Your Opinion on the Current State of Job Identity/Balance in 6.4?

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Originally Posted by Hanayumi

Unfortunately, just dont see SE changing jobs back at this point. Think at best they could balance things so much that they can slap some entirely new system to jobs, tree, new job tier, skill augmentation, who knows, but yeah... this is likely not going change...

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I mean a lot of the criticism has essentially been “feedback for 7.0” since maybe 6.1? 6.2?

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Originally Posted by Ivtrix

I mean a lot of the criticism has essentially been “feedback for 7.0” since maybe 6.1? 6.2?

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It's been feedback for 7.0 since Endwalker launched, because we all know we're screaming into the void for at least 2 years (more like 2.5 at this point) and once 7.0 rolls around and nothing has changed we're screaming into the void for another 2 years or simply quit. Some people have been screaming into the void for almost 4 years already so it's probably going to be the latter for them.

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Originally Posted by Deo14

Yes, I meant faerie gauge, gauge that is used only for 1 skill might as well be removed and replaced with some CD instead.

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In the timeline where healers get more dps complexity, would be cool to see the Faerie Gauge used to fuel fairy offensive actions or damage support actions.

But in the current reality, the best I expect from a faerie gauge revamp is to have it be what fuels the Seraph uptime, like battery does to the Automaton queen.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

2 patch notes later...
<ability name> recast time was changed from 40s to 30s to properly align with the 2 min marks.

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3x40 still meets the same 120s marks as 4x30... Similarly, 6x20 = 2x60.

No, there is no need to remove 20|40s timers to "align with 2 min marks".

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

3x40 still meets the same 120s marks as 4x30... Similarly, 6x20 = 2x60.

No, there is no need to remove 20|40s timers to "align with 2 min marks".

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Lol please disregard my math, but you're right.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

But in the current reality, the best I expect from a faerie gauge revamp is to have it be what fuels the Seraph uptime, like battery does to the Automaton queen.

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I wouldn't mind that honestly think I even suggested something similar in the past. At least then it would have some interaction to it. And allow players to make clever use of aether stacks to extend seraphs duration. Could in theory pop seraph with 160 faerie guage if you had 3 stacks and aetehrflow off cooldown.

Would add some thought and decision making back to the job.

Then you'd just need to fix dissipation and stuff and could really open up some fairy strategy choices.

I wish healers would become interesting again.

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Originally Posted by tearagion

That's not what slidecasting is, slidecasting is just exploiting latency to move before the cast is finished without cancelling it. BLM can slidecast every spell just like every other caster. If you're not casting (i.e. the 1s before your GCD cools down on a healer post-glare), you're just moving not slidecasting lol. I don't need any of your information, man who said BLM can't slidecast.

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please stop attacking him :(

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Originally Posted by Raikai

In the timeline where healers get more dps complexity, would be cool to see the Faerie Gauge used to fuel fairy offensive actions or damage support actions.

But in the current reality, the best I expect from a faerie gauge revamp is to have it be what fuels the Seraph uptime, like battery does to the Automaton queen.

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I'm not a pro-DPS minded Healer, but there's a thread about this in the Healer forum which proposed putting Energy Drain on Faerie Gauge instead of Aetherflow. That way, the gauge would have kind of a point in existing, would still retain the "damage or healing" tradeoff (under this design, Aetherpact is reworked to just be a half-potency Lustrate that is cast by Eos instead of the SCH), but wouldn't lock out the use of AF abilities. One of the most requested changes to SCH is to decouple Energy Drain from Aetherflow since people feel bad for using anything that isn't Energy Drain as "being suboptimal", they just want to have an AF dump if they still have stacks left as AF is coming off CD. The solution to that in this idea is Excog not having a CD so it can be used as a dump, since there's almost always someone putting an Excog on would be useful for.

It's not perfect, but it kind of does that and makes Faerie Gauge not ENTIRELY meaningless: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...e-Proposal-SCH

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EDIT:

For whoever needs to hear it:

A Sylphie is someone who does no damage, not a person who doesn't enjoy complex damage rotations but uses the existing ones to deal damage. (It's also a rude insult to begin with, so shouldn't even be used, but if you're going to use it, at least use it correctly - Cure/Medica spamming mages, for example, would qualify, not people who have the majority of their casts as Glares/Dias)

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

I'm not a pro-DPS minded Healer

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Yes Sylphie

How I feel about the current state of healing:

I’m a White Mage…err… Healer…err…DPS

Self sustain currently is broken so much…

I got distracted in real life and died at the start of the last boss in the dungeon. I watched the warrior self heal and keep everybody else alive. Tank busters, WAR healed to full, AOE on everybody, healed to full.

I never felt so useless in this game at that moment. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they eliminate healers sometime within the next 10 years or less.

Job balance is fine now, I don't see any jobs being locked of PF, or being always picked. They solved a lot of PLD and MCH problems this exp. I played all raid tiers and did DSR, and never felt a single job was a must or was terrible in any fight.
A lot of ppl cried about BLM being way too strong compared to RDM and SMN, but RDM and SMN is always being picked for prog for obvious reasons, believe or not, damage ISN'T everything in a prog scenario, or even on PF reclears, some things like ress has a big impact.


Now about Job Identity... We all know how everyone feels about this. When thinking about bringing identity back to the job its better to think about small advantages one job can bring instead of small problems they have that made them unique.
PLD back in HW couldn't block magic damage, this is something that made him unique in a sense, but its a awful way to make a job feels different, what made PLD felt good for me in StB was how cover could be used in different mechanics.
BRD felt unique in ARR because it was the only job who could regen party MP and TP.
SCH now is the only job with a support movement speed spell.
They need to bring more unique support skills/spells to every job, without being too OP or too weak, and remove some aoe Buffs that doesn't interact with the job, pressing a 120s CD that boost % damage doesn't help job identity at all(looking at you Battle Litany, Chain S., Searing Light)

Also, remove DHit from tanks and make SkS and SpS the same substat (Haste), so PLD and get faster spells casts please.

Job identity and balance are 100% the worst they've been since I started playing in 3.3. The only role that isn't either horrifically unfun, terribly unbalanced, and/or homogenized beyond belief is melee DPS and they certainly have their share of problems too. I mean my keybinds for all tanks/healers are almost 1 to 1 copies of each other. On 2 of the 3 roles in the game, I can swap jobs, turn off my hotbars so I cant even see what buttons im pressing and act like im playing the job I was just on, and i'll still have no problem doing any piece of content because they are practically identical. Tanks and healers don't feel like 8 distinct jobs. Tanks feel like 2 jobs with 2 specs each, and healers feel like one job with four specs. It's ridiculous.

Job balance is basically the summary of this games problems: casualization and depth that gets sucked out in the name of balance, whatever they think that is. It is a dumpsterfire.

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Originally Posted by SilversLyu

Job balance is basically the summary of this games problems: casualization and depth that gets sucked out in the name of balance, whatever they think that is. It is a dumpsterfire.

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It's both more casual and less balanced.

Tanks, Warriors specifically, shouldn't be allowed to fulfill every single role.

Self sustain is ridiculous.

PvE balance has consistently been good. For context: in a game with asymmetrical options, perfect balance is never going to happen. Something will always be the best and the worst, and even the best dev teams accept a reasonable margin of differential. In games with bad balance, character/class x is more than twice as good as class y. I think if you can keep that within like 10% performance difference at a high level that's good, and FFXIV has succeeded; FFXIV community is super sensitive to even like a 5% performance difference. Which is not to minimize it, especially when people getting hitting enrage with just 1% more HP to go. I get it.

Identity is however severely lacking. Started the game in Stormblood and sad to see us lose more and more. It's funny, because they add more buttons, yet the outcome somehow is increasingly stagnant. In PvE, there just isn't a lot of imagination in the class design. RPG games from over two decades ago have more interesting classes. PvP kits are nice because aside from being less bloated, they consistently tell me more about the jobs than PvE has in years. Over twice as many buttons and PvE struggles to do that.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Tanks, Warriors specifically, shouldn't be allowed to fulfill every single role.

Self sustain is ridiculous.

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I'm gonna take your word on this as you've mastered all the jobs. Geez, that's a lot of 90s.

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

PvE balance has consistently been good. For context: in a game with asymmetrical options, perfect balance is never going to happen. Something will always be the best and the worst, and even the best dev teams accept a reasonable margin of differential. In games with bad balance, character/class x is more than twice as good as class y. I think if you can keep that within like 10% performance difference at a high level that's good, and FFXIV has succeeded; FFXIV community is super sensitive to even like a 5% performance difference. Which is not to minimize it, especially when people getting hitting enrage with just 1% more HP to go. I get it.

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That applies for games with actual builds and diverse ways to play each class. If some job deals 1-2% less than other job in FFXIV, then that's much more serious problem than some GW2 build having 10-20% less damage than other build. This is problem with FFXIV balance, game is so straightforward with no variance at all, all they need to do is to balance jobs within their role properly. There's 19 jobs that have only one way to play them, and you only need to balance 3 groups of sizes 4, 4 and 11 properly.

Look at tanks, they are still somehow unbalanced, devs cannot even balance 4 goddamned jobs that have no variance whatsoever, other games need to handle balancing endless amount of various builds. Look at metabattle.com, GW2 has 9 professions, with 3 specializations each, 5 distinct modes, most of the time there is at least 1 meta build for each profession and mode. Look at elementalist for example, there 5 metabuilds (with some having another variant of the build) just for regular PvP, 3 meta builds for fractals, 4 for open world, 4 for raids/strikes, 5 for WvW (3 for roaming, 2 for zerg). This single profession has at least 21 distinct builds which are considered meta by community, so devs need to balance literal 100s of builds across 9 professions, all of which does evolve all the time. If you do tiny change for single trait, that can ruin multiple builds and create more different new builds.

Lines between trinity roles are hair thin, you can take Guardian as base profession, choose either core guardian or 1 of 3 elite specializations. If you pick Firebrand specialization, then you still don't even have set role. You can either go condi DPS or you can do healer/support build, depending on other 2 talent trees, your stats and your choices of weapon sets. This single profession has more choices than all FFXIV jobs combined. And don't get me started on FFXIV's lack of any CC effects, jobs having no choice of weapon, or DoTs that only do bland damage.

To sum it up, FFXIV simply doesn't have any excuse to be anything less than 99% balanced, everything is straightforward, there is no variance, everything can be calculated, yet we still have balance issues and inconsistent balance philosophies.

Tank healing needs to go down, but mostly just war's. Dark knight doesn't really have any and is the only one that gets punished for using it's shortest cooldown outside of raidwides or tank busters through dps loss.
The other 2 are mostly fine though.

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Originally Posted by Tanis_Ebonhart

I'm gonna take your word on this as you've mastered all the jobs. Geez, that's a lot of 90s.

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I'm most impressed by the blue mage 90 there tbqh

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

PvE balance has consistently been good.

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Bro what balance has been terrible this expac. And it was straight up dogwater in HW lol

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Tanks, Warriors specifically, shouldn't be allowed to fulfill every single role.

Self sustain is ridiculous.

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I concur.
It is pretty ridiculous.

Now Imagine if they had a Ranged DPS Rotation. Tanks would literally be: "Im the Main DPS, and you're all MY Support"

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Originally Posted by EderTheBro

Bro what balance has been terrible this expac. And it was straight up dogwater in HW lol

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At least balance had a reason to be terrible in HW when every job was more unique, the fact that balance is still so far off when they're reworking jobs to play similarly and work within the 2 minute meta is just sad.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

At least balance had a reason to be terrible in HW when every job was more unique, the fact that balance is still so far off when they're reworking jobs to play similarly and work within the 2 minute meta is just sad.

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WAR goes brrrrr

So I'll be the only one to say it,

I love new summoner, hated the old one and stopped playing it after Heavensward. It was so bloated and felt very unfulfilling to me like MCH on launch. I've been maining SMN most of this post-patch expansion and having a blast. Sad it was nerfed, but it's still very fun and user friendly.

I really enjoy AST as well. I like that they got rid all the niche-use only cards and adjusted the class around the gameplay I saw the majority of AST playing (fishing for balance). I do think it's lost some identity with the loss of diurnal / nocturnal (regen / buff), but it is what it is. I would like to see them adjust the story for the use of cards now though - if they have and I missed it please let me know!

Really enjoying warrior my main tank. I love my toolkit and the fact I feel like I have some of my destiny in my own hands (healer died? that's ok I've got a ton of skills to carry me through!).

In general, I think most of the oversimplified jobs were oversimplified to be re-complicated with the next coming expansions.

In terms of damage, I don't play enough difficult content to notice. Overall, I'm having fun. I'm really excited for 7.0's new jobs and current job additions! ^^b

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Originally Posted by LittleArrow

In general, I think most of the oversimplified jobs were oversimplified to be re-complicated with the next coming expansions.

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I'll just say it again, that's what Machinist players thought back in Shadowbringers when their job got simplified to hell. The idea that "CBU3 will totally add the job complexity back in with the next expansion, guys" is pure copium.

Copium or not, I don't care if it's complicated again - it was just a guess lol.

I love the job as it is. I hope they add some more summons, and if not, I'm fine with a few more skills next expansion ^^b

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Originally Posted by fulminating

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darthk knight The Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the devs would tell you. It’s a stormblood legend. Dark knight was a Dark tank of stormblood, so powerful and so healy he could use the quietus-abyssal drain loop to influence the damage to create life points… He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying. The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.

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BASED

/10char

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Originally Posted by fulminating

I'm most impressed by the blue mage 90 there tbqh

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Eh it's an auto generated job list from a 3rd party website I've had for 5+ years since there's no official FFXIV job signature generator

It got wonky when BLU was added. I think it gets coded as "max level" that it can be and just assumes that's lvl 90 like everything else.

I only raid as healer, so I can really only speak to that. I'm not happy with the current state of healing jobs. Yes, they are effective at what they do, but they are also *boring*. I'm sure most people are familiar with the usual gripe of having a 1-button DPS rotation. I'm not a huge fan of that, either, but my biggest issue lies elsewhere, that being the fact that we have a massive amount of healing tools and we don't even use a good chunk of them unless things are going horribly wrong. Fight design in this game encourages healers to OGCD heal while casting GCD heals only as a last resort. We get more healing abilities every expansion, but don't we have plenty already? At least give us something interesting, please.

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

I only raid as healer, so I can really only speak to that. I'm not happy with the current state of healing jobs. Yes, they are effective at what they do, but they are also *boring*. I'm sure most people are familiar with the usual gripe of having a 1-button DPS rotation. I'm not a huge fan of that, either, but my biggest issue lies elsewhere, that being the fact that we have a massive amount of healing tools and we don't even use a good chunk of them unless things are going horribly wrong. Fight design in this game encourages healers to OGCD heal while casting GCD heals only as a last resort. We get more healing abilities every expansion, but don't we have plenty already? At least give us something interesting, please.

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For healers, I’d rather have a more interesting healing and buffing setup rather than a more complex DPS rotation. When we have to have a more complex DPS setup to keep us busy, that means the design for our purpose in the raid is flawed.

I’d rather have more buffs for DPS, mitigations, smart heals, maybe a 5 second window skip death option instead of rescue, etc. I don’t want to be a green mage, give healers more purpose, show some creativity.

Heavens forbid healers get a LB1 and 2 that actually do something…

Sadly, all we will get is more “safe plays”, it seems all of the creativity left us between ARR and HW.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

For healers, I’d rather have a more interesting healing and buffing setup rather than a more complex DPS rotation. When we have to have a more complex DPS setup to keep us busy, that means the design for our purpose in the raid is flawed.

I’d rather have more buffs for DPS, mitigations, smart heals, maybe a 5 second window skip death option instead of rescue, etc. I don’t want to be a green mage, give healers more purpose, show some creativity.

Heavens forbid healers get a LB1 and 2 that actually do something…

Sadly, all we will get is more “safe plays”, it seems all of the creativity left us between ARR and HW.

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I'd rather them give us a dps rotation given that all of the raids, yes all of them, showcase more usage of our one button spam than our heals five times to ten times (or more) so. That is already justifiable for a more complex dps rotation. (No buffs don't work here as they'd only be a filler similar to just adding dots as those only fill a 30s window and outside that window you're back to doing 1 button spam.) The game isn't made for healers complex heal kit and the best bet would be to increase our dps kit with nonfiller buttons because the alternative would have them rework all fights and I just don't see that happening and even if it did heal creep from other classes and mitigation would replace eventually anyhow. The way to keep healers a role that must exist, at least imo, is a controversial one, which would be increase their skill engagement, overall dps contribution, and tie them to the dps bonus a party brings...so at the end of the day you might as well bring a healer anyhow as they are 1v1 with tanks and potentially dps, and the parties that don't bring one are just doing it for showmanship or challenge rather than effectiveness.

While the healer damage kit could use an overhaul, the role would also benefit from the diversification of the healing portion of their kit as well. Part of why healers are boring is because of how much of their kit is just a straight heal, there is no difference between using Medica and Afflatus Rapture for example, the only difference comes from the loss of damage by using Medica, but they both do the exact same thing in terms of healing. There's far too many things in a healer's kit that's just restoring straight HP, we could use more interesting buttons like Macrocosmos and Horoscope, things that interact with the rest of the kit rather than just more direct heal buttons or regens or direct shields.

If anything this game needs some more tight obnoxious healchecks, along a proper healer rotation including dps. P10S, a role should play like the role you play.

I wish my favorite job had more skill expression and didn't completely revolve around getting lucky and critting a few skills that happen once every minute.

Every job having so much of it's damage reliant on a small 'burst' window just isn't fun. Optimizing around sustained damage was much more interesting and rewarding.

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

I wish my favorite job had more skill expression and didn't completely revolve around getting lucky and critting a few skills that happen once every minute.

Every job having so much of it's damage reliant on a small 'burst' window just isn't fun. Optimizing around sustained damage was much more interesting and rewarding.

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The only mutual exclusion between the two, though, was accepting drift in buff-less comps in order to get a bit more bonus GCD potency out of your own damage amp window (FoF, etc.) at risk of getting fewer affected GCDs (and any oGCD CDs also held) within the fight.

In all other senses, optimizing for raid buffs is just an addition to optimizing sustained damage, not a replacement for it.

Only play healer since ARR but I think they really need to spice some things up it has been getting more boring/dull as time went by (and no it doesn't get better in ultimate type content) because the root problem is the way healers are build.

I Am still not sure why they decided to split healers back to regen/shield types they removed the split in tanks so people of that role could just bring the class they liked but for some weird reason with healers they went nope... your not allowed...
I have always hoped for healers to have both regen or schield modes especially after AST was introduced seemed like a good start but they just went backwards again..

for WHM after The Lost City of Amdapor (Hard) was released in HW with the Kuribu boss(that one switches and had healing spells that switch to dps spells when she enters a "reverse" mode that one could have been interesting for WHMs as a system (think kind of a cleric stance but more then just swap of potency but have your actual healing spells convert instead)

The Lilly job system dint even get expanded in this expansion. The Lilly spells not being full OGCD like tetra to make it at least flow a little bit better in combat is still jarring to me even after 6 years..

guess my 2 cents

PvP kits are just miles ahead in term of fun and engaging gameplay. Each got their own unique playstyle and feel rather than being pigeonholed into their 2 minutes buff window. Also EVERYONE gets to use their limit break button.

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Originally Posted by Yushees

PvP kits are just miles ahead in term of fun and engaging gameplay. Each got their own unique playstyle and feel rather than being pigeonholed into their 2 minutes buff window. Also EVERYONE gets to use their limit break button.

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Also combos that go into 1 button, truly a blessing.