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Honestly, was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt but this dynamic duo only argue in bad faith, so from now on it should be better to just ignore them I've seen them in other posts with the same weird aggressive and dismissive attittude.
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The video misses the mark in so many ways that it's crazy. Classes have always been viable regardless of the nonsense he is peddling. Was Heavensward perfect? No it wasn't but people still enjoyed elements of it. Not all of us care about total balance. Some people want jobs to feel unique even if that means not everyone will play the class or bring the class to every single raid. Some classes are and always be sub optimal for any given fight and it's pointless to homogenize the combat into a two minute meta dps fest.
And yes, I said it. Classes have always been viable for high end content with very few exceptions. What has happened to XIV is that classes have been gutted in the appeasing people who have argued otherwise to the point of overcompensation.
Terrible is probably a bit strong? It certainly wasn't perfect, nor were the jobs as closely balanced as they are now by any stretch. But terrible isn't really the right word?
That's not to say there weren't extremes of course, 3.0 AST was absolutely terrible. Every hardcore group I knew that ran one for Gordias either switched or failed by A3S.
Not quite as extreme but 3.4 WHM's rough MP economy was highlight and exposed by A12S prog asking a bunch of AoE healing whilst simultaneously offering opportunities for AoE DPS. SCH and AST both had the means to maintain the throughput, meanwhile WHM had to stand around doing nothing.
On the Tanks, DRK blew various degrees of hot and cold out of the gate but not to the extremes of AST. For the DPS, was this the period of piercing or get out? I honestly can't remember.
I don't know of a time when a particular job was incapable of doing any particular content, I'm pretty sure "terrible job balance" in the eyes of FFXIV players has always been like "MNK has to push a lot of buttons and care about lots of positionals, but does about the same amount of damage as another job that pushes fewer buttons with fewer positionals".
That depends IMO.
If you were dead set on playing a particular job and said job was a dumpster fire then that's a fair view to hold.
If you were flexible on what you played then IMO it actually wasn't a bad thing at all. I did Gordias as SCH then WHM, Midas as both WHM and AST, then Creator on AST. The shifting meta and balance gave me a firm push into mixing up what I played, that alone does wonders for preventing things getting too stale and I'd credit that as a healthy portion of why I have some 80 or so A12S clears logged alone, at least half of which were PF.
Meanwhile with the current status of balance above all, I generally just sit on WHM and leave it at that as there's little to nothing to be gained from playing a different healer. Thus things got stale fast I guess.
Sometimes you've got to save the playerbase from themselves, having jobs/classes that are inherently somewhat unbalanced but with a meta that is always evolving over time helps do just that whilst FFXIV's job system means that the 'penalty' for switching to a more flavour of the month job is relatively minuscule compared to what you used to see in WoW.
True but I dont think its a good mentality to be like "Oh this one job I like to play is actually super bad, guess I'm forced to play something else". Game shouldnt be the one to make that decision, the player does and if the balance was that awful, its not something that can be easily ignored. People like their jobs and if every job is viable then that should be the standard.
Endwalker was great, post patches have been hit or miss.
It really does depend on the mentality of the player.
In my main static from Midas to this day pretty much all of us were only really inflexible as so far as we wanted to stick within our preferred role. Outside of that, we'd just play whatever job within the role was needed for that Savage turn/tier. Heck, 3 of us would literally play just about anything as long as you gave enough notice or threw a set of crafted their way in time for prog.
In my eyes at least, players tend to be less likely to be as flexible as you move further from the hardcore extremes? Or at least it's a trend I've noticed when pugging or helping more midcore/casual teams over the years. In this case, a job being out of the meta isn't such a big deal no? Case in point, WHM was absolutely sub par for A12S and people made a big deal of that even occasionally going as far as excluding it from Zurvan PFs, yet ironically it was perfectly fine there and in the case of low level play could actually be easier to hit a decent standard with.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that 3.0 AST was a good thing by any stretch, rather I'm of the opinion that the WHM vs AST balance in Midas was something that SE would do well to explore. Both had advantages over each other depending on which turn you were tackling at the time and for that tier I actually ended up flip flopping between the two over the course of the night.
Tanks have had similar situations over the years too.
And Wesk talks about all of that. Yet you'd think he was talking out of his ass or that stuff like excluding jobs didn't happen back then at all levels if you read some people's replies in this thread. And sure some people might have loved those systems and the jank. As there are some crafters who feel HW crafting was when it was at its peak and wished it would go back to that sort of thing. I remember getting my miner to 60 and wondering how in world was I supposed to get the needed amount of HQ Adamantite or for the lv 60 minner quest as I wasn't an established crafter. I also didn't understand how gathering back then worked and asking anyone got me silence. Still does today thb. I might not have been raiding back then but oh man was it very much not fun hearing a person stuck on A3S try to prog that fight for almost the entire time it was current. Or to hear the complaints from fellow FC mates.
Again sure it feels nice if your job feels like it has its own identity. But I don't know where the sweet spot is or even if there is one to where people don't have to gear up another job and prog on that job only to get "leftover scraps(the gear no one else wanted cause it wasn't their main)" for their main. To then only touch it on reclears cause everyone's gear is so good it doesn't matter if you took an unfavorable job. And having a fairly balanced or very balanced difference between the jobs.
Jobs should be interesting enough that people will want to play as them. I feel that if people are so ready and willing to change jobs just because meta or whatever demands it, then it means the jobs aren't all that interesting and people aren't playing them because they like them but just because it suits their needs at the time.
That isn't what my post says. I clearly said Heavensward is not ideal however the game has been rendered mediocre by listening to players who claimed their jobs weren't viable at all when in reality they were just suboptimal either because that player sucked and lacked self awareness or bc their class wasn't demanding every single type of encounter.
Also regarding believing him-- do you seriously believe no one was taking warriors to raids
? People take RDM to raids today. They take all classes aa they always have because again all classes are viable for all encounters the vast majority of the time, and we should not adjust jobs based on a minority of cases (ie waH it's harder to clear this dps check bc of my job).
People really did not take WAR, PLD, MNK, MCH, SAM, WHM and DRK at different parts of this game's life. To the point where people did so without knowing why a group would not want to even in content where excluding them wouldn't have mattered. Yet look at people in PF 6 weeks after a savage tier comes oit and the fact they'd have dumb restrictions on them like the stupid high ilvs. That would prevent people who knew what they were doing to join just cause they were joining on a job that wasn't as geared as their main. Look at the whole skip Soar meme. People wanted to skip it because it was too hard even though later in the fight you still had to do a Soar. There would be people who wouldn't look at a MCH's numbers and just kick em from a PF group cause lol MCH ping is bad and there were a lot of bad MCH. Or if they did take a great MCH and a wipe happened they'd kick em then assuming it had to be the person playing the "crap" job.
Yes and those are isolated and extreme cases that literally don't neccesitate the vast oversimplification and homogenization that has occurred.
And per your notes about MCH, that's players. That isn't FFXiV-- it's players. Devs are in a perpetual cycle of homogenizing and simplifying when players are always going to make assumptions and create metas. It is a battle they will never win and they should stop now, reverse direction. Accept that not every job will be meta or loved by everyone and stick to their own creative vision.
It wasn't isolated and extreme cases and sure it is all on the playerbase. Yet no one wanted a PLD or MNK for most of HW. At least not while you were progging a fight. Same thing happened at other points in the game. The homogenization of jobs came from people complaining for years to balance the jobs so that you wouldn't run into the problem we created of not being able to do a fight on the job you main. Now does that mean that jobs might not feel like themselves? Yeah. Which even I don't like. I don't think that we should go all the way back cause even back then there were some dumb things the devs thought we liked.