/r/ffxivdiscussion: What would a successful 8.0 job rework look like to you?

- I'd like to see more party synergy again while at the same time highlight each job's unique niche

- Each job to have unique playstyle as early as level 50, with varying systems/upgrades/effects added as you get stronger like Dia adding a bonus regen to your cures instead of just 10potency only...

- Less overall active buttons in favour of more impactful and frequent button presses and follow up attacks. Sure that one 2minute button can stay but you don't need 38 of these, especially if all that it does is raise your party damage or 800potency - Viper and Picto already do that so this might be the trend for their rework and PvP actually does this as well now.

- More creative effects again rather than generic stuns and pure potency skills. It's a highly creative and fantasy based game - the sky is the limit!

- More personal control over the flow of battle: Personal limit breaks for example

- Less perfect play mentality: let healers be able to actually fix people's mistakes instead of them just shrugging since it's going to wipe the party anyway... The 2minute meta also needs to go since alliance and dungeons aren't fun with those actively making you feel bad for dying/lookiing att the scenery or talking to your members for a joke or something...

Build Jobs to be more like in PvP. You don't have to remove all the buttons, but make them more meaningful. There's no point of being "next ability is 50% stronger" if it's always used in conjunction with the same ability every time for example.
Jobs should have their core kit together by level 50 so people can actually practise using it and not feel as much gimped by getting lower level duties. This would also make it easier to overall balance the encounters and ensure that duties retain most of their past difficulty so people can't just skip or ignore all the mechanics.
Focus on Job flavor and allow vastly different inter-job gameplay. You can have your builder-spenders, procs, long systematic rotation etc. with different cooldowns.

DPS could give up on most of their party buffs, make everything either straight up greedy DPS or close to it. Not having to stack your buffs for windows releases a lot of design space for more unique approach. If some of them perform worse on some fight timelines, either allow it or consider building in somekind of system that allows holding parts of their burst to make it less of an issue.

Tanks need to be decided on, whether they have to manage enmity or not. If they have to manage enmity again add proper tools to help with it and consider adding it as minor thing for DPS too. If they do not have to manage enmity at all as it is currently, they should have heavier role in protecting party with mitigations or direct intervention (such as boss casting busters on random people and tank being able to either intercept or taunt it off). They could get some additions to their kits where properly helping their squad gives them resources for bigger DPS and likewise dealing damage can build some mitigation one way or another. This would reward and teach proper tanking gameplay.

Healers should also shift to cyclical gameplay where damage builds healing abilities and proper healing or mitigation rewards you with dps abilities or buffs. If healers retain lower number of attacks, at least make them actively be able to buff their teammates (single or all) and potentially debuff the boss to give buttons to press during downtime. Their kits are super bloated with heals that only get some use in hardest content in the game, consider consolidating some extra buttons to free up space for other gameplay stuff and either lower cooldown on some or make them recoverable through other actions.

Overall the design should end up more flavorful and having larger share of options to pick from. As it is the game is currently getting more and more same-y within roles. They say it's for sake of balance but the current balance is absolutely out of whack. If the balance isn't going to be super tight then might as well make the most of it to have enjoyable and variable designs.

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Originally Posted by Inputnamehere

Remove 120-sec protocol and give fights varying timelines. Let people figure out which jobs are better in certain fights, especially difficult content. If someone's worried about their job not welcomed in a difficult fight, they should go level another job.

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Expecting people to not play the job they like and instead level the "correct" job for the content they want to do is possibly the worst take I heard in a while.
Content should not gate specific jobs.

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Originally Posted by Collin_Sky

The community can't handle PCT being as good as it is currently but somehow wants SE to do that but for every job.

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Picto being as good as it is isn't tied strictly to its uniqueness. If you nerf potency, it would still retain its identity without being too strong.

More job identity. Like others have said, PVP has done a fantastic job doing such and PVE version of jobs have fell flat.

The problem is doing that for 20 jobs with picto and viper excluded. That is a huge task and unlike the 7.0 content design where devs have more time to work on that overtime and receive feedback. 8.0 is just a one and done with 8.1 being balance changes. That is why people dont really have alot of faith in 8.0 because Yoshi said a simple statement and we as a community took that and expect drastic changes.

People expect picto level detail and care for each job with the design philosophy. But that is too big for a team of 4 people who work on the jobs.

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Originally Posted by TomsYoungerBro

Picto being as good as it is isn't tied strictly to its uniqueness. If you nerf potency, it would still retain its identity without being too strong.

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If you want every job to have its own strengths and weaknesses, then "doing the most damage" is going to be one of those strengths.

What I hope is that a lot of ideas that were explored in PVP get carried over to PVE. Give me walking casts on BRD, and MCH. Let SCH interact with more of its buffs, and debuffs with Deployment Tactics. Let DRK spend its own HP on attacks. Give NIN the ability to one shot certain enemies so we can be rid of the godsdamn Origenics tortoise.

A successful job rework should start with a successful job design team rework. Swap out the old members, swap in fresh talent without the old prejudices and biases. And perhaps get more than five designers for 21 jobs this time around.

You'll know that job reworks are successful when fights, regardless of the CD templates of the jobs, have short- and mid-term priorities to weigh against each other, such as --in terms of throughput -- nuking down an enemy in time to reduce its damage dealt (based on remaining HP), healing enough to avoid a DoT or shielding just enough to avoid a knockback and thereby increase caster and melee uptime or --in terms of positioning-- intercepting/spreading damage vs. needing more spot-healing / cycled personal defensives, and there are distinct strategies in meeting those priority conflicts based on the jobs and actual players in your party.

Sadly, all that requires both the technicals necessary for new or more polished undermechanics (more damage being interceptible, greater total mechanical density but the VFX occlusion / conditional transparency to actually still see worth a damn, etc.) also a tighter band of balancing, better training for players (partly through earlier immersion into mechanical depth, harder goalpost encounters with more convenience for reattempts rather than removing fail conditions, and generally a slightly smoother difficulty curve overall).

In the end, we play content, not just jobs, but the greater the undermechanical sophistication (and here I mean actual in-practice/-execution sophistication, not just convolution that boils down to different shades of the same decision and/or actions but with more limited composition choices) available to those jobs, the more those jobs can not only carry different kits but see the use cases across those varied kits compete with decent tightness.

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As for the jobs themselves, I honestly want to see identity and focus on key features/theme regardless of what "role"-bleed may thereby occur, with no job being wholly interchangeable with another even in its own role. Others would be equally capable of producing the same summative net results within its group / as a group, sure, but they'd have to reach those results in different ways. Here again, MOBAs and hero shooters set a decent precedent; the way you optimally play as a member of a different role varies heavily with your composition and the given situation, such that you not only have, say, 21 jobs to select from, but a good hundred different competitive compositions that may each vary your play to a degree that increases with contextual optimization.

And within each job, build from simple and well-differentiated cores, but expand both organically and imaginatively.

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Originally Posted by Derio

More job identity. Like others have said, PVP has done a fantastic job doing such and PVE version of jobs have fell flat.

The problem is doing that for 20 jobs with picto and viper excluded. That is a huge task and unlike the 7.0 content design where devs have more time to work on that overtime and receive feedback. 8.0 is just a one and done with 8.1 being balance changes. That is why people dont really have alot of faith in 8.0 because Yoshi said a simple statement and we as a community took that and expect drastic changes.

People expect picto level detail and care for each job with the design philosophy. But that is too big for a team of 4 people who work on the jobs.

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They have 3 years to do it and whoever was assigned to redesign the whole pvp for 6.1 did it in barely a year for all the jobs. I don't buy this.