AST, MCH, DRK and their failure as new jobs at HW launch

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Originally Posted by SendohJin

they tried to make classes different? MCH and BRD has the same stance. they added positional to NIN so every melee DPS has them. AST has regen and shields. if they were trying they didn't do it that well.

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Each of the classes still have different perks to them that sets up a foundation for their own gameplay. Ninjas have their mudras, DRGs get their timed jumps, as well as maintaing BotD. Monks still have a hhuge emphasize on maintaining full uptime for stacks. BLMs cycle between astral and umbral, and enochian adds on top of that since their IV spells also require astral/umbral respectively, while keeping their 2.0 in check because they can't switch astral/umbral with IV spells. SMN has always been DoT oriented and they get an extra layer of stack management that works in-tune with their aetherflow.

I'm digressing when I say this though, MCH and BRD's stance ability is functionally the exact, same ability. I feel this is where they dropped the ball when it came to diversifying ranged dps' gameplay. Both when you boil it down, comes to watching for skill procs, keeping their own buff refreshed and keeping DoTs up. Ammo doesn't add that much of a variety to MCH for aforementioned reasons, and BRD doesn't mesh well into WM because of their animation and their reactionary procs from traits.

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Originally Posted by tremor24

Unless your group has a monk in which case a DRK has literally no utility to provide and PLD has "something" to offer every comp.

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One could ask why you're bringing in a monk if you're going for bleeding edge content as it has literally zero synergy in a group, and close to no utility if you bring in a DRK. (If you're not going for bleeding edge content however, what you bring in has no importance whatsoever, so the argument is void from start.)

Not that you can't do it (far from it), but that's not the most efficient way to go

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Originally Posted by tremor24

A major issue with DRK right now is that if your group has a monk, why would you ever bring a DRK over WAR/WAR or WAR/PLD?

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you could spin that easily. "A major issue with MNK right now is that if your group has a DRK, why would you ever bring a MNK over DRG or NIN ?"

Thing is, both answers are correct. You just pick one or an other depending on personnal preferences.

It takes time to tweak new classes/jobs as things happen on live servers that don't happen during internal testing (or even in public testing). Hell, WAR was considered the sub-par tank after ARR's launch.

Have you never played an MMO before? Seems like it.

Never before has any new job in any MMO been balanced on release. It's either launch the classes as playable but under/overwhelming or tune them for months before releasing them with 0 player feedback. The only failure I see here is OP for thinking SE can do something that basically no-one has ever done before.

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Originally Posted by Kuwagami

you could spin that easily. "A major issue with MNK right now is that if your group has a DRK, why would you ever bring a MNK over DRG or NIN ?"

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Yes, you are absolutely correct, however DRK is the new addition to the game not MNK. It is far more likely for an existing group (pre expansion) to be introducing the DRK job into a group than a MNK which may have been main'ing this job for a long time. Also, it is much easier for a tank to change jobs due to raid acquired gear overlaps than MNK to NIN.

I frequently hear that DRK is fine because they were part of the world first A3/A4 clears, but often don't realize that the change to DRK was to compensate for the change of their MNK to NIN. Keeping the MNK while changing to WAR/WAR would have a had a similar impact in my opinion with no place for a DRK option if the MNK was unable or unwilling to switch to NIN.

Also, it is occasionally a dps loss for a DRK to keep up the INT down debuff, but always a gain for MNK to do so.

Yep, no matter how much you plan, there will always be oversights missed. Could be as simple as saying, well look this combo in theory and in test have shown to be as good as NIN's strongest combo but then upon a full blown execution of players who have tried it we've learned that because of attribute distribution, TP and accuracy that the dmg balance between that combo and the NIN is actually far apart from one another.


They can design, playtest and analyze things to the best of their ability but it's not until the players whom provide a higher odd of playing outside the box and doing things they might have overlooked that they can truly begin to fine tune what they might of missed.

Keep in mind 3 jobs, in a yr+ time is not easy, trying to balance and create 3 different play styles that feel unique from the other jobs while also not taking away or making another job obsolete is tough, this isn't FFXI where jobs were shunned from being used because of how OP certain jobs could be, Samurai being able to self skillchain, BLM having full control of potent elemental magic giving them a huge edge on flexibility in a combat system that supported exploiting elemental weakness and since a limitless amount of mages could make use of a Skillchain magic burst it didn't matter how many melee you had to make the skillchain only how many mages could burst off the one skillchain.

It's stuff like above which has and I hope will continue to be avoided as XIV moves forward cause ya, while the nostalgia of 11 is nice the truth is it had a lot of imbalance issues that were never tackled in the amount of time that they should of been and ya it caused a lot of jobs to have loss potential because of it.

Drk was made viable due to magic tank busters in content. But their design, compared to pld/war definitely feels clunky and lacking vision.

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Originally Posted by tremor24

Yes, you are absolutely correct, however DRK is the new addition to the game not MNK. It is far more likely for an existing group (pre expansion) to be introducing the DRK job into a group than a MNK which may have been main'ing this job for a long time.

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Touche. I wasn't in a static pre-HS and didn't consider the things under this angle

I think, especially post patch where it's buffs for days, ast has delivered on the card gimmick and is fun because of it. It is certainly whm with cards though. So I can see why whm is threatened. Although the scholar's freaking out just don't know what they're talking about, even with comparable shields ast makes a terrible scholar.

Mch definitely had to borrow some things from brd, like the tp/mp regen and a silence, because it fills the same spot. It borrowed things it didn't need to as well though. Stuff like, 'bard has straight shot, let's give mch hot shot' or 'brd has misery's end, let's give mch heartbreaker' wasn't really necessary. So it's just got the semi combo system to set it apart. I think I prefer it to brd, but that doesn't mean more effort couldn't have been put in. Though I think I've switched to ninja for my off dps. Because of the dead horse everyone's been beating in gb/wm. It went from tolerating it to liking it less and less. I'm done waiting for se to fix it, because they're being stubborn on this one and I don't think they're going to.

Drk I haven't played past the quest to unlock it, so can't comment.

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Originally Posted by SpecialKK

Drk was made viable due to magic tank busters in content. But their design, compared to pld/war definitely feels clunky and lacking vision.

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This for days. That and also the apparent need for more damage, which could possibly be fixed if PLD's enmity issues are addressed.