The problem with WoW-type raid-focused gameplay.

Limited and banal ability sets.

Why? Because of the need to keep tight raid balance. If any one Class/Job gets a slight edge, the player base explodes in self righteous fury.

Any time the developer wants to add anything, they have to be ultra careful with how it affects balance. Want to add something because you think is cool or interesting but will impact raid balance? Forget it.

Banal gear

Same problem as with ability sets. "How will it affect raid balance?" becomes the overriding concern instead of "Is this interesting or fun for the player?".

Want gear with Poison resist? Nope. If there is a raid boss that uses a lot of poison, acquiring said gear becomes "mandatory" and players explode with self righteous fury that the game dare make them do something that they might not be interested in.

Banal items

Same story. If raid balance says, no. It's not happening.

In general, raid balance constrains the game's creative direction.

Want to introduce some new cool lore but it might clash with existing (balanced) player abilities? You either don't do it or you break suspension of disbelief by introducing a contradiction.

WoW is the logical conclusion of this approach. Raider's needs run the game. Everything is sacrificed to their benefit. Lore is shot. The world is boring.

People complain that 3.0 is "more of 2.0". Well of course it is. Any kind of change will have to be made from the perspective of maintaining the precious raid balance. The developer's hands are tied - with rope of their own making but tied nonetheless. They can't just introduce any old cool idea they get willy nilly.

Is there a way out of this dilemma?

IMHO just make raids Job-only and keep Jobs (and their equipment access) limited, boring but balanced - i.e. like now.

With Classes, go wild. Introduce all sort of strange cross-class skills usable by classes only. Have all sorts of weird gear with odd effects for Classes.

You can probably sense by now I'm not big on raiding. I play the game for atmosphere, to explore a fantasy world, kill monsters is just one of many "activities" to me.

Classes only exist because they tried a new thing in 1.0 and uh...no one liked it. They wanted the old stuff. Besides, Yoshi P already said in a recent live letter that they won't be doing anymore Class/Job stuff and are looking into ways to removes the classes themselves.

Your points were good and then you kinda lost it at the end bringing up classes.

1.0 somewhat tried this when jobs first came out, they were advertised as only being necessary when doing full party endgame content and that classes were supposed to stay relevant when doing any other activity (low man / solo). This obviously didn't work, classes have no place really and are generally uninteresting in comparison to jobs.

If you want to change the need to keep raid focused balance then the way raids are designed need to be changed from the ground up.

Excessive reliance on DPS checks as measure of difficulty works for balancing content for the Duty Finder as people will eventually meet those checks via over-gearing but leaves no room for unique jobs / ability types that aren't focused around doing more damage. Where does a support fit if they only buff and don't actually contribute damage to the raid? The party might feel they're better served just getting another damage dealer instead to meet to DPS check.

The same goes for items like resist sets etc, the question becomes does it help kill the boss faster? if it doesn't then it becomes instantly worthless.

Change circular arena design and the timed DPS checks for raids, give us more fights with levers to pull (Leviathan EX) or adds to kill in addition to the bosses (Bismark EX) but don't tie them to an overall DPS check and you might start to see some variance in the types of jobs, abilities, and stats that we'll see.

And in regards to adding crazy cross class options to classes, why not just add them to jobs? as it is the cross class options for jobs are cookie cutter and boring really, I'm sure the argument will be made that players will find a "best set" of cross class actions but it'd be nice if i could pick and choose from more abilities tailored towards various fights.

There is no fundamental reason why jobs cant operate on the cross class system the same way classes can other than the fact that we just aren't allowed to, i would much rather see that changed before trying to make classes relevant in any way (even in solo content), sorry.

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Originally Posted by Ryel

Where does a support fit if they only buff and don't actually contribute damage to the raid? The party might feel they're better served just getting another damage dealer instead to meet to DPS check.

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The easy solution: Rip BRD apart. Just...destroy it and throw the person who keeps suggesting its a DPS in the board meetings out the window and make it what its supposed to be. Replace it with Ranger and add in BRD as a 100% support class. The only thing they would have to do with an actual BRD is make its support buffs, especially any damage buffs, make up for the loss of DPS.

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Originally Posted by Ryel

*snip*

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DPS checks are gear/skill checks for DPS. As the typical is checks for gear/ability of the tanks and healers. No DPS checks then just throw tanks and healers at it instead.

To the rest of it, no you wont. Even in FFXI, DDs maximised their damage output through gear. Ever heard of burn parties? Or stacking certain jobs to burn things faster? AKA THF and SAM. Stacked because they outputted the most damage.

@OP you cant have pure support jobs, as the are even less popular than tanks and healers. Also how would they l;evel? It would just make it even less popular is to level you basically sat there while everyone else killed stuff for you. Some may like, but not enough, not anymore.

Also you would prefer jobs to not be balanced? You enjoy being excluded from content because you don't have that job you dislike levelled and geared for it? But instead prefer t o play a different job, simply because you enjoy it? How popular do you think it would be if you are forced to level and Jobs you do not enjoy whatsoever just so you can do content? Yep, not at all.

If you are going to come up with an idea, try and look at the while picture, the reasons why FFXIV is popular, how it would affect the game. Would it chance it totally (aka your idea would)..

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Originally Posted by Unaki

The easy solution: Rip BRD apart. Just...destroy it and throw the person who keeps suggesting its a DPS in the board meetings out the window and make it what its supposed to be. Replace it with Ranger and add in BRD as a 100% support class. The only thing they would have to do with an actual BRD is make its support buffs, especially any damage buffs, make up for the loss of DPS.

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AKA no-one would play it. How are you going to level? Unable to do anything unless some others held your hand through everything? You like not playing the game and have others carry you through content because the job you have is pure support and can't do anything, which is what you are asking. Oh design content to level to require a BRD. Then you have the problem of not enough want to play pure support as proven time and time again with older MMOs, getting hold of support jobs in FFXI for content was harder than getting a tank or healer, much harder, pretty much every LS was always wanting support. They would have to redesign the game from the ground up to implement a pure support role. Even FFXI BRD with the right subjob could do damage, of course not as potent as a DD job, but still.

So how much would their buffs do? You would have to make it increase the DPS by more than 1 DPS job could which would make it overpowered and over needed for any content as it would need to be designed for bringing a BRD.

This is not and never wil be forced party content for everything. That playstyle is dead and gone. Also most jobs in FFXI where designed as multi role, it was the playerbase that shoehorned them into singular roles. RDM, refresh bot, SCH stun bot, BRD song whore, NIN tank or sub for tank/soloing. SMN, healer. DNC sub job. All of those jobs where capable of much more, but the playerbase said no, not the developers.

Simple fact is upport jobs where never that popular and stymied party play because content had to be designed around having them. You think it's hard to get tanks? Try increasing that by 20 fold if they added pure support, theres a reason they split support amongst other roles in any MMO in the last 10 years.


Tl/dr Bad ideas are bad.

I would rather see them introduce like 5 types of the same gear with same stats but different bonus effects (that could be switched by some gem) than rework whole jobs and classes system.
For example.. adds burning DoT effect to every skill.. adds 10 sec stoneskin to every skill etc etc.. teams would be able to tell each member to have different bonus and could kinda change their own gameplay.

As a crafter i do agree with the op's points that there are problems caused by raids having a monoploy, with the potential of everything else purposefully tuned down to sate the raiding ego.

So how about actually explaining what in the world you just typed.
All i got from was "banal" and "balance is bad"

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Originally Posted by Unaki

Classes only exist because they tried a new thing in 1.0 and uh...no one liked it. They wanted the old stuff. Besides, Yoshi P already said in a recent live letter that they won't be doing anymore Class/Job stuff and are looking into ways to removes the classes themselves.

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I'm not sure you are qualified to say what other people wanted or did not want from FFXIV 1.0. From my personal experience, the concepts employed by the classes were interesting, but the rest of the game just sucked. The classes were just unrefined. It was released in alpha state.

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Originally Posted by Sapphic

DPS checks are gear/skill checks for DPS. As the typical is checks for gear/ability of the tanks and healers. No DPS checks then just throw tanks and healers at it instead.

To the rest of it, no you wont. Even in FFXI, DDs maximised their damage output through gear. Ever heard of burn parties? Or stacking certain jobs to burn things faster? AKA THF and SAM. Stacked because they outputted the most damage.

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Job stacking in XI was a thing because XI fundamentally approached content differently, also XI had this weird sort of... rolling balance/imbalance in that jobs constantly were buffed/nerfed so their place on the hierarchy constantly changed (some took much longer than others to become relevant). Gear / stats and subjobs also threw most attempts at balance out the window anyway.

As for burn parties those were only really a thing for gaining Exp in most cases (Duty Finder prevents this in XIV) if there was ever an over abundance of certain jobs at endgame those jobs were nerfed (hi2u Souleater on HNMs / sup Ranger nerfs) or the bosses buffed to encourage varied damage types, granted it wasn't perfect but they at least tried. XIV already punishes excessive job stacking anyway with loss of stats (party buff) and reduced limit gauge building, if they wanted to they could make further adjustments towards that end.

They can still change the dynamics of raid bosses in a way that wouldn't cause preferred party compositions, add levers or shields that you have to hit in certain phases, or give bosses abilities that alternate the type of incoming damage they can receive (physical / magical or melee / ranged) it isn't impossible to design raids to be obstacles without having to resort to simply being a DPS or heal check, give us more adds so that DPS cant have full uptime on the boss or have use items (raid given) to apply debuffs etc.

look at some of the mechanics we got in CT and leveling dungeons (Great library / Qarn) and ask why they cant be applied to a raid.

It's better than balancing around PvP or trying to balance around Raids AND PvP.

I feel like FFXI had this sort of thinking. We all know how that turned out, what with half the roster of classes being unplayable or outright horrid.

Balance is important. They add plenty of fun stuff that isn't OP, keep it that way.

Ballance?
Warrior pretty over power now.

"The problem with WoW type raid focused gameplay"

-its the same stuff after the first expansion?

I understand where the OP is coming from. I wont say I dislike Final Fantasy XIV, but it's not the game to revive the franchise and make it the golden star of role playing games again. It really comes down to the number of options players have available to solve problems they encounter (that are part of intentional design). Games like Final Fantasy XIV offer very little in the way of problem solving and are all about pattern memorization and gear grinding. They maintain the player base by utilizing daily grind systems that reward repetition and depend heavily on habit forming daily activities that soon become like choirs.

Many games do have these systems, but MMOs tend to push these a bit too much just from the shear amount of time it takes to do some of them. That and the daily quest system binds players to the specific tasks, so even though we did do daily things back in the days before the daily quest systems we had no bound oath of servitude being incentivized outside of our own machinations.

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Originally Posted by Unaki

Classes only exist because they tried a new thing in 1.0 and uh...no one liked it. They wanted the old stuff. Besides, Yoshi P already said in a recent live letter that they won't be doing anymore Class/Job stuff and are looking into ways to removes the classes themselves.

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Do you know which letter this was? I'd be interested in hearing it, since I knew about going forward doing only jobs but wasn't aware of any possible plans to remove the old classes.

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Originally Posted by Ryel

Your points were good and then you kinda lost it at the end bringing up classes.

1.0 somewhat tried this when jobs first came out, they were advertised as only being necessary when doing full party endgame content and that classes were supposed to stay relevant when doing any other activity (low man / solo). This obviously didn't work, classes have no place really and are generally uninteresting in comparison to jobs.

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That's because they kind of stopped with Class development.

They need to add more cross-Class skills. Some can be situational, some can obsolete earlier ones, the point is we keep getting new skills to handle whatever the open world throw at us.

Whether Classes end up OPed in the open world (remember raids will be Job-only) or not isn't that huge an issue. It's open world content, no one will get excluded.

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And in regards to adding crazy cross class options to classes, why not just add them to jobs? as it is the cross class options for jobs are cookie cutter and boring really, I'm sure the argument will be made that players will find a "best set" of cross class actions but it'd be nice if i could pick and choose from more abilities tailored towards various fights.

There is no fundamental reason why jobs cant operate on the cross class system the same way classes can other than the fact that we just aren't allowed to, i would much rather see that changed before trying to make classes relevant in any way (even in solo content), sorry.

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The reason is ... balance. The more options you give the player in customization of their Job, the harder it will be to balance, as you have to take into account every possible combination of skills selectable - if you miss one and it ends up "OPed", player tears will drown out the sun.

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Originally Posted by Bishop81

That's because they kind of stopped with Class development.

They need to add more cross-Class skills. Some can be situational, some can obsolete earlier ones, the point is we keep getting new skills to handle whatever the open world throw at us.

Whether Classes end up OPed in the open world (remember raids will be Job-only) or not isn't that huge an issue. It's open world content, no one will get excluded

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The issue with this is allocation of resources:

Open world content as it currently stands doesn't have enough depth to warrant adding considerations for classes, I'm sure by your comment you mean that classes don't have to be balanced around open world content because it doesn't require a party so class balance isn't a thing, but that actually works against tuning classes as well.

From a development perspective the argument would be as follows:

If open world has no meaning, and classes aren't going to be used in group content anyway, why add abilities that players will almost never use? That time would be better spent adding more abilities / actions to jobs with the understanding that they will see usage in ALL content and not just a fraction of it.

Sadly that's how it will be viewed, and while i personally love flavor skills as much as the next person i would still rather them flesh out jobs as opposed to trying to go back and retouch classes.

As for this:

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The reason is ... balance. The more options you give the player in customization of their Job, the harder it will be to balance, as you have to take into account every possible combination of skills selectable - if you miss one and it ends up "OPed", player tears will drown out the sun.

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This is still dependent on how raids are designed. If encounters were not balanced around DPS checks and how much up-time a DPS can keep on a mob in order to clear, but instead were balanced around the completion of mechanics / objectives you give jobs more leeway to branch out in unique design and ability.

Up to a point players were able to complete endgame content with classes (while overgeared usually) with often hilarious cross class combinations, I would still prefer the cross class system be expanded on jobs to promote more unique play (or at least a larger illusion of choice as that's what it'll be at the end of the day), as opposed to pointlessly trying to breathe life back into classes.

I think what OP wanted to point out is:

The center of the universe is the raid.

If something upsets the raid's dynamics between jobs, the game falls apart. Same thing with gears.

What I think the OP dreams of is the separation of raid abilities and open world abilities, like a section of Raid Skills that can only be used in Raids and an Open World Skills that can only be used in the Open World. The Raid Skills will be balanced around Raids while Open World Skills can go crazy with what it does. Like PVP with their PVP skills.

Balancing the classes are centered around the raids. That's why BRDs and MCHs weren't taken into consideration before Alex Savage came out. Same with AST and DRK.

OP's suggestion is a little bit off mark because the class/job system is no longer relevant. But hey, we can all dream can't we?

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Originally Posted by Sapphic

AKA no-one would play it. How are you going to level?

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Well this is simply untrue. The number of people screaming at the Bards who want to be pure dps proves that this is untrue. Many, many people want Bard to be 100% support. And they'd level just the same way healers do: minimal dps to get you through solo stuff. I, for one, wouldn't play a single support class because that's just not what I enjoy. But the Bard community(this is the only thing I can speak on because it's my main job) is split pretty bad about whether we're support or DPS. Sometimes it seems like it's half and half, sometimes it seems like there are more calling to be pure support. So assuming that no one wants to play a support job is wrong; you can go look at all of our complaint threads and you can see the number of people telling us we're meant to be support only. But OP has valid points; everything is so raid focused that the rest of the game becomes tedious and annoying.

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Originally Posted by Ryel

1.0 somewhat tried this when jobs first came out, they were advertised as only being necessary when doing full party endgame content and that classes were supposed to stay relevant when doing any other activity (low man / solo).

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This is because the 1.0 system was incomplete when implemented. Looking at how the armoury system worked pre-Yoshida, chances are jobs were going to enter the picture but in a similar fashion to how the Secret World did it (which uses a system almost identical to 1.0's armoury); by setting certain actions and traits, you became that job. Granted, TSW's meta pretty much laughs at job builds since said builds are not optimal.

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The same goes for items like resist sets etc, the question becomes does it help kill the boss faster? if it doesn't then it becomes instantly worthless.

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Not necessarily. Old WoW raids were VERY reliant on resistances, and raid survival hinged on resistance auras from certain classes, gear with the appropriate resistance, resistance potions, and any buffs from other parts of the game that would last long enough to get you through that boss. Of course, the issue the became forcing encounters that required resistances, which is why those were eventually phased out.

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Originally Posted by Fendred

I'm not sure you are qualified to say what other people wanted or did not want from FFXIV 1.0. From my personal experience, the concepts employed by the classes were interesting, but the rest of the game just sucked. The classes were just unrefined. It was released in alpha state.

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There was a poll after Yoshida took over, and the general consensus was that people wanted classic Final Fantasy jobs instead of classes like Gladiator and Marauder and so on.

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Originally Posted by AnnietheCat

Well this is simply untrue. The number of people screaming at the Bards who want to be pure dps proves that this is untrue. Many, many people want Bard to be 100% support.

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And you're still outnumbered by the people playing tanks, healers and DPS. There's a reason the princess BRD and princess RDM were "things", and why I'd gladly see BRD focus on DPS to prevent that mess from happening again.

Like I said, I don't /want/ to play a pure support class. I was responding to the notion that those classes are undesirable, when a very large player base wants to see it implemented. Yes, support players would always be outnumbered, but there would be a need for players who choose those jobs. Again, I hate the thought of a pure support class, but being a hybrid class is annoying and I would much rather have a choice of not being a tp/mp battery without giving up my physical ranged dps.

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Originally Posted by AnnietheCat

Again, I hate the thought of a pure support class, but being a hybrid class is annoying and I would much rather have a choice of not being a tp/mp battery without giving up my physical ranged dps.

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I agree. The funny thing is that there doesn't need to be this weird spot for classes with utility. The line has been heavily blurred in this expansion (I never counted on them giving group buffs to a healer job, for example) to the point penalties aren't really needed, IMO. Since we're talking BRD now, I'd go back to my Invocation suggestion, where instead of spending their entire MP bar on a song they can activate a song, hit Invocation and "consume" the song effect for a MP/TP replenish buff that lasts something like 24 seconds. This way you still provide TP/MP regen without giving you this DPS downtime, but at a shorter duration than if you'd just let the song effect consume your MP bar.

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Originally Posted by Ryel

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Open world content as it currently stands doesn't have enough depth to warrant adding considerations for classes,

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If open world has no meaning, and classes aren't going to be used in group content anyway, why add abilities that players will almost never use? That time would be better spent adding more abilities / actions to jobs with the understanding that they will see usage in ALL content and not just a fraction of it.

Sadly that's how it will be viewed, and while i personally love flavor skills as much as the next person i would still rather them flesh out jobs as opposed to trying to go back and retouch classes.

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That needs to be fixed. Seriously, not everyone is super hard up on the challenge of raiding.

As I said earlier, I play for the atmosphere and to explore a fantasy world.

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This is still dependent on how raids are designed.

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Raid encounters are probably designed the same way they are in WoW.

The developers build the encounter around existing Job abilities. They remove anything if it doesn't play well with specific Jobs. Damage and mechanics are designed to be beatable by existing Job abilities and such that each Job is as close as possible performance-wise.

As you can imagine, the more Jobs (and Job variations; which are from their point of view pretty much separate Jobs), the more they have to test the raid encounters against, the more simulations they have to run.

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Originally Posted by AnnietheCat

Like I said, I don't /want/ to play a pure support class. I was responding to the notion that those classes are undesirable, when a very large player base wants to see it implemented. Yes, support players would always be outnumbered, but there would be a need for players who choose those jobs. Again, I hate the thought of a pure support class, but being a hybrid class is annoying and I would much rather have a choice of not being a tp/mp battery without giving up my physical ranged dps.

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Think you are confusing "large player base" with "vocal minority" on the forums. Also the argument is between those who use their support skills when needed and those who don't.