Please put more focus on end game class balance

[Peepiopi]

This is one of the biggest concerns that a lot of us have about Final Fantasy XI right now.

First let me say, I feel like the recent changes over the last few months as far as enmity, and minor job adjustments have been steps in the right direction, but they are far too minor. There are still only a handful of jobs that get invitations to top tier encounters. It would be fantastic if there were class adjustments that are affective enough that open end game to all jobs.

In other words, I would love to see people shout for any "Tanks, Healers, Support, DD" Rather than specifics like "PLD, MNK, RNG, BRD, COR, WHM" etc..

Just as a couple examples: As long as Aegis and Ochain remain overpowered, then no other tanks will matter. I love playing Rune Fencer, but I'm basically relegated to soloing or lowmans because it's not as good as an Aegis/Ochain PLD. I also really like Puppetmaster, but my damage is murdered because of my pet constantly dying and the delays from slow job ability animations.

Boss evasion is absurdly high, and many DD jobs (especially pets) get annihilated by the damage. So you're only left with DD that can either survive the damage, or stay out of range of it.

It's stuff like this that really need to get fixed. The quality of life updates like the HP warps have been PURE WIN, but the game won't really feel fun unless we can actually be included in endgame while using our favorite jobs. I mean I'd say playing Rune Fencer and Puppetmaster feels like being picked last in gym class, but we're not even getting picked! ><

SIDE NOTE: Another complaint I have is with crafting and how it really creates a rather imposing barrier to end game progression for new players, but that's a topic for a different thread. I just wanted to mention it because I think class balance and old fashioned progress barriers are what are keeping this game from growing.

[Camiie]

They need to quit declaring a job "balanced" as long as it's somewhat effective at something/anything. "This job is good at farming Dynamis! What more to life is there?" If they want to do other stuff they can just level another job!" That seems to be their philosophy. Ideally they would treat each job as if each character could have only one job at 99. That's not to say that every job should be able to fulfill every sort of role, but each job should have something beneficial to offer within its general archetype. It shouldn't be so easy to decide which DD to take for example, or rather it shouldn't really matter. They should all get you to the same result even if they take a different path to get there (aka play differently). The devs and many players don't seem to want to wrap their heads around that concept of many paths, same result.

[Xantavia]

Unfortunately, I think this is a total pipe-dream, partly because of the player base. If the jobs aren't exactly equal, there will be those who want only the best, no matter how small the difference. If one job does 10,000 dmg over the length of the fight, but another job does 9990 dmg, they won't want the weaker job. I mean, that 10 point difference might make the battle last a minute longer. Seems people only care about having the quickest, safest, and easiest path to a win and don't even want to try something different.

[Damane]

Unfortunately, I think this is a total pipe-dream, partly because of the player base. If the jobs aren't exactly equal, there will be those who want only the best, no matter how small the difference. If one job does 10,000 dmg over the length of the fight, but another job does 9990 dmg, they won't want the weaker job. I mean, that 10 point difference might make the battle last a minute longer. Seems people only care about having the quickest, safest, and easiest path to a win and don't even want to try something different.

its difficult yes, but its not impossible. I agree with the OP some things need nerfing and some things need to go away:

Things that need to go away:
- BRD COR rotations, make it so buffs wear instantly off when going out of PT
- Pets takeing insane amounts of damage, I can understand their concern of makeing Pet Jobs too OP with this, being able to solo things: simple fix, transfer half of pets enmity allways to the master, for every action/dmg the pet does. But let the pet survive seriously...
- Allow Pets to recieve buffs
- Give RDM and SCH cure V, allow Temper, Gain and barspells to be cast on other PT members, make Adloqium of SCH more potent scaleing with enhancing skill to 5 Regain/Tic, up RDMs magic skill grades a bit, give RDM a unique Fastcast spell that enhances FastCast. There 3 Healer with different buffs and specialities to offer.
- Reduce bloodpacts recast maximum to 15 sec, while makeing so that pet damage/enmity is transfered half over to SMN. More dynamic and damaging job
- up magic damage to be even more competetiv then melee damage
- Remove JA delay
- Nerf Aegis , ESPECIALLY AEGIS
- Equalize BRD COR GEO: Give COR and GEOS haste rolls/geospells and a scherzo roll/geospell, have luopans not die fast, make indispells castable to other PT members, make luopans able to follow PT members.

I am sure the list would go on, thats what jumped my mind first

[Ravenmore]

its difficult yes, but its not impossible. I agree with the OP some things need nerfing and some things need to go away:

Things that need to go away:
- BRD COR rotations, make it so buffs wear instantly off when going out of PT
- Pets takeing insane amounts of damage, I can understand their concern of makeing Pet Jobs too OP with this, being able to solo things: simple fix, transfer half of pets enmity allways to the master, for every action/dmg the pet does. But let the pet survive seriously...
- Allow Pets to recieve buffs
- Give RDM and SCH cure V, allow Temper, Gain and barspells to be cast on other PT members, make Adloqium of SCH more potent scaleing with enhancing skill to 5 Regain/Tic, up RDMs magic skill grades a bit, give RDM a unique Fastcast spell that enhances FastCast. There 3 Healer with different buffs and specialities to offer.
- Reduce bloodpacts recast maximum to 15 sec, while makeing so that pet damage/enmity is transfered half over to SMN. More dynamic and damaging job
- up magic damage to be even more competetiv then melee damage
- Remove JA delay
- Nerf Aegis , ESPECIALLY AEGIS
- Equalize BRD COR GEO: Give COR and GEOS haste rolls/geospells and a scherzo roll/geospell, have luopans not die fast, make indispells castable to other PT members, make luopans able to follow PT members.

I am sure the list would go on, thats what jumped my mind first

The no brd rotations would kill off 2 song brd totally. Right now you can get away with one 2 song brd in a alliance or even two of them if you have a good LS but take away the rotations the demand for the 4 song brds will increase. The rest of your post solves nothing as well or would make things worse for other jobs again not fixing the core issue.

[Damane]

The no brd rotations would kill off 2 song brd totally. Right now you can get away with one 2 song brd in a alliance or even two of them if you have a good LS but take away the rotations the demand for the 4 song brds will increase. The rest of your post solves nothing as well or would make things worse for other jobs again not fixing the core issue.

brd/cor rotation nerf would actually fix more. 2 song bards allready dont get accepted, so the nerf wouldnt change anything at all, it actually would help people to think outside of the box and maybe incorporate other jobs in their setup. Because you know you can buff a ally indirectly by debuffing the mob with other jobs. Thf has feint, DNCs has steps, Angon etc. Blu debuffs, list goes on.

And you stated not why the rest of my post would make things worse. I would rather have some enmity as a pet job, but be able to keep my pet alive and buffed and thus makeing it possible to contribute to some harder fights stuff.

[Ravenmore]

brd/cor rotation nerf would actually fix more. 2 song bards allready dont get accepted, so the nerf wouldnt change anything at all, it actually would help people to think outside of the box and maybe incorporate other jobs in their setup. Because you know you can buff a ally indirectly by debuffing the mob with other jobs. Thf has feint, DNCs has steps, Angon etc. Blu debuffs, list goes on.

And you stated not why the rest of my post would make things worse. I would rather have some enmity as a pet job, but be able to keep my pet alive and buffed and thus makeing it possible to contribute to some harder fights stuff.

Blu debuffs suck and never stick on anything worth casting them on trust me been playing blu for years and giving up traits for crappy debuffs that either mobs are flat out immune too or you need ES to land is not worth it, dnc doesn't add enough dmg to 6 man or 18 man content to take with how it is now and everything dnc main offers that a party would want /dnc (haste samba even the weaken sub version) gets same with it's debuffs. Angon is ok but on any fight that dds have to go /nin the drgs gets the short end of the stick and taking another mnk or nin main would be better. The main reason to take a thf is TH, before they messed with feint merits it used to be a really nice debuff you could keep up full time now its not as useful, again TH is the sole reason to take a thf. Really if debuffing was effective you would see more of it but you don't cause mobs are immune or highly resistant.

[Peepiopi]

The no brd rotations would kill off 2 song brd totally. Right now you can get away with one 2 song brd in a alliance or even two of them if you have a good LS but take away the rotations the demand for the 4 song brds will increase. The rest of your post solves nothing as well or would make things worse for other jobs again not fixing the core issue.

This is kind of the overall problem that we're talking about. Bard rotations, while a "creative" way to maximize effectiveness, is sort of akin to gear switching, which is something the dev team has been trying to shy away from. Plus, I think we a lot of folks can agree that it would be awesome to not feel like they "needed" to do those rotations. But what if having more than 2 songs was one day considered to be more of a perk rather than a need?

The only reason why people are so dependent on 3+ song bards is because not much else quite matches up at the moment, because things aren't really well-balanced for endgame. I mean there are plenty of other jobs that could potentially fill the support role (blu, rdm, cor, geo, pup, smn, sch, etc...) Perhaps if Debuffs were a little more on par with Buffs, and Regen effects were a little more on par with cures, then we might be able to see a little bit less of a monopoly on the support role by White mages and bards.

[Kincard]

Unfortunately, I think this is a total pipe-dream, partly because of the player base. If the jobs aren't exactly equal, there will be those who want only the best, no matter how small the difference. If one job does 10,000 dmg over the length of the fight, but another job does 9990 dmg, they won't want the weaker job. I mean, that 10 point difference might make the battle last a minute longer. Seems people only care about having the quickest, safest, and easiest path to a win and don't even want to try something different.

Yeah sadly some in the community take efficiency to the point of absurdity. And just as in a game of Telephone, the info that there is a slight DPS difference between jobs eventually morphs into that slightly weaker job becoming considered totally worthless under all conditions.

There is already an objective way of measuring job performance, and classes that are considered total crap (THF, DNC, NIN, list goes on) simple deal less damage, and it's not a case of "oh it's only slightly less, we'll clear the content anyway"- a perfectly geared NIN is literally dealing like 60% of the damage a MNK is putting out. There's simply no way to argue against such an absurd gap.

It's true there will always be people obsessed with efficiency, but that's pretty exhaustive. The majority of people playing XIV don't care if you take whatever mixture of MNK, BLM, DRG, SMN, or BRD because you'll still be able to clear the content with more or less the same effort- FYI, BRDs do something like 15% less damage than the melee jobs do in that game right now (under ideal conditions). If FFXI had a Duty Finder, you know the dungeon would be abandoned the instant someone zoned in and saw a NIN tank, a THF DPS, or a SMN as sole support.

[Camiie]

There is already an objective way of measuring job performance, and classes that are considered total crap (THF, DNC, NIN, list goes on) simple deal less damage, and it's not a case of "oh it's only slightly less, we'll clear the content anyway"- a perfectly geared NIN is literally dealing like 60% of the damage a MNK is putting out. There's simply no way to argue against such an absurd gap.

What about the DD that aren't MNK? Some are not nearly as far behind it as THF DNC and NIN are, yet they may as well be. It's all or nothing with some people. Get the best or just don't go, even if winning without the best is entirely possible.

It's true there will always be people obsessed with efficiency, but that's pretty exhaustive. The majority of people playing XIV don't care if you take whatever mixture of MNK, BLM, DRG, SMN, or BRD because you'll still be able to clear the content with more or less the same effort- FYI, BRDs do something like 15% less damage than the melee jobs do in that game right now (under ideal conditions). If FFXI had a Duty Finder, you know the dungeon would be abandoned the instant someone zoned in and saw a NIN tank, a THF DPS, or a SMN as sole support.

And this is what needs to change.