Job feedback [pre-8.0 megathread]

I think the class balance within the various catagories is really strong, except for mdps. I think the damage tax on the res casters is way too high. This is likely a result of RDM being defacto required in world first parties, but the value of caster raise plummets the closer you get to baseline savage clearing gameplay. A better version of the Rex tax would be to give rdm and summoner a worse raise than their healing counterparts. Whether this be via a noticably increased mana cost, or a heavier stat penalty version of the "brink of death" debuff. Currently RDM and SMN are punished in 100% of runs for an ability that's making a difference in less than 5% of them


Also obligatory MCH should do more damage.

Tank is so overly redundant with defensives that it's boring to play. It's true that games like WoW made tanks too fragile, too lacking in aggro, etc, for a lot of people to want to play them, but FF14 went too far the other way, to the point that Healing is boring most of the time, and switches to frantic based off mistakes in a binary difficulty that's fine for no one.

And tanks still play below this bar. Solving problems by making a job easier doesn't really do much because people will still flop under it.

DPS are really dull and samey for the most part. CB3 has been so desperate to make sure every job is accessible and liked that no job is loved. It creates a sea of mediocrity that would have been disappointing game design thirty years ago. Job variance, and jobs having different solutions to the same problems, or different challenges from the same mechanic, makes more content by itself. Yes, it would be harder to balance, but wannabe hardcores will fuss over the very slightest variance and declare that the meta. It's a fool's errand.

The fact that Red Mage, arguably the intro caster class for the longest time, is among the most complicated is really unforgivable.

EDIT: No square that does not mean make RDM more braindead. Stop it.

DRK, GNB and DRG should get a trait that makes their ranged attack upgrade the gap closer into a the now removed damage version (Plunge, rough divide and spineshatter dive)

Aditionally, Dragoon should get Spineshatter back as a separate button for their rotation, because Jumps are core to their identity

Some differentiation between miner and botanist could be great, such as a minigame similar to what we have in the gold saucer. Not as "Rng" though, something interactive but not in the realm of gambling, made easier with how much gathering/perception you have. This is a suggestion for normal gathering as well, Legendary and Ephemeral nodes are fine as is

WHM should get blood lily much earlier in level, ideally the moment they unlock lillies

SGE's Kardia should target the lowest HP party member when used without a target, minor QoL I would use

Healers in general need deeper changes but without shuffling much, that came to mind

MNK should get freeform fist upon using the 3 PB charges and not upon opening a Beast Chakra, minor QoL for the ankward feeling that is cutting your combo when you have Perfect balance but none of the finishers (level 50)

WAR's Gap closer could have the cooldown reduced by tomahawk

PLD Could use some VFX updates, mainly I think Goring blade doesnt fit for a high potency skill (Blasting Zone for example feels really good to use)

Bard should get more of their skills at 50

SMN... just give it something, a DOT, Summons that are not a glorified mini cutscene, something. I cant even elaborate what because I gave up on it by 6.1

PIC, Make Hammer a gain, otherwise it feels terrible to use. If the problem is really about downtime encounters, make it so painting it without a target selected has slightly reduced potency (you will still be getting potency off downtime since you are using dead time drawing)

BLM, I liked the removal of timers because I play with terrible ping, but you should have fixed the ping dependency first, then consider the timer changes

To all Raid buff jobs: Do what you did with criterion, and make their buffs stronger in 4 man content. If you balance the buffs accounting for 8-man parties, then apply the same balance you did for Criterion to the rest of the game. This will make jobs like Bard feel MASSIVELY better in roulettes

MCH :(

(Also give me a different waist box, the one we have right now is getting moldy)

Goldsmith grinding wheel is not loud enough

Culinarian, give me some different chopping boards, I beg, the plank is starting to chip off

Fisher, last time we got a different fishing minigame was in SB with spearfishing, I dont expect a new one, but it would be funny

remove the 2 minute burst meta and build all fight around the jobs not the other way around.


But honestly sage should have no healing skills well that doesn't give shield. all it's heal should come from its DPS skill I think it's pneuma? that is a good exemple of if kardia should also heal a single target but depending on what you use he heal change. Dosis could be a 170 potency then a other spell that could heal for 400 and so on. All AOE DPS should do AOE heals around the healers with decent range to like a 10 yalms. I think it's toxikon? the one with the red thingy well that one should heal a 5 yalms around the tanks for a 300 potency or more. this is what I think sage should be only keep the shield as basic heal like sch.


for smn what I think they should do is rather simple one remove the skill that change depending on with summon you have between titan Garuda and ifrit. Instead when you smn ifrit ruin 3 and disaster I think? make them change into the ruby skills and the smn doesn't just inferno and leave but stay to fight for 15 second like baha. inferno would become a skill you ask it to use on Ekendle instead. ifrit could be single targeting, titan could be doing cone damage weaker then ifrit but stronger then Garuda and Garuda could be fast AOE doing lighter damage but fast too.

Ranged Physical

The role is in the grave right now and has been since SHB released (and potentially SB as well). It has lost all party support identity because everyone and their mothers do party support anyway. Parties are drowning in a sea of mitigation tools, especially on the healer and tank side, but also that every other DPS role brings as well to a lesser degree.

- Solution 1 (easy but boring): mitigation needs to be dramatically weeded out and redistributed to the rphys role as a core of their identity.
- Solution 2 (flesh out enemy damage profiles): respecialize party support so that each tool respects a different paradigm and case scenario: introduce synergies and different types of attacks or series of attacks that favor one type of mitigation or another. Potentially introduce hit nullifiers that can totally absorb a single hit no matter the strength or anything to diversify the system.
- Solution 3 (tentative pvp inspiration): reintroduce crowd control into pve, both on the players' end and the enemies' end, and redistribute corresponding tools to deal with it like Warden's. Improve the UI to clearly show when somebody gets hit by crowd control and requires support. Introduce crowd control nullifiers that do act as wards that offer a layer of protection, namely give back Protect to healers re flavored as a crowd control ward, or as an universal ability for everyone on a cooldown (Purify). I don't think constantly eating crowd control is fun, therefore the need for layers of protection that can break, eventually making players vulnerable and requiring assistance.


MCH

The problems with the job are many:

- Flamethrower plays directly against the job's primary mechanic which is heat generation and needs to be changed. Multiple solutions have been offered over the years, either having it generating heat or consuming heat like a more powerful version of scattergun (but rooting the player in place).
- Autocrossbow has been relegated to a joke skill since it still doesn't regenerate charges (unlike blazing shot), and makes its use in AoE only a gain above 7 targets now if i'm not mistaken (it was 5 at DT's release, and 3-4 before).
- Battery still has no AoE application which is an eyesore, especially when things like Crown Collider literally have AoE visuals. It was less of a problem before the introduction of Chainsaw which is literally an AoE skill generating battery, battery which has no use in AoE.
- Nothing interacts with each other in the kit, it's just about throwing big damage tools on cooldown. It's boring and unrewarding, just annoying when the player misses a GCD and drift at best.
- Tools are all flare no substance: they're just damage buttons that can charge battery for some of them.
- Battery is utterly boring and a gameplay denial where it's just a fire and forget button, and the pet (Queen) is full of infuriating bugs (stops attacking, doesn't use the finisher when changing targets, doesn't dash to the target unless the player specifically uses an ability, doesn't work when the player gets disabled or the terrain changes, etc).

What the job has lost:

- Its primary damage profile which used to be the biggest burst in the game by far (10-15s burst packed with 50% of its damage profile). This was centered around Wildfire, which encouraged skill play depending on what the player was able to put inside and constantly trying to go for the highest number possible was part of the (serotonin) reward, versus today where it just counts GCD hits (boring).
Consider splitting Wildfire into two skills: the Wildfire on a big cooldown that would work like a burst compiling damage like before (like current pvp Death Warrant), and a smaller detonator on say, 30s cooldown, that counts hits like today and could bring up different plays around multi-hit tools (like scattergun/FMF in pvp).
- Heat management (SB profile): one of the only unique resource gauges that wasn't just about building/spending gauge, and instead had the player balance heat to keep enough of it for damage but not to overheat the gun.
Bring back the old Cooldown which was used to dump heat, attach cool effects to it like potency and mobility boosts (3-5s sprint)
- Actual pets to manage and pick from depending on the situation (Rook vs Bishop).
Bring back Bishop at the very least in its pvp version: offers a pulsing barrier on a radius that also deals damage to enemies
- Ammo procs and Reload abilities: it is unacceptable to completely remove what made the job what it was and give the middle finger to everybody that loved it. Ammo was great, and needs to be back. Ammo was what brought skill expression to the job, notably adding a layer of variability in the burst patterns depending on the procs the player would start the burst with. RDM has siphoned some of those concepts notably with the newest formula behind Acceleration, but still doesn't come close at all to an unique playstyle of building up procs and spending them like MCH used to.
Consider introducing different ammo types for different uses in the rotation, or perhaps a quick reload button for ammo and a reload button reloading drill heads
- Damage party support: Hypercharged turrets would debuff the target with a vuln effect for 28ish seconds (tied to turret autos).
Rook could be a battery tool that does this
- Resource party support: Promoted turrets would regen MP/TP for the whole party, at the cost of the job's damage (since the turret would stop attacking).
I am neutral on having to sacrifice damage for this as I don't think the current community is mature enough to handle opportunity cost scenari, as seen with the long threads about damaging gap closers, but still consider bringing back a paradigm in pve where MP and resources actually matter nonetheless
- MP gauge use: Turret Promotion would use the MP gauge to refresh the party. The effect would be doubled by Hypercharge, meaning the player could choose between using Hypercharge for party damage or for party resource support.
A lot of jobs are in a dire need to have their MP gauge put back to use
- Its identity as a debuffer: suppressive fire (melee range stun), head graze (long range silence), rend mind, etc.
Not very useful in a pve paradigm where crowd control is not very useful, like foot and leg graze, but still useful in specific environments like dungeons or especially deep dungeons. If crowd control makes a comeback, this would shine all the better.

Other potential ideas:

- Minor cast times on big nukes like tools or FMF for a more tactile weight behind those, much like for SAM's Iajutsu or RPR's Communio.
- Marksman's Spite, unlocked by specific mechanics to be determined, like something inspired from the old Between the Eyes where its potency is tripled when the target suffers from Bind, Stun or Sleep.
- Bioblaster: inflicts Heavy.
- Air Anchor: inflicts Bind.
- Chainsaw: inflicts Bleed.
- Drill: would be fun to have Guard/Diamondback in pve where some mobs would use it and you could either wait it out or just use Drill to break it (some other jobs would obviously have some tools like this, like PLD's shield bash, etc).
- Reassemble: can be paired with some tools (turns the bind from Anchor into a Stun, turns Heavy from Bio into a Sleep, turns Bleed from Chainsaw into Vuln, autocrits Drill, etc).
- Make Scattergun a multi-hit like in pvp and make it interact with WF that way (uncap WF's amount of potential hits). Same for Full Metal Field.
- More flavor oriented: bring back the unheated variants of shots, and make them heated only under overheat.

DNC

Problems with the job:

- Tillana grants 50 esprit gauge but has no real control over the gauge which leads to annoying overcaps: even if the player delays it to dump gauge, nothing guarantees that a Devilment surge of esprit procs will refill the gauge just after anyway, and delaying means drifting, which isn't recoverable.
- Too simple, not enough skill ceiling. Just press what lights up and use dances on cooldown and you're set. Only optimization really possible is spooling Fans for burst (which also makes the burst funnier and more hectic).

What the job has lost:

- Procs prioritization: procs from Flourish would overwrite normal procs. Whether this is good or bad, I am pretty neutral about it, but it certainly removed skill expression. Perhaps too annoying with gauge micromanagement before though.
- Melee AoE during single target bursts: this is a big loss of range identity for the job.
- Gauge generation from Improv: why??

Potential ideas:
- En-Avant guaranteeing procs on the next GCD (opportunity cost scenario, if the community hates it, then scratch that)
- Starfall grants a speed boost to the DNC and the partner.
- Sabre grants a damage buff between DNC and partner.
- Please introduce one of the most rewarding pvp abilities to pve: Solo Step and Dance of the Dawn. If DotD is too much of an iconic nuke for the burst of the job, then consider using something else instead. Whether the ability just fills up party gauge when the party kills something, or whether it does something else, whatever works.
- Same for Honing Dance, it's too unique to be ignored.

BRD

Problems (where to begin...):

- Empyreal Arrow not having charges, leading to crazy rigid GCD structures making the job infuriating to play at anything else than optimal speeds, else it turns into a clipping fiesta (it's still a clipping fiesta even at optimal speeds). A simple charge would alleviate the problem almost entirely.
- Iron Jaws is a punishing mechanic that just feels bad when the player just loses attention for a handful of seconds and the dots drop at the worst time. Honestly consider removing that skill out of the game or do something else about it.
- Army's Ethos is a bad and clunky mechanic that is supposed to give Army's some meaning, but ultimately only constrains the song rotation to a fixed sequence with no agency whatsoever, and on top of it makes the following bursts insanely tight (at least similar to SB MCH overheat), which meshes very, very poorly with any latency or microclipping. If each song was more defined into when to use them and what for, we could see different song cycles not dissimilar to the summons of SMN (one of the only things that SMN does well). Songs could also benefit from having a very short recast or no recast at all, provided that the player would still want to rotate through them all notably for Radiant's Finale effects.
- Repelling shot is frankly useless/underwhelming and could benefit from more (range, etc).
- Song party passive buffs overwrite each other with multiple bards, which is terrible. Make them stack, it's not gonna break the game, I swear.

What the job has lost:
- Freeform procs attached to dot crits. This actually gave meaning to the gear treadmill and build optimization, and the more an expansion progressed, the harder and more hectic the job became to play, and a lot of jobs could benefit from this design, not just old bard.
- Freeform procs, period: currently procs are way too predictable (every 3s) and this is ultimately boring. The current design of BRD is trying to remove even more of what's left of rng in jobs today and this legitimately makes me angry.
- Like old MCH, party resource support, as in the old Ballad/Army that offered MP/TP party regen.
- Barrage optimization: now we get a free set of Refulgent when using Barrage so that people don't have to feel bad when they don't have a proc for it. It's lame and removes skill expression, but I do not know how to address the drift that we could have before.
- A more unique Troubadour that changed its effect depending on the song being played. If songs could be swapped around, this would generate skill expression.
- More healing tools as seen in 1.0/ARR, and in the opening trailer for ARR.

Potential ideas:
- A more involved party buff gameplay where it's not just about using a song that gives a passive to the party. Perhaps using repertoire would refresh it?
- More song specific abilities, for example Minuet Minne (additionally compiles all healing done during its duration and generated a shield of X %), Ballad Minne (additionally grants party refresh), Army Minne (additionally grants sprint to the party). Lower Minne's CD a little, perhaps down to 60s or something.
- Resonant Arrow detached from Barrage, instead the BRD gains one Resonant stack per combo completion (Refulgent or Shadowbite), unlocks Resonant at X amount, caps at Y for more potency. Can optionally add a minor cast behind for more weight.
- Introduce Nocturne on a short CD for silences (not interrupts), every successful use would grant repertoire.
- Song repertoire mechanics could use more depth than just "refresh an ability that the player spamms".

Valence's comment reminded me of 2 QoLs I wanted for Bard a while ago

2 charges for Emp Arrow
Charge all 3 Codas when out of battle (Similar to how Picto can insta draw outside of combat)

Those 2 alone would go a long way into making bard feel better in more casual content, as it is right now, its kinda a raid/trials job for the most part

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shistar

Please don't touch PLD.

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Yes please revert it back to 6.2 Current job is designed for people who don't even like Paladin

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

Yes please revert it back to 6.2 Current job is designed for people who don't even like Paladin

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I literally said don't touch it, not revert it lol did you maybe quote the wrong person? We're saying opposite arguments.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shistar

I literally said don't touch it, not revert it lol did you maybe quote the wrong person? We're saying opposite arguments.

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Current paladin was made for warrior mains, not paladin mains.

Let tanks be unique again, people who didn't like old paladin will enjoy a tank called warrior, or gunbreaker or dark knight, theirs no reason why all the tanks need to play exactly the same.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

Current paladin was made for warrior mains, not paladin mains.

Let tanks be unique again, people who didn't like old paladin will enjoy a tank called warrior, or gunbreaker or dark knight, theirs no reason why all the tanks need to play exactly the same.

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Genuine question, what makes you see current paladin as warrior-like?

I only level PLD and WAR casually (and I haven't max level PLD now) so I don't really understand it. Requiescat combo so far feels the same like EW PLD to me.