Official Job Guides and Community Job Guides

I've noticed over my years of playing FFXIV that there is a core problem with a lack of transparency in how jobs are meant to play and how the community has parsed them to play. Rather than try to take away the tools that made this possible, I propose a solution that can come from both the developer and the community's theorycrafters.

Each job should have a help guide that details the basics of what their job is meant to do and what their skills do in a short summary. To add onto this, there can then be a dev-created Opener and Rotation, the same Opener and Rotation used by the dev team in testing content like Savage and Ultimate.

This would help solve some heartache at level 70, though truthfully the problem starts much sooner because many Jobs change their rotation entirely throughout their leveling process such as Black Mage who changes playstyle completely at Enochian for example.

Since we cannot put all the effort on the developers, I would also propose that there is an in-game list or official FFXIV subsection of the Lodestone where the community can post and upvote their own Opener and Rotation, the highest rated ones would be displayed first. It could even detail the experiences of a Job at 1-30 then 30-50 and what not if the writer so wished.

Look at SMN, Dreadwyrm Trance isn't very difficult to understand but then you have Summon Bahamut and it plays nothing like your normal rotation or your DWT rotation. The optimal way to play Demi-Bahamut phase was only discovered via theorycrafting the data. Why? Because Demi-Bahamut will attack for every GCD and oGCD that affects the enemy, thus you have to wait for Aetherflow to be available before you activate Demi-Bahamut, then you'll have to use Ruin II and all oGCDs such as Addle to maximize your wyrmwaves.

The tooltip does not tell you anything about that, it just tells you it summons him and he attacks your target.

You got my voice, liked your post.

Unless the developers actually come up with a more effective way to play than the community (unlikely), there's not much of a point. The community will hold players to the community-generated playstyle, not the developer one. In cases where the developer method is less effective than the community created one, the conflicting information actually just causes problems and "tricks" players into adopting the wrong playstyle. Spotlighting quality and accurate community-made resources is the most they should do, but ultimately it's on the player to seek out information pertinent to the level of play they desire to be at.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Unless the developers actually come up with a more effective way to play than the community (unlikely), there's not much of a point. The community will hold players to the community-generated playstyle, not the developer one. In cases where the developer method is less effective than the community created one, the conflicting information actually just causes problems and "tricks" players into adopting the wrong playstyle. Spotlighting quality and accurate community-made resources is the most they should do, but ultimately it's on the player to seek out information pertinent to the level of play they desire to be at.

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I respect your reasoning, but I have a counterargument to the problem of developer vs community.

If we know how the developers play the Job and then we the community will know how they intended the job to play and then we can see how the community is either not meeting expectation or managing to exceed expectations. NIN got nerfed because the dev team was using an inferior rotation compared to what the community had discovered. This is useful data and it benefits both parties when it comes to job balance. We can compare jobs in the same role with the developer's rotation and show them the damage disparity if we think one is too weak or one is too strong.

If we make a playstyle that is superior to the developers, then we've provided them data to improve and that in turn will improve the game's balance and design by knowing what to expect if a certain number of users are subscribed to a community's guide and how well it is being executed. But sure, let's say we just highlight the community resources. They haven't done that and nobody is pushing for it, we should be pushing for more community resources to be spotlighted that will help people. But we need that to be done in-game to reach the most people both on PC and PS4.

Not everyone is as motivated to go digging through Reddit or Discord or any other place to locate the information they need, a baseline will show them they're not performing up to par without them having to dig through search results or ask questions (A lot of people are shy or nervous when it comes to asking questions about improving their gameplay because there's such a stigma associated with it on both sides.)

Ultimately, the players don't know how to seek the information or expect it to be provided for them by the game and if it isn't, then they'll do what they want and then they come to Reddit or here and complain that content is too hard because they've never learned their Job's rotation or they're kicked from parties because they're not up to snuff. Rather than punish these people, I'd like to meet them halfway by providing a quick and easy way to access information on their desired job without being asked to search for it online or talking to others who might be just as clueless or even hostile.

It could even be here on the forums, we could have a large thread of well-detailed posts or links to guides that we can direct people to for further information. But, it'd be far better to have this done in-game to expand on the SSS or Hall of the Novice systems.

Honestly, it would be nice if the devs officially sponsored The Balance in the way that they did for BradyGames and Prima Games. Those guys put in so many hours in trying to figure out optimal information that I'm sure that they could do beginner's guides and all that.

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/battle/

I am not sure if you're aware of this, but we'd already have the "basis" for what you propose!

It would need to be expanded on to really fit what you're describing but I think we'd be best off with the option to post said job-guides in some sort of "sub-category" of the job-guides (and then using your proposed upvote-system)

SE has a completely different view from the community on most classes (and content in general).
Don't forget that SB launch gutted pretty much all AoE in an effort to stop anything that wasn't single pulls in dungeons, started punishing players for leaving tank stance and incentivised a regen healer to use its last resort burst healing more... also SCH DPS was pretty trash back then too iirc

The only thing they really use to nudge you in the right direction are the job gauges and the information on them. I feel like it would just lead to drama anyways. "Btw dev says this, they're obviously right since they make the game, etc."

I remember when Ninja was first released, they had to nerf it because the players came up with a way of playing different than the dev's and did more damage than they were anticipating.

They probably don't want to endorse certain playstyles (it's a touchy subject for healers especially) so them staying out it just leads them to be neutral which seems to be the safer route if you want to avoid drama.

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Originally Posted by Ameela

SE has a completely different view from the community on most classes (and content in general).
Don't forget that SB launch gutted pretty much all AoE in an effort to stop anything that wasn't single pulls in dungeons, started punishing players for leaving tank stance and incentivised a regen healer to use its last resort burst healing more... also SCH DPS was pretty trash back then too iirc

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They gutted our AoE in HW and they gutted it again in SB and it did nothing, but if we don't ask for things and push for change then they're going to just keep doing it. We could've prevented some of this madness if we had formed some sort of proper communication channel. AoE pulls don't have to be gutted if the baseline of player skill rises, but as they keep gutting things you have people who can't clear MSQ Solo Duties because they just slam their head against it until the game yields instead of learning because they've never had to learn.

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Originally Posted by Vidu

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/battle/

I am not sure if you're aware of this, but we'd already have the "basis" for what you propose!

It would need to be expanded on to really fit what you're describing but I think we'd be best off with the option to post said job-guides in some sort of "sub-category" of the job-guides (and then using your proposed upvote-system)

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Yeah, we have the basis - we just need them to expand on it and give information that the game doesn't already tell us like an Opener or Rotation or detail the ideal usage for cooldowns like Shadewalker and the like.

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Originally Posted by Vaer

The only thing they really use to nudge you in the right direction are the job gauges and the information on them. I feel like it would just lead to drama anyways. "Btw dev says this, they're obviously right since they make the game, etc."

I remember when Ninja was first released, they had to nerf it because the players came up with a way of playing different than the dev's and did more damage than they were anticipating.

They probably don't want to endorse certain playstyles (it's a touchy subject for healers especially) so them staying out it just leads them to be neutral which seems to be the safer route if you want to avoid drama.

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It'd be better to have the drama come from official reasoning instead of wishy-washy dev logic that goes nowhere. This neutrality has caused untold amounts of drama about things like Healers and doing damage because there's too much downtime. Tanks and doing damage because there's no reason to be in Tank Stance after you establish threat. DPS and refusing to pull average DPS because they just want to do enough to avoid enrage.

If SE wants to say that tanks are meant to stay in Tank Stance while being MT and Healers should only heal then they should outright say that. Instead, they play both sides and cause strife - they keep giving Tanks more skills to use in DPS Stance and Healers even had it made easier to DPS by removing Cleric's laggy stat swap and accuracy requirements.

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Originally Posted by Ultima

It'd be better to have the drama come from official reasoning instead of wishy-washy dev logic that goes nowhere. This neutrality has caused untold amounts of drama about things like Healers and doing damage because there's too much downtime. Tanks and doing damage because there's no reason to be in Tank Stance after you establish threat. DPS and refusing to pull average DPS because they just want to do enough to avoid enrage.

If SE wants to say that tanks are meant to stay in Tank Stance while being MT and Healers should only heal then they should outright say that. Instead, they play both sides and cause strife - they keep giving Tanks more skills to use in DPS Stance and Healers even had it made easier to DPS by removing Cleric's laggy stat swap and accuracy requirements.

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Dunno, that would just be giving people more ammo IMO. People already like to grasp at straws in some of the threads about tank/healer play even when there isn't an official stance. I remember one time they said "you are healers guys lol" and the forums caught fire, the novice hall thing with healer dps, and even the way they calculate enrages.

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Originally Posted by Vaer

Dunno, that would just be giving people more ammo IMO. People already like to grasp at straws in some of the threads about tank/healer play even when there isn't an official stance. I remember one time they said "you are healers guys lol" and the forums caught fire, the novice hall thing with healer dps, and even the way they calculate enrages.

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Have you considered that the forums caught fire because the game is too easy that the optimal way to play in Savage and Ultimate is to have almost 100% uptime on Healers DPSing and Tanks never using Tank Stance, which is a real issue that the dev team could choose to address by rebalancing the game. Said job rebalancing being the reason that 4.0 didn't include a new tank or healer because they wanted to get the job balance improved and proceeded to do nothing about it?

SE won't come out and officially support or not support it and they won't alter their game's design. When Tanks can go into DPS Stance and be about 2-4k less DPS than a real DPS and stay in said stance forever, then of course people are going to expect that to be the accepted playstyle, there's no reason to leave that damage on the table!

Same with healers, though healers are significantly weaker on terms of DPS output, it's still not worth leaving the damage on the table to just sit there and conserve mana because the game doesn't justify a healer just sitting there for several GCDs waiting for the raid to get damaged again.

This is the game that we have, so either they change it or they have to deal with giving people ammo in which their official playstyle might not sync up with the community's playstyle. It'd certainly tell us a lot and likely prove a point if the dev team wasn't synced with us and we assume they aren't but having it be proven through official data would help us improve our feedback so we don't have things like 1/3 tanks being shovelware or DPS being discriminated against because they bring nothing to the team due to unbreakable synergies.

Since jobs gets adjusted almost every major and sometimes minor patch an official guide isn’t gonna be viable on SE’s part. They also did release a official guide along with 4.0’s release and the suggested rotations and openers in said guide is actuallly pretty terrible so I wouldn’t bother with anymore official ones at all

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Originally Posted by AppleJinx

Since jobs gets adjusted almost every major and sometimes minor patch an official guide isn’t gonna be viable on SE’s part. They also did release a official guide along with 4.0’s release and the suggested rotations and openers in said guide is actuallly pretty terrible so I wouldn’t bother with anymore official ones at all

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You do realize that SE has to test said changes before they put them out, right? As in... SE has already tested the new rotation and opener? The entire reason DRK didn't get more of an overhaul is because they have to test their new ideas and then check it against Savage and the like to be sure it's balanced against WAR and PLD. Also, their 4.0 "Job Guides" don't even have a suggested rotation or opener, it just tells you tooltips and combo paths.

I am obviously talking about this guide: https://store.na.square-enix-games.c...de-import-book.

They released something similar back in HW launch as well. If you look at the bard page in the previews the suggested opener is very obviously suboptimal even for back in 4.0 due to how late battle voice was pressed. And I don't know what you are on about with the test and changes since they literally adjust job balance every major patch so I don't know why you seem to think one book is good enough to last throughout the expansion.

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Originally Posted by AppleJinx

I am obviously talking about this guide: https://store.na.square-enix-games.c...de-import-book.

They released something similar back in HW launch as well. If you look at the bard page in the previews the suggested opener is very obviously suboptimal even for back in 4.0 due to how late battle voice was pressed. And I don't know what you are on about with the test and changes since they literally adjust job balance every major patch so I don't know why you seem to think one book is good enough to last throughout the expansion.

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What the heck is that garbage? Is that a strategy guidebook in 201X? I'm talking about an actual online guide, that would last us through the entire expansion because you would UPDATE it with each patch to keep it current. Every time they adjust job balance they have to test those changes before they go through to the live server. You're putting words in my mouth and missing the point of this.

With a proper Job Guide every time they make an update that alters a job's skills, they would update the Job Guide to reflect this change, this is the point of having it be done in-game or on an official FFXIV/SE website.