PLD, WAR, & DRK balancing ideas

[Sarcatica]

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?

I think I have mentioned this before and I do agree that PLD needs to be harder and more rewarding to play. GB RA RA is a staple for PLD and just a little bit of twists depending on extreme cases, WAR/DRK has to decide if they need Delirium/Path or WAR needing to prep Eye for next phase or adds etc. There are more decision making for DRK and WAR, not so much for PLD.

[Lambdafish]

I think I have mentioned this before and I do agree that PLD needs to be harder and more rewarding to play. GB RA RA is a staple for PLD and just a little bit of twists depending on extreme cases, WAR/DRK has to decide if they need Delirium/Path or WAR needing to prep Eye for next phase or adds etc. There are more decision making for DRK and WAR, not so much for PLD.

Its even more than that, WAR has a different skillset depending on stance and needs to manage wrath stacks to gain access to powerful abilities, and DRK has to decide whether to have darkside up or down, and gains new skills based on that, and has the whole MP micromanagement side of dark arts that add depth to the job. PLD goes into sword oath and.... does more damage, takes more damage, and generates less enmity, that is it.

[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.

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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

[Sarcatica]

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...).

The bad news is PLD objectively has the same amount of mitigation as DRK outside of Hallowed Ground (and even then its 7min CD), DRK performs better in that sense because of how flexible DM is at 60sec cooldown. If you calculate the raw mitigation for Skin+Wall+DM vs. Rampart+Sentinel (especially useful for fast kills on a12s while still being in DPS stance), they are more or less the same because of diminishing returns. At 60secs though, DM starts seeing more play because of how more frequently it is up. WAR has the most defensive CDs with high uptime (mostly Inner Beast) though obviously not optimal, hence tank swaps always occurs to spread burden with the most efficiency. DRK only weaker in Wall, -10% vs Sentinel, not too bad. Overall PLD claimed to have best mitigation is arguable. If we are just seeing it on trying to mitigate the most damage, Inner Beast kills everything with the -20% dmg and huge heals that can be used back to back with Infuriate BUT that's just seeing from 1 side of the kits and hence not accurately assessed in the highest level of play.

[Lambdafish]

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Yeah, this is the unfortunate part, what I should have said is that this is how the tanks are weighted "in theory", in actuality PLD gets a bad deal in every way, and I feel that SE needs to get off the tanky tank train and give PLD something else more meaningful to do (like support).

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

This is actually the completely wrong way to go about it. SE has already said that they are lowering the difficulty ceiling on ALL jobs, meaning that they will all be playable by players with a lower skill level. At that point, having PLD be the simple but strictly worse job is a matter of gross, unnecessary imbalance, which is the problem we have right now. The other issue is the intermingling between the casual and competitive crowd, and that class reputation goes a long way.

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.

Oh and offhand, relevant to the discussion but not furthering it, I don't believe that PLD should have as much DPS as WAR, far from it, however PLD does need something that defines it as useful to the party beyond mitigation. Clemency and cover were terrible executions at this, leaving highly situational skills that did not equate to the extra damage, though if PLD had (wild throwaway example, not meant to be good or bad) an equivilent to bard songs, that could buff party members, debuff enemies, heal, anything like that, they might be taken more in parties. Though yes, AOE damage is a must.

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 ?

Chess literally has the same pieces on each side, it is symmetrical and obviously equal. I haven't played street fighter so can't comment. And in one way or another, there are heroes in LoL that are considered more powerful and have built a reputation, I haven't played it recently but I remember Darius and tryndamere were always some of the more powerful champions (though that could be completely different now). Look at the most commonly banned champions and you will see that there is in fact an imbalance, one that is fine due to the banning phase and the fact that the imbalance isn't so great to upset play (i.e. they aren't good at everything, just a bit harder to deal with for most people), but an imbalance nonetheless. LoL also has so many champions that a meta is more difficult to form as the choices make for extremely varied setups.

[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.

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