DualShocker Interview - 3.5 pt 2 next week, supposedly

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Originally Posted by BigRed5392

gf posting:
how are people saying drk harder to play >.>;; it pretty easy imo.

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It's harder to play than PLD, is what I'm sure people are saying.
There are more buttons involved to play DRK as optimal as a PLD, not to mention MP management.

better survivability means more uptime of damage stance. that's why drk works so well in certain fights. also he didn't say it's just defense. he said that one of the weak points ppl mention is the lack of magic mitigation and that they'll change that. we also don't know what the other tanks will get. war probably not much, as it has so many tools atm. drk could use something similar to sheltron (an on demand 20% reduction for physical tank busters) and that would be pretty much it.
and maybe we will move away from the "damage is all that matters" attitude as fights won't allow mechanic skips anymore or enemies throw more damage at the tanks.

Unless they made 4.0 fights more intense for damage/tank busters and heals, which I highly doubt they stepped out of their comfort zone and went ahead with changes, this change to pld is kinda useless. DPS is the meta and fights are scripted, any tank can perfectly do the job, so people will pick the one(s) with highest damage anyway.

Well we can see that se just dont understand the problems and where they starting at.
Sadly 4.0 havpe all of the 3.x plus new ones.

3.56 now confirmed for Tuesday, March 28th.

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Originally Posted by Kit-Kat

Unless they made 4.0 fights more intense for damage/tank busters and heals, which I highly doubt they stepped out of their comfort zone and went ahead with changes, this change to pld is kinda useless. DPS is the meta and fights are scripted, any tank can perfectly do the job, so people will pick the one(s) with highest damage anyway.

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I think the problem is, and I could be completely wrong, but it feels like they're still following the same 2.0 raiding format. Back then, you had to mostly take one of each job anyway, so it was automatically balanced as long as each job was good at it's role.


It's come to the point now where you can customize your party the way you want it, and since all jobs can still clear content easily, it comes to which one does the most DPS. Things won't automatically balance itself anymore, we have more of a decision now. What SE needs to do is either balance raiding so that it can't be steamrolled with a full offensive party composition and actually requires a mixture of hard mitigation from multiple jobs and hard healing, or give the more defensive jobs (PLD, Monk, WHM etc) extremely good utility to the point where you'd take them despite their lower DPS.

Either way, something has to change in raiding that forces players to mix job compositions. To bring a mix of offensive and defensive kits. I'd hate to see yet another full offensive meta take over for another entire raid.

Still not really hyped...

I don't even read the interviews anymore so ty for the summary OP ^^

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Originally Posted by DaikiKiyoshi

DS: With the new Shirogane housing zone, and the feature that will allow free companies to move, aren’t you concerned about the possibility of the old housing areas becoming empty? Is there any plan to prevent that?

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Due to the limits, the maximum who can move, if they are fast, is 1/3 of the current buildings. So the old areas will not get empty.

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Originally Posted by Iromi

Still not really hyped...

I don't even read the interviews anymore so ty for the summary OP ^^

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I read them still, but they usually start off like this:

Boyfriend: Did you see the new interview posted on Reddit today?

Me: No, I don't want to read it, do I?

Boyfriend: Probably not, but I know you will anyway. You're not going to like it.

I read the article and just shake my head and sigh.

I don't think my apathy for this game has ever been like this. I always had hope that something would happen and make it better. Just like Yoshida made so many things better in 1.x.

With every interview, I feel is going further downhill and that saddens me.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

Either way, something has to change in raiding that forces players to mix job compositions.

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Not much to be done there except forcing every raid party to take X, Y or Z job just in order to clear. Mitigation and Healing are artificial additions and as a consequence only ever as useful as they are required, there's not much you can do about that - You can require more or less of it or you can invalidate Damage as Winning Condition. You don't have more options.

Every "utility" you give jobs is measured by the same standard. As such, the "defensive jobs" as you call them need either more direct DPS done by themselves, or indirect DPS via party buffs. It is as simple as that.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

Not much to be done there except forcing every raid party to take X, Y or Z job just in order to clear. Mitigation and Healing are artificial additions and as a consequence only ever as useful as they are required, there's not much you can do about that - You can require more or less of it or you can invalidate Damage as Winning Condition. You don't have more options.

Every "utility" you give jobs is measured by the same standard. As such, the "defensive jobs" as you call them need either more direct DPS done by themselves, or indirect DPS via party buffs. It is as simple as that.

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With the simple combat system that we have and how fights are designed with DPS checks as one of their foci, you are correct.

Change how things are created, and you change that mentality.

Since Yoshida will not create content requiring a single job he present, we will maintain the status quo.

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Originally Posted by Istaru

Since Yoshida will not create content requiring a single job he present, we will maintain the status quo.

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A lot of things can change based on tool kits available and the Cross Role skills system changes will likely change that.

Pacification use is currently a no go in Raid content because only Paladin has access to it.
Harpooning use is currently a no go in Raid content because only Warrior has access to it.
Buff stripping is currently a no go in Raid content because only Monk has access to it.
Sleep use is currently a no go in Raid content because only White Mage and Black Mage have access to it.
Knockback requires in fight mechanics to use because only White Mage, Summoner and Machinist have access to it inherently.
Bind use is limited because Black Mage is the only Ranged DpS without it.
Silence use is limited because Paladin, Scholar, Monk, Ninja, Bard and Machinist are the ones that have it but you can build viable* comps that will have trouble silencing due to Monk/Scholar.

*"viable" being a comp with 2 tanks, 2 healers, 2 melee dps and 2 ranged dps all of different jobs.

Putting several of these effects in various Cross Role skill lists will allow the devs to design fights that require them.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

A lot of things can change based on tool kits available and the Cross Role skills system changes will likely change that.

Pacification use is currently a no go in Raid content because only Paladin has access to it.
Harpooning use is currently a no go in Raid content because only Warrior has access to it.
Buff stripping is currently a no go in Raid content because only Monk has access to it.
Sleep use is currently a no go in Raid content because only White Mage and Black Mage have access to it.
Knockback requires in fight mechanics to use because only White Mage, Summoner and Machinist have access to it inherently.
Bind use is limited because Black Mage is the only Ranged DpS without it.
Silence use is limited because Paladin, Scholar, Monk, Ninja, Bard and Machinist are the ones that have it but you can build viable* comps that will have trouble silencing due to Monk/Scholar.

*"viable" being a comp with 2 tanks, 2 healers, 2 melee dps and 2 ranged dps all of different jobs.

Putting several of these effects in various Cross Role skill lists will allow the devs to design fights that require them.

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That's all well and good and sounds nice but, but how does that get PLD, WHM and to a lesser degree, MNK to the point of not being unwelcome in top tier content?

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Putting several of these effects in various Cross Role skill lists will allow the devs to design fights that require them.

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If everyone can be useful for mechanics then why take the job with a lower DPS?

Perfect balance is impossible in MMORPGs, no amount of homogenization and streamlining will ever solve it...

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Originally Posted by Ririta

If everyone can be useful for mechanics then why take the job with a lower DPS?

Perfect balance is impossible in MMORPGs, no amount of homogenization and streamlining will ever solve it...

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http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Perfect_Balance

On the discussion of Paladin, obviously from this interview we can take that they're going to balance Paladin's MDef (but that isn't the /only/ change it'll recieve) and here is another "maybe" change:

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USgamer: Finally, let me end on selfish question. As a Paladin player, Flash is a good ability, but it doesn't have any impact. Can we give it some impact?

Yoshida: It's true. It is kind of hard to tell if the enemies have reacted to it or not. As you mentioned, it's literally a 'Ping!' and then some light. We're still in a state where we can go back and review some of the existing actions, so I'll look into it.
[Source]

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The admittance it feels pretty low impact and that they'll take a look is really nice imo (while it's a lot easier to use than Overpower lol, the spamming of flash in the very beginning to hold AoE hate feels awful, imo).

The spell isn't as bad as some of the worst ones jobs have but it has been a highly suggested/debated change across threads about what Flash does and how it may help the Paladin in it's AoE management. The fact he said "we're still open to changes" and "we'll look at it" makes me feel that its already being looked at (cannot say it will be changed or not) but at least the easiness in response makes it seem like a valid item on the Paladin 4.0.

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Originally Posted by Istaru

That's all well and good and sounds nice but, but how does that get PLD, WHM and to a lesser degree, MNK to the point of not being unwelcome in top tier content?

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Other changes involving the Cross Role system will help that.

Currently a lot of problems that Paladin and White Mage suffer from are caused by them being designated owner of certain "must have" abilities. Currently Paladin "owns" Provoke, Convalescence, Awareness and Rampart and White Mage owns Cleric Stance, Raise, Protect and Stoneskin. Moving these skills to the Cross Role Skill list frees up a significant amount of room to allow for abilities to balance these two with the other jobs in their roles.

Monk's problems are mostly tied to lack of a raid wide damage buff in the vein of Battle Litany and Trick Attack. Changing party wide buffs like Battle Litany and Mantra into the Cross Role skills will help them balance things out. The fact Dragoon's Piercing debuff boosts Bard/Machinist dps could be balanced out by giving Monk a way to boost caster dps.

Also the improved Magic Defense boost the Paladin mentioned in the interview and misinterpreted by the Op was likely referring to problems in raid caused by the lack of the -10% Int down debuff from Delirium or Dragon Kick.

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Originally Posted by Ririta

If everyone can be useful for mechanics then why take the job with a lower DPS?

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If the gap in personal+raid-wide dps is small enough: personal preference. Even if all job in the same role had similar levels of effectiveness players would gravitate to the jobs they most enjoy playing. Some players find Paladin boring others enjoy its streamlined simplicity over managing Origin stacks and MP consumption. As long as the dps gap is small enough players will not feel forced to play the most optimum job(s).

They've already suggested that they're going to trim a lot of the clutter and ensure that each role has access to the same tools that they require across the board. As far as PLD goes, this needs to be reflected in AoE capability as well, I feel. So I'm glad that they're in agreement that the Flash ability is lacking. A PLD who wants to get the ARR relic weapon is in for a frustrating time with the light farming phase. Even something as simple as Satasha unsynced can be infuriating due to the lack of AoE they can dish out. So you pull everything you can, use Circle of Scorn and then...you pretty much either have to wait to recharge or slowly pick off each enemy with direct hits. A WAR or DRK, by comparison, can simply spam their AoE and trim a lot of time off of it as a result.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

I'm suggesting that all tanks could eventually achieve similar defensive resilience,

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Then Paladin will continue to warm the bench for yet another raid tier. They can buff Paladin's defenses through the moon. The only pertinent questions people at endgame care about are:

- Can Warrior and Dark Knight survive the incoming damage?
- Can both the healers heal either whilst maintaining high DPS relevant to the reduced damage Paladin takes?
- Does Paladin provide better utility?

If the answer to the first two questions is yes and the last no? Many raiders won't care what Paladin does. It's deemed inferior because damage is all that matters in FFXIV. White Mage suffers the same issue right now in that it's designed to be a raw burst healer yet no fight requires burst healing. And it's two counterparts can easily cover whatever incoming damage there is while providing vastly superior raid utility. The devs either have to devise a means of punishing players who value DPS above all else or overhaul the design of both jobs and give them equivalent utility.

If they upped the PLD's defenses, wouldn't it be interesting if they were given "tank buster" utility. Like an ability which allowed them to shave 1 buster stack on them or the ability to have a time based action which allowed them to retaliate dmg when a tank buster ability is being used, "Double Dmg if covering the person who is being tank busted".

I feel like being creative with the way PLD could increase their dmg output would be a god idea rather than giving them a straight att boost.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Then Paladin will continue to warm the bench for yet another raid tier. They can buff Paladin's defenses through the moon. The only pertinent questions people at endgame care about are:

- Can Warrior and Dark Knight survive the incoming damage?
- Can both the healers heal either whilst maintaining high DPS relevant to the reduced damage Paladin takes?
- Does Paladin provide better utility?

If the answer to the first two questions is yes and the last no? Many raiders won't care what Paladin does. It's deemed inferior because damage is all that matters in FFXIV. White Mage suffers the same issue right now in that it's designed to be a raw burst healer yet no fight requires burst healing. And it's two counterparts can easily cover whatever incoming damage there is while providing vastly superior raid utility. The devs either have to devise a means of punishing players who value DPS above all else or overhaul the design of both jobs and give them equivalent utility.

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To me, this suggests that the game might be better off without the raiding tier since it is the raiding meta that is distorting the rest of he game. I'm not suggesting that raiding should, or will be dropped, but so many points in discussions come down to whether or not the proposed change will work for raiders. To me, that says that much of the core eleent of the game is predicated on raiding, and honestly, I think that's unhealthy for the game as a whole. We've been suffering this DPS meta for almost the entire life of FFXIV since ARR. It's time to go in another direction IMHO.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

To me, this suggests that the game might be better off without the raiding tier since it is the raiding meta that is distorting the rest of he game. I'm not suggesting that raiding should, or will be dropped, but so many points in discussions come down to whether or not the proposed change will work for raiders. To me, that says that much of the core eleent of the game is predicated on raiding, and honestly, I think that's unhealthy for the game as a whole. We've been suffering this DPS meta for almost the entire life of FFXIV since ARR. It's time to go in another direction IMHO.

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Because no other content matters in terms of balancing. Normal modes and dungeons are complete facerolls. You scarily even need to know your rotation, nevermind anything else. Without Extremes and Savage, the devs have to develop brand new content. Keep in mind, those harder difficulties are more or less the same fights scaled up. It's a simple task to scale existing fights whereas eliminating them completely means you're guaranteed to lose a large portion of your playerbase. The impact wouldn't just be felt on the raid scene either. No raids means you have no need of pots, food or crafted gear, thus putting a sizable dent in the crafting market. You then have to ask what keeps even the casual players interested? If Alexander Normal and Dun Scaith were all we got. Well, you certainly don't need 260 or 270 gear. What motivation do they have to repeatedly run content? There's a massive trickle down effect to removing Savage.

We're suffering this DPS meta because the devs do not offer an alternative. Fight designs all revolve around damage and nothing else. Healers are too powerful, thus they have ample down time and are expected to DPS. Tanks have little use of their tank stance because every fight is entirely predictable. After prog, you'll know when to swap and will inevitably spend the vast majority without it. That all said, plenty of players like the harder PvE focus. You can't just have a game of entirely faceroll content or people will get bored.

I think one of the biggest issues is that 'regular' content is very easy outright for many players with a decent amount of experience with the game. Many encounters are very generous in regards to not punishing players for their mistakes and a lot of players have access to gear that increases their damage and health to a point where they easily survive most things that the game throws their way. I've seen people soak up multiple AoE's and survive due to an attentive healer - and it isn't unusual for a dungeon to involve pulling multiple enemies at once and then killing them with AoE.

I'd like to see more engaging content that takes a similar approach to the higher floors in POTD. You need to be cautious with how many enemies you pull at once, there's traps to watch out for and every enemy has at least one special ability to watch out for. At the very highest floors getting hit by any AoE at all will result in death. So the stakes are high and the rewards are actually pretty decent all things considered. Unfortunately actually getting there is needlessly tedious - you need to first find three other people to team up with who will be around at set times. You also need to tackle 50-100 without a single wipe which isn't too difficult in itself and most people wanting to do the higher floors will have already done already dozens of times over. One of the biggest challenges is finding people with a schedule that aligns with one's own. A lot of players in this game are very flaky in that regard.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

To me, this suggests that the game might be better off without the raiding tier since it is the raiding meta that is distorting the rest of he game. I'm not suggesting that raiding should, or will be dropped, but so many points in discussions come down to whether or not the proposed change will work for raiders. To me, that says that much of the core eleent of the game is predicated on raiding, and honestly, I think that's unhealthy for the game as a whole. We've been suffering this DPS meta for almost the entire life of FFXIV since ARR. It's time to go in another direction IMHO.

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There's a fundamental lack of understanding of both human nature and game design 101 with comments like this.

Let me preface, I understand you think we should go in another direction when it comes to class balance due to the DPS meta but what you need to understand is that optimization will always be a thing and its a universal common in MMOs.

This is because MMOs use skinner box concepts of effort/time v reward which means efficacy, optimization and repeat success are often rewarded while outside of the box thinking (which can be fun) isn't universally adopted unless it proves to be more efficient in either ease to execute or time involved.

MMO job balance (especially in subscription based MMOs) will almost universally be based around wherever the highest level rewards are obtained due to them being the largest carrot in the game by which all other reward systems are compared to and balanced against.

So this is usually raids.

However lets put aside raids for a moment and assume they balanced jobs around say... dungeons.

Because dungeons are meant to be run more than once, players will then adopt the speed-running meta (even more-so than we already do now) because this is what class balance and reward systems would be determined by.

Faster dungeons = more dungeons completed = faster loot.

So...

The Tank able to deal with the largest pulls, hold threat and contribute damage would be the meta pick.
The DPS able to do the most AoE damage and deal with bosses would be meta pick.
The Healer able to heal the largest pulls and output the most damage would be meta pick.

This would always be the case no matter which way the devs push the numbers, because players will always gravitate towards the most successful combination.

What if they balanced around FATEs?

The jobs able to accrue the most participation values would then be the ones that shined the most. This means anything that uses DoTs (sup SMN) would instantly be tossed to the wayside as you would see massive influxes of healers and tanks spamming threat generation abilities in order to get max credit.

The list continues when applied to ANY content in the game. Players will always go with what works the best.

This doesn't even take into account that content like that isn't even difficult enough to actually see real balance against anyway, unless you're proposing they start creating savage dungeons on the level of raids in which case the meta will simply become whatever 4 job composition completes the instance easiest / fastest which makes it a moot point.

So back to raids

There are a couple of solutions to the problem.

A) Every role is able to do the exact same thing with different colored abilities AKA perfect homogenization.

This is boring because the razor thin differences in classes we already have would disappear entirely, this means DRK/PLD/WAR would have every ability do the exact same thing under every single circumstance, they would just be skinned differently.

Which incidentally is the avenue they seem to be pushing towards, they just haven't fully committed because they know people would get bored and likely unsub.

B) Aspects of the battle and encounter system would have to be redesigned from the ground up to allow more variance in the way we approach encounters.

This is massive can of worms because whatever change made will eventually be optimized on a per fight basis, its just how things always end up. Look at every single MMO in existence if you need reference on this. The woes of battle systems and class balance is something that plagues nearly every single multiplayer game because there are just massive numbers of variables in playstyles and approach that developers cannot account for.

This also works counter to the Duty Finder because a fight with too many possible encounter scenarios / strategies means the most popular / known one will likely be the one that is the easiest to execute and the jobs that favor that strategy will be preferred.

Which leads to the final issue

Players by far understand the game better than developers do.

It's funny because people always come up with the "let the devs do X because they know better" which almost universally Is not the case, developers may have a vision that they want things to fall in line with but it's almost impossible to brute force players to act in an specific manner and it still be considered fun.

Don't believe me?

Read Yoshida's comments on things like NIN/MCH/AST/WAR all when players were backing up how the jobs either performed way above or way below developer expectations because either players were just plain better than the developers at playing the game (See: NIN damage) or party composition / encounter level / tested gear did not match what the developers were planning (see jobs performing differently with gear/party variance).

It's not even a phenomenon unique to FFXIV, there are tons of game developers who have straight up admitted that classes/characters/jobs/specs/warframes/champions/heroes/etc have performed entirely different in live play than they initially planned.

It's why we have balance patches to begin with.

And why some games have public test servers.

So yeah you're looking at the symptom but not the actual problem.

Also I implore you to read this carefully should you chose to respond so we dont suffer another misunderstanding.

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Originally Posted by Ririta

Why doesn't Ala Mhigo have its own housing plots?

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If Ala Mhigo have a housing plot then it will be only for Garleans, not or adventurers.
Or a housing plot that look like a slum.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

[...] and every enemy has at least one special ability to watch out for.

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In fairness: This is already the case. It's typically a telegraphed AoE and if you do a mass pull, you'll often have dozens of them flung right at you. Getting hit by one just... usually doesn't matter. Healers can pick up the slack easily.

The whole "insta-death" paradigm that's not just in higher floors of PotD, but also in Savage is a symptom of healer power - nothing else but death matters, because only death has a considerable cost to erase. And at times, even death only matters because of the stat debuff that might prevent you from beating enrage.

Personally, I don't think punishing people with an instant:"You're out." card, i.E. death if they make a mistake is particularly fun design. I much prefer it the way most games do it: You can get hit multiple times, but replenishments for your HP are scarce. Alas, healers again - They're too powerful to allow for that.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

We're suffering this DPS meta because the devs do not offer an alternative.

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More precisely: We're suffering this DPS meta because the game revolves around lowering health bars to 0 in order to win a fight and the only way to do that is to deal damage. Damage is what matters, the only thing that matters. Everything else is fluff - You do it if it's required, to the degree it is required, but afterwards go back to damage, because only damage will further your win.

It's a common metagame - Every shooter, every fighting game, most bullet hell and strategy games as well as tower defense games have the same. Probably a lot more. They have different ways on how to deal that damage, but on the meta level, all of these games are identical - there are health bars, hit points or whatever and you want to reduce those to 0 to win the round/game.

As such, I have a hard time considering it inherently flawed. It just has grave consequences for the trinity design: Two parts of said trinity are only as relevant as they are required. They are fluff. And for a player, it sucks if your chosen identity is essentially fluff.

There is no systemic fix for that - You can invalidate damage as win condition to put the importance on mitigation/healing, but that only shifts the issue around: Now you only deal as much damage as required and then go to mitigation/healing, whereas previously, you'd mitigate/heal as required and then go to dealing damage. That's not making things better.

All you can try is to require so much healing/mitigation, that the respective roles cannot do much else, because they're so busy just fulfilling that role. That doesn't fix the issue, mind you - DPS is still king. But at least the players of these roles would not feel or be urged to DPS, because realistically, they can't.
For that to happen however you'd need drastic nerfs and far higher complexity - As it stands, mitigation is largely something passive, you only actively mitigate when a tankbuster comes in by pressing a single CD. It would have to change to something highly active.
Likewise, healers would need far higher complexity in their healing, because just nerfing their potencies alone would result in nothing but a boring Cure spam. That gets rid of the downtime that makes people urge them to DPS, but it's not engaging. Maximizing your AoE healing output should require far more than medica II, then spam medica I. Maximizing single target healing output should require far more than putting a regen on them and spamming Cure II. Then, maybe, we can also stop having healer checks be all about unforgiving timers, because as it is, whether it's a prey mechanic, a tank buster or AoE nukes, it's all only about knowing the timer for the mechanic by heart and pressing the solution heal for it, otherwise death/wipe happens.

the "dps meta" isn't a the problem.
the problem is that what works for the pioneers is often enforced on the majority.
more damage for a faster clear was never the issue, but asking ppl to do more damage without understanding the fight itself. you often see midcore ppl or pugs try to skip certain things, cause it's too hard to learn something. though you could simply do the mechanic and deal with it. and after you understand the fight you can still try to optimize and do more damage.
just look at zurvan and soar. it's such an easy mechanic but instead of learning how it works and just assign positions before the fight, ppl were asked to skip it with damage and later in the fight to cheese is with tank lb. broken seal is the tougher mechanic.

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Originally Posted by Felis

If Ala Mhigo have a housing plot then it will be only for Garleans, not or adventurers.
Or a housing plot that look like a slum.

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Lol not sure how many people would want to have a house in an area like the slums but.. it would be a cool place to have, like in 2 or 3 expansions from now you have a Midgard inspired Garlean location, and you could be in part of the very lofty fancy section, middle class normal area, or like the trash heap where you might find Tifa's bar and stuff like that.

Would love to see a Zanarkand, Altissia, or Jeuno like city if it's possible in the lore. Although I guess ultimately I'd like to see these things as theme packs for an instanced housing area, so SE could design overworld content and then take those assets and make a smaller sandbox for players to dream in (rather than creating an entire district). .

On Paladin I think they could make a support tank desirable, but the support skills need to be strong AND not only about healing - right now I'd consider Warrior almost a better support, maybe actually is depending on situation, because their debuff is so good (which seems a bit backwards to me in theme). If they can't do something like that then they should just make each tank have different core design mechanics but all offer very similar end results, including damage (so that'd mean drastically increasing Paladin's output). First one would could do things similar in end results but will of course be more fun to balance lol, second one will make the tanks feel a little bit more like "pick your favorite color of the same flavor of ice cream").

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Originally Posted by Ryel

Snip

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Very good write up! I suggest people read this one.

Idk what people expect, it will always be a DPS meta, and they'll always be a meta comp. Best the devs can do is close the gap between jobs being viable, as it stands now every job is viable but the gap is too large, ie casters, monks, paladins and white mages.

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Originally Posted by Felis

If Ala Mhigo have a housing plot then it will be only for Garleans, not or adventurers.
Or a housing plot that look like a slum.

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I wouldn't mind it, just wanted to live in Ala Mhigo.

Though I remember hearing that we'd have to liberate it before exploring the city so that woudn't be a problem I think.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

More precisely: We're suffering this DPS meta because the game revolves around lowering health bars to 0 in order to win a fight and the only way to do that is to deal damage. Damage is what matters, the only thing that matters. Everything else is fluff - You do it if it's required, to the degree it is required, but afterwards go back to damage, because only damage will further your win.

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And only in this game are the requirements for "everything else" so minimal that "how much damage can you do" becomes the most important question for both tanks and healers as WELL as dps.

FFS, SE, just design encounters that require tanks and healers to do their jobs.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

And only in this game are the requirements for "everything else" so minimal that "how much damage can you do" becomes the most important question for both tanks and healers as WELL as dps.

FFS, SE, just design encounters that require tanks and healers to do their jobs.

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Fixing healers is kinda easy - nerf healing potencies, up healing requirements, possibly do something about how brutally effective their DPS is while in Cleric Stance, boom. But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game. (It also doesn't affect magic damage, so rip pretty much every major raid boss ability in the game.)

And how exactly would you make offtanks "tank more" instead of sitting in DPS stance? Endless dual bosses a la T1? Constant add waves to manage? There's only so much you can do to try to regulate how much damage tanks do...even WoW, which IMO has a lot better trinity balance still doesn't really find ways to make off tanks do a whole lot outside of swaps and adds.

Sorry if I seem like I'm attacking you, since I actually agree that the slow distillation of the trinity into "who can deeps moar" also bugs me, but I've struggled to find a solution for tanking woes for some time now that would work outside of a straight tank re-design. Things like, dropping fire n' forget tank stances in favor of making those same effects be maintenance buffs that tanks have to use certain combos to keep up, etc, to make them feel more like they're tanking and less like they're DPSing. And I don't really know how well that would translate here, all things considered.

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Originally Posted by Shougun

stuff thats cool...

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My fantasy of 4.0 PLD change is we become like ninjas in our stances with some skills getting added effects. Flash is one of the main skills I see getting that treatment. Mind you its all in my head and not anything more.

Flash: As it is.
Under Sword: Adds damage.
Under Shield: Adds a DoT.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game.

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Paladins and the Parry stat would actually benefit from a high number of constant high damage blockable/parryable attacks. Single hit/Double hit Tankbuster-centric design of raids is the nemesis of RNG based Mitigation.

30% chance of 20% mitigation is a 30% chance of survival vs 1 100% HP tank busters but becomes 6% average mitigation versus 100 1% HP attacks.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly?

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In theory it's fairly simple: Both tanks need to be engaged by opponents, i.e. have aggro from something (basic tank function 1) and they both need active mitigation tools that are required to survive (basic tank function 2, reliant on tank function 1).

First one is easy: Additional enemies that one tank alone can't cope with. There's nothing else you can do, it's the definition of tanking, so no way around that if you want to make an off-tank tank instead of being a DPS (or redundant). Second one is the harder one.
A classic from fighting games would be timed mitigation: Hit the button "just" before the enemy hits and you parry/block/whatever, potentially with a combo system to work off that. Neat idea for bosses, but doesn't work as well on trash. Dodging telegraphed attacks is a form of active mitigation as well, but not tank specific - In fact, due to positionals, we generally don't want tanks to move much. You can try something akin to Inner Beast, i.E. stack management, or maintenance buffs as you yourself have suggested. They already try to work with proccs (like Reprisal). I'd say short cooldowns, short durations and timing is the key to crack that. Tank busters would be a lot more frequent, but hit less hard and the mastery in tanking would lie in mitigating as much as possible to give the healer more breathing room with their mana - Too many mistakes -> Out of Mana -> Wipe. Good tanking -> Spare Mana -> Balance cards for everyone? Something like that.

Good players "will" end up having downtime in those fluff roles (otherwise worse players can't play them), so it's going to go back to damage either way. To preserve the role fantasy, best you can do is to gimp their direct damage abilities and give them damage support buffs instead. But that opens the can of worms that is solo play...

But that's just the mitigation side - One can also make the aggro side more complex in a similar vein, but that requires non-tanks to be able to survive the occasional hit in case your tank isn't all that great. Juggling the two could lead to a decent dynamic that can keep players busy at least.

Anywhoo, reducing the DPS focus is all about raising the bar for healing/tanking. And there's ways to do that. Whether it's wanted or not is a different question - Some people enjoy being glorified DPS with short queues. But that's a different topic >_>

They could be mean..

Want an encounter where DPS is not all that matters?

How about this one?

Boss at 95% health does two (2) tankbusters back to back...on the HEALERS!!!

It is a guaranteed attack for 100% health and ignores all shields. Lose 1 person and the boss gets a 10% damage reduction boost that lasts for 1 minute. Lose 2 characters? You cannot damage the boss for 10 minutes.

Solution? Cover. The PLD or PLDs gets to save one or both of the healers from dying. Thus the run can continue.

In this case, the PLD mitigation matters, it's actually all that matters. DPS is secondary.

Bad part of this? Either WAR or DRK or both are excluded.

This would never happen, and I'm not saying it should. But this is simply and example of a fight where the usage of abilities is key, not how much DPS you generate as a tank.

For paladins, instead of Flash getting damage I'd like to see Circle of Scorn being made into a proper, stronger spell (triggers the GCD and has a MP cost), that would distance paladins from dark knights while not stepping into the warrior territory since Flash would still be needed for AoE aggro.

As for Sword Oath, it needs to do something interesting rather than just add damage. I don't know what, but right now it's really boring and weak next to Darkside and Deliverance.

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Originally Posted by Ririta

As for Sword Oath, it needs to do something interesting rather than just add damage. I don't know what, but right now it's really boring and weak next to Darkside and Deliverance.

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I mean granted that damage does add up in a prolonged fight but when compared to the other two, its not good, its not bad, its just meh. PLD needs a bit more ability <---> stance interaction as well.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

Fixing healers is kinda easy - nerf healing potencies, up healing requirements, possibly do something about how brutally effective their DPS is while in Cleric Stance, boom. But how would you "make tanks tank", exactly? Looking at the design of something like a PLD, which relies heavily on cooldowns, if you simply make things hit super hard so that a tank always needs to have CDs up to soak damage...well, it'll work well at making WARs tank, because they'll be using Inner Beast instead of Fell Cleave (I don't play DRK so not sure how they'd be affected), but how would PLD handle that same scenario? They don't really have a "spammable" cooldown outside of Shelltron, which is 30 seconds and...not super great, tbh, because of how parry works in this game. (It also doesn't affect magic damage, so rip pretty much every major raid boss ability in the game.)

And how exactly would you make offtanks "tank more" instead of sitting in DPS stance? Endless dual bosses a la T1? Constant add waves to manage? There's only so much you can do to try to regulate how much damage tanks do...even WoW, which IMO has a lot better trinity balance still doesn't really find ways to make off tanks do a whole lot outside of swaps and adds.

Sorry if I seem like I'm attacking you, since I actually agree that the slow distillation of the trinity into "who can deeps moar" also bugs me, but I've struggled to find a solution for tanking woes for some time now that would work outside of a straight tank re-design. Things like, dropping fire n' forget tank stances in favor of making those same effects be maintenance buffs that tanks have to use certain combos to keep up, etc, to make them feel more like they're tanking and less like they're DPSing. And I don't really know how well that would translate here, all things considered.

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Tanks are somewhat limited in they will always be a partial DPS. The issue is more how little they actually require mitigation. For example, a Dark Knight can handle both A9 and A10 without ever turning on Grit, provided they have a Ninja to help control their aggro. Even A11 and A12, you'll barely need your tank stance once you've seen the fights. One potential solution would be less predictability. Say they adjusted it so all three tanks could swap stances off the GCD ala Warrior. If the boss suddenly did unpredictable high tank, it forces the tanks to mitigate with their tank stance-- turning it into a cooldown itself. Not necessarily a perfect solution but it's the first that came to mind. Perhaps forcing both tanks to stack together for more mechanics might be another option. Unfortunately, I cannot imagine the devs would ever go into the unpredictable route because that would make learning fighters harder.

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Originally Posted by Istaru

They could be mean..

Want an encounter where DPS is not all that matters?

How about this one?

Boss at 95% health does two (2) tankbusters back to back...on the HEALERS!!!

It is a guaranteed attack for 100% health and ignores all shields. Lose 1 person and the boss gets a 10% damage reduction boost that lasts for 1 minute. Lose 2 characters? You cannot damage the boss for 10 minutes.

Solution? Cover. The PLD or PLDs gets to save one or both of the healers from dying. Thus the run can continue.

In this case, the PLD mitigation matters, it's actually all that matters. DPS is secondary.

Bad part of this? Either WAR or DRK or both are excluded.

This would never happen, and I'm not saying it should. But this is simply and example of a fight where the usage of abilities is key, not how much DPS you generate as a tank.

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All this accomplishes nothing except forcing Paladin into the meta. You literally couldn't complete the fight without one. Either Dark Knight or Warrior will be flatout ignored even more so than Paladin is currently. Not to mention, forced mechanics such as this are rarely fun. It's entirely artificial and would only sour players on the fight. None of this accounts for being unable to damage the boss because you messed up a mechanic is boring. It lacks any creativity and most groups would simply wipe to try again, thus invalidating it regardless. Another thing... A9S and A10S enrage at 11 minutes. So... yeah. :p

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Originally Posted by Ririta

For paladins, instead of Flash getting damage I'd like to see Circle of Scorn being made into a proper, stronger spell (triggers the GCD and has a MP cost), that would distance paladins from dark knights while not stepping into the warrior territory since Flash would still be needed for AoE aggro.

As for Sword Oath, it needs to do something interesting rather than just add damage. I don't know what, but right now it's really boring and weak next to Darkside and Deliverance.

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Personally would like to see flash changed to not be spammed /at all/. At least it seems like you suggest it remains a spam aoe spell to Paladin, without damage - and spamming a damageless spell with a buff that gets shortened on recasts (debuff resistance) just for a ping of enmity feels really meh lol (also the lack of damage means it produces less enmity than a damage + enmity ability, extra meh). Perhaps because at least for warrior flash is actually fairly helpful in certain situations, that flash is given to everyone. With a little tweak so it can even be useful on Dark Knights like flash has slightly lower enmity generation, no damage still, but double the distance (or even leaves a field effect for say 5 seconds where if an enemy enters the field they will receive flash's effects, doesn't reapply - awesome for mobs you know that will spawn). Would be cool if the ability shifts slightly, every tank gets access to flash but the ability aesthetics change slightly. Fearsome Shout for Warrior (red/shouty effect), Gloom or Shade for Dark Knight (instead of light it's darkness), and Flash or Blinding Light for Paladin (same spell).

Unless you were suggesting CoS also keeps its enimity generation (perhaps even more), and that CoS becomes Paladin's spam tool once they unlock it. I was thinking you meant it becomes more like a steel cyclone / decimate, so you'd still be spamming flash though. If its more like an overpower then you'd just spam CoS instead and flash would be like the other spells SE wants to get rid of since higher tier ones are just better.

I would like to see chance buffs changed into something else like every third attack will miss, a monster cannot miss more than 5 attacks every 2.5 minutes (half effective on magic users, and 15% reduction on third attacks in PvP and only functions on auto attacks with 15% reduction on bosses). The massive aoe range would make flash useful for all tank jobs in grabbing large spawned packs, even allow SE to make different strategies (room starts to pour from all corners, tank can handle it opposed to now which would be like "wut you doing SE?"), and with the damage reduction it could be useful to cast once in the fight (and so long as the fight wasn't slow or big groups not spawn, it would be useful to cast /only/ once).

Then give Paladin something else (now that flash is a sort of /massive/ aoe grab, and slight damage reduction for all tank jobs), something that also doesn't require spamming. Before I suggested an ability that causes Paladin's enmity and damage to reverberate within a given effect, like through a new flash (but seeing as now I suggested everyone gets a big flash) perhaps another skill. So say Radiance, an MP draining aura or an efficiency decrease cost while active ability (higher tp cost/mp) that allows Paladin's attacks to reverberate to nearby targets (both portions of enmity and damage). Of course the AoE part of the enmity and damage would be reduced but basically CoS would turn into a mini holy bomb (in large packs of monsters) and Paladin would cycle through their regular combos on monsters. The calculation for damage would be something like % of potency to a maximum of X amount per ability, DoT potency is included into the calculation (but again there is a maximum potency damage). So while using the 1/2 you'd do quite a bit less aoe damage than War/Drk still (but more than before) but your 3 / CoS / Spirits Within could provide sudden burst that makes your average AoE damage acceptable, so you don't slow down the group in the end (so long as the monster doesn't die so fast you can't finish a combo lol).


Tl;dr - If flash doesn't become a damage spell I do not want to spam it, at all - ever lol.

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Originally Posted by ErikMynhier

My fantasy of 4.0 PLD change is we become like ninjas in our stances with some skills getting added effects. Flash is one of the main skills I see getting that treatment. Mind you its all in my head and not anything more.

Flash: As it is.
Under Sword: Adds damage.
Under Shield: Adds a DoT.

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I would love to see the oaths mean more I feel it has a high opportunity for theme on the paladin as well, while keeping the stance management different but also /encouraged/. Since it feels weird to leave stance when you're new but if you have a bunch of neat effects on a different stance you'd be like "hey I really want to get my TP back so maybe I should use tempered will with my sword oath!". While adding an extra layer it is still relatively straight forward compared to Warrior and still leaves Paladin that streamlined feeling, but also offering them a bunch of support / self options in each ability. Bulwark + shield oath = 360 degree block and each block reduces sheltron cooldown (by a small amount, like 1.5 to 2 seconds), + Sword Oath = each block reduces spirit's within (2-4 seconds) and every second block adds a double auto-attack.

Would like to see cover have something with it too, so you'd be promoted to use it to take advantage of block related skills. Like in shield oath it stays relatively similar perhaps longer max range with damage reduction built in. With sword oath however it would only share a portion of the damage, but each blocked attack would also invigorate the covered target with % blocked amount into HP/TP/MP as a comrade sort of effect (not a lot, but like after covering the warrior for the full duration he gained a total of 7% hp, 15% tp, and 15% mp) meanwhile you were able to use the blocks to power your other block related abilities and you could self heal the damage you took with a clemency or a healer drops a HoT on you.

They may want cover sword oath not to function on tank busters though, it would add extra strategy options but may result in cases where Paladin is deemed required because instead of being required to make a single super shielded full health tank with defense cooldowns up you'd just share the load between two fairly full tanks (the later being a significantly easier task to do, than being prepared with all the cooldowns and full health on a single person).