PLD, WAR, & DRK balancing ideas

[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.