Here's the Answer to Test on the Healer Strike and future class design Square

The only reason I'm posting this is because Square has a bad history of making poor design choices or firing people who are right and then having to back peddle (Shout out to the Chad QA Healer who said the job design for healers was too easy, and rather than promote the guy, in typical JP business fashion they fired him because he went against the current design paradigm and spoke up -- you'll always be remembered in my heart -- even if Yoshi is out of touch on healer design in his classic take on, "do ultimate difficulty content to compensate for our poor job design").

Therefore, I'll try to be concise and then expand later if needed on this expansive subject.

Posit:

Singular role jobs are an outdated, boomer, and inferior way to design around. Locking someone into meatshield, dps bot, or heal bot and having them only function as such is a sacred cow that needs to removed.

This implementation doesn't need to be thrown away completely, but does need to be iterated on.

How do we do this?

Mainly, DPS as a role should no longer exist solely. DPS as a core function needs to be spread out among three different archetypes:

Tanks/Frontline, Healers, Utility/Support.

Why though?

Firstly, this paradigm keeps roles from having too much overlap with each other. You can give tanks a bit of healing, healers a bit of utilty, and utility a bit of either of the other two, but there's limit to the toe stepping you can do if you're intelligent about it.

The idea that DPS must be the balancing factor for your job design is a flawed one. DPS should be balanced around overall content, not competitive metrics to validate job balance against other jobs for content.

By granting portions of DPS to each major "role", it allows for the removal of the singular and often lopsided design issues you run into when creating a theme for a job but need to curtail its ability because it deals "too much/too little" damage for its archetype.

Does this mean DPS is unimportant or we can just throw it at all jobs and expect the game to be balanced? No. However, the balance needs to focus on group compositions versus game content overall rather than the above job contention. Classes should only be singular digits of difference in DPS balance, not the current double digits we see between roles.

This enables Square to push what is capable and focus solely on job design as a function of the main role interacting alongside its dps rotation for a more enriched and interestering play experience.

The above statement has a positive effect on providing player agency and player expression in their job that is focused on a gratifying job fantasy.

Additional statement:

Also for Yoshi and crew, I want to call out a terrible design decision you made and highlight the fact that the current displeasure in classes is a result of that.

Back at the end of heavensward, you chose to simplify jobs and reduce the nuance in their design in an appeal to a lower skill ceiling player. Instead what you got was watered down, boring, homogenized jobs that lack identity and depth.

No one is asking for a massive player spectrum skill range, or having to get a pilot's license to play your character. However, what you chose went too far in its implementation and now we're stuck with this weird job design similar to WoW class design.

Your implementation and refinement of these job aesthetics is at an all time high (good thing), but their creativity and player expression is at an all time low (extremely bad). It's important you don't conflate one with the other.

Take that with you when going forward in your future design decisions.

TLDR:

Singular roles are a sacred cow that need to die off
DPS should be inherent to all jobs and measured more closely with each other
Job roles should coincide with a strong dps rotation that highlights their job fantasy



P.S.

The only people who want singular job roles are those who like to bot, or are lazy and want to be carried through content. For the latter, nobody likes carrying you anyway.

Also Yoshi, you need to write an apology letter to the QA person responsible for testing your healing jobs that you fired originally, as he was correct and he was punished for being thus. We call that "having integrity".

Also who are we kidding, Yoshi and crew don't read the forums, nevermind the English ones.

I will point out that especialy the Japanese Side of the Community in general terms is in favores the trinity. So i fear on basis of that approach is doomed to fail.

For example in the Japanese Forums they tend to ask for more interessting design in Healers yes but not for Damage Rotations. They act under the Idea that healers should heal.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ayalu

I will point out that especialy the Japanese Side of the Community in general terms is in favores the trinity. So i fear on basis of that approach is doomed to fail.

For example in the Japanese Forums they tend to ask for more interessting design in Healers yes but not for Damage Rotations. They act under the Idea that healers should heal.

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Healers can heal, but it in no way has to conflict with dealing damage. Look at sage, it's a half hearted attempt at that take, but it's a take in the right direction.

The roles still need to exist, healers still need to exist, but the way that healing is implemented should be a function of doing damage or taking multi-facted actions as well and not the boomer take on "i hit only 1-4 buttons, it heal, this is job identity".

Heals that do function as "I hit button and heal" need to have a cool down associated with them and be powerful. But we need to move away from the spamminess of one button, no combo abilities, while also forcing healers to partake in combat more than just "i hit one dps button when my primary function isn't immediately needed in this brief interim".

I'm all in favor of healer damage rotations and think that they should add at least six new damage actions and drop their potency to the point where they have to use every one of those actions to produce what they now do with one action. It'll make leveling a bit more challenging, sure, but if healers want a DPS toolkit, give it to them.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ayalu

For example in the Japanese Forums they tend to ask for more interessting design in Healers yes but not for Damage Rotations. They act under the Idea that healers should heal.

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Because they should. This seems to only be controversial in the NA forums.

If the game had a "perfect" trinity, then they would literately remove the DPS from the healer AND the tank. The actual design of the tank would basically just be "mitigation and enmity", any DPS they do would be service to enmity holding. Likewise for the healer, any DPS done should be in service of doing some kind of action. Take for example "Reflect", if the white mage had Reflect, and cast it with the tank, any magical damage to the tank would be reflected back to enemy. However casting reflect before a healer casts heal, would instead reflect the healing back on the enemy. The tank likewise, if they have a physical shield, would reflect physical damage back to the enemy. For the tanks that do not have a shield, a correct parry execution would be needed to reflect damage to the enemy.

Likewise, the only healing DPS or Tanks should have should be directly within their role. So the Red Mage could have like "raise" and "cure 1" but not Holy or medica. Summoner in this game is an invention of 14, so maybe it can retain resurrection, but it's heal cast is only equal to cure 1. Paladin should have the ability to do a cure, but it should only be "cure 1" levels. All three should not be able to collectively cure more than the actual white mage healer doing medica. So that means either the potency should be lower or the recast time. A tank should not have any kind of "self-sustain" that recovers HP without it breaking their mitigation and enmity hold. You break your role, and the cost is to get back into your combo.

Western players don't like this, because most other western CRPG's adhere more to D&D rules. The DnD Cleric actually carries a medium weapon (Mace/WarHammer) but have almost no offensive spells (because a lot of spells are used on the environment (like detecting traps, walking on water, talking to dead)) and healing. But this omits a large part of what DnD does (alignments that forbid paladins and clerics from doing evil acts for example or they lose the protection of their god.)

If you watch any DnD podcast/streams, they move super slowly. Like an entire fight could take an hour. Even CRPG's people playing Baldur's Gate (3) could easily spend an hour just doing the turn based combat. By comparison Final Fantasy is super fast. Final Fantasy trades speed and story for strategy. The consequence of this is most of the spells you might learn in the game are not used (like most of FF1's Nul* spells aren't that useful) and once you learn the most powerful spells, you have no reason to cast the weaker ones, just cast the most expensive ones and then spam pots to recover the MP.

But I think one of the major flaws in 14 goes back to version 1.0, the original classes were supposed to be something else. Conjurer was not a white mage, it was more like a druid. The Thaumaturge casts, well poison. Once these got turned into White Mage and Black Mage, basically half the elemental attacks got cut and put on Thaumaturge and Thaumaturge lost everything so they could become Black Mage. What they should have done in hindsight is not do this, and rather made all the Jobs we have now as additional classes. Those cross-classes were part of 1.0 and wiped out in Heavensward. Then at level 30 they get the job crystal for that class that enables the the cantrips (oGCD's), while everything in the "class" itself is tied to the same GCD. THEN, only THEN, should it have been possible to pull these into another class. So if you're playing White Mage, but you want to "DPS" more, you need to level the other job you want the cantrip from to the same level.

That isn't what happened before, and wouldn't work now, because a healer is based on MND, so dragging a INT-based cantrip or a STR based cantrip over to the healer would result in basically no damage. Rather you'd end up pulling over oGCD DPS from Sage and Scholar to White Mage. Problem is only Assize fits this. Everything else is a heal. It would result in creating meta's around those. The game would have to re-engineered for every skill to level synced to the job it came from, and the underlying stats of that level. That is too complicated without re-engineering the skills to be separate from the job. This is also why the "role actions" are, quite frankly, pretty useless, spells you can get away with never putting on your skill bar and don't ever "need."