FFXIV and Job Identity

Summoner - The beast tribes of Eorzea worship and summon forth beings known as primals, among which are Ifrit, Garuda, and Titan. Yet what is a god to one man is a demon to another, for the city-states of Eorzea see these beings as a grave threat to their collective survival. In times immemorial, there lived mages who had not only the power to summon the primals, but also the means to transmute the primals' essences, thus binding them to their will. Known simply as summoners, the existence of these men and women and their arcane art have been all but lost to the ages.

Summons

• Ifrit-empowered spells deal extra damage to low-HP enemies
• Garuda-empowered spells increase DoT effects
• Titan-empowered spells provide extra defense during cast

Resurrection

Increase MP cost to 3000

Red Mage - On the eastern edge of Abalathia's Spine lies the mountainous region of Gyr Abania. It is in these elevated lands that people took shelter, when a burning star guided them away from the Sixth Umbral Calamity's treacherous floodwaters. The survivors gathered from near and far, and amongst them were refugees of the sorcerous cities of Mhach and Amdapor. These sworn enemies buried their history for the sake of the future, and cast aside their vestments of black and white. Upon the remnants of their arts a new discipline was built, and the first red mages stepped forward with rapiers in hand to fight back against the rising tides of destruction.

New Mana Mechanics

• If White Mana > Black Mana by 10+, your next Verholy grants a healing-over-time effect ability.
• If Black Mana > White Mana by 10+, your next Verflare grants a damage-over-time burn effect.
• If both are perfectly balanced, your next melee combo deals 10% extra damage.

Embolden

Reduce to 5% damage buff for 15s

VerRaise

Increase MP Cost to 3500

Pictomancer - Though the Fifth Astral Era is most famously associated with the War of the Magi, a wealth of lesser-known legends were forged in that bygone age. Among them is the tale of Archon Relm, an itinerant artist and mage who relinquished her traditional staff for a magicked brush. With it, she would render abstract images to life, establishing an entirely new school of magic in so doing. Masters of this arcane discipline follow in the Archon's footsteps, wielding vibrant hues of aether to invoke all manner of fantastical beasts, weapons, and landscapes from their mind's eye─for the source of a pictomancer's power lies not in their artistic skill, but the richness of their imagination, with which they strive to paint a brighter future.

New Ability Masterpiece

Grants a random buff based on the type of last-used Sketch.

• If a Landscape was last used → Party gains a defense buff.
• If a Weapon was last used → Party gains a 2% damage boost for 10s.
• If a Creature was last used → Party gains a movement speed boost.

Grants PCT party utility without pushing BLM from the Greedy DPS spot

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Originally Posted by ETermin

Miscellaneous Adjustments

Debuffs

While extremely controversial, debuffs such as piercing, blunt, and slashing should make a return. As of Dawntrail there are currently 21 jobs and more on the way, by bringing back debuff it would lead to multiple meta party compositions. The meta would be able to be changed per fight basis as SE could make some encounters immune to certain debuffs.

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Welcome to the Slashing meta where your job choices are Warrior, Gunbreaker, Samurai, Viper, Reaper, Ninja and Dancer. You caster and healers do not matter, unless you can use a 3rd melee effectively to be ranged when required. this is literally HW/SB, but worse.

As for making bosses immune to certain debuffs, that just locks jobs from fights in a game where the dev team has explicitly said the do not want jobs locked out of fights. Every job has to be able to clear everything and imposing a restriction on a job does not help.

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Originally Posted by ETermin

Aggro Management

The current iteration of aggro management, it is effectively a non-mechanic. Aggro is a mechanism that should be managed by all roles. Stormblood had the best iteration of the mechanic so I will be building from that.

While it was difficult to maintain aggro for some tanks this can be remedied by reintroducing an equivalent of Sword and Shield Oath. By adding a 30s cooldown that would increase aggro generation would also add another form of aggro management for 2 tank fights

For Healers enmity dumping was removed from lucid dreaming making it a skill only used when you need mana. Adding a separate skill for aggro dumping or reintroducing it to lucid dreaming could work.

DPS aggro management was also completely removed. Reintroduce this by various means (Diversion or Quelling Strikes) or similar to healer management.

Meta Compositions

Meta should be embraced as it allows people to feel accomplished as they figure out how to optimize an encounter. All Classes should still be able to complete an encounter, the meta would be able to complete it faster.

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Stormblood aggro management was ass. It was something dealt with by the DPS and healers and not really tanks.

Just adding a button to press every 30 seconds is just busy work and is a band aid fix to a clear issue. Might as well make it a toggle.

No one likes a clear winner comp as, whilst every job might be able to clear, if it is easier with another comp, that will be the one to use. Look at Pictomancer and FRU or P8S where jobs were being left behind due to bad damage.

And, whilst I'm not going to quote everything, all your random comments about the jobs are just random stuff thrown together with no thought on anything. As some examples, DRK having no mitigation, it is straight up getting deleted before it can restore any health and no, a 5% VIT bonus will not save it. Then you have things that make me wonder whether you know about the current game, for example, giving Monk a second charge on PB, when it already has one, the blitz system doesn't even make sense (do you need to use one of each? can you do multiple of the same? etc.) and your Leaping Opo thing makes no sense either. 'Additional effect based on stance' What? Not to mention Coeurl increasing a twin snakes buff that doesn't exist anymore.

SAM, Tsubame-Gaeshi, 2 charges with a 10 second cooldown? Not even relevant to current SAM due to how it has been changed. BLM looks a mess, RDM has something if you balance White/Black magick, despite that going against what the job is supposed to do and giving Verholy and Verflare effects that make Verflare the obvious choice in basically all situations actually reduces the planning of the RDM as you no longer have the choice based on mana balance and your current buffs.

Everything is just a mess and seems to be based on outdated information. Honestly, if you were trying to convince someone that these were good ideas, you have failed. I would recommend concentrating on one role and explain, in more detail, what you want the general shape of the jobs to look like, what additional things you want to add. It is also important to state why you think the particular role has been diversified more than what it currently is because, let's be honest, noone can really say what 'Job Identity' means.

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As for making bosses immune to certain debuffs, that just locks jobs from fights in a game where the dev team has explicitly said the do not want jobs locked out of fights. Every job has to be able to clear everything and imposing a restriction on a job does not help.

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Since debuffs are damage received based, it is not locking jobs out of fights, it adjusts how the fight has to be approached from an optimization standpoint. None of this locks a class on a fight, it incentivizes optimization based gameplay, something that is sorely missing right now.

A bunch of these ideas don’t work or have new problems.

First of all, what is accessibility to you, and how is overall difficulty judged? In normal difficulty content, how hard it is to play your job perfectly does not even matter. And your tier list goes up, each tier increases all of the metrics (punishment for mistakes, execution requirements, and complexity of the game plan) but this does not need to be the case. It also currently is not how the game works - DRK presses more inputs in its burst window than GNB so is arguably harder than in that regard, but GNB is more strict and more punishing for mistakes, as it has requirements that need to be met for using the cooldowns that also cost resources.

You say that all the 1 2 3 between bursts for tanks is a problem (and I agree) but your PLD, DRK, and GNB ideas don’t address this at all. The GNB idea actually makes it worse - it makes it so stepping away from the boss does not affect the rotation.

Your WAR idea of getting mitigation by attacking needs more detail to explain how it works. Can WAR mit tankbusters during downtime (eg. DSR Strength of the Ward)? How will the existence of burst windows and party buffs affect how WAR players will use these attacks?

As mentioned by Mikey, your proposed DRK will just die outright to tankbusters. IIRC the tankbusters in M1S do over 300k base damage, and tanks had around 200k max health on week 1.

I don’t mean to be rude but it seems clear that you don’t have much experience with many of the jobs, at least in their current states. You put the current BRD, VPR, PLD, and SAM all in the same tier of difficulty? Focusing on specific ones and getting into more detail with them would be a better way of expressing your ideas.

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Originally Posted by ETermin

Since debuffs are damage received based, it is not locking jobs out of fights, it adjusts how the fight has to be approached from an optimization standpoint. None of this locks a class on a fight, it incentivizes optimization based gameplay, something that is sorely missing right now.

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You are new to MMORPGs as a genre, yes? As in, you have no experience how this factually locks out classes from a fight because you have just never had the experience, yes?

Also some interesting individual observations:

* Your Red Mage idea just has 1 optimal solution. Without numbers it's impossible to say whether it is to keep Black > White or keep them balanced, but it'll be one of those two. Since Verflare gives black mana, I suspect it'll be that one, but I can't know without numbers, either way there's no actual player choice involved, it's just a static solution.
* Summoner is more interesting, but only the Titan part. The other two are irrelevant, as you cycle them anyways. There could be a marginal optimization akin to intentionally mis-using your melee combo on RDM because you could do a late Ifrit to get below whatever the threshhold is one cycle, and another early one right before the boss dies. Over the whole time of a fight though, utterly doesn't matter. All three would need to have non-damage effects like Titan for some player agency to evolve (the same is true for the RDM thing, make all three non-damage-related to make them matter as a choice).
* The Dancer changes seem illogical. Esprit is already an unreliable gain, so no need to give a bonus based on a randomized combo. Plus you can already overcap it easily in some situations, again, no need. The Flourish change sounds weird, because that's just a flat boost then as yeah, that's how you use it. Devilment goes against the whole idea of Dancer. Tilana again seems to indicate you don't play Dancer or aren't aware how the job works.
* You also write ideas for the PRanged jobs, then your individual per-job ideas don't actually reflect those ideas any more.
* You also don't play Reaper, I take it? Because eh... you might want to go into Shroud on one. You'll be surprised. >.>

I could go on, but eh... anyway there's some individually neat ideas in there, but also a ton of bewildering ones, and a whole host that either don't reflect the current design of jobs (as in, that's just not how stuff works), or that already work the way you want them to.

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Originally Posted by Voryn

As mentioned by Mikey, your proposed DRK will just die outright to tankbusters. IIRC the tankbusters in M1S do over 300k base damage, and tanks had around 200k max health on week 1.

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Little bit of clarification on DRK, In lieu of passive bonuses like PLD or WAR is why its receiving the 5% vitality bonus. defensive cooldowns would still provide mitigation as usual.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

* Your Red Mage idea just has 1 optimal solution. Without numbers it's impossible to say whether it is to keep Black > White or keep them balanced, but it'll be one of those two. Since Verflare gives black mana, I suspect it'll be that one, but I can't know without numbers, either way there's no actual player choice involved, it's just a static solution.

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The idea was to give RDM a little more flexibility in their rotation by switching between +10 black and incentivize having a clean rotation for the +10% damage. The player would be alternating between the two. The HoT effect is not ideal, and thats the point. The hope was to reward having a clean rotation for higher end gameplay.

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* Summoner is more interesting, but only the Titan part.

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I didnt have a lot of ideas for SMN due to how simplified its become over the expansions. This is the best i really could come up with.

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* The Dancer changes seem illogical. Esprit is already an unreliable gain, so no need to give a bonus based on a randomized combo. Plus you can already overcap it easily in some situations, again, no need. The Flourish change sounds weird, because that's just a flat boost then as yeah, that's how you use it. Devilment goes against the whole idea of Dancer. Tilana again seems to indicate you don't play Dancer or aren't aware how the job works.

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The goal was to make capping espirit in the opener more guaranteed to reduce the amount of RNG.

Flourish, last i remember was it being used in the opener or right after, by granting the +5s duration to Technical finish it was to promote keeping it aligned with TF.

Devilment - The core of devilment would stay the same where it grants one person +20%/+20%, the rest of the party would gain +2% crit making it a slight party buff

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* You also write ideas for the PRanged jobs, then your individual per-job ideas don't actually reflect those ideas any more.

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Dancer - yea i guess its not really reactive, increasing utility seems good.
BRD - Songs were really weak on brd last i remember, the goal was to increase dps via performing songs efficiently and increase their effectiveness
MCH - Yea its kind of a total rework that would bring back the cast bar for higher dps, but I wanted to leave it accessible as a non-castbar job

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* You also don't play Reaper, I take it? Because eh... you might want to go into Shroud on one. You'll be surprised. >.>

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I havent played reaper into the higher levels. I was going off the complaints that I was hearing.

I like your ideas, a lot of them sent me on a nostalgia trip for some reason lol but like Carighan said it would lock out jobs from content. Which shouldn't be an issue in a game where you can play all classes on 1 but it somehow is an issue.

It sucks, since Final Fantasy, traditionally isn't about balanced jobs. It's about bringing the strongest jobs to encounters. Which is what we had back when Titan was the hardest encounter, MNK use to slay for that extra blunt damage, Summoners used to be able to stand in tank with Titan, Eos was a pure healer Selene was a buffer/debuffer(silencer), AST card RNG was garbage but man was it fun, Aggro was a thing. Good times, but people that focus on 1 job, in a game where you can play them all on 1; complained at every turn after every patch. I don't think we're going back.

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Originally Posted by CSX

I like your ideas, a lot of them sent me on a nostalgia trip for some reason lol but like Carighan said it would lock out jobs from content. Which shouldn't be an issue in a game where you can play all classes on 1 but it somehow is an issue.

It sucks, since Final Fantasy, traditionally isn't about balanced jobs. It's about bringing the strongest jobs to encounters. Which is what we had back when Titan was the hardest encounter, MNK use to slay for that extra blunt damage, Summoners used to be able to stand in tank with Titan, Eos was a pure healer Selene was a buffer/debuffer(silencer), AST card RNG was garbage but man was it fun, Aggro was a thing. Good times, but people that focus on 1 job, in a game where you can play them all on 1; complained at every turn after every patch. I don't think we're going back.

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I agree FF isn't necessarily about balanced jobs.

I do miss old scholar, but I understand why they split the healers the way they did.