Please make support jobs viable in the future :)

Ok, my major issue with the class/job system is they made it too easy for people. Everyone gets their own buffs and mob debuffs that their job needs. This leaves NO room for support jobs (support is different than healing to me). By support I obviously mean someone who is their to increase the power of their group and debuff and crowd control enemies.

I would REALLY love to have this fixed slightly to allow for support jobs to be implemented.

And I am slightly annoyed that this games new jobs are just being fan service to ffxi players and ONLY implementing jobs already in ffxi :(. They already have the crystal tower and all the enemies from it (in final fantasy 3), they NEED to implement the Sage job from ff3, with gear that looks like the ff3 sage gear. They just NEED to! By far my favorite final fantasy job ever created. They could add sage and red mage, both could be support mages with DPS capabilities! Boom, two new mages :).

ffxi failed to make a sage, my only wish is that this one won't... but in all reality they will never put the sage in lol. Obviously making it like the ff3 sage would be too OP (access to all schools of magic), so it would need tweaking to make it more viable for an MMO.

But I think what really needs to happen is to adjust classes/jobs to make room for support classes/jobs (honestly the class crap is a hindrance to everything and should be done away with, but too late for that). And I know red mage is a popular choice for new magic class by community, but...... also sage should be made :)

you would need to balance the encounter in order to have support classes, and as a result, you need a support for encounters then, otherwise why else implement it for endgame, Rift has this system with dedicated support roles, and you know what the biggest issue it has, finding players who are dedicated support, if tanks are hard to come by as is, why add another role which is just as hard to have in your team, you cant force players to play a role they dont want, but in Rift this happens all the time, someone is told they need that role, but to play a role to its fullest, you do need to spend time with it.
How would you address this may I ask. Even Rifts current end game is moving away from having support and you can do end game now with out any support, this is just the nature of things.

It takes away any strategy to fights. You should never really NEED support. Look at ffxi. Bards are not needed for anything. Yet EVERYONE wants bards for EVERYTHING because they can just help sooooo much. You don't need to tailor content that much to fit support. It gets boring when jobs will ONLY be dps, healer, or tank. Lets add some variety please and give people something new and more unique to do.

Also, sage..... just sayin :P

Many of the game's bosses and trials are tuned for 1/1/2 or 2/2/4 composition currently. If you add a support, you'll make it so groups would have 2 tanks, 2 heals, 2 DPS, and 2 support (using full team for example), which could potentially cut DPS numbers and make certain fights like Titan HM or phases of EX and maybe coil undoable. This is also disregarding the fact that debuffs and crowd control rarely work on end-game bosses due to immunity.\

Making the composition a group of 5 or 10 (adding support) will be overkill for these fights, and restructuring them will break the fine tuning and challenge. This would work alright for groups WILLING to try different comps, like 1 tank for Titan HM currently. Support may do well in coil and make things easier. But it doesn't match up well with SE crowning achievement, which is Duty Finder. To make support compatible with DF, every boss in the game would need to be reworked, immunities reworked, HP modified, damage calculated, etc. ...... just for adding another role.

There's more to game development than "put it in and see what happens". Even with NIN, the case of a simple DPS (as far as I know), they have to test the fight with 1 NIN in a group, as well as 4 NINs in case it comes up in DF, see if there are any exploits or unforseen results, analyze whether NIN needs any ranged attacks, see what's being played most at the moment (ranged nukes, my bet)......

TL;DR: Adding a new role is effectively telling SE to restructure its whole battle system, which everyone has the right to express, but is VERY unlikely ....

Edit: raelgun beat me to it XD

Well it is unfortunate they did this in the first place. To me, their current system just seems a way to make everything easier to every player. "Hey your job can do it all!" Spare me... Honestly, the 4 man crap makes me cringe. Why... why can we not have the typical 6 man parties? Why can't we have typical 12 man raids? 4 man is just too small. It sucks, leaves room for no variety, and sucks.

Well Yoshi stated in some interviews that he wanted to implement an hybrid role for hybrid jobs, i'm sure that would include support, the last time i heard about this it was just an idea in the development table, so idk what's the current progress of this idea.

The problem is there isn't really a "support" slot like FFXI had. You would either need to make a dps that deal damage through strong group buffs or give healer/tank party buff abilities. You bring up Sage a lot so I'll trying to use that as an example.

Cnj -> Sage
Lv30 - Presence of Wind: you next aero has a 20% of reduce the targets evasion by 15%
Lv35 - Tornado: The area is taken over by a powerful wind dealing damage and lowers accuracy by 10% to any target who enter
Lv40 - Presence of Stone: your next cure has a 15% chance of granting instant cast to Stoneskin
Lv45 - Reflect: 25% of magic damage is returned to the target
Lv50 - Quake: Envelops the area with unstable ground dealing earth damage and lower defensve to all targets in the area.

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Originally Posted by Bawnawgwa

Honestly, the 4 man crap makes me cringe. Why... why can we not have the typical 6 man parties? Why can't we have typical 12 man raids? 4 man is just too small. It sucks, leaves room for no variety, and sucks.

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Simple, time management. The more people to takes, the longer it takes to form.

Once individual job animation limit breaks are implemented and hopefully when the system branches out to allow for more diversity.

It would be nice to in a sense get a "team builder" in DF. We can do so individually through PF but would be nice to see that in DF.

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Originally Posted by Bawnawgwa

It takes away any strategy to fights. You should never really NEED support.

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Actually it's the opposite. While you shouldn't NEED supports, making them valuable increases strategy possibilities. Right now, there is no actual strategy for fights in the game. Small group numbers leave you with very simplistic group formations where almost every fight involves avoiding the stuff on the ground until the enemy dies. It's why all 4-man dungeons have turned into nothing but AOE speed runs. There's nothing in the mechanics that requires anything other than one person tanking, one healing them, and the others just spamming damage.

If the enemies had more CC/debuffs they mixed in with their normal attacks, you could force people to actually think about how to deal with each encounter with the class makeup they are working with.

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Originally Posted by Bawnawgwa

It takes away any strategy to fights. You should never really NEED support. Look at ffxi. Bards are not needed for anything. Yet EVERYONE wants bards for EVERYTHING because they can just help sooooo much. You don't need to tailor content that much to fit support. It gets boring when jobs will ONLY be dps, healer, or tank. Lets add some variety please and give people something new and more unique to do.

Also, sage..... just sayin :P

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BRDs were required for pretty much everything at the time I quit (last September). There's no way you could defeat the delve bosses before stun immunity w/o at least 1 BRD. COR was pretty much mandatory as well.

Speaking of BRDs... BRDs are pretty much mandatory in T8 for paeon, unless you go with all casters. They are kind of a hybrid class in that respect. Instead of introducing a whole new role, it might be more prudent to give existing DPS classes support roles similar to bard songs.

The game is designed around that every class can play solo. Adding pure support jobs would detract from that. Also they dont want it that certain jobs are needed for content. Hence minimal support abilities on BRD.

@Raelgun: Regarding Rift, support souls where pretty awesome for raiding, pointless in dungeons, better to roll as a DPS instead of support to make the dungeon easier. Also, good thing with Rift, I was 61 BRD but when needed switched to assassin for a certain boss, Matriarch in Endless Eclipse and Tactician for the trash for more AE. But on the rest, BRD. But still, was able to do some decent DPS whilst maintining buffs. T1 and 2 20 peep raids Bard was pretty important for the +5% to heals, reduced damage and stat buffs from resonance.

Can't comment on tier 3 as left before that got added. This is storm legion raids btw.

I am not saying pure support like ffxi bard. I like ffxiv bard being bow damage. But it would be nice if their dps is usually lower and bard had songs to increase attack, attack speed, defense, etc etc. Giving back its buffs instead of just making it a pure damage with some battery. It is therefore still able to solo, but had a more defined role away from a black mages role Lol.

That would be awesome if Yoshi is really considering and working in hybrid jobs that increase party size to 6 :) I would be all for that

The problem with adding support classes is always the same: you can't balance an encounter around them. Either you 'need' one in the group to actually win the fight, or having one in the group completely trivializes the fight.

You need them, or you don't need them: there is no middle ground.

Also, 4 man groups are perfect for meaningful encounters, and I'd imagine that if they add a hybrid role, it'll simply replace one of the existing 4 slots.

I don't see it coming any time soon. Who would the support class replace in 4 man content? DPS? Great, not like the queue is long enough as it is. You would then need to make content that requires support classes otherwise people would just overlook the new jobs. So the whole balance of fights would be off.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it too. Whether in the style of applying buffs to the team, or debuffs to the enemies, but I just don't see it being workable in the near future.

Yea I suppose. It just makes me sad they built their game this way. They could have made room for support from the get go and made everyone happy, but they didn't.... They made parties as easy as they possibly could.....

ALSO, lets look at an mmo called Aion, just for example. Chanter is probably the biggest support in the game. Provides amazing buffs like a bard, and great at knockdowns/stuns. Now, nothing in the game requires a chanter. If you get one in your group, awesome! The dungeon or what have you will probably be easier :P. If you don't have one, no problem, the dungeon is still perfectly doable. Thus this makes them wanted, but not needed, which is perfect.

Content does not need to be designed around these support roles. Many mmo's have proven this is false. ffxiv just royally screwed up their class/job crap and have made it incredibly hard to implement it (mostly because of 4 man freakin parties).

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Originally Posted by Bawnawgwa

Yea I suppose. It just makes me sad they built their game this way. They could have made room for support from the get go and made everyone happy, but they didn't.... They made parties as easy as they possibly could.....

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The member of "everyone" is extremely happy with the small, quick and easy to form, traditional for FF size 4 man groups. Large party sizes aggravate me.

Maybe in the future SE will add a dps that's main source of damage comes from party buffs but in the mean time you'll just have to get used the fact the support is a secondary function of jobs like BRD and SCH.

THIS HAS ALREADY BEEN ANNOUNCED

Though, I'm sure mostly no one has it on their radar, because it has very rarely been talked about. However, it's been part of the design from the very beginning, so expect that fights have actually been designed with the idea of support jobs in mind.

Link: http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/119...s-with-Yoshida

There's probably another link somewhere that I forgot, because a brief glance through this one didn't seem to mention what I remember about him saying they were working on making hybrid roles viable without being too powerful.

While he apparently says "hybrid", I think it's more fair to say "support", and these will (probably) mostly be jobs that can do light dps and work to buff the rest of the PT. I imagine once the hybrid (support) role is added, BRD will be transitioned to support (dps lowered, songs made more potent).

That said, don't expect anything to be "pure support" like FFXI's BRD. Expect something more like FFXIV's BRD with less dps and more, you know, support.

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Originally Posted by Bawnawgwa

ALSO, lets look at an mmo called Aion, just for example. Chanter is probably the biggest support in the game. Provides amazing buffs like a bard, and great at knockdowns/stuns. Now, nothing in the game requires a chanter. If you get one in your group, awesome! The dungeon or what have you will probably be easier :P. If you don't have one, no problem, the dungeon is still perfectly doable. Thus this makes them wanted, but not needed, which is perfect.

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Every single end-game instance in Aion wants a Chanter. Not bringing one makes the encounter unnecessarily harder. Not only that, Chanter is the only support in that case. All groups are LFG IS Need Cleric, Chanter, Templar 3k+ DPS// LF DR need Cleric Chanter Ranged DPS // LFG EB Cleric Chanter DPS

Everyone wants Chanter because it makes fights much easier. Also, if you don't come support spec as Chanter, you're worthless. (You can be DPS or support spec). For PvP you want to be DPS, but for PvE you have to be support. It's expensive to change specs so many players don't like Chanter because of it (Chanters are also pretty rare).

Lol I enjoyed Chanter.... :P. But someone just made a topic kind of on this topic regarding red mage. Stating how jobs kind of all take their own 'red mage' skills making it hard to implement. I just wish they considered support roles from the get go and it wouldn't really be a problem. :(((((

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Originally Posted by Billzey

Speaking of BRDs... BRDs are pretty much mandatory in T8 for paeon, unless you go with all casters. They are kind of a hybrid class in that respect. Instead of introducing a whole new role, it might be more prudent to give existing DPS classes support roles similar to bard songs.

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My thoughts exactly, or even a supporty healer or tank class. Would make one tank encounters more flavorful

While it would be nice to make a support class they would either have to:

a) re-work the current battle system to include a dedicated support class (i.e light parties would now be 5 ppl)

or...

b) do what they did with the bard and make it a dps/support


The problem with a), is the que times and making it a requirement to have the said roles might make it longer. I feel b) might be more reasonable from a dev stand point as it requires no reworking other than balancing.

My opinion is just to introduce dedicated support classes, lets use "Dancer" as an example, and make it so that they buffs the provide compensate for the lack of missing a dps. Also keep the light parties to 4 ppl but instead make it like this (1 tank, 1 healer, 1 dps, 1 dps/support), and full parties would just double that number.