Your Opinion on the Current State of Job Identity/Balance in 6.4?

My opinion ?
In one word: WEIRD

We have positionals but only on certain jobs. Some jobs have alsmost no skill ceilling other still have. We have a lot of healing but the necessity for it is missing.
We have ranged tax on certain jobs but others dont have that. We have mana but almost no mana-mangement (hey to all BLM out there).
We have a lot of stats but in the end its crit - dh - det as if we could delete the rest ?
We have BLU... dont know... it exist, i guess.
We have AST but its lore is ignored.
We have WAR wich is at the moment all the jobs at once (DPS+healer+Tank) for some reason.... also i do wanna know how the love story in the old WAR Jobquest ends SE!!!!!!

I could go on but who cares.... my answer is weird and sometimes unsatisfactory.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

The only mutual exclusion between the two, though, was accepting drift in buff-less comps in order to get a bit more bonus GCD potency out of your own damage amp window (FoF, etc.) at risk of getting fewer affected GCDs (and any oGCD CDs also held) within the fight.

In all other senses, optimizing for raid buffs is just an addition to optimizing sustained damage, not a replacement for it.

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When you force more and more of a jobs total potency output into a smaller and smaller window of time, that small window becomes so heavily weighted against the remaining rotation that it diminishes the importance of the gameplay outside of it, and makes rng mechanics like crit/dh more influential.

Currently, you can mismanage your filler for 8 minutes straight on PLD, and as long as you crit more of your blades than the next guy, still do more damage. I don't find that rewarding.

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

When you force more and more of a jobs total potency output into a smaller and smaller window of time, that small window becomes so heavily weighted against the remaining rotation that it diminishes the importance of the gameplay outside of it, and makes rng mechanics like crit/dh more influential.

Currently, you can mismanage your filler for 8 minutes straight on PLD, and as long as you crit more of your blades than the next guy, still do more damage. I don't find that rewarding.

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Okay, that's fair. I do think the Blades make an excessive difference, yes.

That said, that has far more to do with they're being literally up to 1,125 effective potency opposite PLD's 350 average ppgcd from its combo-ing.

When the buffs were accentuating the difference between Royal Authority and Goring Blade vs. Rage of Halone, for instance... that wasn't an issue, despite still wanting to play around those raid buffs.

The issue is less the buffs themselves, than the burst ppgcd exploiters. Even without the raid buffs, the 25% FoF bonus onto 900 base potency... is going to devalue everything else.

The.
2min.
Meta.
Must.
Die.

I keep trying to think about dozens of ways to improve the complexity of my favorite jobs while still making them accessible, but there's very little to think in the way of player skill expression if everything needs to fit in a collective burst window.

The challenge is not putting your brains to think. XIV just, quoting Zenos, wants to give a "test of your reflexes" - and your memory, at that, to press your keys at the right time, or else? You guessed it - won't fit in the next 2min burst window, possibly for the rest of the encounter. No wonder why many people regard PVP as a good form of skill expression, because in fact, it is the main thing over there, even though we have 1/4 of the number of actions available in pve.

The more I think about this, the more I keep getting frustrated at the way XIV structures combat.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

For healers, I’d rather have a more interesting healing and buffing setup rather than a more complex DPS rotation. When we have to have a more complex DPS setup to keep us busy, that means the design for our purpose in the raid is flawed.

I’d rather have more buffs for DPS, mitigations, smart heals, maybe a 5 second window skip death option instead of rescue, etc. I don’t want to be a green mage, give healers more purpose, show some creativity.

Heavens forbid healers get a LB1 and 2 that actually do something…

Sadly, all we will get is more “safe plays”, it seems all of the creativity left us between ARR and HW.

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Unrealistic, they would have to rework every single fight and instance in the game. The healers need dps rotations instead, because they were designed to do damage from the ground up.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

because they were designed to do damage from the ground up.

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Originally healers were given dps spells for one reason and one reason alone. And that reason was for solo play and the msq.

They were never intended to contribute dps in parties.

The problem stems from the fact that incoming damage is so low. Which again is deliberate by the devs because they don't want to overwhelm or stress healers or push people away from the role.

Encounter design is the games real issue.. tank self sustain isn't too high. Incoming damage is to low...

Healers are bored because incoming damage and stuff is so low that it takes no healing damage is far to scripted and predictable.

Ranged dps is busted because encounters are designed around unavoidable damage from raid wides.which means that ranged roles have to trade there power for survival.

So instead of the convention design where melee hit hard but have enough armor to take a few hits.

Casters hit even harder than melee at the cost of reduced mobility. There survival coming from magic barriers and control spells like binds and sleeps. Casting these spells costs dps.

Then you have physical ranged the old school glass cannons. Hit super hard. Are super mobile but are super squishy..

Melee should typically be among the weaker of the dps jobs as a trade for there survival and mobility.

Xiv encounter design breaks this paradigm though and everything loses its strength in exchange for extra survival. Burning a game where damage is the only thing that matters. Melee reign supreme because ranged gains nothing to compensate its lack of dps

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Originally healers were given dps spells for one reason and one reason alone. And that reason was for solo play and the msq.

They were never intended to contribute dps in parties.

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I don't believe this was ever the case honestly. Back in ARR, even when enemies actually hit worth a damn, it was still advantageous for Healers to DPS in most group content, It was almost grieving not to really. Add to that, some skills had secondary CC utility, such as Stone 1 granting a Heavy, Holy's stun, Shadowflare's Slow, etc. It's really hard to say this argument was ever true, regardless of the Devs intentions because they were just much more useful in group content then they ever were solo. Not like the Devs haven't been called out numerous times for inaccuracies in regards to game design. Then there's also the fact they added Aero 3 in HW, and the argument really loses any credibility it could've had really.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Originally healers were given dps spells for one reason and one reason alone. And that reason was for solo play and the msq.

They were never intended to contribute dps in parties.

The problem stems from the fact that incoming damage is so low. Which again is deliberate by the devs because they don't want to overwhelm or stress healers or push people away from the role.

Encounter design is the games real issue.. tank self sustain isn't too high. Incoming damage is to low...

Healers are bored because incoming damage and stuff is so low that it takes no healing damage is far to scripted and predictable.

Ranged dps is busted because encounters are designed around unavoidable damage from raid wides.which means that ranged roles have to trade there power for survival.

So instead of the convention design where melee hit hard but have enough armor to take a few hits.

Casters hit even harder than melee at the cost of reduced mobility. There survival coming from magic barriers and control spells like binds and sleeps. Casting these spells costs dps.

Then you have physical ranged the old school glass cannons. Hit super hard. Are super mobile but are super squishy..

Melee should typically be among the weaker of the dps jobs as a trade for there survival and mobility.

Xiv encounter design breaks this paradigm though and everything loses its strength in exchange for extra survival. Burning a game where damage is the only thing that matters. Melee reign supreme because ranged gains nothing to compensate its lack of dps

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If it were true that healers were only given dps spells for solo play they'd still have them.
However, they do still spend most of their time doing damage despite 95% of their spells being heals.
Again, they were designed from the ground up to do damage. You were never spamcasting heals in FF. Healers have always dealt damage most of the time, and they still do. That's the way the entire game has been designed.
The amount of damage spells they have doesn't change the way they are intended to be played. But having those extra damage spells would make them infinitely more engaging.
We have always dealt damage way more often than we had to heal, the only difference is that they dumbed down the way this damage is applied more and more with each expansion.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

I don't believe this was ever the case honestly. Back in ARR, even when enemies actually hit worth a damn, it was still advantageous for Healers to DPS in most group content, It was almost grieving not to really. Add to that, some skills had secondary CC utility, such as Stone 1 granting a Heavy, Holy's stun, Shadowflare's Slow, etc. It's really hard to say this argument was ever true, regardless of the Devs intentions because they were just much more useful in group content then they ever were solo. Not like the Devs haven't been called out numerous times for inaccuracies in regards to game design. Then there's also the fact they added Aero 3 in HW, and the argument really loses any credibility it could've had really.

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On top of that from a game design perspective it makes no sense. Healing is not useful past a certain point while dealing damage is always useful, as players optimize their gameplay they'll remove the less useful things (unecessary healing) for things that always have value, which is damage, so, if your game has fixed healer slots (meaning that you can't change the amount of healers you bring per encounter), those healers will always gravitate towards dpsing as they get better.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

ISnip

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I don't really disagree with this honestly. However I think the issue here is what used to be seen as a disconnect between the people designing the jobs and the people designing the content..

Its like the job designers always envisioned whm to be a pure healer type roll. But then the content designers designed content around a scholar being able to heal. So all that pure healing power went to waste.

Same thing with many of the old dps jobs especially in the older days where all the content was designed around aoe. But Jon's were designed to be single target damage dealers and the levels at which they had access to aoe skills didn't make sense.

Tanks again. Pld was designed to be a low dps high survival tank. War designed to be a lower survival more offensive tank.. but content designers made sure a warrior could survive. So the extra mitigation a pld bought was again wasted...

But things have never really hit hard even in the earliest days people were wall to wall pulling hell even more so because there weren't gates blocking you.