PLD, WAR, & DRK balancing ideas

[Reynhart]

My point is clear enough.

Your point is. Chronos' tendency to compare the "meta" of FFXIV to other meta might need a bit of rhetorics.

And on that note...

Although I think you are going to be hard pressed to find any meta that doesnt favor one or more things over others - that is kind of what is implied by a meta.

What is favored in rock-paper-scissors ?

[Lambdafish]

What is favored in rock-paper-scissors ?

This is a really bad example, because rock-paper-scissors is objectively and numerically equal on all sides, each beat one and is beaten by one, that is the rules. You cannot judge jobs in the game the same way because there is no numerical weighting to how much better something is. We know that SCH is better than WHM because SCH has a pet, but how much better is SCH because of this and what would need to be added to make WHM exactly as good? You are technically both right, but Chronons is more right in that it is very very hard, if not impossible for the devs to design content in a way that is both interesting and follows an extremely tight meta that won't be broken by the players, and that is something that is extremely limiting from a design perspective.

Technically all the tanks are weighted equally because PLD has better mitigation and worse damage, WAR has better damage and worse mitigation, and DRK is 50/50, but this is highly variable because damage is held in higher regard, and mitigation itself is variable from fight to fight (then there is things like difficulty to play, and the list goes on...).

[Reynhart]

This is a really bad example, because rock-paper-scissors is objectively and numerically equal on all sides, each beat one and is beaten by one, that is the rules.

You can have plenty of other examples. Which side is favored in chess ? Which character is the absolute strongest in Street Fighter ? Which hero is the bestin LoL ?

You are technically both right, but Chronons is more right in that it is very very hard, if not impossible for the devs to design content in a way that is both interesting and follows an extremely tight meta that won't be broken by the players, and that is something that is extremely limiting from a design perspective.

It's not that hard. From a tank PoV, content is designed with only one constraint : The lowest mitigation job can survive. All the rest, is not tied to the content, but the job themselves. And you can easily create synergies between jobs so that they'll offer benefits (On DPS, because it's the universal goal) so close that it wouldn't matter in the end.
The main problem is that the dev team took a flawed approach from the very beginning. Designing PLD as the tank who...well, tanks, is obviously flawed. Designing PLD as an easy job is also a flaw, because it should provide rewards for players who really achieve mastery on it.

People state that the meta changed when HW was released, but it's wrong. The only things that kept PLD into party in 2.x was the absence of a third tank and the design choice that "stacking the same job is a bad idea". If the LB would charge the same and if you could stack the slashing debuff multiple times, PLD would have been out since 2.1.

In fact, looking back at 2.0, It kinda make sense...PLD was the tank who tanks because WAR was just horrible as a full time MT...then people complained (With good reason) that they wanted to MT as a WAR. I wonder where were those who claim that "It's the game's meta, deal with it and pick a new job" back then ?

[Chronons]

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Ok, ok, ok... I will do my best to clarify. Your premise is, "There shouldn't be mechanically easier but weaker jobs, only easier content". My premise is there should be more mechanically easier jobs and having a Meta develop as a result is ok. Your supporting reasoning is the pursuit of "balance". My supporting reasoning is "equity". I made the assertion that if you arbitrarily raised the DPS of PLD (or any other "low skill" job) you are just flipping the paradigm. Meaning that jobs that require more skill to play and also dont offer extra dps now, will fall out of use in favor of the easier low skilled jobs in competitive play. My working definition of competitive play would be early savage progression (before gear makes it easier ie, world clears) and speed runs/damage runs (FFlogs, etc.) These are the people that develop the Meta that trickles down to the rest of the community not, weekly tome runners, statics 3 months post patch, or primal farms.

Also, im not going to quibble with you over the definition of what a Meta is or isn't. What we are really debating is game design not semantics.

snip

You said that in your opinion, dont let me misrepresent you, the more complex classes doing more DPS shouldn't continue as that forces competitive players into a meta and that is a bad thing. My posit to you was if you could name for me any competitive game that does not have a meta, which you conceded that you could not. That means two possible things; Either every competitive game that you or I can think of is doing something bad, or that metas are a natural development of competitive games and arent in fact bad. Now, I will do my best to answer your direct question below.

You are right that a more difficult to play job should have more advantages to it, that is how pros and cons are weighed, but this does not fix any of the issues. The solution then is to make PLD more challenging to play, to give it more to do, and some actual identity to its gameplay. Then it can be equal to WAR in its advantages, wouldn't you agree?

This guy gets its. My issue as stated is with an arbitrary increase in DPS in a mechanically simpler class like PLD. I do agree with you in principle. If you made PLD more difficult to play and increased its DPS, or made it more defensive I would agree that it would be a "balanced" change. In practice however, I disagree that changing PLD is a good idea at all. That is because FFXIV does not only have a competitive player base. There needs to be high accessibility mechanically simpler jobs for low skill players. Those players exist, and vastly outnumber the competitive crowd. Making all the jobs equal in difficulty does one of two things: it isolates low skill players by not giving them the tools they need to grow or it waters down the competitive scene. SE's remedy for this is making the more complex jobs do more damage. That means that no job will ever be unfit for any content they create, only that the harder jobs to play will clear them a little bit faster. It is for that reason, I think, it is important for the game to do its best to have both. PLD is perfectly fine in any content that will ever come out in the game, but it is ok that it does less DPS than DRK. These are jobs that are shared by weekend couch warriors as well as world progression players.

TLDR: There needs to be easy jobs and hard jobs for the spectrum of FFXIV players. The only way to not make jobs obsolete ( if its hard with no benefits - noobs cant play it, veterans dont want to) is to reward the harder jobs in some way.

-Edit-
Reynhart- White, depends on the game, google LoL tier lists

[Reynhart]

My supporting reasoning is "equity".

What do you mean by equity ?

White

No, but it's tricky

depends on the game

In most SF game, even the top-tier character usually have a disadvantageous match-up, and then you have players who specifically master that character for when they face the top-tier. (On a sidenote, that's a meta choice)

google LoL tier lists

Same as SF, no champion is better than all the others on every situation

And the last two points are the most important. In FFXIV there is no content where bringing a PLD is more effective than bringing a WAR (If your other tank is a DRK) or a DRK (If your other tank is a WAR).

Look at the most commonly banned champions and you will see that there is in fact an imbalance

There is a ban when a champion is clearly better than all others in most situation. Considering that a party without a WAR is always handicaped compared to a party with a WAR...

LoL also has so many champions that a meta is more difficult to form as the choices make for extremely varied setups.

We have 14 jobs, soon 16 or 17, twelve 8-man instances, three 24-man instances, and 7 Extreme trials, yet none of them managed to create a situation where not having a WAR is a clear benefit...this is not "difficult design", it's "we don't care"...

[Chronons]

I have played PLD since 2.0 launch and in 3.0 I almost quit the job because of a reputation is had gained from its imbalance. I was literally being rejected from PFs in favour of DRKs because of how much better DRKs were in raiding and ex primals, and it was a very demoralising feeling. This is not how the game is supposed to work, and the devs should be working to make party composition MORE accessible, not more limiting, and while they have done an ok patch up job with PLD over the course of the expansion (it is far better than it was now), the core of the job still needs love.

You weren't being rejected from PFs because SE made content impossible to do as PLD though, it was from the community's incessant need to adhere to a meta that is utterly not required for 99% of play. Its just a lose/lose for SE. People who play PLD because its the only tank they can manage need it to stay the way it is, great PLDs want it to be revamped so they can push it like other jobs - who do they cater to? Unfortunately most people who play dont even know what rotations look like and are content to stay that way. SE will likely, and from a business perspective unfortunately probably should, cater to them.

snip

lol I'm glad those are what you took from what I said. I really shouldn't have expected much else.

[Reynhart]

lol I'm glad those are what you took from what I said. I really shouldn't have expected much else.

"I'll quote you without even typing what I quote and make a purposedly vague sentence so that I don't have to develop my answer".
Yeah, sure...

You weren't being rejected from PFs because SE made content impossible to do as PLD though

Who said anything about "content impossible to do" ?

SE will likely, and from a business perspective unfortunately probably should, cater to them.

Content that require perfect mastery like Savage are already not catered to those people.

I'll leave you to your unexplained "equity"...

[DestroyerOfLargePlanets]

You said that in your opinion, dont let me misrepresent you, the more complex classes doing more DPS shouldn't continue as that forces competitive players into a meta and that is a bad thing. My posit to you was if you could name for me any competitive game that does not have a meta, which you conceded that you could not. That means two possible things; Either every competitive game that you or I can think of is doing something bad, or that metas are a natural development of competitive games and arent in fact bad.

IMO it's more like a combination of the two: metas are a natural development of competitive games and it's always a bad thing. It's bad, but unfortunately it's unavoidable. What can be done to combat that, however -- and we can see this in League of Legends for example -- are constant balancing tweaks to the various playable characters. These balancing tweaks aim to conserve a level playing field. But in any case, it's no use pursuing that train of thought; I think your next paragraph is much more interesting and I'd like to shift focus there.

My issue as stated is with an arbitrary increase in DPS in a mechanically simpler class like PLD.

I have an issue with that as well, but for different reasons which are irrelevant at this point. I mentioned it in my first comment on this thread iirc.

In practice however, I disagree that changing PLD is a good idea at all. That is because FFXIV does not only have a competitive player base. There needs to be high accessibility mechanically simpler jobs for low skill players. Those players exist, and vastly outnumber the competitive crowd. Making all the jobs equal in difficulty does one of two things: it isolates low skill players by not giving them the tools they need to grow or it waters down the competitive scene.

I get what you mean. SE needs to cater to both the competitive and the casual players so there appears to be a tradeoff when adjusting the difficulties of the tank classes. The question is: how do we adjust the difficulty of all tank classes so that they are ALL accessible and playable by low-skill players while also providing challenge to competitive players who want to push the limits of their class/job? How do we achieve this while also avoiding limiting player choice by making one tank class/job more effective than another tank class/job? The ideal situation, in other words, is to have all the 3 tank classes at equal difficulty and equal damage (personal dps or raidwide dps contribution) but to have the difficulty of these classes land in the perfect "goldilocks" zone which satisfies the level of play of both casual and competitive players.

I can think of a multi-step process that may alleviate some of these problems:
Step 1: Increase the difficulty and damage output of PLD. (Not its personal damage, but allow it to increase raidwide DPS via support buffs or support mechanics). At this point, PLD, WAR, and DRK will all be above the skill level of most casual players. They will effectively be isolated/"locked out" of these classes because they're simply too hard for them to play. Step 2 will address this issue.
Step 2: Make rotations of all classes/jobs more straightforward. No more trying to figure out if saving Infuriate and Internal Release for your Berserk window is a DPS loss or gain (hold it, obviously xD). If Infuriate and IR had the same CD as Berserk, than it would be much more straightforward. Basically, if you can create a simple flowchart of the rotation of a job/class without having to write down a bunch of crap in asterisks then that's a good start.
Step 3: Create level 60 tutorials for each job detailing the proper rotations. (If SE has the resources, then this would further cater to the low-skill players while having no detrimental effects to the competitive scene).
Step 4: Make ridiculously hard fights that require the competitive players to rearrange their rotations in order to optimize damage output in the fight.

SE's plans for 4.0 rotations actually reflects this. I hear they're going to make rotations easier and more straightforward. Moreover, I hear that the next raid will have a difficulty level that's twice as difficult as the savage tier right now! I'm a competitive player, and even if they do make rotations easier, I'll be happy so long as I can still push my job to its maximum potential in such a difficult fight.

[Chronons]

snip

Thank you. Genuinely. This is an exquisite example of an argument based in logic and reasoning. It also shows that you fully understand the counterpoint I was positing.

I would agree with your multi-step approach. It provides the much needed context that others seem to neglect. I think you have effectively tried to address the isolation affect of complicating classes. I also think that giving PLD, or all the tanks for that matter, different but equal contributions to DPS is generally good. The crux of this, I think, will be SE's ability to effectively balance. Low skill players will always be a limit to how interesting/complex they can make the jobs. There are plenty of players who are lvl 60 that don't have a clue what rotations, BiS, or cooldown management mean. And they generally will outnumber those of us who do. Now, will SE be able to make the jobs simple enough for new players, while also keeping them all equally desirable for competitive play? I'm not sure, but perhaps. My pointing to other games always having a meta is my suggesting that it is very, very difficult. Namely because most games have the same issue, catering to low and high skill players.

[Sarcatica]

Now, will SE be able to make the jobs simple enough for new players, while also keeping them all equally desirable for competitive play? I'm not sure, but perhaps. My pointing to other games always having a meta is my suggesting that it is very, very difficult. Namely because most games have the same issue, catering to low and high skill players.

In the first place, it is a very hard task for MMOs to diversify raid picks. Unlike games with pvp, MMOs are constrained by how the raids interact with the players, sooner or later people will find the best comp, route etc. Compare to LoL, DotA2, CSGO, SC2 etc where opportunity is not presented the same way mainly because the opponents are human as well which means that diversifying raid picks on MMOs needs more variables to play against, all bosses so far have the same patterns with rngs. The root of the problem comes from the design itself where tactics on how you handle mechanics don't change, or rarely differ. As long as the formula stays, diversity on picks remain stale at the top competition.