"A system that rewards effort and innovation" can't be buzzwords for imbalance-get

[Dragon]

I would implement regimens and strategies that gain exponential momentum based on the different classes in it, and I would make them so beneficial that teams that whore out jobs for imbalance have a difficult time keeping up. Thus, a party with only two or three kinds of classes or jobs in it is always inferior to a party with 6 classes or jobs in it. People flock to imbalance too easily. The solution is to OP balance.

Or have a status effect, where if your party is balanced, you get enhancements like comrade in arms. "Strength in Diversity"--TP regain? Attack and potency boost? Regimen output+30%?

The solution is to overpower balance. Reward diversity. Don't just sit there and develop challenge that benefits the same stunners, sleepers, spike damagers, and ranged attackers as always.

But I'm not in the business of saying how it should be done. I only care about what needs done. I don't care how it's done honestly. You cannot put hackneyed challenge checks into this game, or it'll instantly become and archer and thaumafest.

Honestly my solution to archer is to give meleers multishot. Archers have no business avoiding AoE while being the kings of spike and DPS.

Thaumaturge...yeah it's just a matter of fiddling with their abilities. I like the idea of a magical tank, but if they're the magical tank...they'd best be paying for that with a big fat damage reduction like gladiator does.

They've already proven they can kick the player base's habit of inviting as few people as you can, to the point where parties actively want more people as opposed to wanting as few as possible. They've already designed content where strangers who NM hunt are better off pairing up and helping each other out rather than countercamping.

They can create a system where job diversity is celebrated, not intentionally avoided because it just dilutes good jobs with bad ones.

At first I didn't know what to think about you, but now I think I might like you even though I slightly disagree in the following....

Then it is the SITUATIONS that need changed.

Stop making every boss go berserk at 20% life and start spamming AoEs and power attacks. That only plays to stacking archers that can spike it down at the end and mages who don't get hit. It plays against meleers who are at that point simply sitting ducks.

I think instead of that, maybe SE should make rage give said NM a boost to range attack AND AoE-range to the point that ranged classes would be hit by an AoE if they want to stick in range that would also prevent them from simply getting out of 'range' to avoid an AoE (like let's say a ranged attack is 20m, well the AoE range normally would be 15m, but then upon Rage, it'd be boosted to 40m).

Stop relying on "stun" innovations to avoid death unless all the jobs have stun.

Definitely!

Stop making fights more challenging by simply adding more numbers of enemies. That plays to mages and spike damagers who can immediately take enemies out of the picture. Divine might, what did you do? You Chi blasted or manabursted something to win that, by the demographic none of you probably fought that fight toe to toe with them. You did SOMETHING to avoid the challenge, and I guarantee the dragoon had nothing to do with it.

OR make those adds AoE-resistant as well?

If you're going to design fights that cater to certain jobs, you can't keep designing the same stupid mechanics that keep playing to the same jobs. If you can't design a fight where you can make a dragoon as wanted as a black mage, your game needs balancing work. Your dragoon needs help.

Amen.

Things like that would be great, but then you have the issue of being forced to have a certain job type. What if nobody from your LS has levelled that job, or there's nobody free online from one of those jobs? It's the same issue that we had in XI where we couldn't even level unless we had a fairly specific setup for a party.

Then your linkshell has a problem. Even the most social linkshells have at least a job or two from each major archetype.