Dear Naoki Yoshida and the Battle Development Team,

[Dzian]

It's getting to the stage where they are seemingly running out of fresh ideas or the time to actually balance and implement them.

I don't think it's a case of running out of ideas. I believe it's more a case of they've dumbed down and simplified so many things that they find themselves backed into a corner and have no room to expand or grow all those cool ideas simply wouldn't work because of how much they've already cut out and over simplified everything.

Every boss encounter in this game is essentially just a striking dummy with some heavily scripted dodge mechanics thrown in. Highly predictable and as such incredibly easy to handle. Bosses never adapt or react to what a party does they just continue to follow that exact same script every time.

Tanking has been trivialized to the point where it's press a cooldown every 45-60 seconds and that's it you've done your job... The reason why tanks focus so much on DPS is because what else are they going to do for the next 45 seconds??
Healing is basically the same. except in stead of pressing a cool down it's tossing a heal every 45-60 seconds.. and then they have nothing to do the rest of the time but dps...

DPS has been so heavily trivialized that is pretty much a preset rotation that never changes from one encounter to the next, hell if it wasn't for the inability to queue actions. people would quite easily macro there entire rotation and that macro would work in every fight...

What can the devs possibly do to expand this system and make it grow? Without some major changes not very much at all because they've backed them selves into a corner by dumbing everything down to a point where they cant possibly expand.

You could for example bring some classic FF status ailments into the picture. Slow paralyze, Blind, Oil. Confuse. and give jobs other areas to focus on other than dps..
However in the current state of the combat system that just wouldn't work. If a whm threw a paralysis on a boss and it procced on that bosses tank buster or next raid wide hit. you would quite literally break the entire fight because of it's highly scripted and predictable nature..

however if you were to randomize encounters you'd have room to incorporate these elements without breaking them. as paralyzing a tank buster would help but given that another one could technically come at any moment it wouldn't completely negate the risk of that damage. the same could be true of blind. if a big hit actually missed...

what you'd do here is create alternative ways in which players could interact with the battle and contribute to there party without arbitrarily defaulting to dps... if you randomized the encounters you'd also likely find healers healing more frequently because it wouldn't just be a case of 1 lustrate in 30 seconds is all I'm going to need...

Another option could be to rework positional bonuses so that they actually did something interesting and fun, Attack from the rear and break a bosses tail thus preventing him from using massive tail swipe cleaves, Or attack from a flank and you might wound a leg preventing dash mechanics from happening, Or break a weapon the boss is holding preventing them from shooting ranged attacks at people stood over there. Basically having fights that require different approaches and change according to your actions instead of just going into boss E and using the exact same rotation you just used in bosses A, B, C and D... but again this would require moving away from the tightly scripted and highly predictable encounters they've backed themselves into a corner with..

There's also jobs. and they pretty much are homogenized within there roles. i know some folks think the term is thrown around to much but the reality is they are all highly homogenized.

While it is true for example that a smn and blm may play slightly differently and both again play differently to a red mage. They are still homogenized classes. Each of them brings the same strengths and weaknesses to a party. its not as if a blm is weak at single target damage but excels at aoe and crowd control. where as smn may be weak at aoe, pretty good at crowd control while there egi rips single targets to shreds. they all have the same strengths and weaknesses to within a very small margin...

melee is the same you might expect a monk to excel at one on one but be lacking in aoe. where a dragoon may not be quite so strong or fast but with his longer range polearm might actually be able to crack several skulls at once,

same goes with tanks where they all share the same strengths and weakness again and again with healers...

every job is basically a jack of all trades master of none. and that pretty much makes them all homogenized because they all share the same strengths and weaknesses..

and thats another reason why they're backed into a corner and have no room to diversify or be creative..

look at tanks in 4.0 backed into the corner of being dps jobs the devs tried to get out of that corner said hey guys defense matters took away strength and tried to entice players with tenacity. and players just laughed at them and kept using 270 accessories pushing tanks right back into that corner..

[EriShvakh]

This balance is the difference between over healing and someone being dead.
This won't change and so I believe it won't really influence the amount of users who love to heal.

It's really hard to destroy the core of healing, without outright removing healing itself. The problem is, when you learn how to keep this balance, you need something more to entertain you between heals. For SCH and AST it was their unique kits. Now it's going to be netflix.

you never know you might like it but instead come here try to make devs change mind when release is already coming soon and expansion is done.

not going to happen, if they notice bad changes they'll deal with it on their own.

I don't really need to play content to see that going from cards with unique utility to being dmg bot is a downgrade for the AST. (I am talking about semi-casual content here. I understand that in prog AST always was a dmg bot)

[Renato]

People need to chill. Everything that was revealed in the media tour laid the foundation for the changes but they're subject to change in the final release. Play the game first at the end of the month before freaking out.

[JohnSpawnVFX]

People need to chill. Everything that was revealed in the media tour laid the foundation for the changes but they're subject to change in the final release. Play the game first at the end of the month before freaking out.

Changing potencies and tweaking effects of some skills, yes. They aren't going to suddenly give extra DPS spells to healers or scrap the new card system between media tour and launch.

[Daralii]

People need to chill. Everything that was revealed in the media tour laid the foundation for the changes but they're subject to change in the final release. Play the game first at the end of the month before freaking out.

There aren't going to be sweeping design changes a month before launch when they're already as pressed for time as they seem to be. Some skills may be redesigned(at least by the time Eden comes out) like Shake It Off was, for example, and they might backtrack on some changes, but they won't completely redesign 3+ jobs like some people want.

[Enla]

Changing potencies and tweaking effects of some skills, yes. They aren't going to suddenly give extra DPS spells to healers or scrap the new card system between media tour and launch.

That and I still have nightmares from 4.0 SCH, which was telegraphed just about the same way before launch and everyone told us back then we were overreacting just like they are now. Lo and behold expac drops and SCH's suddenly have immense difficulty healing /normal dungeons/ and SE quickly had to step in to rectify the problem people had been complaining about for months.

About the only thing we don't know right now is how hard content will hit in ShB. Yet even then it doesn't change some of the core complaints or the fact that ShB very well might only 'hit harder' in the same way Stormblood 'hit harder'. Where it lasted only through the leveling cycle before petering out with a groan once you hit level cap. Likewise I don't need to play ShB to tell you that taking away SCH's one stack dump in the form of Energy Drain is a bad idea.

[Jamein]

What I ask is that you LISTEN TO YOUR FANBASE WHEN IT COMES TO JOB BALANCE.

Please don't.
Considering that the playerbase had to ask for nerfs to steps of faith and cried about Shinryu normal mode at the start of the expansion I'm going to go ahead and say that the vocal majority of the playerbase has absolutely no clue what they are doing/talking about.

They can stick to complaining about not getting male bunny races, just stay away from gameplay please.

[Jamein]

but they won't completely redesign 3+ jobs like some people want.

Good, the only class that MOST people agree needs changing is scholar. The rest are fine outside of potency changes.

[Videra]

its as I said expansion isn't out and people are going to pretend they have played it and giving input before even trying to class after the changes.

you never know you might like it but instead come here try to make devs change mind when release is already coming soon and expansion is done.

not going to happen, if they notice bad changes they'll deal with it on their own.

This is not a valid argument. For examples of why see Blue Mage and 4.0 SCH. Both of them were shit, to begin with, we knew they were going to be shit, and we gave feedback. Sadly, only one of them warranted a response. We have all of the information we need to give constructive feedback at this point in time, and it's -very much- so important that we do as much.

[AnnaRosa]

This is not a valid argument. For examples of why see Blue Mage and 4.0 SCH. Both of them were shit, to begin with, we knew they were going to be shit, and we gave feedback. Sadly, only one of them warranted a response. We have all of the information we need to give constructive feedback at this point in time, and it's -very much- so important that we do as much.

Yes the more players that main healer can do it the better.
But people need to have a bit of work to write in a concise form simple with metrics in a new thread called "healer class job 0.5 feedback" or whatever you decide for the post title something with "healer""feedback" and perhaps a post structure like this:

Positive aspects/advantages:

▶ ....;
▶ ....;

Negative aspects/disadvantages:

▶ ...;
▶ ...;

Without the use of negative words just pointing out why this one change brings disadvantage for each class, although I think is more productive to see after trying the new content but some players are writing they already know so the faster they give their opinion in a constructive way the faster the community manager can reach SE/dev team with the players concerns.