Combat Revamp - Healing/Tanking Paradigm, Encounter Design, + bonus PLD rework (LONG)

[KaldeaSahaline]

So let me preface. This is a fairly long post that goes over a FICTITIOUS combat revamp that I've been toying with over the past month. It touches on GCDs, oGCDs, how tanking/healing could work differently and be more active and less punishing, and how encounter design could stand to be less pass/fail and binary. As a bonus, to help put some of the ideas into perspective I even design a complete from the ground up redesign of the PLD job. In that redesign I tackled some elements like incredibly boring low level gameplay (IMO a HUGE drag on FF14 as a game) as well as more interesting abilities and mitigating button bloat.

All I am asking is read it, try to understand and envision what I going for and talk about it. Tell me things you like. Tell me things you don't. Offer your own suggestions/ideas, etc. Have fun with it. This concept originated because I had seen a lot of discussion on reddit about the healing/tanking design paradigm that SQEX has been employing and how its detrimental to the longevity of the game.

Personally I agree, the reason being how can they possibly add any new tank/healing jobs without there being a staggering amount of overlap with the existing 3. I mean hell, just adding the third, kind of caused a bit of an issue.

That said, I do not want to get into that discussion in this post. We can do that in another if anyone would like. I merely wanted to set the stage for WHY I created the re-work and some context into the design philosophies I'm employing therein.

GCD:
I know that most people like the slower 2.5s base GCD. I am going to propose some changes here and am splitting it up between casters and weaponskill based jobs.

Weaponskill based jobs changes: (Tanks, Melee, & Phys Ranged)
I like faster gameplay. So it should come to no surprise to anyone here that my concept accommodates that. Please analyze under the assumption that all jobs will be re-worked to follow the paradigm (so stuff like MNK/NIN would be redesigned to retain their faster playstyle, but still fit this).

One main reason I want faster gameplay is because the concept of "combo" feels very off in this game and I'd like to shorten interim combo presses to a 1.5s GCD while leaving 2.5s between full combos.

An Example: You hit Fast Blade -> incurs 1.5s GCD -> You hit Riot Blade -> incurs 1.5s GCD -> You hit Judgment of Azeyma (see PLD rework) -> incurs 2.5s GCD as combo is finished.

I think this is a fair compromise of both styles. Combo's FEEL more like combo's now, but when finishing one there is a delay that is familiar.

Caster based jobs: (Casters/Healers)
I don't think spells should be subject to a GCD system. I think the cast time aspect should be able to handle that on its own or have GCD match the spell cast (thus basically hiding it entirely). I'm very open to ideas as to if/why this would be bad as I am not an expert on it.

An example: You cast Cure -> 2s cast goes by -> Cure resolves -> You cast Cure -> etc.

The idea behind this iteration would be faster healing gameplay, that would be supplemented with less incoming burst damage, but steadier varied damage. More on this later.

oGCDs:
I really want to really prop up the oGCD as a core system. Right now IMO oGCDs are insanely binary and boring. 99.x% of the time they're mindless press on cooldown abilities. I want to shift these away from that and into our more situational and "job gauge" spending abilities.

An example for PLD (based on re-work):

Shield Swipe
Type: Offensive oGCD
Potency: 140
Range: Melee
Cost: 20 Oath
Condition: Usable after a successful Block.
Effect: Deals damage and allows a weapon-skill to be cast for free as if it was an oGCD. This use does not interrupt the current combo and must be used immediately after the Shield Swipe.

An example: You cast Fast Blade -> You block an attack triggering the availability of oGCD Shield Swipe-> Incur 1.5s GCD -> You cast Riot Blade -> Incur 1.5s GCD -> You cast Shield Swipe -> You cast FREE Royal Authority -> You cast Judgment of Azeyma -> Incur 2.5s GCD.

This gives a small bit of insight into the bonus Paladin re-work. The idea here is a reactionary ability that triggers a decision making process. Do I need threat, damage, or defense. Keep in mind I am aware that double weaving oGCDs inside a 1.5s GCD is "bad" as it delays next GCD, but given the power of the ability and the fact that the finisher is treated as an oGCD and not a GCD it only pushes it back slightly I'm ok with that. Always open to better implementations if you have one.

Hopefully the point I was trying to make is to make oGCDs more interesting than bland buffs and things that actually impact or change your approach to the encounter.

Crowd Control:
I want crowd control back. Interrupts, slows, stuns, etc. Tie most crowd control to oGCDs, not cross role nonsense. Give certain roles/jobs better versions. For instance, Tanks likely have the best stuns. Best being defined as a measure of cooldown/cost (if any), duration, range, AOE vs. ST, power, etc. Melee probably get best interrupts, ranged get best snares/roots/slows, etc.

Interrupts:
Have bosses that cast things that can be interrupted. Tie these mechanics to less scripted timers forcing people to adapt and be aware and also have failure to interrupt not be instant death. I.e. damage spikes on a tank, they react by shifting to more defense and healers focus on more triage to stabilize. Maybe missing an interrupt spawns an add, creates a dangerous void zone, destroys part of room, causes enraged status for a brief period, spikes burst damage, drains resources, heals adds/boss (less strict hard enrage timers, but much more soft enrage design), etc.

Slows:
Enemies that need to be slowed to better control flow of incoming damage. Maybe allow bosses to be slowed and let a tank kite to give healers time to catch up/drop stacks, etc.

Stuns:
I want to bring in this concept of "CC armor" here. Have bosses do special attacks, again on not strictly coded timers, that require coordinated CC from the team to delay/prevent. B&S/Wildstar used this system to great effect IMO. Enemies and bosses would have varying levels of CC armor for their attacks and each job/role would have varying degrees of effectiveness in those stuns. CC would only be available during the boss' attack.

Think of it like this:

Boss has 5 different basic abilities with varying "CC armor":
Tankbuster (4)
Raid AOE pulse (5)
Persistent Voidzone (2)
Self Buff that grants damage buff and vuln down buff. (6)
Resource Drain (4)

Lets say every 45s or so the boss cycles through these 5 100% of the time, but possibly up to like 6 or 7 times. You'd never have enough CC to stop them all. Missing one wouldn't be a wipe, it would just make things harder and change how you recover/adapt.

The idea would be as a team you'd decide which of these are the most dangerous to you at any given time. Imagine your tank is out of cooldowns, and is at 26% HP. You see a tankbuster casting. By time it finishes the healer might be able to get tank up to 55% HP. It might be safer to CC that, ignoring the tankbuster, and eat the persistent voidzone that makes the room smaller/makes follow up mechanics harder.

What happens is the encounter becomes dynamic. You now have a smaller room, but safer health pools. What happens if you do this strat 5 times? Now you have very little room. That's dangerous. Imagine if over the course of the fight, you're close to killing, but the boss has gained 6 stacks of damage up. That means any raid wide damage or tankbuster going off could be a wipe. You prioritize those and push the DPS and try and clear. Failing a CC isn't a wipe. It's a choice that impacts how to approach the fight and lets you work around your comps. Imagine one raid night you're stuck with 4 melee. That means raid wide damage isn't hard to heal (everyones stacked), but space is paramount, so you focus on interrupting those abilities and eat the damage taken ones.

Tanking Paradigm:
Tanks have 4 main responsibilities. That is Threat, DPS, Mitigation, and Positioning. Currently I feel that NONE of these responsibilities are captured well. Threat is irrelevant, DPS is passive, Mitigation is one and done, and bosses RARELY move. Under my proposed paradigm A tank has to spend its resources on which of categories it needs at any time and that will shift multiple times over the course of the encounter.

The other bit of design I'm interested in capturing is that a tank can adapt to his group. If his healers are weak and his DPS are strong, he can focus on covering for the healers. Alternatively, if DPS is bad, threat is less important, but damage checks might need help getting through allowing a tank to shift his resources to DPS expenditures.

Tank Swaps:
Ideally I'd like to see tank swaps be less taunt at X stacks or taunt to invuln Y. I honestly don't think that's good design. Better design would be a system that allows swaps to be more organic/dynamic as well as more defined roles.

Example mechanics:

• Boss hits hard and frequently. You would alternate based on the inability for a healer to stabilize a tank's health pool, this would give time to let the other tank recover slowly over time.
• Boss hits a tank with a debuff that enables them to do XYZ mechanic. I.e. Clear void zones, kill certain adds, survive XYZ. Maybe the debuff causes a rapid HP drain on the tank, thus having them tank and soak the debuff simultaneously, would be incredibly difficult to deal with.
• Periodic add spawns during boss fight (not intermission style that is commonly used) that give a reason to swap tanks or pull a tank off normal duty.

Threat:
Threat should not be a one aggro combo one and done. It should be dynamic throughout the fight. I.e. add spawns need snap threat, boss DPS check phases might need more threat, threat resets/drops, etc.

Mitigation:
Much like threat, mitigation should be a choice. Ideally because damage would be retooled to be more frequent and less bursty, you'd have an active mitigation in addition to sustained mitigation. If a tankbuster is coming through you'd want to have some mitigation up for it be it active (i.e. current mitigation), or sustained, which is where you use your rotational abilities to provide defensive benefit.

Paladin examples:

Sheltron
Type: Defensive oGCD
Duration: 10s
Cost: 30 Oath
Effect: Blocks a single attack reducing x% of incoming damage.

Royal Authority:
Royal Authority generates a shield equal to x% of its damage dealt that lasts for 6s. Any additional shield generated from Royal Authority that occurs during those 6s adds the shield values, and refreshes the duration to 6s.

This is to offer some synergy with Shield Swipe. In that you could rapidly dump your Oath on Sheltrons/Shield Swipe for blocks to hit back to back Royal Authority's and build a large shield to mitigate a huge hit. I like that kind of gameplay.

DPS:
The idea here is that you can push DPS as a tank, but doing so directly influences how much damage you take and how much threat you generate. There are parts of encounter design where DPS is incredibly valuable and sacrificing mitigation/threat is intended/viable. If you're spending Oath on DPS related abilities, you do not have that Oath to use on defensive/threat skills.

Positioning:
FF14 forces a lot of stand still type of encounters. I don't enjoy that (granted I completely understand given the games horrendous netcode how painful movement based stuff can be, let's assume it's fixed prior to a redesign of this caliber).

Space control is an amazing part of encounter design that frankly isn't used really at all or very well in FF14. The idea that as mechanics occur, parts of the room become volatile or problematic forcing an adjustment of strategies dynamically to succeed. That means tanks move bosses, tanks move away from bosses to do X, etc. That also helps build some tank niches, where maybe one tank has better AOE DPS, another has better AOE threat, and another has better mobility.

Let's look at Neverwhere from O4S. Instead of being a stand still DPS check for a minute and a half or whatever, it could have been a straight soft enrage with ever increasing damage and each big punch obliterates the part of the platform he's on. This forces the tank to move, the DPS/healers to be aware and position well and to clear him before you run out of space, or the damage is unhealable. Mechanics prior to Neverwhere could have impacted your existing space, thus forcing you to adapt. Imagine if because you had bad healers, but good DPS, you sacrificed some room to get more damage on the boss earlier. You go into last phase with not a lot of room, but also not a lot of boss HP left. This way you don't stress the healers, but instead shift that responsibility on the DPS.

Alternatively, imagine if you had bad DPS and good healers. You could go into last phase with a lot of room, and boss at a higher HP%. This allows you to take your time in the last phase and push it down safely assuming healers can handle the damage output.

That kind of decision making and encounter design sounds way more fun to me.

DPS Paradigms:
The DPS paradigm would stay similar, but I'd like to see different jobs be retooled for different niches. I.e. let some DPS jobs have good burst DPS making them very valuable for add phases/burn phases, and let others be strong at ST/AOE, or cleave (cleave usually refers to like 2 or 3 target damage output simultaneously).

Healing Paradigms:
Ideally my goal is to shift healing from the concept of reactionary burst healing to a more proactive triage style of healing. That means damage incoming faster and not nearly as scripted. To offset this it'd be balanced based on less bursty damage.

Healers would have skills that offered choices in triage:
WHM example:

• Cure: which is a moderate cast, moderate power, and moderate cost heal. This is your balanced heal most likely used on frequent damage receiving targets like tanks.
• Cure II: which is a fast cast, moderate power, expensive cost heal. You'd use this in more emergency related situations.
• Regen: would be your low cost, moderate power over time, and fast cast. Would be valuable to ensure high uptime given its low cost and solid power over time.
• Cure III: would fill a powerful AOE heal with limited range, fast cast, and expensive cost. This is your AOE stabilization spell. You couldn't sustain a raid very long with frequent casts of this, but its useful in its speed and burst healing.
• Medica I: would fill the niche of moderate power AOE heal, slow cast, and low cost. The opposite of Cure III. You'd use this when you are ahead of the curve and to offset obvious incoming burst damage. Not strong for stabilizing parties rapidly.
• Medica II: would provide very low power AOE heal, fast cast, moderate cost, and offers moderate healing of time effect with a large range. This would be the tool to help prepare and recover from big damage over a period of time. It doesn't do a significant amount of healing up front, but helpful in slowly recovering the entire party.

The idea would be that healers have different archetypes and differing efficiency within those archetypes. You'd have the ability to stabilize HP values very quickly, at a significant resource (MP) cost. Each job would have differing strengths and weaknesses, much like current FF14, but still allowing room for additional healing playstyles and healers to shine in different aspects of encounter design which is good IMO.

Paladin Job Re-Work:
The Paladin to me is still that sword and board tank who specializes in mitigating damage, lacking mobility, and offering some unique magic gameplay.

No more tank stances. Now the Job gauge is based off just the term "Oath". It has a max of 100, and is generated rapidly and spent rapidly with cooldowns that boost its generation and effects. This is also assuming that they get rid of "classes" and just do jobs from level 1. I tried to make the low level stuff more interesting by front-loading more abilities/traits earlier on.

Direct Link to image incase quality sucks ass. https://i.imgur.com/RTJxJQR.jpg



Quick notes: I am utilizing the PVP combo sequence (1 button changes throughout the combo) for PVE. I created a few new weaponskills to fill functions that were lacking and I consolidated and re-purposed several skills. A few examples:

Shield Swipe now functions differently. Flash is retooled as a burst resource generator, Stances have been retooled as DPS and defensive cooldowns respectively. They work as good resource burning abilities to try and keep up. Bulwark re-purposed as a smaller passage of arms. Royal Authority is changed to be a shield generator (sustained mitigation tool) instead of flat DPS.

You may notice some weaponskills are no longer 3 button combos, but are 2 button combos. This is intended. You could expect to see WAR/DRK have shorter DPS chains, but maybe longer threat/defensive chains. Then they would have varying oGCD potencies, cooldowns, and costs to help differentiate their strengths and weaknesses.

This rework cuts the current Paladin toolkit of roughly 32 abilities down to 22, while IMO (and please discuss) giving a much more engaging standard of play.

In Summary

The idea here is that I wanted to shift to a more active playstyle for all roles. To supplement this we needed more active encounter design. Less 1 shot mechanics. Less bursty damage. More decision making. More frequency and variation of mechanics and lastly job designs to support all of it.

Try to envision all the changes simultaneously when commenting and please share your feelings/thoughts/likes/dislikes and your own ideas.

I even had a pretty robust Materia system created (with over 30 unique materia created for this iteration of PLD alone that impact how skills work and interact with each other (imagine like set bonuses/talents in WoW), but unfortunately it's not ready and I've been sitting on this for longer than I'd like so i'd rather not hold it up. Please try not to hold the numerical balance at too high of a standard. I winged it. If something seems abnormally off let me know though.

[Derio]

All content would have to be reconfigured for this.

This would make healing and tanking more difficult while making dpsing easier.

This would make entry to healing and tanking even more difficult for new players and could possibly increase average queue times.

Also balancing, readjusting the balance for this would be a developer's nightmare.

Not saying its a bad idea, but it would take a considerable amount of dev work and the biggest problem is would the community accept this or not.

[Galactimus]

I wouldn't say "shut down." It's just....

I've mained PLD from 2.0 to 4.2. Completing all the raids while they are relevant; even the dreaded AS4. And after this many years of PLD abuse, lolPLD cults, and endless emotional trauma all I can say at this point is "Do whatever you want with the hostages. Take my housing and all of my gil. You can even have the women, the children, and the glamour. But please, I beseech you, just leave 4.1 PLD alone. We are finally happy."

[Shurrikhan]

So let me preface. This is a fairly long post that goes over a FICTITIOUS combat revamp that I've been toying with over the past month. It touches on GCDs, oGCDs, how tanking/healing could work differently and be more active and less punishing, and how encounter design could stand to be less pass/fail and binary. As a bonus, to help put some of the ideas into perspective I even design a complete from the ground up redesign of the PLD job. In that redesign I tackled some elements like incredibly boring low level gameplay (IMO a HUGE drag on FF14 as a game) as well as more interesting abilities and mitigating button bloat.

Well, I'm sold on the idea. See you in an hour when I'm done reading.

Running Thoughts:

I think this is a fair compromise of both styles. Combo's FEEL more like combo's now, but when finishing one there is a delay that is familiar.

My thoughts on this would be largely the same if not for the therefore uneven ability to weave oGCDs. Hope to see what you do with them?

I don't think spells should be subject to a GCD system. I think the cast time aspect should be able to handle that on its own or have GCD match the spell cast (thus basically hiding it entirely). I'm very open to ideas as to if/why this would be bad as I am not an expert on it.

Removing GCD systems from casters, however, accomplishes only three things, imo:
1. The removal of variation in benefit of instant casts relative to cast time (shortened GCD, effectively, if the cast was longer than a GCD, but not if equal or less than the GCD). (A negligible negative.)
2. The removal of guaranteed mobile downtime (whenever a cast time is less than the GCD). (A noticeable negative, imo.)
3. The allowance of quicker, more expensive cast choices (useful to healer toolkits). (A toolkit-allowing positive.)

Cure: which is a fast cast, moderate power, expensive cost heal. You'd use this in more emergency related situations.
Cure II: which is a moderate cast, moderate power, and moderate cost heal. This is your balanced heal most likely used on frequent damage receiving targets like tanks.

Oh, there they (3) are, albeit in the opposite of the usual order of acquisition.

Still though, if you're going to go so far as removing the GCD as it would affect casters, I recommend you go further, approaching a new system that accomplishes what you feel a cast system should do, rather than simply removing it on principle and letting the cards fall where they will.

I really want to really prop up the oGCD as a core system. Right now IMO oGCDs are insanely binary and boring. 99.x% of the time they're mindless press on cooldown abilities. I want to shift these away from that and into our more situational and "job gauge" spending abilities.

Neat. While I like the rhythm and sense of arsenal they bring, I, too, often feel like they're just obligatory button-presses that are more like mile-markers in our rotations rather than decisions.

Keep in mind I am aware that double weaving oGCDs inside a 1.5s GCD is "bad" as it delays next GCD, but...

Food for thought: if GCDs were to be removed entirely, in favor of animation-stream combos and the like, this concern would be void anyways.

I want to bring in this concept of "CC armor" here...
...Boss has 5 different basic abilities with varying "CC armor":
Tankbuster (4)
Raid AOE pulse (5)...

As you know, and are doubtless annoyed with by now, I tend to prefer one scalar over multiple set values, such as an enemy simply having a Determination stat that determines how much damage potential is lost to incoming damage atop whatever particular buffs he may choose to cast, and from there the "CC armor" is a simply matter of damage and effect potency being split among both the enemy and his incoming attack. Think of it like someone charging at you or winding up for a powerful attack: at that point your efforts against him are dual purposed, but you're also dealing with proportionately more force--and since your own hasn't changed, your potencies seem less effective between trying to keep, say, a behemoth from moving when it's still stationary, compared to when it's already in full sprint.

Threat should not be a one aggro combo one and done. It should be dynamic throughout the fight. I.e. add spawns need snap threat, boss DPS check phases might need more threat, threat resets/drops, etc.

What are the factors behind these dynamics, I wonder?

Much like threat, mitigation should be a choice. Ideally because damage would be retooled to be more frequent and less bursty, you'd have an active mitigation in addition to sustained mitigation.

How much a part do resource systems play in this...

The idea here is that you can push DPS as a tank, but doing so directly influences how much damage you take and how much threat you generate. There are parts of encounter design where DPS is incredibly valuable and sacrificing mitigation/threat is intended/viable. If you're spending Oath on DPS related abilities, you do not have that Oath to use on defensive/threat skills.

So long as that doesn't end up / remain a brain-dead rotational process, awesome.

FF14 forces a lot of stand still type of encounters. I don't enjoy that (granted I completely understand given the games horrendous netcode how painful movement based stuff can be, let's assume it's fixed prior to a redesign of this caliber).

Space control is an amazing part of encounter design that frankly isn't used really at all or very well in FF14.

Agreed, but I'm not readily able to imagine the difference in execution available to the situations and accordant strategies you mention beneath these lines. If the DPS is low, wouldn't the mechanical advantage catch up proportionately quickly? Unless the fight is undertuned or the parties overgeared, I'm not seeing how the two styles would ultimately make a difference, as they would intersect almost precisely at boss death, while the varying advantage lend more to the ability to deal with mechanics or the lack of such abilities more than the throughput of healers or DPS. Perhaps I'm misreading. I probably am.

The DPS paradigm would stay similar, but I'd like to see different jobs be retooled for different niches. I.e. let some DPS jobs have good burst DPS making them very valuable for add phases/burn phases, and let others be strong at ST/AOE, or cleave (cleave usually refers to like 2 or 3 target damage output simultaneously).

I'd have to caution against this. Different niches, rather than different flavors, obligates job choice for each and every encounter outside of dungeons, where they're still largely obligated within the best compromise between encounters (assuming anything more than casual difficulty *and* pace).

You could expect to see WAR/DRK have shorter DPS chains, but maybe longer threat/defensive chains. Then they would have varying oGCD potencies, cooldowns, and costs to help differentiate their strengths and weaknesses.

I have to admit, I would have assumed the opposite, given your stated purposes. Longer chains on mitigation and threat means less reactive interactions with active mitigation and threat generation, which in turn means less control, and therefore less available engagement to your average player -- more becoming rote scripting or margin-building rather than active adaptation.

Quick notes: I am utilizing the PVP combo sequence (1 button changes throughout the combo) for PVE. I created a few new weaponskills to fill functions that were lacking and I consolidated and re-purposed several skills

Perfect. If you're not going to allow for free combos, I see no reason not to build around the QoL features optimal play would already fit into with mere ability spread adjustment.

This rework cuts the current Paladin toolkit of roughly 32 abilities down to 22, while IMO (and please discuss) giving a much more engaging standard of play.

I love the direction you've taken the ability growth curve in, even if I do think it may have slightly overshot. I suspect it may be more engaging per button, though I feel like the idea could actually go far further, accomplishing even greater engagement despite having even fewer keys. I'll pass on a spitball sample soon, if you like.

This is also assuming that they get rid of "classes" and just do jobs from level 1.

To be honest, I don't see why you would need to. You can just as easily run these functions off of various other factors or resources, or simply "upgrade" the original Gladiator-specific resource into "Oath", thereby attaching additional passive effects upon its generation and/or expense that could yet further increase engagement through the depth tactics involved in Paladin play, either all at 30 with subtle stimulation through abilities thereafter, or as step-by-step augmentations through Traits.

[KaldeaSahaline]

This would make healing and tanking more difficult while making dpsing easier.

This would make entry to healing and tanking even more difficult for new players and could possibly increase average queue times.

I want to avoid the meta discussions on "balance" and "dev workload" and focus strictly on the ideas I've proposed therein.

If you don't mind, provide specific examples and insight into why do you think it would be more difficult for tanks and healers and also why you think it'd be easier for DPS.

Tell me some things you liked. Some things you didn't. Perhaps some ideas that popped into your mind as better alternatives?

This is the FFXIV forums, where suggestions and ideas for anything interesting combat wise will either get ignored or shot down.

To be fair though, you didn't really contribute either so...

Any insight into the actual content of the post? Likes? Dislikes?

I wouldn't say "shut down." It's just....

I've mained PLD from 2.0 to 4.2. Completing all the raids while they are relevant; even the dreaded AS4. And after this many years of PLD abuse, lolPLD cults, and endless emotional trauma all I can say at this point is "Do whatever you want with the hostages. Take my housing and all of my gil. You can even have the women, the children, and the glamour. But please, I beseech you, just leave 4.1 PLD alone. We are finally happy."

While PLD for sure is finally in a good spot, do you have any actual insight into the content of the post or specifically the PLD rework? I've love to hear another PLD's thoughts on the design.

Well, I'm sold on the idea. See you in an hour when I'm done reading.

Going to tackle your statements in reverse order because I think after seeing the PLD rework it kind of answered a few of your own questions (if my excel formatting made ANY sense to you at all). I didn't respond to everything I apologize

The reason why I state jobs is because some abilities pre 30, would not fit thematically with a GLAD. That's the main reason why.

The reason I didn't take the concept even further is because I was planning on a full page materia concept, but unfortunately it's going to take me a while to find time to do it.

The idea is that a PLD would definitely have more control over its defensive capabilities. That's it's niche. Not that's it necessarily "stronger", but that it operates more efficiently in that niche. A WAR might need 3 GCDs to get a slightly more powerful defensive buff, and a buff activated via resource expenditure might cost say 40 instead of 30. Alternatively though, the WAR might generate say 40 resource from its combo whereas PLD generates 30 thus granting it flexibility to translate that resource into damage reduction and balancing them out.

That's the "idea" though, but without me creating a full blown other tank workup it's hard to quantify.

As far as other niche's go, I think it's ok to have some DPS variance because encounters would have more than one niche. If you look at O1S right now, mobility is irrelevant, Burst damage is irrelevant, defensive capability is irrelevant, AOE damage is irrelevant, interrupts/CC are irrelevant.

The idea would be that encounter design would be filled with areas for numerous jobs to excel.

The styles should absolutely intersect at the end and that's fine. The idea is that every single pull is not identical because factors and timing change slightly causing decisions to be made on the fly. Somewhere somehow a tank got spiked hard and is at 20% HP. In order to prevent him going down, interrupts/CC are used to stop a tankbuster, thus letting the boss use an ability that destroyed part of the platform (say 1/5 of the room). This makes subsequent mechanics more difficult because you have less room. Maybe this causes people to take more raid wide damage than necessary forcing us to have to interrupt/cc raidwide damage based abilities to allow healers to stabilize the party.

The end goal of this paradigm is to get away from people memorizing boss fights and having them be a wipe the second something goes wrong to actually fighting the bosses.

[Vstarstruck]

[*]Cure: which is a fast cast, moderate power, expensive cost heal. You'd use this in more emergency related situations.

no.

when you made this did you even consider you will not have all abilities ? (i/e leveling up, not being 70, etc?)
what if you are in content where you are only able to use the first cure and he first medica?

An example: You cast Cure -> 2s cast goes by -> Cure resolves -> You cast Cure -> etc.

cast? or casting? Way I read this or being suggested is this:

casting cure > cast cure > 2s goes by (animation I am guessing) > cure resolves> you cast cure.

This is suggesting to have a worse system then now and more dragged down by animation lock while not being able to cast skate? You need to cast skate to dodge moves. The healing in this game is overall slow because of the slow response servers have and this seems to make it worse.

[Lord_Zlatan]

This is the FFXIV forums, where suggestions and ideas for anything interesting combat wise will either get ignored or shot down.

Right, which makes considering he is talking about a game going through a complete overhaul, which has already gone through a complete overhaul.

It is a completely ridiculous notion to expect the director of FFXIV to say "wow, interesting forum post, lets revamp the entire game! Come on, everyone!"

[Lord_Zlatan]

Also, as to the OP: Dont want to quote the OP as it is very long but the one thing I would completely and utterly love to see is more negative status effects that we can add to enemies apart from DoTs and resistance down effects.

Paralyze, Slow, Blind, etc etc that actually EFFECT enemies in a meaningful way would mean that some things would need to be rebalanced to require the negative status effects to be vital to the encounter but i think it could be done

[Legion88]

Just some questions.
Why is it in your PLD example that you give alle 5 levels a bunch of skills?
The only reason i could see behind this is the locking of skills completely behind the class/job quests
Also your WHM example seems "strange". I don't have a lvl table so i can't see when WHM would learn Cure II, but wouldn't it be more logicaly if the spell without numbering would be the basic from which the other evolve?

All in all ithink there can't be a limit to suggestions and ideas to combat systems as long as it is not like a "you have to do this or worlds end!" rambling.

I'm waiting for the full version with the complete redesign of the jobs and a way deeper explenation of the system in your mind.

[MoroMurasaki]

I haven't finished reading this and my phone is about to die but I didn't want to wait to tell you omg I love it and I love your brain.

Seriously amazing stuff. I will have a more indepth review later today but for now just wanted to say it was looking great.