BLU for Duty Finder and Raids! Show your support!

[Dualgunner]

FFXIV's jobs are designed with solo play in mind, group play being an afterthought. FFXIV's job are mostly homogenized, where in FFXI two classes had very different purposes and usages. That's 2 different design.

Considering that ffxiv jobs are balanced around endgame raiding which is not only primarily but *solely* team based content, I'll have to disagree.

Conversely if they were balanced with solo play in mind, why is only one job able to reach the end of solo deep dungeon? If they were designed for solo play, wouldn't there be more than one able to place in solo content?

[Stanelis]

Considering that ffxiv jobs are balanced around endgame raiding which is not only primarily but *solely* team based content, I'll have to disagree.

Conversely if they were balanced with solo play in mind, why is only one job able to reach the end of solo deep dungeon? If they were designed for solo play, wouldn't there be more than one able to place in solo content?

Jobs in FFXIV both tank, DPS and heal themselves to some extent while playing solo. That's something very different from FFXI (in which most jobs couldn't solo). As for the deep dungeons, considering it is a DPS check while requiring you to survive, it is only natural that only a few classes can complete the content solo (namely the one that can DPS the most while healing themselves the most and mitigating the most damage). Furthermore, aren't tanks and healers in FFXIv supposed to DPS in endgame ? That simply wasn't the case in FFXI.

If you take one player in any of FFXIV's job and take a look at what they can do, you d find that you would actually be needing 6 players in FFXI with different jobs (and relevant jobs combination) to do the same thing. That's what I meant by talking about "designed with group play in mind" : you cannot do anything relevant solo and aren't complete outside a group. In FFXIV, even as a tank you can deal a reasonable amount of damage and heal yourself. In FFXIV, while there is group balance, you're only talking about optimization here, but mostly you ll be dealing your damage solo, in a group. That's also why SE's need to implement such a large amount of mechanics to induce difficulty in FFXIV : the bosses would be very boring without (that's what happened in WOTLK, in wow, when blizzard invented this sort of design in 3.0, Naxxramas became a joke and everybody cleared the raid in a few weeks).

I'm talking about the design of the battle system here, if you d compare FFXI's class and battle system design and FFXIV's one, you d find them to be very different. If you take two different caster in FFXI, you d find them to be very different at their core, while in FFXIv two caster DPS (like SMN, BLM and RDM) basically only DPS and have a small amount of utility. Where in FFXI the utility the classes had access to made them very different (hence, they had different purposes), and way beyond a simple matter of DPS.

As an example, the main point of SMN in FFXI's endgame was to provide enmity free damage on HNM. Where BLM's main goal was to burn adds quickly with fellow BLM, to provide crowd control and to stun the bosses. In FFXIV, both BLM and SMN goal is to deal damage, regardless of the encounter. If we go back to the poor DRG in FFXI, his issue wasn't that it wasn't balanced (because his DPS was on par with other jobs), it was because it didn't bring anything to the group beside his DPS (even though DRG were used in melee groups in FFXI, but these weren't very common by design in endgame because they required a lot of endgame gear to be functional).

That's also why the blu could easily be balanced in FFXIV : if you were to analyze each skill and spell in FFXIV you d find you can split them into 3 categories : healing, damage, and mitigation. If you take this into account you ll notice there are way less possible effects and way to interact with the mobs that you d think. A damaging weapon skill is a damaging weapon skill, no matter what its skin is : number aside, it is the same effect (damage, and possibly healing or mitigation depending on added effects on said WS).