Balance, Accessibility, Diversity

Someone in the "will you accept total balance" thread brought up that "balance" may not be the enemy of diversity so much as accessibility may be. But balance is so much more fun of a piñata that the conversation got stifled in there, and one could argue pursuing that conversation in that thread is off topic anyway. Hence new thread.

Honestly the issue could be they're pursuing balance *and* accessibility, so if we look at this as a triangle of "Balance, Accessibility, Diversity," what two would you pick and what would you drop?

Accessibility and Diversity.

We like to cry foul of 'balance' but the reality is that when we talk balance, it's almost always just a numbers issue, and we know that SE balances around the average of the lower end than it does around the average of the higher end. Number issues are easily solved by just scaling things up or down.

Diversity, however, is what makes playing different jobs exciting. Seeing the game through a different lens, seeing the problems and solutions an individual job is privy to, and having that widen your scope of the game.

Accessibility is a mixed bag. Almost all the complexity in the game is in clearly marked content, Normal - Hard - Extreme - Savage - Ultimate. However, it is better for content to be widely accessible as opposed to not - The gaming community will always find ways to add more challenge to content no matter how "easy" it is. That said, the game could use some more initial complexity with its jobs. Some more crunchy feedback for when you do things wrong and right. (RE: Tornado Kick Monk) As it currently stands, since Stormblood, you can generally hit about 80-85% of a job's maximum output with basic understanding of overall game knowledge.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Accessibility and Diversity.

We like to cry foul of 'balance' but the reality is that when we talk balance, it's almost always just a numbers issue, and we know that SE balances around the average of the lower end than it does around the average of the higher end. Number issues are easily solved by just scaling things up or down.

Diversity, however, is what makes playing different jobs exciting. Seeing the game through a different lens, seeing the problems and solutions an individual job is privy to, and having that widen your scope of the game.

Accessibility is a mixed bag. Almost all the complexity in the game is in clearly marked content, Normal - Hard - Extreme - Savage - Ultimate. However, it is better for content to be widely accessible as opposed to not - The gaming community will always find ways to add more challenge to content no matter how "easy" it is. That said, the game could use some more initial complexity with its jobs. Some more crunchy feedback for when you do things wrong and right. (RE: Tornado Kick Monk) As it currently stands, since Stormblood, you can generally hit about 80-85% of a job's maximum output with basic understanding of overall game knowledge.

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I pretty much agree with this, Balance tends to just be a numbers issue and that can be tweaked. Accessibility and Diversity are job design specific and are much harder to determine once we reach a certain threshold of options available. In order for true diversity to take place, the content in the game would need to shift from it's dps heavy metagame. Until this happens, everything is largely better off similar but with added flavor much like tanks. The problem isn't completely with the jobs, it extends to the content too

You cant have everything.
People claiming accessible classes can be diverse and balanced are denying themselves.

Reality shown us already that in order to make each job accessible SE deleted certain mechanics from these jobs that made the diverse from the rest, thus making every jobs closer and closer in gameplay to each other. There is no other way to do that, you cant have engaging and enjoyable job that is easy to play and at the same level as the rest.
And its not like SE have no idea what they are doing, their team is balancing each job to the exact decimal, in fact there is NOT OTHER mmorpg on the market that has such a great balance between classes, this speaks for itself and people claiming SE are bad at balance are one big ignorants. So its not the problem with SE employees creativity and knowledge, but the share fact that leads us to simple equation.
Easy job + balanced = boring as hell

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

People claiming accessible classes can be diverse and balanced are denying themselves.

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Developers claiming they can't are deluding or merely excusing themselves; at the core, they're unwilling to put in the effort and expense necessary to design fights that meaningfully accommodate varying composition-based strategies, usually overpowering whichever jobs/specs/classes have the fewest or least significant design idiosyncrasies.

As often as MMOs have made this claim before major homogeneity or streamlining changes, balance has more often worsened thereafter, not improved.

The bottleneck is development time and coordination between class designers and fight designers and how informed those designers are of player trends and compositional synergies -- all of which can produce higher qualities of balance+diversity when well managed -- not some grand, fatalistic compromise between making outputs effectively equal and inputs perceivably different.

Personal choice. Id like diversity and balance. With diversity some will be accesible anyways, but of course ive always argued difficulty should be rewarded soooo. Im not really sure you can pick two perfectly.

If all classes are diverse, and some are difficult (inaccessable) then balance wont be perfect either because difficult classes aren't balanced via that alone.

If diverse and accesible are conflicting goals often, but honestly there is always room to grow both.

Arguments such as the ones i threw out above can be used in myriad ways to similar result for any pairing because our preposition statement is false OR not well enough defined.

Ie since many things people said above are sound arguments the proposition must fail cause the truths conflict.




You dont have to pick two. For lack of a better word "balance" between these three goals can grow upwords like a tetrahedron and the true goal of developers should be just to not ever forget one side.

@Main Topic

It depends what you mean by Balance. I don't care for every job to perform equally well in every comp in every fight. In fact I'd consider that likely a failure of design.

Ideally, the vast majority of jobs should each be able to slot into a slight majority of compositions and multiple compositions should be very near to each other in performance. However, if the difficulty as can be influenced by compositional choice via short-term checks are so insignificant that only long-term checks (e.g. beating enrage) matter, that too is generally going to be a failure of design. No concept of balance should have so little to form parity from.

A better balance is one in which you can pick your leniency on a level of what individual job bring to the table, what their synergies bring, and what the sum of their relevant capacities bring with more choices that feel "good" (or, "competitive") choices than feel "bad" (or, "sub-optimal"), which has more to do with how advantages are presented to players than it does actual parity. It should not mean that all parts are interchangeable. The closer we get to that point, the more noticeable (and negatively perceived) even the tiniest imbalances become because there's no variance in context or experience. If everything feels the same, and we've no agency over the fight except what numbers we throw at it, then gameplay really is at least half just number-crunching and gameplay becomes less and less about reaching success than just how quickly one can reach it. Difficulty comes to exist increasingly in leaderboards alone and inventiveness the result of precise detail in a single fight at a time rather than awareness, instinctive coordination, or general knowledge. That can work for some content, but it shouldn't be the whole of it.

Diversity > Balance >>> Accessibility.
It shouldn’t really be just “pick two” however, but rather what is prioritized, so you can still try to pursue the lowest priority to a degree, as long as it doesn’t take too much from the higher ones.

Diversity is the highest priority as it ensures that everybody can find something enjoyable for themselves, regardless of their preferences. Besides, there isn't much of a point to having many job choices if they boil down to mere aesthetics. It also means that while accessibility is the lowest priority, by making jobs diverse you can have a few which are simpler, without taking away from those which are more complex.

Balance is also important, as nobody likes to feel useless and because keeping the options balanced ensures players can make their choices based on gameplay preferences, rather than feeling forced into something they dislike for the sake of effectiveness and not dragging their team down.
Balance itself is also not that difficult to accomplish without detriment to diversity, because you can have lots of different ways to achieve specific output numbers. Balance doesn't care about the road but merely destination. 1000 damage is 1000 damage, regardless if you accomplished it with several small hits or one huge hit, whether you had to manage your resources and ogcds or were just hitting 1-2-3 sequence of gcds and if that damage came directly from you or through boosting your party - the end result is all that matters.

Accessibility is not only less important in my opinion, but also directly detrimental to diversity and enjoyment when excessive. That doesn't mean things should be complicated for the sake of it of course, there is a certain limit at which things may become too complex as well. However whenever you try to make something simpler, you do need to cut out some things while leaving the essentials and at certain point(one which I believe ffxiv tanks and healers have sadly pretty much achieved) those shared essentials is all that's left, while all that's unique is gone.
Moreover, people often ask for removal of limitations they see as "clunky" and "unfun", while failing to realize that those limitations are a base for job mechanics that actually make them enjoyable and diverse. Games are about overcoming challenges and solving problems - if there's nothing to overcome or solve then what is there really to have fun from?

I would say that diversity in Playstyle should always be the priority, but when that diversity is extended towards basic utility they need to be very, very careful that if it's doing something different it isn't overly hamstrung in comparison to other jobs. This has been the biggest problem when it comes to Monk's buff upkeep with Skills like Riddle of Earth and Anatman. Sure they fulfilled the same basic role as Transpose/Umbral Soul/Blood of the Dragon/Armor Crush but they were objectively worse by every metric and left Monk with tons of situations where it would just lose GL when no one else would (which included taking no damage due to a shield), or require it to do something stupid like picking up Vuln Stacks by charging into AOEs.

At that point there's 'diversity' but it isn't a boon, it's a hindrance that makes the job outright infuriating to play compared to another job that doesn't have to suffer that sort of inconvenience.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Some more crunchy feedback for when you do things wrong and right. (RE: Tornado Kick Monk) As it currently stands, since Stormblood, you can generally hit about 80-85% of a job's maximum output with basic understanding of overall game knowledge.

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That's probably a bad example of things going right considering how divisive it was. That said they could have at least taken away "Hey we want to use Tornado Kick more often, if you don't want us losing our stacks to use it then change it.".

the problem is the endgame when it becomes "raid or die". when you have the "savage" raiders coming here complaining that X class does more DPS than Y class. if you open up the "endgame" to more playstyles less people would care about balance.

look at a game like Path of Exile sure there is balancing but there is never a focus on "this class does too much, buff my class to match"

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Originally Posted by Vulcann

the problem is the endgame when it becomes "raid or die". when you have the "savage" raiders coming here complaining that X class does more DPS than Y class. if you open up the "endgame" to more playstyles less people would care about balance.

look at a game like Path of Exile sure there is balancing but there is never a focus on "this class does too much, buff my class to match"

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It’s funny how people are ignoring this stance because this is THE reason balance gets held to such a high standard. If there were alternative methods of high end content designed to challenge people that weren’t so DPS heavy by designed. You’d see jobs that aren’t very dps friendly but still contribute to an alternative setting take root there.

Say we get a exploratory raid like content similar to eureka where it’s not a bunch of isolated fights, but requires exploring and clearing certain objectives and killing difficult targets to navigate the duty. RDM would be very much viable in that field as opposed to BLM who is viable in the current landscape of raiding. Food for thought really, should we complaint about jobs being the same, or should we complain about the content not being diverse and challenging enough to bring out their diversity.

Thinking on what wayfinder just said. Subdivided mechanics in raids that didnt require, but incentivized certain Classes would be really interesting. Shot in the dark idea but

(Scout mobility mechanics)What if dancers speed was enhanced in raids by 25% and same as ninja. Have a mechanic that is only completable by a ninja or dancer because of distance. that when completed grants a dps or alternate boon to the party.

(Heal check tank coop mechanics) mechanics where a healer has to heal an object to grant the party a dps or alternate boon, only completable if they are given significant focus time to do so via the team applying mitigations with perfection.

(Jumper mechanics) mechanic that can only be completed by a drg, brd, or sam via their backwards jump. Requires landing on a new platform via targetables that also has an eye mechanic so that you cant face it while jumping or you die.

Its off topic but would be a fun diversifying aspect to some fights. That could also be used with specificity to bring up some classes value in at least some of the fights in a tier.

give us alternate end games besides just savage raiding.

things like Mapping from Path of Exile or Rifts from Diablo 3. playable with others or trusts. then you can really diversify the classes instead of trying to fit them all into the raid scene.

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Originally Posted by Vulcann

give us alternate end games besides just savage raiding.

things like Mapping from Path of Exile or Rifts from Diablo 3. playable with others or trusts. then you can really diversify the classes instead of trying to fit them all into the raid scene.

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The issue then becomes how do you offer rewards worthwhile enough for people to do that content? If it's equivalent ilvl to Savage, then people will opt for whatever is the easier of the two.

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Games are about overcoming challenges and solving problems - if there's nothing to overcome or solve then what is there really to have fun from?

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Fun is relative, even though I can see your point. My priorities when gaming are, for example, probably vastly different than yours as I couldn't care less about "overcoming challenges" or consider difficult (or only difficult) content as "fun". This may make my mindset not compatible with some single-player games or the "generally accepted" MMO mentality of end game, but also doesn't make it wrong per-say. With MMOs appealing to the emtional side of players with powre fantasy, self-insert and wish-fulfilling tropes, stuff like "fun", flair etc do, of course, collide with the hard cold side of numbers. Or else, damage jobs wouldn't be as abundant and massively "overplayed", compared to tank/healer or support jobs, even though the numbers would theoretically be the same.

As long as any given role is within 10% of the other roles I consider it balanced. Within 5% is ideal.

So I'd say strive for that, then work on Diversity/accessibility.

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Originally Posted by Vulcann

give us alternate end games besides just savage raiding.

things like Mapping from Path of Exile or Rifts from Diablo 3. playable with others or trusts. then you can really diversify the classes instead of trying to fit them all into the raid scene.

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While it would be nice to have more varied content in the game, this issue has nothing to do with the topic. Balance in savage isn't detrimental to the diversity of job gameplay, it might be to diversity of capabilities, but this can also be achieved with asymmetrical balance.

You also can't compare balance and gameplay of games like PoE and D3, which aren't even the same genre as FFXIV. You're talking about loot-based aRPGs with tons of different build options, completely different gear progression and no trinity roles. Nothing from those games translates into FFXIV. Hell, "gameplay" in D3 isn't even about actual gameplay per se, because that is just spamming one or two skills most of the time - it's about theory-crafting your build and collecting the gear for it.

Rifts in D3 were one of the most boring things I had the displeasure of playing. You know why? Because they're not meant to be engaging - they're just masses of mobs to test your build on and the fun part of the game is making that build and seeing it shred things.

We're talking about diversity of gameplay in an mmorpg with a trinity system and linear gear progression - if you want to play a looter aRPG then play one, instead of trying to turn a completely different game into your preffered genre, because you don't understand how different types of games could work.

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Originally Posted by Mahoukenshi

Fun is relative, even though I can see your point. My priorities when gaming are, for example, probably vastly different than yours as I couldn't care less about "overcoming challenges" or consider difficult (or only difficult) content as "fun".

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You are overestimating what I mean by "challenge" here. Not everybody wants to do the most difficult content obviously, but whether consciously or not, humans naturally enjoy problem solving and that's why games are considered a fun activity. The thing to overcome might be as simple as stacking three icons of the same color together, but it still requires your input and therefore certain effort, no matter how small. Even the simplest of games require certain limitations to be enjoyable, because they need to be a problem to solve.

That's also why majority of people dislikes grinding one thing for a long time - it quickly becomes repetitive and boring, because there's no new challenge to overcome.

To m the problem with "accessibility" is that there's a segment of the population that just wants content design to be "push button, win game." Lets face it here even at their absolute most complex the jobs in this game could be played by someone in a coma for normal mode content. So why did anything need to get even more "accessible?" Here's the thing I bet there's a large segment of the population that finds the classes in their current state too complex because they involve more than 2 buttons. The other conundrum with accessibility is that classes only become somewhat complex when it comes to the mechanics of savage raids. Why the heck would we care about making savage raids accessible to anyone but advanced players?

I wouldn't be surprised to find out there are 10 year olds who have cleared savage content. Certainly there are teenagers who have. To me that makes any accessibility argument moot. Anyone claiming a job in this game, even at their absolute most complex, is too complex just doesn't need to be playing the game. I don't want to sound like some arrogant gatekeeper but come on put a modicum of effort into the game.

Moving on to another subject, savage balance. Sure keep tuning keep tweaking, try to get things in balance. However, people focus far too much on this. People get obsessed with numbers and unless you're going for world first who cares what job someone takes to a raid. I'm of the belief that it shouldn't be too hard to find 7 like-minded people who want to do savage raids and are serious about it. You're probably going to get more mileage out of someone who loves playing a lower dps job than getting that same person to play a higher dps job they hate. I think some people just spend too much time scaring themselves about dps numbers.

So that's a long way of saying diversity of job design is where it should be at.

This is a weak argument considering i've played games that have been out far longer then FFXIV and have far less fights far less Variety and everything just ends up being clones of each-other. gear wise. I don't think the balance is to bad. games that lack Variety end up taking the high risk approach for everything and then servery dulls down healer and tank roles by making tanks meat-shields and healers have no dps skills. Things can't be completely balanced because then things become imbalanced, Sometimes there needs to be a higher reward for risks but don't have the risks rewards outweigh the risks, i think there is enough Diversity, right now at least you can play what you want and not get instantly kicked for it i think the community makes up for this, because i've played other mmo's that if you didn't do what everyone else did in terms of what is considered "Optimal" Then they'd kick you in a heart beat even if the dungeon is a beginner dungeon, Diversity is what keeps people playing jobs, Id rather have people who really like their job, versus someone that just plays something because "its the best"

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Originally Posted by Satarn

this issue has nothing to do with the topic. Balance in savage isn't detrimental to the diversity

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actually it is, when a game's only endgame is raiding every class needs to be "raid viable" and the easiest way to make every class "raid viable" is by making each class in a specific archtype very similar yet with maybe a couple special actions that lets them be a bit different. this has been happening in every game that goes the "raid focus" route.

game starts off with a unique and diverse class lineup
game introduces raiding
raiders complain when specific classes are more useful than others
developers start removing the uniqueness from classes to satisfy raiders
raiders complain more
rinse and repeat.

you open up other ways to acquire gear besides raiding and you can start adding unique and diverse classes.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

The issue then becomes how do you offer rewards worthwhile enough for people to do that content? If it's equivalent ilvl to Savage, then people will opt for whatever is the easier of the two.

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make savage content drop items or give more currency toward items instead of the other content. and give savage items unique and interesting looks so that people will want to run it for glams. its shown that people will do content for glams with copied factory.

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Originally Posted by Vulcann

game starts off with a unique and diverse class lineup
game introduces raiding
raiders complain when specific classes are more useful than others
developers start removing the uniqueness from classes to satisfy raiders
raiders complain more
rinse and repeat.

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Your obvious raiders-hate-boner aside, this doesn't even make sense when you look at the history of the game.

FFXIV had raiding pretty much from the very beginning in ARR(1.x doesn't count). I think most people will agree that jobs were at their most diverse back in Heavensward - when raiding was very much there and at its most hardcore to boot. The HW era had something else to it though, specifically in the jobs department - they weren't just diverse, they were also very complex and therefore not all that casual-friendly.

The homogenization of jobs wasn't for balance - it was for accessibility. The more casual part of the playerbase complained about things being too hard, too "clunky" as people often say and in order to appease them, SE started dumbing things down, simplifying and cutting out each job's unique mechanics and as side effect making them less diverse. Then those complaints continued in Stormblood and 5.0 dumbed things down even further.
Those "raid focused" games you speak of - were they not also more and more casual-friendly as the time went by?

Interestingly Eureka - which is as far away from the raid-style content as XIV ever got - came in 4.x and somehow the expansion after adding this new, "refreshing", original, non-raid content, things are getting less and less diverse. We are going to get more Eureka-style content in next patch series and somehow SE didn't give us more unique options in preparation for that, how come? By your logic, Shadowbringers should be when the jobs are at their most-diverse, but alas here we are.

I've said it many times and I'll say it again: balance(and by extension raiders) are concerned with numerical outcomes, which can be equally achieved with as diverse rotations and job mechanics as you could wish for.
Balance and raids are not the issue - that is unless you're really hell-bent on playing a job that's solely focused on non-combat utility like Peloton or decreasing people's fall damage, in which case you should probably look for a different game.

Diversity and balance I think.

My reasoning is that classes should be fun and unique, and THEN balanced. Accessibility will come as classes diverge, some will naturally end up easier than others.
Balance should be secondary, fun is more important than one being more powerful, and while the raiders do have too much say, the problem is that SE is also doing things from the wrong angle so the raiders get more say not because there is more of them but because the alternatives for more casual players have not come about in any decent capacity

Look at Eureka, a massive brain numbing chore of a grind that could have given more casual players a means of getting their gear. Instead because it was so repetitive, slow, burdened with unneccesary restrictions and required FATES for the last bit of the weapon, it was dead on arrival, got brought back to a coma, then died again once pagos came out

If Eureka had been somewhat more varied and not crippled by poor decisions (As was admittedly many things in SB) then it would have been a viable alternative.

the current homogenisation, dumbing down and stripping of core elements and identity of classes in shadowbringers is why this expansion hasn't dethroned heavensward in terms of best expansion

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Originally Posted by Satarn

Your obvious raiders-hate-boner aside, this doesn't even make sense when you look at the history of the game.

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yeah yeah i forgot the egos of raiders can't take any sort of criticism or else that person is dubbed a raid hater. i have raided for 20 years from eq1 all the way to the latest expansion of WoW. so yeah i know how raiding works and i know the effects it has on games. when you focus solely on raid progression when it comes to character balance you can throw the uniqueness of class out the window. its happened in literally every game that has a focus on raiding. sure the "casual" base effects its as well but the larger driving force in every single game with raiding is the "elite raiders"

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Originally Posted by Vulcann

yeah yeah i forgot the egos of raiders can't take any sort of criticism or else that person is dubbed a raid hater. i have raided for 20 years from eq1 all the way to the latest expansion of WoW. so yeah i know how raiding works and i know the effects it has on games. when you focus solely on raid progression when it comes to character balance you can throw the uniqueness of class out the window. its happened in literally every game that has a focus on raiding. sure the "casual" base effects its as well but the larger driving force in every single game with raiding is the "elite raiders"

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You didn't counter anything I've said with evidence or even remotely convincing arguments though. Pretty much all you do is say "no, that's wrong because I say so, also raiders are bad".
Nobody cares about your EQ or WoW experience, these are different games and you simply saying you have "some sort of" experience, doesn't magically make everything you say true without any evidence and proper arguments. You say raiders can't take criticism because of supposed ego, but it is you who responds to criticism backed by arguments, with a petty insult in the very same sentence and not much else.

How much of the endgame in XIV you've played by the way? Not just raiding, Eureka and deep dungeons too(the upper floors, not story/leveling stuff), since we're talking about alternative content and its effects on job design. From what I'm seeing you've only just joined in SHB, have yet to experience most of the content and haven't researched about past expansions, but you're trying to talk like some sort of authority in the matter of how this game has changed over the years.

Since you claim this is the way to diversify the jobs, can you give some examples of mmorpgs that became more diverse in their class design, after introducing other content alongside raiding? We're talking mmorpgs with raiding specifically, because other game types are irrelevant for XIV design obviously.
You've proposed adding D3 style Rifts - how do you imagine such content allowing for more varied job design in ffxiv specifically, while also being engaging enough that people care to do it?