FFXIV and Party Setup.

[Arupopo]

There was something rewarding about fitting your character to fill a specific role in FFXI. The ability to change some gear or re-arrange your rotation to fit a different niche within a party to get things done. But, seeing as FFXIV went down the 'dungeon roulette' way we are stuck with 1 Tank 1 Healer and 2 DPS. Where are the support classes? In every MMO I play, support is my go to. Corsair, Bard and Blue Mage from FFXI were so involved that everyone party I was in I would need to re-arrange who/when I had to buff the team.

Why are there no support classes? It seems rigid and non-flexible on a party makeup and individuality.

Increase the difficulty of all monsters/bosses by X amount and add in a 5th slot for a support role? Ofcourse at the moment I play a healer instead and the Astrologian does look like it could be the job i've been looking for. Just wondering what other people think about a lack of a support class and going for a 4 party standard model instead of 5 or 6.

[Ultear_Milkovich]

in FFXI.

This is another game.

[Arupopo]

This is another game.

Sure is. Just wondering if anyone else liked to play Support classes and not an exact DPS/Healer/Tank Role.

But thanks for your contribution.

[Havenae]

This is another game.

So it is!

Does that then mean that we can't find ways to improve it? To include play styles that deviate from the narrow WoW-Mentality of eat numbers, erase numbers or write numbers? Would that be okay?

Anyway, I personally would like to see more variety. I'd like to see support classes/jobs play more of a role in this game. But I'd also like to see current classes/jobs be opened up to not only fill one niche of the party makeup.


MMOs used to do a good job of this, it wasnt just FFXI that did it. There used to be need for CC (crowd control), a need for maintaining buffs or having buff/debuff classes that their sole job was to basically do that to enhance the party so the damager could do more damage so the tanks could take more damage so the healers could heal better or heal more. Then WoW happened and all the strategy, cooperation and synergy kind of fell away over time in favor of simple minded nuke fests, or nuke until something happens then click on something then nuke more. And so now many players think this is the only option.

This game does a little better job than that in most cases but it could still be improved. I'd like to see Summoners converted to more a support role or a higher versatility role. I'd like to see Bard split from Archer and give it more of an importance as it was in FFXI (yeah I know different game, so lets work backwards on things that were good) where it was one of those jobs that if you could get it in your party, then you better.

[Omegakiyohime]

I would only like to see the implementation of a support role, if and only if, it can be interchangeable with another DPS. Support is yet another specialize task (alongside Tank and Healer) that does not attract a ton of players and as such, just like it did in XI, would increase queue times dramatically. I'm not sure they could balance it to the point where a DPS and a Support could be interchangeable without reworking most of the other classes/jobs as well. They were nice in XI, but waiting for hours for one to log on was hell.

[Lemuria]

I've been saying we need more diversity for months. The problem is that the mechanics of the game don't really support, well, supporting roles. If you made a job which was excellent at support, something would have to give. Whether that's their overall DPS, such as when Bard casts their songs, or survivability, you need to have some compromise or risk unbalancing them.

And compromise is one this game doesn't understand. Since so much of the game is intended to be beaten solo, too much sacrifice will make content unintentionally difficult to complete for those classes or jobs. You only need look at endgame equipment to understand that this game does its best to maintain the status-quo at all times. Each upgrade indistinguishable from the last aside from a mild boost to the same stats.

I'd love some more options myself, but I don't see it fitting in with the current game model. They'd have to give the game a major facelift to work it in, and I'm not convinced it wouldn't cause more problems than it would solve.

[Risvertasashi]

Where are the support classes?

Have you done much of endgame?

Everything is designed very... efficiently. From abilities to encounters themselves. Everything has its specific place. This sort of system has its own elegance but, in short, there's no room for something like "support" classes.

To elaborate slightly... games like EQ, FFXI, and similar MMOs... they're more like a battle sandbox. Here is world. Here are various enemies, some of them very tough. Here are the abilities you can choose from. Figure out a way to beat it.

Not so with modern era MMOs. There is a prescribed way to defeat the MMO's encounters. Use X and Y abilities at Z time to handle mechanic A. Do something else to handle mechanic B, and C, and so on. All the while, meet this minimum DPS threshold and dodge telegraphs. All carefully balanced. Don't virus and shield that tankbuster and the tank dies. Use a nonoptimal rotation, don't make the DPS check and the party wipes. And so on.

No room for dedicated support classes here, see?

The closest we get are support healers, like SCH and perhaps the coming Astrologian. Machinist sounds like it will be relatively support heavy... another BRD if you will, but still a DPS before anything else. But that just means their spend their off time DPSing. And DPS with a few abilities here and there. MNK's dragon kick, chant, various BRD things, and so on.

[kyuven]

Support classes create a rather troubling dynamic: They tend to be terrible at soloing compared to other classes.
DPS classes blast everything to kingdom come before they take too much damage.
Tanks just sit there and take hits while doling out some damage til everything dies.
Healers are able to basically do what tanks do in a more active means.
But support classes? They can't deal damage like the DPS classes, can't take hits like the tank, and can't restore their own health like the healers.
But what does this mean?
Easy.
It means they're less popular than even the tanks.
Now you have to build encounters around them.
And have slots for them in the queues.
So you have options:
1) Design encounters with Support in mind as a role, and deal with player complaints of the queues being too long (not to mention taking longer since the Support will do less damage)
2) Design encounters to not take them into account and allow it to be flexible, which means the encounters are now much more dull to take into account that groups may not always have a support.

So rather than building support classes, our DPS classes have support options.
Remember: This is not FFXI. And after playing it quite a bit recently, I'm glad for that.

[Ultear_Milkovich]

if you take any EX trial or coil fight it will be difficult to insert a support job inside. Esp. before the echo nerfs. Competitive content really needs the trinity to cut it. Same with 4 man dungeons will you replace the tank, the healer or go with a solo dps?

And in PVP well... lol

Could work with 24 man "raids" but outside of this i dont see any use for a support job. I mean a real support with pretty much no dps, not like the bard.

[JimboTCB]

Rift had "support" as a dedicated party role, and it was pretty great. Especially as nobody liked doing it so you basically got to play as DPS but with much smaller queue times Depending on what particular fights required you could focus on buff/debuffs, AOE healing or damage, and if you built your character right you could still put out pretty good DPS while performing your support role, and soloing was never much of a problem. The main problem was that in terms of buffs/debuffs, their usefulness scaled based on party size, so in small groups it was debatable whether it was a benefit, but they were pretty much essential in full raid content - however you never really needed more than one because all their effects were raid-wide.

However, it kind of needs things to be balanced around from the beginning, not just bolted on later. The entire party balance in FFXIV is designed around groups of 4 or multiples thereof, with a 2:1:1 mix of DPS:heals:tanks. You can't just drop a DPS slot and turn it into support without needing to rebalance pretty much every encounter to account for lower group DPS, and conversely you can't increase party sizes to 5 to allow for a support role without accounting for higher DPS.