Why not having "Difficult" jobs?

why not just have a role that have high skill ceiling?

for example:

Tanks that have high skill ceiling can put higher damage than others but require more skill.

DPS that have high skill ceiling can put higher damage than others but require more skill.

Healer that have high skill ceiling can put higher party support than others but require more skill.

I don't want to see Viper turn into new Dark Knight.

Because the casuals will cry that it's not fair that someone else is doing more damage than them and demand the same damage output regardless of how shitty they play.

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Originally Posted by Karious

Because the casuals will cry that it's not fair that someone else is doing more damage than them and demand the same damage output regardless of how shitty they play.

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Why casual care about damage when they only do casual content?
unless they are doing high level raids, that what I call skill issue

I would love for them to give us a "difficult" healer...

Their skill ceiling heavily depends on how well the rest of the party dodges.

The probable answer: JP casuals are not in the same solar system as EN casuals in terms of how casual they are.

I like to think of myself as casual, but I enjoy a little complexity in my day-to-day stomping. Viper was a welcome change to the usual brain-dead slowness of DPS classes.

I don't browse the JP forums, but I've heard from those who do that they were absolutely foaming at the mouth that Viper was not friendly enough to casuals.

And, of course, they get priority when it comes to feedback. Because JP game.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

The probable answer: JP casuals are not in the same solar system as EN casuals in terms of how casual they are.

I like to think of myself as casual, but I enjoy a little complexity in my day-to-day stomping. Viper was a welcome change to the usual brain-dead slowness of DPS classes.

I don't browse the JP forums, but I've heard from those who do that they were absolutely foaming at the mouth that Viper was not friendly enough to casuals.

And, of course, they get priority when it comes to feedback. Because JP game.

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JP is minority, the game is international.. if you want to listen to JP players do that change in JP servers.. international servers do not welcome that change and I believe JP hardcore players do.
I believe that most of JP players will move to EU/US/OC servers once that implemented but i don't think that so

A lot of people will say it's the casuals, but I actually feel like simplifying jobs is more oriented toward savage raiders. The fact is, casual players actually will happily play classes of any complexity, because the majority of them are happy to have fun while ignoring half of their buttons. They don't try to play optimally and they don't know exactly how much damage they're actually doing, so the majority of the time, they don't actually know how complex their class even is to begin with and they're willing to put up with far more than someone looking to fully master a given class. This was my experience as a new player and I'm pretty certain it's most people I see in dungeons.

When MMOs homogenize or simplify classes, I feel like it comes down to balancing. The fact is, the raiding community goes ballistic if one class is even slightly weaker, even if the missing damage is ultimately inconsequential. This results in situations where certain classes simply can't have unique or varied burst design, or else they might not line up well and wind up doing far less damage and looking far weaker in certain encounters and seen as worthless (RIP old Summoner, my favorite DPS class for non-raid content). Furthermore, complexity is directly in opposition to balancing because it means you're doing more work on one class to achieve the exact same damage on another class. If they made a certain class very difficult and busy, you'd probably expect that class to do significantly more damage than its simpler equivalent, but if they'd implement such a distinction, I feel like a lot of people would complain that they feel unfairly forced to play the harder class. So overall, they do usually have more complex options (for anything that isn't healers at least, RIP healer mains lmao), but I think that's generally the biggest thing keeping them from implementing much more complex classes. A lot of their changes to classes in the past have been raider oriented, and if you need any proof of that, SCH's changes in 7.0 scream raid design. Their new damage button is on a 120s cd tied to their burst window button, which is completely nonsense design outside of a raiding context. The fact is, job design in XIV is inherently raider oriented, and that's the reason classes are "simple". They're easier to balance and design content for them.

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Originally Posted by Soxxx

A lot of people will say it's the casuals, but I actually feel like simplifying jobs is more oriented toward savage raiders. The fact is, casual players actually will happily play classes of any complexity, because the majority of them are happy to have fun while ignoring half of their buttons. They don't try to play optimally and they don't know exactly how much damage they're actually doing, so the majority of the time, they don't actually know how complex their class even is to begin with and they're willing to put up with far more than someone looking to fully master a given class. This was my experience as a new player and I'm pretty certain it's most people I see in dungeons.

When MMOs homogenize or simplify classes, I feel like it comes down to balancing. The fact is, the raiding community goes ballistic if one class is even slightly weaker, even if the missing damage is ultimately inconsequential. This results in situations where certain classes simply can't have unique or varied burst design, or else they might not line up well and wind up doing far less damage and looking far weaker in certain encounters and seen as worthless (RIP old Summoner, my favorite DPS class for non-raid content). Furthermore, complexity is directly in opposition to balancing because it means you're doing more work on one class to achieve the exact same damage on another class. If they made a certain class very difficult and busy, you'd probably expect that class to do significantly more damage than its simpler equivalent, but if they'd implement such a distinction, I feel like a lot of people would complain that they feel unfairly forced to play the harder class. So overall, they do usually have more complex options (for anything that isn't healers at least, RIP healer mains lmao), but I think that's generally the biggest thing keeping them from implementing much more complex classes. A lot of their changes to classes in the past have been raider oriented, and if you need any proof of that, SCH's changes in 7.0 scream raid design. Their new damage button is on a 120s cd tied to their burst window button, which is completely nonsense design outside of a raiding context. The fact is, job design in XIV is inherently raider oriented, and that's the reason classes are "simple". They're easier to balance and design content for them.

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Homogenize didn't solve the problem.. WAR is the best tank overall damage + tank wise.. Healers play 99% the same with different animations.. DPS.. Picto that's what i want to say..

Creativity of Square enix job design team was only on FFXVI and FFXVI alone!

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Originally Posted by Tunda

why not just have a role that have high skill ceiling?

for example:

Tanks that have high skill ceiling can put higher damage than others but require more skill.

DPS that have high skill ceiling can put higher damage than others but require more skill.

Healer that have high skill ceiling can put higher party support than others but require more skill.

I don't want to see Viper turn into new Dark Knight.

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My guess is that the dev don't want a class to be stick with the ''hard'' tag cause then casual would be ''scared'' to pick said class. That or they don't want the difference between a good viper and a turbo casual viper to be so big that people tell them how to play or things of the like.

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Originally Posted by Soxxx

A lot of people will say it's the casuals, but I actually feel like simplifying jobs is more oriented toward savage raiders. The fact is, casual players actually will happily play classes of any complexity, because the majority of them are happy to have fun while ignoring half of their buttons. They don't try to play optimally and they don't know exactly how much damage they're actually doing, so the majority of the time, they don't actually know how complex their class even is to begin with and they're willing to put up with far more than someone looking to fully master a given class. This was my experience as a new player and I'm pretty certain it's most people I see in dungeons.

When MMOs homogenize or simplify classes, I feel like it comes down to balancing. The fact is, the raiding community goes ballistic if one class is even slightly weaker, even if the missing damage is ultimately inconsequential. This results in situations where certain classes simply can't have unique or varied burst design, or else they might not line up well and wind up doing far less damage and looking far weaker in certain encounters and seen as worthless (RIP old Summoner, my favorite DPS class for non-raid content). Furthermore, complexity is directly in opposition to balancing because it means you're doing more work on one class to achieve the exact same damage on another class. If they made a certain class very difficult and busy, you'd probably expect that class to do significantly more damage than its simpler equivalent, but if they'd implement such a distinction, I feel like a lot of people would complain that they feel unfairly forced to play the harder class. So overall, they do usually have more complex options (for anything that isn't healers at least, RIP healer mains lmao), but I think that's generally the biggest thing keeping them from implementing much more complex classes. A lot of their changes to classes in the past have been raider oriented, and if you need any proof of that, SCH's changes in 7.0 scream raid design. Their new damage button is on a 120s cd tied to their burst window button, which is completely nonsense design outside of a raiding context. The fact is, job design in XIV is inherently raider oriented, and that's the reason classes are "simple". They're easier to balance and design content for them.

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It's this.

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Originally Posted by Soxxx

A lot of people will say it's the casuals, but I actually feel like simplifying jobs is more oriented toward savage raiders.

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Nope. My entire raid team is in disbelief that they're neutering the Jobs beyond turbo casual levels, and hate the beyond moronic obsession with the two minute meta.

My casual friends are questioning who finds the Jobs they're having fun on hard. They might not nail their rotations, or their positionals all the time, but don't want to see them get destroyed even further. We've had casual [x] job "mains" actually leave the Jobs they love because "These suck to play now."

These designs are literally for nobody. Not you. Not me. Not our friends. Not our raid groups. Not even the most baby of sprouts. I would know. I've literally watched a few who have finally reached Heavensward, playing through the game for the first time, and even THEY aren't having issues learning how to play their classes. They might react a little slow to mechanics PLUS uptime, but who of us didn't the first time we played?

So I ask. Seriously. Who are these for? Because it feels like the only people who think this design is good, is the dev team that has gone on record stating that they suck at the game compared to their playerbase, and that they had to remove one of their healer testers for dungeons, because they cleared an Extreme. When the bar is low enough for testing that an Extreme disqualifies you, I truly question who on that team actually understands anything in this game.

You can't have only 8 high skill jobs because then you'll create a meta that trashes the rest. As for why jobs didn't get harder. The explanation was that first they're making mecanics harder. And to be fair. They did and are. Both at once would been to much for 99% of the players

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

You can't have only 8 high skill jobs because then you'll create a meta that trashes the rest. As for why jobs didn't get harder. The explanation was that first they're making mecanics harder. And to be fair. They did and are. Both at once would been to much for 99% of the players

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I am not saying 20% higher damage or something.. BTW if look into the graphs there is 25% damage difference NOW in DPS look at fflog

Realistically yes they should unbalance the difficulty of jobs and let those who like difficult rotations to enjoy themselves and those enjoy the ease to have it thier way too. At point there is enough jobs around that this can be easily doable. Really the only 2 things are holding this idea back "aesthetics" and "content difficult," basically "I want to play this job because how it looks but its too hard" and "These jobs make so and so content stupidly easy..."

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Originally Posted by Tunda

I am not saying 20% higher damage or something.. BTW if look into the graphs there is 25% damage difference NOW in DPS look at fflog

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The balancing is allways wack pre 7.1. That's why picto is better than blm. They'll fix it eventually

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Originally Posted by Tunda

why not just have a role that have high skill ceiling?

for example:

Tanks that have high skill ceiling can put higher damage than others but require more skill.

DPS that have high skill ceiling can put higher damage than others but require more skill.

Healer that have high skill ceiling can put higher party support than others but require more skill.

I don't want to see Viper turn into new Dark Knight.

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It's unironically the poopsocking ultimate players that cause this to happen. It's never had anything to do with casuals because if it did, every bad change this forum begs for would be implemented

We can only speculate and it would be cool to have an official communication for the matter because nobody actually feels in line with devs vision, even the JP players. My own speculation is that they're not listening to feedback but are rather looking at internal statistics on jobs like pick rate, how much people are playing it "wrong" etc. I know for a fact that they did this process for tanks in ShB because they were not happy that they were not enough tank players and it worked wonderfully so I guess they're trying to do the same with the rest of the jobs without understanding why it worked in the first place. It's a common pitfall that ruins video games to look at statistics without a critical eye, DBD is particulary egregious in that regard because they litterally balance the game in order to make each killer have a 50% win rate while ignoring everything else and got shocked when during the first official tournament, everybody picked the least played killer because it is actually OP af.

Final Fantasy is not the only game where classes in end game content causes a lot of tension and problems. WOW has a similar but even more extreme problem where you have people who can do the content better than 99 percent of players and wanting things balanced their way so they have a better time.

There are those who can do all forms of harder content but find the max/min philosophy that too many are obsessed with in WOW to be tedious and not worth it. Then you have more of the casuals and decent players in between all that with all sorts of opinions. It's a freaking mess.

If you had a "difficult" job but it did the same dps as everyone else, would you be okay with that?

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah

If you had a "difficult" job but it did the same dps as everyone else, would you be okay with that?

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I'm pretty sure a lot of people would say "yes" without a second though. I think most of us agree that's fine to have easy and hard jobs coexisting that appeal to different people as long as everybody is having fun.

EDIT : imo it's more a matter of identity and playstyle variety than difficulty that matters anyway. We all have different fantasies and that's what matter.

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Originally Posted by Ozmandis

I'm pretty sure a lot of people would say "yes" without a second though. I think most of us agree that's fine to have easy and hard jobs coexisting that appeal to different people as long as everybody is having fun.

EDIT : imo it's more a matter of identity and playstyle variety than difficulty that matters anyway. We all have different fantasies and that's what matter.

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I have to wonder if people, in particular raiders, would complain that <insert_easy_job> can do 'y' as good as <insert_hard_job>, why bother playing <hard_job>, or worse, we need to nerf the easy job. Summoner comes to mind.

Coming from a decade of fighting games, "homogeny balance" being "good for balancing competitive gameplay" is a giant myth. It's great at creating over designed slop nobody wants though and patches made up of dial tweaking changes and looking at the audience for approval while fundamentally being unable to escape from boring design ever out of fear it'll upset the balance that they never achieved to begin with.

It's good at creating the need for gimmicks and illusions that replace all the player agency that slowly gets chipped away to try and convince your players that the game is still good, actually, just try these changes. Look at the cool new animations! It's good at creating a dev cycle of having to give players a fake amount of depth to explore every patch and recreating that once they find out how shallow the changes are.

Also definitely a lot of reading player metrics. Basically divination, trying to act like the way most devs collect player numbers and use them means anything is hilarious. They might as well read from a magical 8 ball.

At the end of the day, if you can't convince the most casual players that they don't, in fact, need to play a top tier or do the most optimal rotation/combo, you will forever suffer their whining. And the top players are the same! It's the intermediate wall of skill understanding. Good Jobs/Characters do the Good Rotation/Combo for the Good Damage and Bad Ones are Bad. They simply need Patches. When my favorite job gets The Good Patch then I will be Good too. I'm simply being held back from my potential, you see. When it comes down to numbers for people trying to squeeze out max theoretical damage and stuff that's different but that's not the actual gameplay and neither is speedrunning high end content, those are edge cases. They will figure out answers though, they don't need patches to hand it to them. The fun is supposed to be in making it work in those scenarios.

Game design is doomed because it tries to appeal not to casuals or hard core players, but because it tries to appeal to no one except ease of development and creating a community that will defend bad design or be too busy with infighting.

It caters to protecting the ego of players who feel the need to look good for doing their job at all times.

I also stand by the fact that they just want to try to squash any differences between levels of gameplay to create an illusion that the skill difference is so minute, anyone can do it! You can be top player too, Timmy! But then Timmy can't double weave consistently, whatever will he do? His GCD drifted in Aurum Vale.. he cleared without a single hitch BUT LOOK AT HIS POOR GCD THE HUMANITY, THE DPS LOSS..

Like yeah whiners exist at all levels, it's just modern gamer star quarterback syndrome. It's a terminal fear of perceived failure.

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah

I have to wonder if people, in particular raiders, would complain that <insert_easy_job> can do 'y' as good as <insert_hard_job>, why bother playing <hard_job>, or worse, we need to nerf the easy job. Summoner comes to mind.

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SMN wasn't a problem purely because it's easier than the other casters.

SMN was a problem because it has a lot of completely free movement, it can res, it can heal, it's extremely easy to master and it also did more damage than RDM. SMN was basically a direct upgrade over RDM in every way and it was breaking the role balance by existing, the problem was not as simple as SMN being a bit too easy.

I think if a job is clearly better than a truly similar job and you can prove it's harmful to meaningful amounts of content, it's good to change them.

If they're just easier or harder to master though, while that does hold weight on a tier list of strength, it's an abysmal thing to attempt to balance to please people or make a fun game while trying to do.

Role balance should care about if everyone can clear but it should not try to make it equally easy for all jobs to clear. It just make jobs that suck. Just let them be different. Let one of the jobs be the harder one.

"But then no one will let them into party finder for the content because a tier list said they are bad" yeah gamers are clowns we know. I'm tired of my game design being subjected to this. Making everything homogeneous so people will play nice with each other doesn't work. They'll just find a new metric for what defines bad job and exclude someone else. You can't make a game that makes people stop caring about what is on someone else's plate.

More time should be spent telling players to cope

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah

I have to wonder if people, in particular raiders, would complain that <insert_easy_job> can do 'y' as good as <insert_hard_job>, why bother playing <hard_job>, or worse, we need to nerf the easy job. Summoner comes to mind.

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I am doing high end raiding all the time so I can answer you with 100% certainty that people actually prefer difficult jobs. And there's an easy answer as to why : most of us are bored to death. We play this content solely for the challenge so "handicaping" ourselves by playing harder jobs is actually something we look for. You can see that in a lot of games, one the best example being the souls series where magic is generally the most easy and op playstyle but there's actually very little people playing it because they don't find that engaging.

If people complain about some jobs being too hard, the devs should just say "we have easy jobs, play them" because I think everybody deserves to have fun in its own way.

They also justify this by claiming that we have two options.
- Difficult / challenging encounter
- Difficult / challenging jobs / mechanics

For some inexplicable reason, the developers believe these two things are entirely mutually exclusive . So they hide behind their bullshit excuse of ‘if we make classes/job more complex we have to nuke the difficult of every single raid in existence and every raid in future’

Basically, the devs threaten anyone who wants job complexity with ‘well fine but you’ll have to be happy with significantly less challenging/demanding encounters.

Which ultimately leads to the shitty situation we’re in now where there are literally no raids for ‘encounter complexity’ yet, yet job complexity is largely non-existent on almost every job. FFXIV: Where Nobody Wins!

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Originally Posted by Connor

They also justify this by claiming that we have two options.
- Difficult / challenging encounter
- Difficult / challenging jobs / mechanics

For some inexplicable reason, the developers believe these two things are entirely mutually exclusive . So they hide behind their bullshit excuse of ‘if we make classes/job more complex we have to nuke the difficult of every single raid in existence and every raid in future’

Basically, the devs threaten anyone who wants job complexity with ‘well fine but you’ll have to be happy with significantly less challenging/demanding encounters.

Which ultimately leads to the shitty situation we’re in now where there are literally no raids for ‘encounter complexity’ yet, yet job complexity is largely non-existent on almost every job. FFXIV: Where Nobody Wins!

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It doesn't help that a lot of the playerbase just accepts it all without any question.

Also, to everyone that believes this system is good, I invite you to look at P7S, the biggest flop of Endwalker. Nobody can have any engagement from the fight for the first 7 or so minutes, and that fight is meant to be an engaging high-end fight.

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Originally Posted by Soxxx

The fact is, job design in XIV is inherently raider oriented, and that's the reason classes are "simple". They're easier to balance and design content for them.

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That's exactly it. Casual players don't care about numbers whereas Parsers of Light pop a coronary of a job has a lower potency or a "unique" buff. Look at the AST "if you're not fishing for Balance you're doing it wrong" situation and how that turned out. Or melee uptime and big circle bosses. 2 minute raid buffs. Enmity and boss positioning. Etc etc.

On one side it's so easy you can literally press 1 button and win and on the other side of the spectrum everything must be as homogeneous as possible. The end result is bland, boring and uninspired gameplay for the majority of the content.

Personally, as a 1.0 player I'm doing what YP is saying. I do the bare minimum with the MSQ and then I leave for a couple of months. Not worth my money, honestly. Jobs are just sad at this point and the "gameplay" outside of savage and PvP bores me to tears.