Don't forget increasing the CD on Surecast but making it not work on most knockbacks. (Looking at you E3 and E4)
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Aim for balance but never perfect balance. Fighting games are full of interesting characters with different strengths skills and weakneses. However often there will be only like 12 tournament viable number of characters out of 24. That’s a healthy number. People who play at high end of the game have a decent number of characters to pick for winning high end games.
If you wanted perfect balance. Every character would need to be the exact same character, which is what is slowly happening to this game. I don’t think it’ll ever get that bad. But the closer we get to that the less interesting the game will become.
Fighting games are a bit of a poor analogy. This is a cooperative game, not a competitive one. In a fighting game you can pick a low tier and likely lose, but that's your choice and you still get to play. In a co-op game, other people may get upset at you picking a low tier class, and may not allow you to play.
Secondly, the teams are bigger here. Think how a fighting game is at its worst balance, say only two characters are even considered worth playing. Every match is the same two characters over and over again. It's boring to play and even more boring to watch. Now look at FFXIV 8-man content. If only two healers are viable, those two healers are then always required for content, and are thus the ONLY healers in any group ever. Ideally any job is considered viable. At the very least there should be more viable jobs than party slots for the sake of variety.
In a fighting game you can choose a suboptimal character and play at lower levels. In ffxiv you can choose a suboptimal character and PUG. There’s never going to be a point where you can’t play your preferred class.
I also find it hard to believe that ALL the pre-built parties care so much about getting through the content as quickly as possible that they won’t take someone who will do it slightly slower. If some class in incapable of doing the job they’ll get left behind, but that’s a much bigger problem than lack of balance.
Personally I feel like the majority of players having less fun because their jobs are becoming simpler and more like one another is a bigger issue than a small percentage of people at the very top end getting rejected from speed-clearing parties.
Man, isn't it funny how when the healer changes were first announced everyone was like "you're overreacting, it's not out yet, it'll probably be fine" but once it did come out and we did get to play it that it was exactly like we thought it would be. Healing is the same as ever and we have less to do in down time. Meaning our role is much less fulfilling now
BTW deceptus, been seeing you post a lot about scholar on the forums, and I gotta say, I agree with just about everything you say on it.
I put stock in what I see. What I saw before Shadowbringers was released came to pass. Everyone with a functioning pair of eyes could blatantly see that they were having shit shovelled at them by having healer DPS options neutered, and yet some people defended it. It is truly astonishing. On top of the cavalcade of awful changes to Astrologian, which people also gave feedback about, and got a completely non-sensical response of; 'Wait until launch!' and now we're at the 'Wait until savage!' point, and then we'll be on to "Wait until 6.0!".
Yes. The battle team that designs the job is also the one that designs the encounters. That's the logic. It's sound logic to see the jobs in their new state in the content they were designed for.
And you know what? I've enjoyed White Mage so far. The other two I still need to work through but I only have so much time.
Now, I'm not trying to gloat. I'm actually on the same ship regarding card changes, I just disagree where it should head. Same bit as Scholar. I think resource conflict was a key part of Scholar. I don't care much for Energy Drain but something should replace it.