Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

I'm mainly upset at the fight designers and their balance team's inability to balance things properly, not quite the raiders. I shouldn't have said the playerbase demands more parity because that's often not the case, nor do they consistently listen to those requests when they do pop up, like with PCT right now. There's a bunch of changes 7.0 came with that no one asked for, many of them pushing more of each job's damage into the 2m raid buff window, and to me it looked like it was for FRU.

Honestly, and I'm sure this is A Take, but if they can't design these fights without good balancing or destroying job identity, I want them to at least take longer to figure it out, if not outright stop.

Easiest example of Ultimates not really necessitating the job homogenization are the first two ultimates, UCoB and UWU.

They came out in Stormblood which, while maybe not Heavensward, was still incredibly far away from the current design rot we find outselves in nowadays. So clearly you don't need to turn every job within a role into the same grey sludge to make them work.

Not fully but it plays a major part into the Job design philosophy.

The current predicament with job design is only focusing on encounter design, while making Jobs play very similar to alleviate any balance issues that expansion's like Heavensward had, but the issue becomes when they make jobs too samey and too generic, it doesn't help that most jobs at this point aren't just easy to pick up (which is a good thing), but they are easy to master. But this comes with a major downside that it makes the game less fun and have less replay value.

Generally speaking as a counter point to having more unique but maybe slightly less balanced designs you will hear "but what if my favourite job gets locked out of PF!" is understandable to a degree you want a job to be viable enough, But sadly you will not really get perfect balance even right now you see Pictomancer as a must pick, In EW PLD/WAR got locked out on certain savage PF groups this sort of imbalance will always exist, The solution to making all jobs viable for content Should not be making them all have the same upsides, downsides and play the same what's even the point of having a unique job now? might as well just make jobs different animations with the same ability which if you look at Healers or Tanks, they aren't far off that at this point.

Unique fun Jobs would actually enhance a lot of content feeling stale, going over content you may have done a few times but on a new job should at least be a little more exciting then it is right now. I really hope job design does improve, right now we have to wait until 8.0 I don't have my hopes up personally, too many times that I have had them up with this game, but I'll give credit if they actually pull off something exciting and fairly balanced. Encounter and Job design should in my opinion work well together, both are very important right now we're missing in the Job design which in itself hurts the replay value of encounter design, Job design would also suffer quite a lot if encounter design was bad, we need both to be a focus not one.

There is also nothing wrong with different jobs being better at different endgame content as long as everything is at least viable (and they have 4 turns in Savage and many different phases in Ultimates to favour different mechanics). Of course, they'd have to make gearing multiple jobs quicker and make more Hardcore/Midcore content every patch we can't have that either.

Ahh yes, another thread talking about casual vs hardcore and why SE should not focus on Ultimates/high-end content. Amazing..

The main reason why they balance based on ultimates is simply to not create META classes/roles (even tho' it still exists somehow).

Everyone should have an equal opportunity and chance to be accepted and find groups to tackle all manner of content. Look at WoW. If you don't play a meta class/spec you ain't getting into groups. What a time to be alive, imagine liking/enjoying a spec but you are constantly told it sucks and it's weak..YIKES! Hard pass, thanks!

It wouldn't surprise me. At all. What the hardcore players want is a sanitized, samey experience so they can show off how good they are at hitting their parse! And if all the jobs feel the same, they can reroll classes! But keep some classes really low DPS. Easier to lord over them and be superior that way.

God forbid we have any variety or feeling in classes. It's pretty bad when World of Warcraft can show you up.

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

The main reason why they balance based on ultimates is simply to not create META classes/roles (even tho' it still exists somehow).

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Unless you make jobs completely unviable (which nobody wants), the META only really affects world first raiders (for those 2 fights a year, once) and bad players with skill issues that think it's a job's fault they're not clearing.

And also I'd like to add: just like we have PVP exclusive kits, they could make much more interesting and "less balanced" kits for other content that is less meta dependent like (solo) Deep Dungeon or Field Operations but the best they can come up with is a couple of overpowered skills you need to farm. If there were PvE content with PvP-like skills, I bet a lot less people would complain about how boring dungeons are.

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Originally Posted by Moqi

Unless you make jobs completely unviable (which nobody wants), the META only really affects world first raiders (for those 2 fights a year, once) and bad players with skill issues that think it's a job's fault they're not clearing.

And also I'd like to add: just like we have PVP exclusive kits, they could make much more interesting and "less balanced" kits for other content that is less meta dependent like (solo) Deep Dungeon or Field Operations but the best they can come up with is a couple of overpowered skills you need to farm. If there were PvE content with PvP-like skills, I bet a lot less people would complain about how boring dungeons are.

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I too love to see DRK in PVP, or how PLD was right down broken at some point since they had hollow ground, and was impossible to capture/deny of capture point... such an amazing experience.. /s.

Why don't you just outright say you need a right-down broken class to feel good about yourself and be done with this circle jerk argument?

That's now what I'm saying at all but I also have no idea why you're being so agitated so I'm gonna let you work out your issues on your own... We just wanna do something else besides spamming Glare in 90% of the content lol.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

I think they should balance around the hardest content.

But I don't think that means that everything else should play like utter slop as a result. I think there's a middle-ground with being able to balance around high-end content, without turning your standard content into a soulless husk.. Just a shame that the development team don't really seem capable of doing such.

Either way, they have a self-inhibiting design philosophy, it shows, and the game suffers for it.

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I will sadly say they should balance on casual and extreme content then make fight from above around the job because I sadly think that the 2 minute burst meta hurt the game more then anything