FFxiv could use a big change in game design but what about balance

So the challenge for SE that is how to deal with job design (and overall game design choices), for said 8.0 according to Yoshi-P, will be to provide a way to make normal content engaging again.

But how can they do it without breaking balance for old content?

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Here is some popular request that we can see among the forums or reddit that I have in head, and the issue that will have to be dealth with :

1) Healers want to heal A LOT (gcd healing mandatory even with OGCD opti) :
-> Probably one of the most challenging stuff to do for SE, because you can just put brutal heal check : in savage / ult it could work, but in the end it'll stays the same with how encounters works in ffxiv : spam gcd during prog, then clean up and gcd only when needed, no need to worry about mana once timeline is set.

SE could use random raidbusters / auto crit but it was already that in ARR/HW

+ for normal content, experienced healers would still find themself damage spam with good OGCD healing use
-> Remowing OGCD healing could force experienced healers to do more gcd healing, but give the feeling of healing like ARR / HW

2) Healers want to have damage rotation :
-> This is a way to make healers more engaging for experienced healers without hurting the game too much and its design (that is based around damages), only issue would be old content, having a few more damages buttons can be easily fine, but actual caster rotation could lead to synched old content being harder

3) Change in encounter design
-> DT is testing stuff, but in the end the game can't become a dynamic hack & slash, it will stays about targetting stuff and watching cast bar / aggro list

4) tank wants to do tank stuff
-> Tank & healers are always touchy roles because in normal content most casuals players will feel pressured by any healing / tank check going on, but SE could sure pump things up a bit for tank in normal content (more tankbuster ? ).
Again, endgame is less of an issue, M6S have been giving a slap on tanks that is enough for the all patch.

5) DPS (and overall dps rotation) should be engaging / give skill expression
-> Some jobs didn't need to be dumbing down that much, but some had deserved easier execution to deal with endgame content.
SE could make dps hard to get a perfect rotation with again, but how to deal with previous (EW) / current encounter design ? Think about TOP if suddently DPS were having do deal with harder rotation.

6) Dungeon design :

Probably easy to do for SE, boss right now with DT are less sleepy, but could still use some twist, and adds in dungeon should be more than just "grab 2 pack, or 1 pack and 1 big add, pop mit, pop burst"

Alright this last one doesn't shows any issue with SE adressing this and overall balance but I wanted to vent, this is the only point where I'm disapointed and don't see why they don't put some extra thinking in it

Not the worst ideas i listen in the last times. But overall the way they should go is the same they went on PvP Jobs.

They must kill the 120s meta and rebuild every job on a personal scope. Every job must first make fun to play solo, if you hit a normal enemy on the map, in a dungeon or in a raid. Personal limit breaks, combos, switchable skills like healers do damage with heal spells to enemies and heal others. The job mechanics must be the base of there skills, integral need to use them. After they make every job on that level, like they done it in pvp, than they must add skills that go on in raids. Synergy is not even important for that. Because come on, nobody need 10% damage buffs... when you have your personal 10 seconds of son goku kame-hame-ha on the right moment that you time yourself on a raid where it is important. Like the one fight with nebrealis. Where everyone wait for the melee limit.

We most go on form "sweat shop unification project" we have now to "personal identity for everyone". And than we can design the old content on this! Its a challenge for them to do this!

Balance is what got us where we are though. They are so balanced, they have more or less the same tools and features with a different coat of paint.

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Originally Posted by Lucypher_Yorha

1) Healers want to heal A LOT (gcd healing mandatory even with OGCD opti) :
-> Probably one of the most challenging stuff to do for SE, because you can just put brutal heal check : in savage / ult it could work, but in the end it'll stays the same with how encounters works in ffxiv : spam gcd during prog, then clean up and gcd only when needed, no need to worry about mana once timeline is set.

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They have tried that sort of thing. But it can have the reverse effect and make healers avoid PF because they believe they shouldn't have to heal people's mistakes and that they should not make them, even if mistakes are part of the design of the fight.

The bigger issue isn't healers getting used to it, but gear making it trivial so that after some weeks they may not need to care about the heals and mit as deeply due to higher HP pools, defense and heal potency, including of the barrier tanks. So some healers might never actually experience how tough the healing was in the first weeks.

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SE could use random raidbusters / auto crit but it was already that in ARR/HW

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Boss auto attacks will suffice. And they have been doing these more in recent content. The issue was all these "larger than life" casts meant bosses were too busy to actually auto anymore.

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Remowing OGCD healing could force experienced healers to do more gcd healing, but give the feeling of healing like ARR / HW

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Removing that from both tanks and healers would be a start. I don't know how it would work with the scaling at level 100, but the trinity was clearly more intact back then whereas now, even in an Extreme trial a tank can keep the party going for ages after the healers die so it can be finished off (I did this multiple times the last week).

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This is a way to make healers more engaging for experienced healers without hurting the game too much and its design (that is based around damages), only issue would be old content, having a few more damages buttons can be easily fine, but actual caster rotation could lead to synched old content being harder

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Old content wouldn't be harder, but rather easier, if there were more attacks dealing higher damage. And old content does not need to be any easier. It's in a bad spot as it is.

I think the best hope for this is if they do something like skill trees in 8.0 like they've talked about.

Balance is a mirage. Balance is an excuse. Balance is a cost-cutting maneuver.

Balance is a misdirection. Balance is a smokescreen. Balance is a PR stunt.

Balance is the lie that you tell the sacrificial lamb. Balance is the sentiment you express while secretly harboring the desire to destroy. Balance is the thought-ending cliche, an a priori, religious finality.

All this sandpaper and for what? Imbalances are still rampant and exacerbated by a drastic reduction of encounter metrics.

don't give healer a DPS rotation give healer buffs they can give instead like do mechanic again not just a memory game

At the end of the day, if you want interesting job design, you have to accept a little bit of imbalance. Not talking full on like one job is 25% better then another, but some is inevitable.

Maybe I'm the only healer who wants proper DPS rotation lol
I mean, obviously I also want to do more heal in raid, but there's gotta be a limit of how much damage the boss do. And when doing casual content (msq, fate, etc) we will be back to nothing to heal.

That said, I get that not everyone want more dps option. So maybe we can have something like AST card for other healers? Because AST card sytem feels like a minigame to me, especially SB Ast where you have more control of the cards and its effect.

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Originally Posted by Kozh

Maybe I'm the only healer who wants proper DPS rotation lol
I mean, obviously I also want to do more heal in raid, but there's gotta be a limit of how much damage the boss do. And when doing casual content (msq, fate, etc) we will be back to nothing to heal.

That said, I get that not everyone want more dps option. So maybe we can have something like AST card for other healers? Because AST card sytem feels like a minigame to me, especially SB Ast where you have more control of the cards and its effect.

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AST was the buff healer(with time magic to extend them), SCH was the DoT healer, and SGE could have much more to the "damaging healer" idea than Kardia and Pneuma. WHM just getting Aero 3(or a holy equivalent) back would at least be more than it has now. CS3 has already made it abundantly clear that they can't balance for shit even when each role effectively only has two archetypes at most, so I'd rather they just bite the bullet and roll back the homogenization so that the enjoyability of the battle content isn't entirely dependent on savage/ultimate encounter design.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

AST was the buff healer(with time magic to extend them), SCH was the DoT healer, and SGE could have much more to the "damaging healer" idea than Kardia and Pneuma. WHM just getting Aero 3(or a holy equivalent) back would at least be more than it has now. CS3 has already made it abundantly clear that they can't balance for shit even when each role effectively only has two archetypes at most, so I'd rather they just bite the bullet and roll back the homogenization so that the enjoyability of the battle content isn't entirely dependent on savage/ultimate encounter design.

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True. I was really hoping that sage would be a proper DPS healer, but unfortunately right now it's just a worse version of SCH.

what about balance? its a crock of steaming excrement that leads to.... the boring same garbage we have today. people whine when someone out dps's them... who cares if they know their job and rotation so they can do that.. others want to do teh same damage etc. which means they try to balance that, and you cannot balance for skill.

they need to make the jobs fun.. screw balance. if a job is fun, is a far better metric than the mythical "balance"

no game developer has ever balanced a game.. unless there is only a single class.

You first would have to fix the game system. Fix the microlag/unresponsiveness. Scrap OGCDs, nice idea that doesn't work and hugely contributes to the tedious/braindead pos gameplay.

Then you have to fix the roles. Tank = Tank, not a blue color DPS that happens to be the one to get hit. Healer = Healer, not a DPS that sometimes uses a CD heal. And scrap all shared role actions.

After that you can start to fix the jobs. Throw out all the 123s 124s 125s you get the idea. And then sit down for 30 min and feel bad about creating something that not even the shittiest 80s game had. Remove the resource bloat. Throw out the 2m and 1m damage CDs and meta. Throw out all skills that are in a 'logical sequence'. In fact, just delete every skill on every job and start fresh because that's hella lot easier for you. Create skills that stand alone, do have a direct impact and are fun to press. 123 into resource 1 into resource 2 with always the same no brainer OGCD between them is not fun, it's the definition of bad. One unique resource per job is enough, there's no need to have more. Most skills should be based on that resource and player/situational choice.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

AST was the buff healer(with time magic to extend them), SCH was the DoT healer, and SGE could have much more to the "damaging healer" idea than Kardia and Pneuma. WHM just getting Aero 3(or a holy equivalent) back would at least be more than it has now. CS3 has already made it abundantly clear that they can't balance for shit even when each role effectively only has two archetypes at most, so I'd rather they just bite the bullet and roll back the homogenization so that the enjoyability of the battle content isn't entirely dependent on savage/ultimate encounter design.

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Returning WHM to a 2.5s cast Glare/Holy and rebuilding its skills around that would do wonders for it imo. Being a slow-ish caster with higher raw output and mobility challenges should be its thing, not EW/DT AST but worse.

I really don’t get how people believe jobs will become more complex in 8.0, when encounter complexity is already going up. If one increases, the other has to decrease — that's always been SE's design philosophy. Just think about it for a second. You’ve been lied to before. They weren't supposed to dumb down more jobs in Dawntrail.

I had slight trust in a certain somebody's "big change in 8.0" claim. But after what they did to BLM, nah. Now I just play what's left of the game until I can find a replacement game, or run out of patience.

This is a PvE game. You don't need obsessive balancing in a PvE game. Over-balancing makes everything boring down. And honestly, I won't call the current state "balancing" anymore. It's more like giving up job designs entirely so they can have an easier time with all future "adjustment", which would be simply tweaking the same numbers over and over in an Excel sheet.

Either they no longer have any competent team members to work with, or their stale decision-makers thought it a better idea to just put the game on a heart-lung machine and fleece it for as long as they can.

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Originally Posted by Valence

All this sandpaper and for what? Imbalances are still rampant and exacerbated by a drastic reduction of encounter metrics.

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I hate to say I agree with this. Sure the rez casters are close to each other on damage, as are the non rez casters, and the melee close to each other, and the r phys close to each other.

But all the jobs are pretty much stratified by their above role. Literally. With the exception of Ninja.

So, the big fix to encounter design comes from recognizing 3 things.

1, healers are overpowered as all hell (at healing.)

2, tanks are overpowered as all hell (at tanking, specifically mitigations.)

3, binary pass-fails aren't fun. They're attention checks and they get extremely tedious, especially when it's the only way your role does its job.

In order to fix the encounter design, the devs need to claw back power from all healers and tanks. Even from casters, who have way too much movement right now for good caster design. You just can't make interesting heal checks when a healer can solve charybdis into second aoe for free. You can't make interesting tank mechanics when a paladin just using personal mit can hit 450% EHP. Hell, you can't make any tank other than a mitigation tank if you let mitigation values hit 450% EHP. You can't even do fun things like force healers to make actual decisions when spells like medica 1 exist.

Like, seriously, how do you threaten classes this overpowered? Almost every single design problem of FFXIV, including modern day DDR fights, is a direct consequence of healers and tanks being completely overpowered.

Fixing it can be done somewhat simply with a trait at level, say, 102, and a complete healer and tank swap (and adding cast bars back to casters,) could even be done without messing up older fight design. But the simple fact is all the problems of FFXIV game design stems from making classes too overpowered, and instead of depowering them, they double down and push the design ever more into the extreme. More one shots, more auto-deaths, faster mechanics, faster massive aoes. That's not interesting design, it just eventually hits a breakpoint and people stop playing the game.

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

Returning WHM to a 2.5s cast Glare/Holy and rebuilding its skills around that would do wonders for it imo. Being a slow-ish caster with higher raw output and mobility challenges should be its thing, not EW/DT AST but worse.

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Honestly, we can draw a straight line from modern DT caster design all the way back to healers having the innocuous request of wanting to be able to cast oGCDs without clipping their GCDs. If I were a dev, as per my above post, I'd rather remove healer oGCDs and force them to GCD heal, than have the current situation that has resulted in no casters existing anymore.

Casting gameplay is at its best when fights don't have a ton of movement, but you still need to make movement and it matters. Kind of like how, in my opinion, healer gameplay is at its best when the healer has limited resources and relatively weak spells, can't instantly solve problems, and if they want it to be instant, it comes at severe cost. Triage gameplay is amazing for healers, no damaging GCDs necessarily required.

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Originally Posted by Taranok

Honestly, we can draw a straight line from modern DT caster design all the way back to healers having the innocuous request of wanting to be able to cast oGCDs without clipping their GCDs. If I were a dev, as per my above post, I'd rather remove healer oGCDs and force them to GCD heal, than have the current situation that has resulted in no casters existing anymore.

Casting gameplay is at its best when fights don't have a ton of movement, but you still need to make movement and it matters. Kind of like how, in my opinion, healer gameplay is at its best when the healer has limited resources and relatively weak spells, can't instantly solve problems, and if they want it to be instant, it comes at severe cost. Triage gameplay is amazing for healers, no damaging GCDs necessarily required.

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I just don't understand why it needed to be spread to the other healers when it was only AST that remotely needed it because of its card stuff.

And the only reason AST even needed it was because they extended all healer dot durations to 30s from 18s in SB, more or less halving their instant cast count.

And I'd guess the only reason the dots even needed the extension was because of Cleric Stance, which was removed in the same patch anyways.

Mate, they're not even keeping older content balanced now with these shit jobs. What makes you think keeping older content balanced should be a consideration for the future when it isn't at this point in time?

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

The problem is that everyone has a different idea of design and balance for "their" job, healers being the penultimate example given the constant back and forth between those who want more healing and those who want more DPS, and that's just discourse within a single role.

Ask five different MCH mains what they want done with MCH and you'll get five different answers (I know I sure as hell don't want it to be a buff bot), same with virtually every other job where if you put it to vote, you're not likely to get an unanimous outcome on how they want the job to play. And even if you DO get something that takes the majority of votes, it'll likely just result in fewer people playing the job anyway because of all the disappointed people who didn't want it to be changed that way (see MNK and BLM this expansion alone, not that anyone asked for the changes by the way), while the number of new people picking it up will continue to be an unknown toss-up. (Did making tanks nigh-immortal really up the queue times anywhere?)

Even the whole "oh just make one job within a role easy and make the others complex" falls flat immediately because no one wants "their" job to be the derpy one. Again, look at healers, and you'll find a lot of WHM mains that DON'T want to be the glue-eater and want the buck passed to one of the others, and sure enough you won't find any takers among SCH, AST, or SGE either.

I don't rightly know a solution to any of it and I'm not paid to find one regardless, and the only options seems to be for us to either continue dancing to Square-Enix's tune (quite literally given the "DDR" nature of encounters and rigidness of jobs), or find another MMO because they seem set in their ways even all these expansions later, and jobs are still being molded around said encounter design with BLM being the latest example. (With MCH probably not far behind as they inevitably make it like the rest of the physical range jobs.)

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I agree with the whole conundrum overall, but what do you mean MCH not far behind? MCH has already gone through the same chopping block. It was one of the first to eat it alongside DRK, actually.
Or maybe we're gone full circle already and what is a braindead and uninteresting reworked design has actually become enlightened in comparison to the newest additions?

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

My knowledge of MCH prior to late-Endwalker is limited as I didn't play before then, I just know there was something about ammo and giving away TP and uh... turrets were *almost* like SMN/SCH pets I think?

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MCH used be a priority-based job, like old HW Summoner. That's the simplest way to explain it.

Right now, I think a lot of players literally cannot envision job design that isn't [Opener/2-min] -> [builder-spender].

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

The terrible irony is that even as some people complain about homogenization of some roles, they're willing to accept it happening to others, because Square-Enix has created a situation where NOT conforming gets you left out in the cold. BLM was just "fortunate" that Square-Enix didn't leave them to languish for very long, and that's probably because of Yoshi-P bias.

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This community has absolutely zero solidarity. There's a reason I tell people to just quit the game, because the community itself is one of the biggest problems. The DPS players all made fun of healers back in ShB, back when they were complaining. It's honestly pathetic to witness the infighting. Players tearing at each other's necks when they all have their own grievances at the game. It's like the prison experiments where the prisoners end up fighting each other and not the prison guard.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

but will probably be forced to wear another's skin entirely, in this case turning into BRD/DNC with a gun.

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I'd take it to be honest. At least it would be closer to what it used to be on its original premise.