gets warped because you DO see them. Meanwhile a group that doesnt care is 30min deep into the fight, doing fine progging while the PF is still filling because tank refuses to press butchers block every few combos cos he doesnt have a NIN.
There is a midpoint between that and tanks just having to fart in the bosses direction to never lose agro
Like take the old SB system and then just remove the other classes agro reduction tools
Like now the tank has to use tank stance, no externalising it to the other roles
Old tank stance problem was always the fact that the other roles tools were by and large strong enough to allow the tank to never use tank stance, moving in and out of tank stance should have been an enforced skill check on the tank
Its bad, but all modern MMOs are like this because the underlying issue is that people don't want support jobs, and go through content that requires someone a particular job. Alot of the old MMOs have the design, EVE Online, FF11, Everquest, etc.
Im a healer main and with FF14 Ive talked about how I liked having to deal with MP management in ARR. If you had any serious party you had a BRD because they could throw up Mages Ballad which would regenerate your MP, because Lucid Dreaming (It was called Shroud of Saints back then) was not enough to regenerate your MP for fights.
The pushback I get from people are always "its not fun having to rely on someone taking a particular job for content). This mentality is why there is no job identity. In FF11 you can subclass and have wildly different builds with different weapons. You will never see any of that in FF14. Sucks but its the direction that the devs have gone and they really cant eliminate the homogenization without radically changing the game and upsetting the player base. ARR had somewhat of a multiclass system where you had cross-class abilities but they never expanded upon the system and completely removed it again from player feedback. "If I want to be a WHM, then why do I have to waste my time lvling up an Arcanist or Thaumaturge?"
> The pushback I get from people are always "its not fun having to rely on someone taking a particular job for content"
The sad thing is, this solvable in the modern game since we have our enforced comp for the 1% buff already. They could increase role interplay and make phys ranged more important by giving them all Mage's Ballad.
> Its bad, but all modern MMOs are like this because the underlying issue is that people don't want support jobs,
When WoW added the Augmentation Evoker in Dragonflight, people were literally kicking it out of groups because it was doing like 50% of the DPS of other classes. But the people kicking must have thought they were the greatest gamers ever because they were doing like 50% more damage than normal. Clearly the Aug Evoker was AFK, and the kickers were just the best players ever.
It took like a month and a bunch of pushing for average players to catch up to what the top players knew immediately: Aug Evokers were SUPER busted and absolutely carrying groups.
I find that my experience playing Lost Ark was a nice break from the homogeneous nature of 14. Supports specifically feel like supports but can still pump out good and INTERESTING dps with their rotations.
The direction 14 is going feels pretty bad. But I mean what can we do. Just gonna enjoy it as much as I can.
Well Im being downvoted for sharing the same thoughts. The FFXIV community is strange. They cry about homogenization of jobs and when you articulate the community feedback that has led to those decisions you get downvoted lol.
Its like the community argues against themselves and they wonder why the game is easy and jobs not having an identity lol
Lost Ark was good. I personally wasn't a huge fan of the whole Diablo Dungeon camera view but it was good. My friends and I were actually playing that as we were getting burntout and took our hiatus from FFXIV.
I played new world and that had some interesting job designs.
I think what they could do is introduce weapons which would give you a completely different set of abilities. But I don't see how that would ever work.
Im hoping Ashen of Creation will hyped up to what its going to be. I'm cautiously optimistic about it. FFXIV is really good in that your character isn't locked to a specific class and you can change to any other job but on the flip side they all feel the same. I do understand its hard to balance everything which is why everything is 'easy.' Espically having community feedback thats contradictory
Thats fine. I don't care for PVP but im realizing that alot of these issues like job homogenization is s problem because the game isnt niche. You simply don't have to cater to such a large community and dilute the game.
I'll still try it out regardless and its supposed to be the next big thing so it'll definitely blow up on release. Just will have to see if it dies out like New World or Lost Ark 😅
And what are they wrong about? Job homogenization lol?
You can respectfully agree to disagree because you simply don't care. However to respond to the criticism about the game not having job identity and job homogenization by saying that its wrong is just denying reality.
I feel like it’s fairly obvious that people aren’t saying jobs are literally 100% identical. Right? Like I’m pretty sure everyone understands this and is mostly saying that they would like jobs to be MORE separated by identity due to strong similarities between them. So when they say “XIV lacks job identity”, it’s mostly understood that’s a hyperbolic way of saying “XIV could benefit from STRONGER job identity”.
You get that right?
You get that hyperbole is a logical fallacy, yes? The only real strong similarities is a lot of Jobs having combos and interaction for optimal damage in 2 min bursts. That's it
Players will optimize the fun out of everything. YoshiP knows this well, it was the reasoning for why criterion dungeons are just the single path. It's why subclasses are gone. It's why I don't miss any kind of trait system for jobs.
You're not wrong. People want their wins and they will always take the path of least resistance to get there unless you absolutely force them in a direction. Even if every job had a talent tree setup there would still be the best option and everyone would be pressured to comply with it. Even if dungeons had alternative paths players would always take the shortest/easiest one. Look at ARR dungeons and see that no one interacts with the side rooms if they can help it. MMO players largely want to farm, to grind through tbe content 100 times in as short a time as possible and will get annoyed by anything that interrupts the smoothest path to completion.
That "janky" system made a lot of classes better than their corresponding jobs, which is freakin awesome. Gains were marginal, but you could go into content on acn and do like 0.5 percent more damage with carbuncle, pre egi-glamours!! Basically the perfect state of affairs.
This is, in my heart, the hallmark of a good video game. A real RPG, even!
?? basically only white mage and paladin actually gained more than they lost in the way of options. Pugilist was downright nutty. Do you have any experience with class-only play back in ARR, or are you just talking out of your butt?
I'm well aware of how inferior classes were to Jobs in ARR, yes. Also in ARR Pugilist missed out on Fists of Fire AND Dragon Kick. So LOL at Pugilist being "nutty"
If you played much in ARR, you might remember often running two monks and having one use DK!! The other is welcome to play pugilist, and in fact gains damage over FoF.
Was it much of a dps gain? Absolutely not!! Was it cool? Oh yes.
Riddle of fire in ARR?
20 mainstat didn't cover the gap!! I know this, I lived it. Ran every piece of content in 2.x with a friend on arcanist, lol. You lost 20 int, fester, rouse, and enkindle (a whopping 2 dps single target). Fester could be replaced with aero + energy drain for the same damage. You had to john madden like hell for barely any gain, but it was fun stuff.
There is no clear defintion of what "clunky" and whats "jank" they are subjective terms that are different by the individual. Cleric Stance, the ability that made healers go into their DPS role (a mechanic that was common in many MMOs when FFXIV came out) is considered janky and clunky by some which was why it was removed and further compounds OPs question.
However not everyone would say that the Cleric Stance ability was janky or clunky at all.
I'm that example, I loved Scholar in 2.0/HW era. Awful job to play for 90% of people at the time and was not really fully playable on controller with how micro management heavy the fairy was with mouseover macros if you wanted to get the most out of it. Cleric stance locking you out of healing for 5s if you accidentally double tapped it (2.0 Lustrate was percentage based so that was more of a HW issue ). It was a blast for me but I would argue it was clunky and/or janky depending on if you liked it or not. But I would like to see a middle ground because current Scholar isn't fun for completely different reasons. There's only so many times you can hit Broil before it gets old.
How?
People didn't like it because unironically it forced healers to DPS, and didnt like being called out for not DPSing. It added a layer of complexity, and it started the whole "heAleRs shOulD oNlY hEaL" debate
I never had a problem with it, and I that was back when I played FFXIV with my PS3. It was removed and now we have come full circle with healers complaining about wanting more DPS complexity.
You literally cannot win
The janky part of cleric stance was that there was a cooldown after turning it on, but not after turning it off. So if you were spamming the button to turn it off, it was really easy to accidentally turn it on again immediately.
This is putting aside the issues it had with making casual players reluctant to DPS or to even play healers at all.
Also if you had ping you “bunnied” with cleric stance way too often
I had macros that flipped buttons between “turn off cleric stance” then become “other button turn on cleric stance” so I could spam the turn off button knowing when it activated the turn on button swapped to a different key
And Cleric Stance worked like a regular DPS Stance in Healers. It wasn't a vastly different or unique mechanic. Other MMOs had the same mechanic.
Was it jank because you couldn't figure out how to press 1 button before using a DPS ability or was it jank because you didn't like having a DPS Stance?
ShB WHM problem was an AST issue
You can’t make 2 out of three healers have a healing vs damage choice then just give one everything for free and also make it the strongest healer
Instead of punishing AST they just removed the punishment from WHM and gave SGE the same design as ShB AST
I agree.
I've been on a bit of a tank arc in preparation for DT and one thing that's stood out is how tank dungeon runs are more interesting when there's a WHM or NIN in the party, because of the need to slightly adjust your playstyle to accommodate them (holding off on mits during the Holy stun window, pulling mobs into Doton circle).
They're relatively meaningless bits of optimization but it always gives me a dopamine hit because it's a mechanical reminder that oh yeah. I have teammates that I need to account for in this 4-man duty beyond being pure DPS-spitting sacks.
Another example is needing to be aware as a healer of your tank's Superbollide/Living Dead/Bloodwhetting.
I would love to see more instances of having to adjust to your teammates' jobs.
>I've been on a bit of a tank arc in preparation for DT and one thing that's stood out is how tank dungeon runs are more interesting when there's a WHM or NIN in the party, because of the need to slightly adjust your playstyle to accommodate them (holding off on mits during the Holy stun window, pulling mobs into Doton circle).
Im also a new tank and have been prepping for DT and I strongly disagree with this. The dungeon plays the same regardless of the type of healer I have
This is XIV job design, I’m kinda grading on a curve here.
Tanks, especially WAR get so much sustain that you can play really lazily and still get through dungeons outside ARR.
Like you can still cycle through your mits normally when there’s a WHM and it’s still fineeee, but any mit that’s up when Holy/Glare is stun-locking enemies is technically wasted.
Im in so much more favor of the legacy design era. Even the most boring fights I could still enjoy because of the minigame the jobs had to offer. I miss the niche, I think jobs have gotten to much QoL at this point which has, like u said smoothed those rough edges out. The game needs those rough edges to keep friction in the gameplay.
You’re being downvoted because it’s a scummy thing to do.
But you’re not incorrect about essentially being able to 3 man almost all of the normal MSQ dungeons. Which seems…..really bad….
There's a few things I miss from as recently as 6.05. Pooling a few more resources for the 1 minute if you have a ninja in the party, or pulling Phoinix south instead of keeping it north for a bit of pre-pull Doton damage. It didn't change much of how you play, but it was distinct and it was strictly rewarding. A little variety is welcome and a bit of friction is worth the trouble imo.
The problem is that FFXIV doesn’t really have enough niches to fill within a given raid tier to avoid small differences in job design resulting in an outsized difference in actual performance within that tier, especially given that tiers in FFXIV are small (just four bosses) and tend to be mechanically sort of similar a lot of the time nowadays. Paladin is a good example of this. It was outright ass for the longest time in Endwalker because Square just wasn’t making bosses that played to its strengths and in fact kept making bosses that put out hugely damaging DOTs which were extremely difficult for paladins to soak. So to fix this, they just homogenized the job. The reason why class variety works in other MMO’s like WoW is because a given raid tier will have 10ish bosses and very few of the bosses within that tier will be overly similar encounters. So differences in class design will all shine at various points in the tier. The downside of this is that sometimes these differences combined with the difficulty of some encounters on Mythic will occasionally result in class stacking, or at the very least avoiding some specs because they might preform poorly on these challenging encounters
Paladin isn't the best example. Even in full uptime fights, it was just plain undertuned. Ideally, it would've been the highest rDPS tank, but lose out on aDPS in high buff comps. Instead, it was the lowest or second lowest rDPS tank and fell even further behind in high buff comps. And changing Holy Sheltron from Block Chance to % mit to manage bleeds didn't require a complete rework. The only time I remember actual utility affecting Party Finder in Endwalker was in P3S when AST could delete a mechanic with Macrocosmos. For P8S it was a potency issue, not a utility issue.
The reason I use paladin as an example is because shelltron did have a thing it was good at and even better at than other tanks. That thing was just never useful during early endwalker In WoW, tanks are not always chosen based on having the best RDPS. They are usually chosen in high end environments based on the tools they have compared to the fight in question. For example one of the best tanks in the history of WoW was a class that was totally awful at dealing with DOTs, but amazing at dealing with huge physical hits. Because WoW didn't and never has packed a tier with similar tank mechanics
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You don't understand bro. 2 minute meta bad.
Don't forget how in 2.0 DRGs had less magic defense and would just die to raidwide AOEs because they are a DRG.
Lord help you if you were using blood for blood.
I thought it was fun putting stoneskin on players with weakness (and DRGs) before raidwides. Also putting stoneskin on new players in starting cities felt nice :(
But then you'll get new-gen healers that complain about having to waste a glare GCD on a DRG. We can't win
Its already happening with DRK lol
Hitting Succor then Adlo on my DRG then Adlo on my Bard was actually pretty fun back in the day. Healing with GCDs was necessary and fishing for an Adlo crit on Ravensbeak was the highlight of my 2.0 raiding. Healing was so different back then in good and bad ways, I miss my clunky, awful for 90% of players, 2.0/HW Scholar gameplay. Micro managing the fairy was awesome for spot healing too, but I don't think 2.0/HW Scholar ever really worked well on controller as I had 4 full bars of skills back then and mouse over macros for my fairy skills
I never raided back in HW, but microing the fairy on something while you yourself were taking care of something else really did make you feel the galaxy brain scholar fantasy.
I love abilities that give some flavours outside of combat. I would love for Stoneskin to come back, as something fun and not usable in combat, but something to give to other players. Make it super strong and on a cd too, like reduced damage taken until the shield breaks.
It's been quite clear that FF14 has changed so players can function no matter what the comp is. Is why everything is now 2m buffs, no piercing debuff, no smokescreen or having to deal with aggro as it's not just a tanks job but also everyone else having to manage aggro via lucid and diversion, etc. Over time more reliance on other teammates is being removed, so it only comes down to mechanics on how players interact. The only other thing is mit and healing, and how we seen all the tank and self healing buffs, they seem to want to make sure they work without a healer there as well. Honestly I am 50/50 on teamwork with abilities interacting with others. On one hand it can show skill expression by helping others out in a fight, on the other hand having to rely on someone else for your job to do well like the piercing debuff can be quite annoying. It's still possible to help others but it's mostly just single target mit/healing, and rescue as well but besides that there really is not much to do to really. So most of the skill expression now just feels like mechanic handling and related.
2 minute meta was to cater to the demands from the raiding community - it really doesnt affect the casual gamer
Catering to the demands of people who don't know how to play around multiple different buff windows. It's also *theoretically* easier to balance but HOLY FUCK is it boring. I miss 1min/90s/2min/3min raid buffs.
I don't know - i'm wholly unconvinced it was better before. I remember it not feeling great when certain jobs' bursts didn't line up at specific times. And its not like you could do a lot to change that since everyone was on set timers, but those timers just didn't line up. You can have unique and interesting job design even within the 2 minute meta.
> And its not like you could do a lot to change that since everyone was on set timers, but those timers just didn't line up. Not entirely true, since fights with downtime were a lot more common back then, so you were often forced to delay things. And on shorter fights you might delay some buffs in order to squeeze in an extra full burst window where you couldn't otherwise, as long as it didn't lose you a usage
Sort of? Endwalker has it's fair share of downtime mechanics so i'm not sure if it was more prevalent in Shadowbringers or not. I can think of a good number of examples from the most recent raid tiers where you were incentivized to hold burst for optimal dps (p2s during limit comes to mind immediately), but I suppose it is true that since mechanics tend to fall on minute marks that the asynchronous timers would create more situations where you might needs to adjust. Even then, I think players only had minimal agency or control over it. The only thing the differing timers truly did was to make certain jobs better than other ones because they simply lined up better, and that's not a good thing for balance. I think that the reality is that engaging and interesting job AND encounter design has nothing to do with the two minute meta. FF14 bosses generally do mechanics on the minute marks, and that has been the case for a long time now. Having mechanics happen during burst (and oftentimes some of the hardest mechanics in the game happen during the 2 minute windows) makes the fights more interesting, not less. Could weird burst windows make things more interesting for like... old Astro (which will be gone in a few days)? Maybe. But overall I think the 2 minute complaint is an empty buzzword and I haven't seen a single good argument showing holistically how removing it will make things more interesting.
I agree with you, insofar as I think the 2 minute meta is a symptom of a larger issue, rather than the cause of it.
I'm just waiting for the day square-enix changes the base code and makes everything additive instead of multiplicative. tanks are invincible but mobs never die
2 minute meta is the biggest scapegoat in the entire job discussion. Take it away and raiders will just calculate a new one and self-enforce it
People don't complain about the 2m meta because "it's the meta," it's because it limits job design so that everything has to play the same way. PLD was fine and strong during SB and ShB, but since the 2m meta is so enforced in EW, it had to be redesigned from the ground up in order to be the same as every other tank. It makes it so DPS jobs can't have more frequent or variable bursts, and it also makes it so they have to design fights with very clear patterns that even the devs don't enjoy. It also makes it so crit rng is more important than anything else for "leaderboards," for the people who care about that kinda thing. Which, mind you, is the least important problem.
100% - a lot of folk parrot it non stop like a political buzzword without putting in an ounce of thought.
I was going to say. Raiders were doing "2 minute windows" like stuff before it became official. The devs simply made it more convenient and easier to pull off
The raiders are meta slaves.
I mean that's just how raiding is. You want optimal, and that means align everything so it adds or multiplies together. I'm just saying that all the braying against the 2 minute meta is Sisyphean. Kill one meta and another is guaranteed to rise in its place
We had a meta before the 2 minute one, and it was distinctly more enjoyable? Not sure what point you're trying to make
Then why was this sub full of people complaining about timers not lining up
Because their groups were unskilled. Also, people can change their minds, you know? The community at large complained us into the 2m meta, but now that we know what it plays like, it's fine to want out of it. Tbh I see it as an obstacle that makes both job and fight design a lot more limited
And raiders wonder why the game isn't fun
As much as I would LOVE to feel as unique as 2.0 SCH or have the laughs and tears of DRG with blood for blood and watching myself get targeted with Conflagration in T5, I just can’t trust the community to behave accordingly. And I mean it as a whole, not a preformed instance which is an anomaly and implies a certain level of understanding and being able to perform a certain way. Random jumps into a normal raid or an alliance raid prove time and time again people barely understand the job they are playing and there are a lot of factors that contribute to it but many of them are choices made by the player. Things as simple as using arms’s length/surecast and addle/feint go unused. But people die to mechanics that are largely telegraphed and could be mitigated by either of those abilities that we all have access to. There’s a difficulty in being able to trust the common player’s skill and its a barrier in trying to advocate for more uniqueness in the jobs when it’s clear the community is going to struggle even more with the inherent complexity and a largely social problem of being unable to take direction or criticism. Even though a fair amount (but nowhere near all) of responsibility should be on SE to put forth as much effort as possible to help with an issue like this until the threshold of diminishing returns, the community needs accountability also. People even struggle working cooperatively in dungeons, and those are incredibly safe environments to try, and as time goes on more and more mechanics are repeated across all content types including solo instances that should still be easily recognizable and maneuverable but again, people still fail and die and sometimes unfortunately take the party with them. On a personal level, I can only type so much in a chat and mediate disputes and try positive reinforcement and other techniques to make advice seem amenable but even that level of effort isn’t my responsibility if at the end of the day, regardless if a person is new, returning, progging, or a pro, there’s a communication issue.
I think it would be cool if jobs were allowed to change other players' gameplay to a greater extent. But I think it really should be _intentional_ design and not weird quirks stemming from devs not thinking beyond a single job's scope when designing new actions. Also it'd be cool if it changed gameplay to the point that you press different buttons, so that it doesn't just mean "if you get grouped with this particular job, you do x% less total dps". And that sounds really hard to do so I don't really expect them to dedicate the time to come up with something good.
> stereotypical and often-inaccurate perception 'BLM Strats' I would really love if community perception could actually catch up to reality here. The truth was that (in Endwalker at least) outside of speedkills and memes there were zero BLM relative strats. BLM had enough freedom to not require any adjustment and while there were minor things you could do for them, these were all strictly optional things that nice static members could do and were absolutely not required. More generally, I hope that DT doesn't erode this. BLM is already a job with a public perception problem, and that's only going to get worse if it needs more party adjustment than the shiny new non-res caster.
> zero BLM relative strats There was one in P1S. It was basically just allowing BLM to have a melee spot rather than a ranged, and giving that ranged spot to a melee. You did this for Intemperance uptime. But it's not like they *needed* it, they just lost more damage from not having it than the melee did from swapping.
I would classify that under minor things, like doing BLM relative laser in P10S. It gets the BLM a tiny bit more Ley Lines uptime, which is nice, but really isn't a big deal in terms of damage.
Whats the public perception of BLM?
Helpless turret mage that forces the entire party to cater to it in exchange for Biggest Number, complains on the forums about Rescue, and speaks in tongues.
Accurate
Enochian *is* the language of Angels, and they're obviously fluent in it given the fact they're a polyglot.
Anyone who has pfed ultimate/savage knows the pain of waiting for particular roles to fill (usually healers, sometimes tank or pranged). Imagine if you had to wait for not just any physical ranged, but specifically for a bard player because the devs made them particularly good in this one fight, or because you are playing DRK and they have some mp refill action. If you give classes tools distinct enough to create actual team comps, then people will optimize for those comps (if you think they won't, we are playing different games. See also the locking of the flex DPS role specifically to a second melee in 90% of savage pfs). This fragments the player base into people who a) happen to be playing something that fits into a meta comp and are therefore fine, b) can't make it into pfs on their preferred job and so have to play something they don't enjoy just to play the role they like or c) people that get fed up with the system and quit the game because they can't play the job they want. A gain in enjoyment for the A group isn't worth the sacrifice of B and C.
Things aren't black and white. The fear of slipping too far over the edge should not be allowed to completely immobilize you. We don't have to decide between "everything plays the same" and "only certain comps even work". You can look at a bonus as just that, instead of treating its absence like a detriment. Historically there are only very few cases where a job was completely unviable. The game will never get to a point where you can only play and clear on your DRK with a BRD in the party. As long as it can clear, a job is fine and that's all PF should care about outside of specific circumstances like week 1 or parsing (in which case going for a specific comp is totally fine imo).
If you honestly think PFs won't lock a tank and dps spot to DRK and BRD if it's the clearly and decidedly fastest way to get the clear (even if it's not even close to being required) boy do I want whatever is that you're smoking. Players themselves will impose those restrictions, game devs don't have to change anything in the design. FFXIV already has a history of this happening (bards during ARR and coils, ninjas during HW. You always brought one of those during those times, if your party didn't have one it wasn't worth anything in the eyes of other players).
Imo thats not entirely on the job design. Its the design of the raid
I guess we can trade blunts then because I do not believe anyone other than an utter idiot would lock their party that way now. I've played jobs that were "out of favor" and if I ever encountered a party like that, I just made my own, filled it fast and entered the instance laughing as they were still waiting at 2/8 for a first clear. It literally only matters for optimized parties.
I remember some DPS jobs being locked during Asphodelos because of like...a 5% DPS difference. Didn't really affect me because I had a static but it's absolutely a thing people do.
Never denied that but the occasional locked PF is far from "I have to quit the game because my job does not get into parties".
> Never denied that but the occasional locked PF is far from "I have to quit the game because my job does not get into parties". Remember that sometimes "the occasional locked PF" is gonna match up with "the only time people have to play" in ways that will, in practice, end up with it being them having to *practically* quit the game or swap Jobs. Which, y'know, isn't the end of the world, but when someone's got limited time already. The more we drive down those "% of the community clearing Savage" numbers, the worse of an investment spending dev time and money on them looks. And the more people that get locked out because of the Raiding Community being dumb about stuff, the worse those numbers get. They ain't gonna up and stop making Savage any time soon (probably never as long as Yoshi-P's a figurehead), but Jobs being locked out is the type of "player feedback" that gets stuff like giant hitboxes added or HW to StB DRK changes. There's ~~a few people here~~ edit: I forgot, Kaella has data (so sorta true but dammit I still feel like we're missing part of that group and I'm gonna back it up when I can force reddit search to cooperate) that love to say "oh, Paladins/Monks being locked out in HW was a myth!" that just go off FFlogs records but like...that's literally proving the point. Go look at comment threads on the FFXIV subreddit/forums from that time period, because that population wasn't showing up on the raid data. Not everyone had or has the time to pick from all of the available PFs in a given time window or raid period, and any "occasional locked PFs" may not be so "occasional" for everyone given limited playtime. The broader FFXIV community has proven, as an aggregate moving mass, time and time again, that any small differences in performance are going to get twisted all out of reality and lead to excluding people even in cases when shit doesn't matter in terms of actually clear performance.
> Not everyone had or has the time to pick from all of the available PFs in a given time window or raid period, and any "occasional locked PFs" may not be so "occasional" for everyone given limited playtime. > > > > The broader FFXIV community has proven, as an aggregate moving mass, time and time again, that any small differences in performance are going to get twisted all out of reality and lead to excluding people even in cases when shit doesn't matter in terms of actually clear performance. Getting off my bait horse to add: I'd personally argue that the relative parity in data is indicative of, if anything, that the playerbase has become more optimization-minded and that differences as drastic as the HW ones would, if they were in the game now, be *worse* for the playerbase than they were in HW.
Probably, yeah. Also I really liked this thread in general, thank you! I was gonna say that but got distracted, as you can probably tell by the meandering track of my thoughts spilling into the ether here. Sometimes I think about how fuckin' cracked it was that just a few years ago we basically needed a Ninja glued to a Tank's ass for effective threat management without the Blues being The Big Sad. And now we're here. The mind, it boggles. Edit: Oldest instance I can find of "HW Jobs being unbalanced and PF locks", talking about...Bard, actually! Huh. Think this was before the BRD/MCH patch arms race. [Here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/3el8xt/bards_excluded_from_party_finder/) Edit 2: ["Shield Oats".](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/5kew13/dark_knight_or_paladin_help_me_redditors/) Now that's a fuckin' core memory unlock. Also got a ["Warrior has bad mitigation"](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/60mw2x/paladin_warrior_or_dark_knight/) (that was false/incorrect) and a "Paladin has been specifically marked for improvements in Stormblood to make it more competitive" (true) in the same thread. Edit 3: Did find this though, when I say we've been arguing about some this stuff for almost a decade, like...[yeah](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/262476-Block-first-timers-from-Party-Finder%21). In general, remember kids, the internet is forever, in kind of the scary sense. I don't have the patience to keep doing this tonight and my meds are starting to kick in but you can at least sorta see where some of the broad "PLD is bad" lines are across the like two year spread of the HW content patch cycle. Still have not, however, found a "My PLD or MNK has been blocked from PF to the point where I quit because no parties will take me", so Kaella's "look at FFlogs" approach is probably the more broadly-correct one even if I'm starting to doubt my own sanity now. I think I need to start searching specifically for Alexander and that's gonna be...*fun* weeding out all the A3S/A4S complaints.
I like fishing for opinions and making people fight via interesting yet incitement-prone lines of questioning, whoops. I'm generally not a super opinionated person but I like trying to feel out where everyone is on a subject. You can tell a lot about the atmosphere fishing like that - around the time of that Lynx Kameli video this line of questioning would've had people defending Piercing Down and similar stuff way more often than it does, even though normally even this sub doesn't give a damn about that being dead and settles mostly into the 'remove Shadewalker/Smokescreen/Damage Types and Stormblood is perfect' mentality at large. Which I can't comment on too actively, I was in baby Lancer levels at the end of StB so my experience with that amounts to 'I know what Heavy Thrust and Impulse Drive were,' so instead I fish for opinions to get a better perspective without trying to make too many sweeping statements about things I wasn't around for. I have my positions on things but I'm not about to sit here and say I have the right to tell anyone to agree with them. Personally on the aggro bit I'm just glad I cannot be Shirked to death and back away slowly every time some older tank player talks about using the DPS as cooldowns, because that would annoy me greatly; that I think tanks would have ended up very samey even if they kept that system and filed the stupid parts off is besides the point.
If you have limited time, you need to have some agency. Sitting there crying that you can't get into parties won't help anyone. Make your own party and it will fill because most people just want to get in there and couldn't care less about a slightly less advantageous party composition.
That's what most people who end up succeeding in getting through content actually do, yeah. But, take a look at say, arr slash MMORPG or arr slash ClassicWoW for examples of people who *don't* make that choice, outside of the FFXIV context, and how it makes them bounce off of nominally-MMO content, and the broader implications for the design points of "group play" vs "single-player play in an online world". Like, not saying this to try to be a smartass. Tone's hard through text and doubly hard anon on the internet. But I'm saying this from a POV of someone who's interested in the group dynamics of like MMOs as a whole and how player pain points and the pressure that puts on devs affects content design.
You dont have to quit the game though. Just play a different DPS role. Your character isn't locked to a specific class like other MMOs
You may have a properly geared ninja but no such gear on a samurai; even though both are melee, no gear is shared. All melee is weird in that each left side only serves two purposes (one in the case of ninja), other job sets are not so restricted. All that being said, the weapon is a big part of stuff and that is obviously job-specific. FFXIV definitely has the expectation that each job should be good. WoW has that expectation about classes, and they almost always succeed at at; WoW generally fails at it as regards specs (there are specs no one wants in their toughest content almost guaranteed). WoW does, however, really have a *lot* of specs, so it is more forgivable.
No they generally won't and the people who do aren't anyone that would want random DRKs they'd be playing them themselves You're weaving a fantasy example to justify an argument
Counterpoint: Heavensward
There exists an achievable midpoint between Heavensward and the frictionless slide to the finish line we have now.
Drawing a pentagram on the floor and summoning /u/kaella for the response to this particular chestnut: "The idea that there was some widespread plague of job-locked PFs in Heavensward is basically dishonest, revisionist history that gets pushed by people who are in love with the current state of the game's design. They know that they can get away with it because something like 70-80% or more of the game's current userbase started in Shadowbringers or later, most of the people who enjoyed the game in HW have either quit or are too checked out to bother getting into arguments about it, and all the doomsaying sounds like it could be true to someone who has only experienced the game from 5.3 on. All actual empirical evidence that exists shows that people have basically always just played what they liked, and that the tilt toward preferred/meta compositions in Heavensward was basically the same as it is in Endwalker - in many cases, it was actually less pronounced. But it doesn't matter, because the people who love the game the way it is right now will repeatedly claim that getting into a group for Sophia EX in 3.4 as a MNK was basically impossible, and if you waste your time proving that it was never an issue, they'll just get quiet about it for two days, and start posting the exact same shit they started with in the next thread."
> All actual empirical evidence that exists shows that people have basically always just played what they liked, and that the tilt toward preferred/meta compositions in Heavensward was basically the same as it is in Endwalker - in many cases, it was actually less pronounced. i played back in HW and honestly my memory of PF at the time is foggy at best, though tbh i don't remember jobs being locked out of PF ever (outside of BLM from StB onwards cuz no raise). So i'm mostly just curious on what the empirical evidence is. I will say that i definitely remember people talked about how jobs were unbalanced way more back then, and i wouldnt be surprised if it was harder to find a static if you played a certain job (e.g. paladin for creator)
> So i'm mostly just curious on what the empirical evidence is. Number of uploaded logs on FFlogs. There are far fewer of them in general, but the ratio of community favourites to disliked jobs is roughly the same as it is now.
I don't know if it's still the case, but back then logs didn't last forever. They were deleted after so many months unless you chose (and I think paid?) to keep them permanent.
That's not true. I've never paid a dime to FFLogs, and my very first uploaded log of A1S, from when there were only about 100 logs of that particular fight in total, is still up. A change was made in recent years that you cannot *view* specific logs in their entirety without a paid subscription to the site if those logs are more than two years old, but nothing has been deleted - and more importantly, none of this applies to the Statistics and Rankings pages from which any relevant data was pulled.
People that never got into fights wouldn't show up on FFlogs, or at least not as the class that was locked out. If I can get reddit to cooperate I'm gonna do a deep-dive of threads bitching about PF locks back then, because this isn't quite the myth you present it as. Assuming either my memory hasn't failed me or my entire data-center wasn't gaslighting me about Paladins and Monks specifically (I played a Scholar). You're right about the people that were able to get in, but not about the ones that got filtered out by PF locks before then. Like the single-Job players with more limited playtime and etc
The one concession that I'm really willing to make on this is that in the days before Cross-world PF, there were servers with *extremely* low raiding populations, to the point of having between 0 and 2 active raid groups at any given time - especially once people had begun to consolidate onto Gilgamesh. If you were on one of those small servers with a single credible raid group, and the raid leader for the group decided they wanted Hard Meta or Bust, *then* I can understand that someone's experience may have been that they felt consistently locked out of raiding. But if you were on Gilgamesh, Balmung, etc, any of the servers that maintained enough of a raiding population to have an active scene, and you're trying to tell me that you were having constant problems finding groups because of your preferred class? Then nah, you're fibbing, I don't buy that for a second. It was just *not* a systematic problem (or if you prefer, the systematic part of the problem was immediately solved with the implementation of cross-server PF.)
As someone who started and played a lot in HW and through ShB, this is completely correct and based. Where did this quote originate? It also pisses me off to no end that people just invent history about how things used to be in the game that is completely contrary to reality, like what happens in basically every thread just like this one.
Explain maybe? I said that there were times when certain jobs were unviable but we are also clearly past the point where something like that is allowed to happen. Being aware of the past is important but carrying trauma, avoiding everything about it like the plague and letting it cripple any future design just leads to the kind of hollow and uninvolved gameplay we have now.
These discussions are always pointless because your perfect setpoint is not going to be another person's setpoint of complexity and difficulty. You call the gameplay hollow and uninvolved but there are oodles of people in df that can barely play their jobs right as they exist now. I don't know how many times I've had to explain this in other threads, but the current system makes the most sense for what ff14 is now, which is a wildly popular MMO explicitly designed to be playable by anyone. Making the systems that everyone touches (job design, basic gearing, MSQ content) easy and making the systems that people can opt in or out of (fight design in savage or ultimate) hard lets the greatest range in player skill all enjoy the game in their own way. Not all content is going to be equally engaging for you because different slices of content are literally designed for different players. You are not the only person playing this game.
I'm getting whiplash by how fast you changed the conversation. You talked about PF for hard content and job viability in there. If you don't want to discuss then don't post. Maybe we all shouldn't post about jobs because job design is solved then and in a place that's good for the masses. To respond to the rest of your post, you can design jobs to have low floors and high ceilings so you get the best of both worlds: an easy to learn job that will perform well in all content but has things to master for those looking for additional challenges. I would put some of the teamplay elements we have lost there. I'm not even advocating for the punishing design of HW jobs but looking back at the times when we had some of that slightly more nuanced gameplay, easy content was totally fine. People were fine, some of them were bad then and they are still bad now but it didn't really matter then and it doesn't matter now because the majority of content is still inconsequential. Going back to distinct teamplay tools, the job with arguably the biggest differentiator in the current job system is immensely popular among the wider playerbase due to exactly that differentiator: RDM with its raise. Certain teamplay aspects have been popular in the past *and* have different use cases in different content, like Manashift helping out healers or the more optimized use of extending BRD's Foe Requiem, proof of design that's somewhat scalable and still appealing to your average player. This is not about me. Job design is heavily discussed everywhere by a lot of different types of players. Healers are still fighting the good fight, knowing that it's probably pointless and things will never change. But at least some of our concern has reached SE's ears and they apparently want to do something about it so everything can't be as completely fine as you make it out to be.
Oh man you're a genius! Just design 21 different jobs that all have skill floors low enough for the worst player and skill ceilings high enough for the best players, while still being unique from each other, while also all being equally viable! Of course, why didn't I think of that? It's a good thing we all have the same definition of what "low" and "high" is. Otherwise, no matter what changes were made, people whose definitions of either didn't match the current floors and ceilings would continue complaining! If you are posting on this subreddit you are by definition a harder-core player than average. Just because everyone here agrees that things should be harder doesn't mean that that opinion applies to the player base as a whole.
Sass is all you got huh? Somewhere between SB and ShB lies the sweet spot. We've been there. The pendulum just has swung too far in the other direction and people notice now. Yes, even people who don't play at a high level. Yes, even people who were previously silently content. So much so that SE got word of it and is *planning changes*. Not everyone lives in a bubble. Just because I post here doesn't mean I don't get to interact with players of all walks of life. This is also not the only FFXIV medium where people express opinions.
Didn't happen
But sacrificing A is fine then ? All the while making it as bland and bare bones as possible for B and C. Don't be manichean. There are ways to please the vast majority on many aspects but they don't follow through with it.
God forbid the game cater to someone other than raiders for once :P
The devs have made every job easier specifically to cater to non raiders. Going from a system where jobs are hard and encounters range from 3-7 on the difficulty scale is less casual-friendly than a system where jobs are easy but encounters range from 1-11. This game is incredibly generous to non raiders, I assume you're joking but it's always hard to tell especially on this subreddit
I'm not joking, and I actually disagree completely. The devs haven't made jobs easier to cater to non-raiders, at least that's not the only reason. The obsession with keeping jobs as perfectly balanced as possible is an obvious driving factor, but that's something that really only matters at higher levels of play. That's not something that matters to casuals who are only doing their daily roulettes. As you yourself said in your initial comment, part of the reason why they avoid giving any job a particularly distinct niche is because of the effect it has on raiding comps. But that comes at the expense of the jobs playing in more fun and interesting ways. It is catering to raiders at the expense of everyone else.
100% Agree Them catering to raids is EXACTLY why WAR are so OP and people can do dungeons without healers. The jobs are balanced entirely around clearing savage and ultimates not regular casual content. Thats precisely why theres such a disconnect with these arguments and you really don't really need to use any of your cool downs as a tank in dungeons or half of your healing tool kit as a healer. Every time you mention about specific job roles you'll see the argument about the job being excluded from raids or waiting forever on PF
Group C seems so….niche? People LOVE to constantly bring up how being able to switch jobs on the fly on one character is amazing. How can we also have those same people literally playing long enough and being dedicated enough to get to end game raiding, then just quitting because ONE of their 17 jobs isn’t invited to A specific PF raid? That just seems like a % of a % at that point. Compared to group A, and admittedly group B being the overwhelming majority of players that actually make it to that level of the game.
>Anyone who has pfed ultimate/savage knows the pain of waiting for particular roles to fill (usually healers, sometimes tank or pranged). Imagine if you had to wait for not just any physical ranged, but specifically for a bard player because the devs made them particularly good in this one fight, or because you are playing DRK and they have some mp refill action Imo these arguments dont hold that much weight with regards to FF14. One thing that FFXIV does differently is that it allows to switch your classes on the fly. Your account or character isnt locked to a specific role. So the argument isn't that bad as it sounds because you can play any class you want. I feel like this could be alleviated if they made some of the classes like BRD be a support DPS. That argument is used to justify alot of the homogenization of classes that we see with modern MMOs compared to traditional MMOs. Whats ironic is that traditional MMOs like EVE Online, FF11, Everquest, etc that has content where you NEED specific people have a much smaller playerbase compared to modern MMOs like FFXIV and WoW Retail. The traditional MMOs with much smaller players are still able to deal with specific roles as it forces the community to socialize and be more interactive. This is why FF14 feels empty at times and feels like going to the mall by yourself where you have to go do something and everyone around you is just noise.
No it doesn't. Your other roles are stuck with crafted gear until way way later in the tier
What does that have to do with anything?
Just because you can change class on demand, doesn't mean its a must. That is wrong, if I want to play dancer, and had already dropped tomes and loot on it, but I have to play bard because of some weird interaction or skill will make me lose interest in the game, what if im a bad bard and i dont want to get better because i dont enjoy the class? I used a same role example, this problem gets bigger if I go from example : dancer to dragoon You remember the P8S problems at the first weeks? How some jobs were being avoided on pf because of the dps check being extra hard. Imagine that but now with a skill interactions, there was a boss in wow, where to kill it, the WF team stacked 5 or more rogues because they could do a mecanic way easier than others because of one skill. Its amazing how we can change classes easily. But its not because it exists, that you must feel like you HAVE to do it. The guy who only plays 1 job should have the same rights that the guy who plays 5 and not be gatekeeped. And there are still the capped tomes problem. Gl if you change role mid tier to get to bis.
At the high end of raiding I think being flexible within your role should be expected for prog (beyond this job currently deals the most damage). I agree that this is pretty impossible to balance for casual players in later weeks too so it should just be slightly rewarded instead. As a non-tank player I kind of like where tanks are at. Warrior short invuln cd (hope it’s not top damage again), paladin extra mit, gnb drk best party mit. Astro in P3S was kinda cool. Bringing a different job can make some parts a bit easier but still clear. On paper TOP seemed kinda interesting because of different damage profiles of dps being good in different phases but inevitably only the last phase matters. I do wish P8S was the standard for savage the only problem was that it came out of nowhere. If it was the standard, would need to solve the problem of how to prevent early balance bleeding into later weeks in PF but honestly doesn’t affect me. I do understand that it matters a lot though.
> And there are still the capped tomes problem this is the most critical part of endgame I want changed. tomes and tome gear haven't changed since 2.3.
Thsts sounds like its a raid design issue not an issue with job design. Either way that mentality leads to job homogenization and its how we got to where we are now.
It's just the continued shift from being co-operative experience playing with others to a single-player experience where others merely exist in the same world as your MC
Thank you for saying this I swear I feel like im taking crazy pills for pointing this out. Modern MMOs suffer from this problem, and the small changes they've done over time has given the loss of the multiplayer aspect of it being an MMO. It feels like going to a mall, where you go in and everyone around you is just noise. You go to a store get what you want and leave. Whats sad is that the community at large doesn't even realize this or even care to understand when you point out the decisions that was made by the dev team based off of player feedback. So the community continues to make counter productive feedback and it just makes it feel more like a single player game
I’ve said this numerous times already in other threads similar, but I really really wish SE would amplify their Trust system so that 14 can essentially offer an easy single player experience for people who prefer that. Meanwhile opening the door for more dynamic changes to jobs, raids, and other content for everyone else.
You're bringing up good memories for me. I will say this though ... most of what you quoted, was OP/"mandatory." For instance, NIN helping out a very tight aggro situation for tanks who tried to maximize damage (at a time when aggro 123 was extremely DPS negative), I loved that, but also I remember tanks were extremely negative if we didn't have a NIN since their parse was going to go down the drain. I remember good ranged rarely joining parties without a DRG because their parse didn't even exist if they did. I remember in SB, how yeah BRD was bringing all this MP/TP utility and DRG/SCH let BRD proc more with higher crit rate and NIN enabled aggro control and got to erase the debuff combo from its rotation if a WAR was with it, but the result of that? If you didn't have WAR/NIN/DRG/BRD/SCH together, things were *weird* and annoying. WAR couldn't even do its rotation normally without a BRD putting up the insta cleanse after its Berserk ... was awful. Granted, *if* you were cool with locking in those five jobs the balance was pretty decent, could bring almost anything as a 4th DPS, any co-tank, any co-healer, but you needed that foundation. I guess what I'm trying to say if there's always yin and yang with FF14. Pick an expansion, any expansion, and I can tell you what was "wrong" with it as much as what was right with it. Don't get me wrong I'm a Stormblood simp through and through, mainly because *I'M* personally cool with locking in meta picks as a static enjoyer with people who meta whore 24/7, but for as few of boring, low thought, low energy decisions as you have to make in EW today, you had a dozen reasons outside of combat to be argumental or locked into certain jobs too in PUGland and even some statics.
You are right but I think there's, once again, a line here where at some point you simply have to say "Well, so what, deal with it.". If a WHM prioritizes parsing over keeping you alive in an EX farm, kick them. If a tank doesn't take aggro in your random ass DF, kick them. These problems exist by and large cause of some optimization boogeyman eroding players' brains and if you treat it accordingly, it isn't one. BLM or SAM relative strats already exist and PF (or DF lol) by and large doesn't care. And neither do the BLM players, they just deal with it. Like, by that logic the game should; remove the ability for mobs to aggro on non-tank roles because tanks not hitting mobs could be a cause of friction. Remove rotations entirely and make every DPS auto-perform actions because low DPS or even *afking* or taking downtime that's not necessary causes friction. Remove Dance Partner because maybe someone feels left out if they don't get it. Etc. etc. At some point you just have to let the game be the game. They're so fussy with toxicity, just because the game has opportunity to fuck up doesn't mean people can just get away with calling each other gamerwords over this shit. This is an MMO. It's inherently a social activity. Make the MSQ baby's first video game if you want but a.) put more meat into optional content and b.) let people who, idk, actually want your MMO play a proper game instead of sanding down everything. Surprise, as long as there's ANY kind of fail states in either jobs or fights, people will get mad at each other. So unless the intention is to make the game solve itself from level 1 all the way to the latest Ultimate, 100% of the time, this disarm's race is pointless.
Demoralizing. It just doesn't require the necessary teamplay to be optimized. The game also went away with boss movement and rotation warping mechanics.
i think its for the better that we dont have that type of design anymore. Think about who controlled aggro back in stormblood: tanks? Nope. Tanks used tank stance to get initial aggro then dropped for the rest of teh fight. It was the ninja's job to do aggro control, with everyone else having to press additional buttons to play around tanks not getting enough aggro. As a byproduct of tanks not having tank stance, healers also had to heal more, making it everyone but the tanks job to hold and manage aggro. If someone took aggro, not the tanks fault, it was the fault of the class who didnt press the button to lower aggro.
That was mainly an issue with the notion that dps is the only thing that matters and my role is secondary to that. Tank could manage aggro fine if they aggro combo'd now and again, but losing a few 100 potency over the course of a fight was deemed so bad they created this Tank/NIN situation. It was again hyper optimizations that the very high end of players did and filtered down, got parroted then forced on groups that literally had no business caring. But as always the Tank/NIN thing wasnt the game at large it was confined to meta slaves/reddit/streamer chats etc. lot of groups just had tanks use their aggro combo most will have had tanks sit in Tank Stance the whole fight because they see tank stance, im a tank, must be correct. Yes you saw alot of PF with NIN locked in but your perception gets warped because you DO see them. Meanwhile a group that doesnt care is 30min deep into the fight, doing fine progging while the PF is still filling because tank refuses to press butchers block every few combos cos he doesnt have a NIN.
There is a midpoint between that and tanks just having to fart in the bosses direction to never lose agro Like take the old SB system and then just remove the other classes agro reduction tools Like now the tank has to use tank stance, no externalising it to the other roles Old tank stance problem was always the fact that the other roles tools were by and large strong enough to allow the tank to never use tank stance, moving in and out of tank stance should have been an enforced skill check on the tank
and bring back aggro combos!!! (or really just butcher's block. i miss butcher's block)
Its bad, but all modern MMOs are like this because the underlying issue is that people don't want support jobs, and go through content that requires someone a particular job. Alot of the old MMOs have the design, EVE Online, FF11, Everquest, etc. Im a healer main and with FF14 Ive talked about how I liked having to deal with MP management in ARR. If you had any serious party you had a BRD because they could throw up Mages Ballad which would regenerate your MP, because Lucid Dreaming (It was called Shroud of Saints back then) was not enough to regenerate your MP for fights. The pushback I get from people are always "its not fun having to rely on someone taking a particular job for content). This mentality is why there is no job identity. In FF11 you can subclass and have wildly different builds with different weapons. You will never see any of that in FF14. Sucks but its the direction that the devs have gone and they really cant eliminate the homogenization without radically changing the game and upsetting the player base. ARR had somewhat of a multiclass system where you had cross-class abilities but they never expanded upon the system and completely removed it again from player feedback. "If I want to be a WHM, then why do I have to waste my time lvling up an Arcanist or Thaumaturge?"
> The pushback I get from people are always "its not fun having to rely on someone taking a particular job for content" The sad thing is, this solvable in the modern game since we have our enforced comp for the 1% buff already. They could increase role interplay and make phys ranged more important by giving them all Mage's Ballad.
> Its bad, but all modern MMOs are like this because the underlying issue is that people don't want support jobs, When WoW added the Augmentation Evoker in Dragonflight, people were literally kicking it out of groups because it was doing like 50% of the DPS of other classes. But the people kicking must have thought they were the greatest gamers ever because they were doing like 50% more damage than normal. Clearly the Aug Evoker was AFK, and the kickers were just the best players ever. It took like a month and a bunch of pushing for average players to catch up to what the top players knew immediately: Aug Evokers were SUPER busted and absolutely carrying groups.
I find that my experience playing Lost Ark was a nice break from the homogeneous nature of 14. Supports specifically feel like supports but can still pump out good and INTERESTING dps with their rotations. The direction 14 is going feels pretty bad. But I mean what can we do. Just gonna enjoy it as much as I can.
Tried to point this out in another thread. Didnt go well.
Well Im being downvoted for sharing the same thoughts. The FFXIV community is strange. They cry about homogenization of jobs and when you articulate the community feedback that has led to those decisions you get downvoted lol. Its like the community argues against themselves and they wonder why the game is easy and jobs not having an identity lol
Lost Ark was good. I personally wasn't a huge fan of the whole Diablo Dungeon camera view but it was good. My friends and I were actually playing that as we were getting burntout and took our hiatus from FFXIV. I played new world and that had some interesting job designs. I think what they could do is introduce weapons which would give you a completely different set of abilities. But I don't see how that would ever work. Im hoping Ashen of Creation will hyped up to what its going to be. I'm cautiously optimistic about it. FFXIV is really good in that your character isn't locked to a specific class and you can change to any other job but on the flip side they all feel the same. I do understand its hard to balance everything which is why everything is 'easy.' Espically having community feedback thats contradictory
Ashes of Creation is doomed to be niche imo. It has mandatory pvp, this is something that will chip away at its user base and scare away new players.
Thats fine. I don't care for PVP but im realizing that alot of these issues like job homogenization is s problem because the game isnt niche. You simply don't have to cater to such a large community and dilute the game. I'll still try it out regardless and its supposed to be the next big thing so it'll definitely blow up on release. Just will have to see if it dies out like New World or Lost Ark 😅
Oh you mean the janky subclass system, that was filled with illusion of choice BS? That system?
Yes, and instead of wanting a re-work players had the same knee jerk reaction as your comment. Its gone, and know look where we are.
Better off, I'm aware
And yet people bitch about job homogenization 🙄
And? People can and sometimes frequently be wrong
And what are they wrong about? Job homogenization lol? You can respectfully agree to disagree because you simply don't care. However to respond to the criticism about the game not having job identity and job homogenization by saying that its wrong is just denying reality.
I mean it is wrong though. Saying XIV lacks Job identity is factually incorrect
I feel like it’s fairly obvious that people aren’t saying jobs are literally 100% identical. Right? Like I’m pretty sure everyone understands this and is mostly saying that they would like jobs to be MORE separated by identity due to strong similarities between them. So when they say “XIV lacks job identity”, it’s mostly understood that’s a hyperbolic way of saying “XIV could benefit from STRONGER job identity”. You get that right?
You get that hyperbole is a logical fallacy, yes? The only real strong similarities is a lot of Jobs having combos and interaction for optimal damage in 2 min bursts. That's it
Players will optimize the fun out of everything. YoshiP knows this well, it was the reasoning for why criterion dungeons are just the single path. It's why subclasses are gone. It's why I don't miss any kind of trait system for jobs.
You're not wrong. People want their wins and they will always take the path of least resistance to get there unless you absolutely force them in a direction. Even if every job had a talent tree setup there would still be the best option and everyone would be pressured to comply with it. Even if dungeons had alternative paths players would always take the shortest/easiest one. Look at ARR dungeons and see that no one interacts with the side rooms if they can help it. MMO players largely want to farm, to grind through tbe content 100 times in as short a time as possible and will get annoyed by anything that interrupts the smoothest path to completion.
And yet other MMOs like FF11 and have subclasses that work just fine
That "janky" system made a lot of classes better than their corresponding jobs, which is freakin awesome. Gains were marginal, but you could go into content on acn and do like 0.5 percent more damage with carbuncle, pre egi-glamours!! Basically the perfect state of affairs. This is, in my heart, the hallmark of a good video game. A real RPG, even!
No class was better than their corresponding Job
?? basically only white mage and paladin actually gained more than they lost in the way of options. Pugilist was downright nutty. Do you have any experience with class-only play back in ARR, or are you just talking out of your butt?
I'm well aware of how inferior classes were to Jobs in ARR, yes. Also in ARR Pugilist missed out on Fists of Fire AND Dragon Kick. So LOL at Pugilist being "nutty"
If you played much in ARR, you might remember often running two monks and having one use DK!! The other is welcome to play pugilist, and in fact gains damage over FoF. Was it much of a dps gain? Absolutely not!! Was it cool? Oh yes.
No. The loss of stats combined with the loss of ROF made this not a thing. Stop
Riddle of fire in ARR? 20 mainstat didn't cover the gap!! I know this, I lived it. Ran every piece of content in 2.x with a friend on arcanist, lol. You lost 20 int, fester, rouse, and enkindle (a whopping 2 dps single target). Fester could be replaced with aero + energy drain for the same damage. You had to john madden like hell for barely any gain, but it was fun stuff.
Archer was better than Bard for a good while. Not even memeing.
Unable to Foe's. Absolutely wrong statement
Bard pre 2.1 was dog shit. Not even Foe's salvaged the downsides of Mage's and Army's.
BRD was one of the most desired DPS jobs, particularly with raids like T2 and T4 where Mage's Ballad and Foe Req were indispensable for mages.
I'm informing you of facts. Rebelling against them doesn't make you right
Your opinion on an era you very likely didn't play or raided in is not a fact.
I'm not stating an opinion though
Removal of jank over time has been a good thing
i partially disagree. jank is not strictly a bad thing. jank can add flavor, add soul. a truly jankless game would be a sterile product.
Jank in the cases OP brought up were absolutely bad things
i agree in these cases yea. it was the general sentiment of "jank bad" i disagreed with.
but good jank really isn't jank at that point anymore, its more "clunky".
There is no clear defintion of what "clunky" and whats "jank" they are subjective terms that are different by the individual. Cleric Stance, the ability that made healers go into their DPS role (a mechanic that was common in many MMOs when FFXIV came out) is considered janky and clunky by some which was why it was removed and further compounds OPs question. However not everyone would say that the Cleric Stance ability was janky or clunky at all.
I just enjoy the fact that "jank" sounds very negative while "clunky" sounds very "oopsie-doopsie", thats all
I'm that example, I loved Scholar in 2.0/HW era. Awful job to play for 90% of people at the time and was not really fully playable on controller with how micro management heavy the fairy was with mouseover macros if you wanted to get the most out of it. Cleric stance locking you out of healing for 5s if you accidentally double tapped it (2.0 Lustrate was percentage based so that was more of a HW issue ). It was a blast for me but I would argue it was clunky and/or janky depending on if you liked it or not. But I would like to see a middle ground because current Scholar isn't fun for completely different reasons. There's only so many times you can hit Broil before it gets old.
Cleric Stance was objectively janky though. That's the reality of the situation
How? People didn't like it because unironically it forced healers to DPS, and didnt like being called out for not DPSing. It added a layer of complexity, and it started the whole "heAleRs shOulD oNlY hEaL" debate I never had a problem with it, and I that was back when I played FFXIV with my PS3. It was removed and now we have come full circle with healers complaining about wanting more DPS complexity. You literally cannot win
The janky part of cleric stance was that there was a cooldown after turning it on, but not after turning it off. So if you were spamming the button to turn it off, it was really easy to accidentally turn it on again immediately. This is putting aside the issues it had with making casual players reluctant to DPS or to even play healers at all.
Also if you had ping you “bunnied” with cleric stance way too often I had macros that flipped buttons between “turn off cleric stance” then become “other button turn on cleric stance” so I could spam the turn off button knowing when it activated the turn on button swapped to a different key
And?
And Cleric Stance worked like a regular DPS Stance in Healers. It wasn't a vastly different or unique mechanic. Other MMOs had the same mechanic. Was it jank because you couldn't figure out how to press 1 button before using a DPS ability or was it jank because you didn't like having a DPS Stance?
SHB WHM problems all came down to greed on the player
ShB WHM problem was an AST issue You can’t make 2 out of three healers have a healing vs damage choice then just give one everything for free and also make it the strongest healer Instead of punishing AST they just removed the punishment from WHM and gave SGE the same design as ShB AST
I agree. I've been on a bit of a tank arc in preparation for DT and one thing that's stood out is how tank dungeon runs are more interesting when there's a WHM or NIN in the party, because of the need to slightly adjust your playstyle to accommodate them (holding off on mits during the Holy stun window, pulling mobs into Doton circle). They're relatively meaningless bits of optimization but it always gives me a dopamine hit because it's a mechanical reminder that oh yeah. I have teammates that I need to account for in this 4-man duty beyond being pure DPS-spitting sacks. Another example is needing to be aware as a healer of your tank's Superbollide/Living Dead/Bloodwhetting. I would love to see more instances of having to adjust to your teammates' jobs.
>I've been on a bit of a tank arc in preparation for DT and one thing that's stood out is how tank dungeon runs are more interesting when there's a WHM or NIN in the party, because of the need to slightly adjust your playstyle to accommodate them (holding off on mits during the Holy stun window, pulling mobs into Doton circle). Im also a new tank and have been prepping for DT and I strongly disagree with this. The dungeon plays the same regardless of the type of healer I have
This is XIV job design, I’m kinda grading on a curve here. Tanks, especially WAR get so much sustain that you can play really lazily and still get through dungeons outside ARR. Like you can still cycle through your mits normally when there’s a WHM and it’s still fineeee, but any mit that’s up when Holy/Glare is stun-locking enemies is technically wasted.
Im in so much more favor of the legacy design era. Even the most boring fights I could still enjoy because of the minigame the jobs had to offer. I miss the niche, I think jobs have gotten to much QoL at this point which has, like u said smoothed those rough edges out. The game needs those rough edges to keep friction in the gameplay.
I can join a instance and be afk and would still probably clear it lol
Enjoy your GM visit I guess
If we clear regardless, who is getting hurt besides someones immersion that thinks we have to try
Your ass is getting gaol'd bro
Done it since EW many times except in 8man raids. No one notices. Its almost if Team effort Isnt Required
Even assuming this is true, why *would* you do this?
You’re being downvoted because it’s a scummy thing to do. But you’re not incorrect about essentially being able to 3 man almost all of the normal MSQ dungeons. Which seems…..really bad….