The 4 person party system, and why it's always a bad idea.

The main reason this is a bad idea, is the smaller your party size, the longer your queue times for DPS.... you'd think they would have learned this from WoW and AT LEAST went with the 5 person group rather than going with an even lower number.

It's sad but true that Tanking and Healing are both stressful and demanding jobs where it can often feel a lot more like the whole party is riding on you. Don't get me wrong, I've tanked and healed for years in MMOs, and I am healing even now.

I have also done my share of DD as well. As a DD, you only have to worry about 2 things for the most part, keep yourself alive by not standing in the bad, and deal damage.

A tank has to worry about keeping themselves alive, mob positioning, threat, and doing their rotation so that they hold their threat and hopefully using cooldowns at the correct time while still also moving out of the bad, not to mention leading the party in dungeons where you go from one end to the other.

A healer has to worry about, keeping everyone else alive, keeping themselves alive, moving out of the bad, dispelling bad effects, and raising people during an encounter when things go south.

I'm not saying DD is EASY or anything like that, but it is, in general, less stressful than the other two roles for the majority of players. So it stands to reason, that a lot more players are going to gravitate towards DD roles than the tank and healer roles.

In an MMO, a larger party size means a shorter queue for DD, and less healers and tanks needed per DD. For example, WoW's 5 man groups or FFXI's 6 man groups.

Why then, knowing what they know about MMOs in general and the roles that players inevitably gravitate towards, would they choose to willfully go with an even smaller party size than the norm?

A 4 man group set up means that you are actively expecting 50% of the MMO player base to 'suck it up and play a tank or healer' if they want to get decent queue times, or even find groups with FCs and friends who actually have room for them. IMO, this leads to more and more players who do not enjoy tanking or healing feeling pressured into it, and ultimately it turns out bad for the game in the long run because people feel like doing what they want to do (DD), is just not worth the wait times or worth being third person down on the list that their FC might call on if 'so and so' can't raid tonight.

A 5 man group means for every 1 tank and 1 healer you've got 3 DD instead of just 2. A 6 man group like FFXI means you have your standard 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 or 4 DD, or possibly 3 DD and a support class who can offer some buffs, DD, and splash heals when needed.

I can see the argument that the 4 man groups feel a bit smaller and more personal perhaps, and I am wondering how other people feel about it?

Would it not have been a far better decision to go with a larger party size to accommodate more DD and possibly support roles knowing that in most MMO communities these roles make up the bulk of players?

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Originally Posted by Altheras

The main reason this is a bad idea, is the smaller your party size, the longer your queue times for DPS.... you'd think they would have learned this from WoW and AT LEAST went with the 5 person group rather than going with an even lower number.

It's sad but true that Tanking and Healing are both stressful and demanding jobs where it can often feel a lot more like the whole party is riding on you. Don't get me wrong, I've tanked and healed for years in MMOs, and I am healing even now.

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Like you said, the long wait for dps the tradeoff for having the least stressful job in this game. However, organizing your own dungeon group from friends/FC bypasses the DF wait time (unless doing AK "reserving instance").

... I prefer 4. Wait time as dps is of no concern for me.

I'm not saying this applies to you, but this is where i'm gonna vent lol:

DF queues are just an option - one that wasnt available in v1. If DF queues are painful, one can shout for a party, join a FC, use the search function etc...

dps runs into 1hit aoe "why you not healing me?" lol. I wish dps had a lot more stress to deal with.

Also a bit off topic, but when add ons are available i hope dps classes can get something that lets you know when out of range of being healed. so many times when i've gone to heal someone and they are running off into the sunset.

Historically, 4-men parties are a staple of the Final Fantasy series, up until FF VI (and they brought it back in FF IX as well).

I like it, a lot, personally. I hear your concerns, but I think it's a nice design for a Final Fantasy title. It could actually have been 3-men parties if they used the more recent FF designs. :rolleyes:

Have to agree. The 1+1+3 role distribution seen in other modern MMOs seems to be working much better.

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Originally Posted by SzaaKarna

I'm not saying this applies to you, but this is where i'm gonna vent lol:

DF queues are just an option - one that wasnt available in v1. If DF queues are painful, one can shout for a party, join a FC, use the search function etc...

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True. It's not something I personally have a problem with as I am usually heals, but I have found when putting together my own groups with FC and Linkshell and such that we often have more DD wanting to go than we can fit, while having just enough tanks and heals.

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Originally Posted by Kule

dps runs into 1hit aoe "why you not healing me?" lol. I wish dps had a lot more stress to deal with.

Also a bit off topic, but when add ons are available i hope dps classes can get something that lets you know when out of range of being healed. so many times when i've gone to heal someone and they are running off into the sunset.

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This would be a really awesome addon! Not just for DPS but also for tanks and maybe even for healers to have an alert on who is out of range.

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Originally Posted by Alcyon_Densetsu

Historically, 4-men parties are a staple of the Final Fantasy series, up until FF VI (and they brought it back in FF IX as well).

I like it, a lot, personally. I hear your concerns, but I think it's a nice design for a Final Fantasy title. It could actually have been 3-men parties if they used the more recent FF designs. :rolleyes:

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I could see this point of view. It could lend more to the traditional FF feel, but I guess of all of them I played tactics(5 man parties) and FFXI(6 man parties) the most, so I really didn't think about that side of it. ^^

Look at it this way.. Light parties of 4, full parties of 8, raid groups of 24. 24 is about a big a group you can feasibly manage for raiding anymore. Take that light party to 5, now we have full parties of 10, raid groups of 30.. Getting 24 people together is going to be an effort in and of itself, bump that to 30, might as well be back in the days of 40 man raids that took half a day to organize.

While I understand your intentions and cannot disagree on the value of your opinion, it's a good idea.
The problem is that the entire enmity system would have to be overhauled to accomplish this.
There would be more damage dealers that generate more enmity on a mob making tanking even more 'stressful' than it already is.
Having more damage dealt by more players would mean that the healers would also be drawing more enmity by virtue of having to heal more players.
This in turn would mean that the tank would have to generate even more enmity to keep the attention of the mobs off even more players and there aren't enough enmity generating tools to do that.
Just my 2 gil.

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Originally Posted by Mishakai

Look at it this way.. Light parties of 4, full parties of 8, raid groups of 24. 24 is about a big a group you can feasibly manage for raiding anymore. Take that light party to 5, now we have full parties of 10, raid groups of 30.. Getting 24 people together is going to be an effort in and of itself, bump that to 30, might as well be back in the days of 40 man raids that took half a day to organize.

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Typically in WoW with the 5 man parties, you'd have 5 man groups, 10 man groups, and then 25 man groups. The structure would just be a bit different once you got up to 25 man groups, you didn't have 5 tanks and 5 healers, you'd have usually 2-3 tanks and then 4ish healers allowing for the rest to be DPS.

Having said that though, I've yet to see what the 24 man group makeup is going to be like for FFXIV, I doubt it will be 6 tanks, 6 healers, and 12 DD though, now that I think about it.

I'd just like to take the time to say that so far as a level 50, I notice that when people die, I as a summoner raise more people back to life than most healers. Maybe i have bad luck but i tend to end up in parties who care more about healing the tank and themselves than bringing anyone else alive so i am usually the one who stops dpsing to raise others.

I suppose that can be looked at as a good thing, perhaps they felt that by giving other classes tank and healer abilities you essentially have a backup tank and healer ready to go so maybe that is why they thought it was ok to have 4 man team situations? Personally i wish there were a lot of dungeons or instances or situations which required forming alliance parties of 20+ to do content, and i don't mean fates where noone is talking to each other because everyone just needs to attack stuff, i mean situations which require huge amounts of people to actively coordinate their next move to survive. People talk about how this game is still at launch, you know what?

When Aion launched i went from open beta and played the first month until I lost my part time job at the time, at launch there were situations where you and two or three full parties could jump into the other factions world and literally fight every person from the other faction that came after you. I'm talking you and 30 others coordinating taking out any player you see as quickly as possible and then moving fast because once players noticed your group had invaded that world they would be in their own general/trade chat letting everyone on that server where 30 people were running around and eventually it would be your 30 people vs WAVES of other players until your group got wiped. The exhilaration was beyond anything i've felt in this game. So yeah to the OP I am also disappointed with all this content meant for small groups.

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Originally Posted by Meklore

While I understand your intentions and cannot disagree on the value of your opinion, it's a good idea.
The problem is that the entire enmity system would have to be overhauled to accomplish this.
There would be more damage dealers that generate more enmity on a mob making tanking even more 'stressful' than it already is.
Having more damage dealt by more players would mean that the healers would also be drawing more enmity by virtue of having to heal more players.
This in turn would mean that the tank would have to generate even more enmity to keep the attention of the mobs off even more players and there aren't enough enmity generating tools to do that.
Just my 2 gil.

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Yeah I see your point. I wasn't so much suggesting a change now as they'd have to rework the ENTIRE game around the idea. They'd have to buff mob HP and basically change the whole system which I know they would never do. I was more questioning why the decision for such a small party size to begin with. It seems a bit odd of a choice given how much more of MMO populations tend to lean towards DD roles.

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Originally Posted by Yoko_Kurama

I'd just like to take the time to say that so far as a level 50, I notice that when people die, I as a summoner raise more people back to life than most healers. Maybe i have bad luck but i tend to end up in parties who care more about healing the tank and themselves than bringing anyone else alive so i am usually the one who stops dpsing to raise others.

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It's nice to see a DD who stops and helps res, often times I find myself being the only one who bothers, having the other healer not even bother to res me if anything happens, let alone help me get tanks back up. Sometimes I just res til I'm oom and still have people shouting at me for resses with the caster DD just ignoring it and DDing and the other healer just trying to keep the remaining people alive.

I also would like to see more larger group content that's more involved than FATEs. We can only hope that such things show up in future patches.

Yeah I really don't understand why SE didn't stay with the 6 person part and 18 person alliance they had in ffxi, that system worked well. 6 is the perfect size for a party.