So after waiting for about 2 weeks to see the consequence of homogenization

[Atamis]

Homogenization seems to be largely a consequence of catering to "raiders" who push said metas thus requiring "balancing" by making everyone 50 shades of grey. Unfortunately the only challenging content FFXIV and most similar MMOs push out are raids. Even the current Xpac only has raids for endgame. Maps are not challenging enough to push a seperate meta, FATES are not challenging enough (or rewarding) to push a separate meta. The deep dungeons ARE challenging enough to push a meta, but usually only when solo as the group content tends to be fairly unrewarding outside glamour, and of course the glamour meta is anyone's guess.

About the only way to remove the "Meta" is by making an FFXIV-EX mode, making the overworld actually hard, to add actually challenging content outside of raids where having 2+ glass cannons is actually a detriment to groups. Right now only dps matters, as every rraid devolves into do more DPS to the boss before the enrage timer and the only thing that kills people is standing in fire.

[Mansion]

Homogenization seems to be largely a consequence of catering to "raiders" who push said metas thus requiring "balancing" by making everyone 50 shades of grey. Unfortunately the only challenging content FFXIV and most similar MMOs push out are raids. Even the current Xpac only has raids for endgame. Maps are not challenging enough to push a seperate meta, FATES are not challenging enough (or rewarding) to push a separate meta. The deep dungeons ARE challenging enough to push a meta, but usually only when solo as the group content tends to be fairly unrewarding outside glamour, and of course the glamour meta is anyone's guess.

About the only way to remove the "Meta" is by making an FFXIV-EX mode, making the overworld actually hard, to add actually challenging content outside of raids where having 2+ glass cannons is actually a detriment to groups. Right now only dps matters, as every rraid devolves into do more DPS to the boss before the enrage timer and the only thing that kills people is standing in fire.

I think the problem is not the "raiders who push said meta", more likely ignorant players locking out jobs and such because they kind of read somewhere that X or Y job was underperforming somehow.
Meta will always be a thing, because the game is done in a way where people can math out which comp will have the fastest kill. That does not mean that other jobs can't perform, it's just some player who choose to understand things that way.

I'm not negating some jobs need a serious fix though! Just that it's not all "because of the meta"

[Duelle]

I think the problem is not the "raiders who push said meta", more likely ignorant players locking out jobs and such because they kind of read somewhere that X or Y job was underperforming somehow.
Meta will always be a thing, because the game is done in a way where people can math out which comp will have the fastest kill. That does not mean that other jobs can't perform, it's just some player who choose to understand things that way.

This is because player trends and behaviors trickle down from the top players down to the less skilled players. If the people doing EX/Savage clears are doing things a certain way, the people below them will also begin copying them after a certain point. A tale as old as time, and trying to make it worse (i.e create other metagames) doesn't help anyone, as you'd basically funnel people into different content instead of letting them play they job the want in the content they want.

[Razard]

About the only way to remove the "Meta" is by making an FFXIV-EX mode, making the overworld actually hard, to add actually challenging content outside of raids where having 2+ glass cannons is actually a detriment to groups. Right now only dps matters, as every rraid devolves into do more DPS to the boss before the enrage timer and the only thing that kills people is standing in fire.

So your not advocating for the removal of meta so much as you're advocating for a different kind of meta.

[Connor]

I feel like the whole ‘meta’ is a compound result of encounter design, job design and then community perception of the job.
In an ideal world (for me anyway) you’d be able to just take whatever job you like the best. I know that’s technically possible now, but at the same time, with there being a certain stigma around some jobs it’s more risk than reward to take a job you like if it’s considered one of the ‘bad’ ones.

I’m hoping the patch tomorrow will make it so jobs that are having issues will become just as viable as the others (both in terms of gameplay and how they’re viewed by others).

As for the topic of balancing and homogenisation, I feel like for jobs that struggling right now like Ninja and Red Mage it’d make more sense for them to buff or adjust the things that make them unique, since they’re both jobs that have something different to offer than their competitors (not that this precludes them from getting any damage buffs which they of course should’.) Not that adjusting that kind of stuff is necessary since personals dPS isn important thing, but at the least I hope they keep these aspects intact instead of just removing them to make balancing easier. Whether it’s Ninja’s Mudras or things like Bunshin/Ninki and of course Trick Attack, Red Mage’s magic/melee combo and things like Reprise combined with healing spells. I think making it so every job feels like it has ‘something good to offer’ would go at least a little bit towards making the combat jobs feel a bit less ‘same-y’.

I think the issue with these two classes in particular as well is that they’re kind of having to compete with the ‘big dps’ jobs because of a shared role, despite the two jobs not really being about the ‘big dps’. Then combining that with encounter design (DPS focus), job design (sliding scale of DPS/utility from high to low), and community perception (‘we only need the big dps jobs), and things unfortunately aren’t looking great for those classes.

I guess you could argue the same about Dancer vs Bard/Machinist to an extent. It’s competing with two ‘big (relative) DPS’ that have less utility but more DPS in a raid environment designed around DPS and not needing utility, as a job designed around that utility, which affects what people think of it in future. Thankfully for Dancers, since their utility is mostly focused around direct damage buffs, which is strong enough that it won’t take much to close the gap between its competitors (which from I understand is already very small).



Ninja is the same; it’s main utility (only utility?) increases direct damage, so it’s easier to balance by either buffing the utility (might be a bit weird) or just buffing it’s personal DPS since it already has good utility (which makes much more sense given it’s a melee)

Main job with an issue here is that it’s main utility can’t be turned into a direct damage increase (easily). But at the same time, it’s value dramatically increases as party performance decreases. So it’s like, if they buffed it to even the level of Summoner, you’d have a job that’s doing good DPS whilst having potentially the most useful skill possible. But then, the better the party is, the less useful that skill becomes, so eventually you’d just become a Black Mage with Dualcast and a pokey stick. If they just removed the utility though (Vercure/Verraise), it’d feel like there’s a hole in what the Red Mage can bring (because it still has to be lower damage than Black Mage anyway). If they just give it some buffs to close the gap between it and it’s conpetitors, then the issue still remains that it’s largely designed around being able to provide utility that gets less valuable the better you do (and progression is always an inevitability, I don’t think many parties consistently have deaths even after they’ve learned the content lol). So it’s much harder to think, ‘how can this job be made to fit into what’s expected of jobs as part of the “meta”’ for Red Mage compared to other jobs with issues. It’s hard to know how a job that bring ‘extra healing’ can try and fit into those expectations though (because raid design doesn’t generally call for high healing requirements anyway)

Tl;dr I know it’s largely going to be simple potency changes but I think the 5.08 has a chance to adjust the job designed even if it’s in a subtle way, which makes them fit more easily with raid design, which in turn will affect how people see them. The ‘meta’ probably won’t change, but at least it might loosen up in terms of what jobs and what combinations you can bring, which I think is always good a thing

[ForteNightshade]

I think the problem is not the "raiders who push said meta", more likely ignorant players locking out jobs and such because they kind of read somewhere that X or Y job was underperforming somehow.
Meta will always be a thing, because the game is done in a way where people can math out which comp will have the fastest kill. That does not mean that other jobs can't perform, it's just some player who choose to understand things that way.

I'm not negating some jobs need a serious fix though! Just that it's not all "because of the meta"

That isn't necessarily the case. The discrepancy between certain jobs now is staggering. A 20% Monk offers more than a 50% Ninja. Let that sink in for a moment. 20% means said Monk either died or has no idea what they're doing, and yet they're still better than a decent Ninja. This becomes even worse between the Casters. A 95% Red Mage is 40 DPS below a 50% Black Mage. That is utterly absurd. Locking out jobs isn't ignorance when there is this wide a gap between them. It can actually be smart. You're simply playing the odds. Sure, you might get an average Black Mage but that's better than an orange Red Mage. Conversely, an average Red Mage is 1,100 rDPS below the aforementioned 50% Black Mage.

Meta isn't the issue here. It's horrendously poor balancing. Your odds of clearing are straight up better taking a Monk over Ninja, and they're better with a Black Mage over a Red Mage. If this were by a small margin, no one would care. Look no further than the tanks. What we're seeing isn't small margins. Ninja, Bard, Machinist, Dancer, Red Mage and Summoner are several hundreds if not nearly a thousand below the big three. Dragoon, Monk and Black Mage are absolutely dominating.

[Vendalwind]

That isn't necessarily the case. The discrepancy between certain jobs now is staggering. A 20% Monk offers more than a 50% Ninja. Let that sink in for a moment. 20% means said Monk either died or has no idea what they're doing, and yet they're still better than a decent Ninja. This becomes even worse between the Casters. A 95% Red Mage is 40 DPS below a 50% Black Mage. That is utterly absurd. Locking out jobs isn't ignorance when there is this wide a gap between them. It can actually be smart. You're simply playing the odds. Sure, you might get an average Black Mage but that's better than an orange Red Mage. Conversely, an average Red Mage is 1,100 rDPS below the aforementioned 50% Black Mage.

Meta isn't the issue here. It's horrendously poor balancing. Your odds of clearing are straight up better taking a Monk over Ninja, and they're better with a Black Mage over a Red Mage. If this were by a small margin, no one would care. Look no further than the tanks. What we're seeing isn't smart margins. Ninja, Bard, Machinist, Dancer, Red Mage and Summoner are several hundreds if not nearly a thousand below the big three. Dragoon, Monk and Black Mage are absolutely dominating.

Thats not even right for all content, just some downtime ones like E1. in E2 Voidwalker a 25th MNK beats a 75th NIN
In E3 the MINIMUM mnk parse is only 100 dps ahead of the NINs 75th.
And in E4 the MINIMUM monk is BETTER than the 75th percentile NIN. its literally crazy right now. Literally the worst monk that ever cleared E4 contributed more than 75% of the NINja's who even MANAGED to clear E4
(e4 min monk is 12.389 rDPS, 75th percentile nin is 12.350 rDPS)

will change in literally one day now tho i hope

[Atamis]

So your not advocating for the removal of meta so much as you're advocating for a different kind of meta.

Kinda but not really. You can never remove the meta, there will always be a meta of what does best in any scenario. Just playing the class someone enjoy sounds great and fanciful but that is an unobtainable goal without rampant homogenization or content that requires bottom level difficulty to complete.
I was advocating for non meta things to dilute the amount of meta required. Say if they added an encounter where door or drawbridges had to be lowered to allow dps to be done, and say they allowed ninjas to use their teleport to cross a moat typically separating the controls from the party without a lengthy run around to a crossing. Now the "meta" has changed and ninjas are preferred for their utility, and any other class with some way to interact with the world outside dps or dps-boosting support benefits as more dps doesn't make the fight clear any faster and there isn't a hard invuln phase that can't be pushed(obviously an extremely rough example with flaws)
You can never remove the meta, checkers has a meta, tik tac toe has a meta. Anything competitive will develop a meta. This isn't going to be solved by telling raiders to stop being efficient, this requires the players and mostly the devs to solve. Raiders just creat the meta where lesser skilled raiders copy and take as gospel thus locking non meta jobs out

[Shurrikhan]

Kinda but not really. You can never remove the meta, there will always be a meta of what does best in any scenario.

This is like saying, "There will always be a top 1%, so there's no point in worrying about poverty."

That there will be some community preference, bias, or inertia towards certain choices (some manner of "meta") is as obvious -- and irrelevant -- as the existence skill-gap and optimization. Save perhaps those who would argue with you about the color of the sky, no one much cares. What matters is the impact the prevalence of any given "meta" has on the player experience. If it never had and never would hurt the player experience, we wouldn't be talking about it. And it certainly wouldn't have the negative connotations usually given to it here.

The question is the same always -- would the the gameplay (including out of game feelings that nonetheless affect how you feel when you get back into game) better or worse? How much? And, for whom or how many? Could we just leave out the tertiary factors and stick with that for a bit. How is your suggested alternate meta better than what we have or are likely to have by later tonight?

Edit: To be clear, I'm not assuming it wouldn't be better. Heck, having more content between merely Ex primals and Savage, and more diversity and depth even in Savage content, would be hugely appreciated, but without any actual player-felt effects of your suggestions, there's absolutely no way to weigh it.

[Zikh]

This is the path that every MMO seems to go down eventually. WoW being the best example, now that Classic got released. WoW Classic has more players than the polished, optimized and far more streamlined retail version, BfA. When you take out all the stuff that people complain about, you're left with a hollow shell of a game. The problem is that at the start you have to polish the game to a degree, but the hard part is to know when to stop. Nobody knows when to stop and eventually they end up carving everything out. It's like making a sculpture out of wood/marble, you keep chipping away more and more to make it more and more beautiful, but every time you think there's something wrong with it and you keep on chipping away more and more until there's nothing left.

Once you've streamlined and optimized the shit out of everything in your game, it's dead.

Dungeons are all the same, 3 bosses, 2-3 pulls before a boss with walls between them. Maximum streamlining and optimization. There are no deviating paths since it's a straight line from boss to boss. All the bosses have the same move set with different names. Tank buster, unavoidable aoe dmg and 1-2 telegraphed moves. None of the trash has any mechanics, pull them all and AoE them down, every time, in every dungeon, always. Dungeons are super boring. ARR dungeons, 2.0 were better than what we have in ShB. And the walls, don't even get me started with the walls. In Yoshi P.'s 200m dash Usain Bolt has to stop every 50m, punished for excellency. What kind of communist world are we playing in?

Raids are one room, square or round and that's it. There is no trash, there is nothing to see, there is no instance nor buildings, no fortresses to conquer, just that one room. Coil of Bahamut made me go "whoaaa! holy shit, this place is so cool!" There are no minions for the bosses or any guards. Just teleport instantly to the boss. Streamlined to the max. And the bosses themselves use a set of timed moves with very little deviation. Everything happens the exact same way every time.

Then there's the job changes, streamlining and optimization.

All the FATEs are the same, just sleep and spam your aoe attack. They all give the same rewards and they are all the same, dreary drudgery.

And what's the deal with being able to use lvl 70 gathering/crafting gear to go easily all the way to lvl 80? More streamlining, more convenience, more optimization. And the invisible walls, the endless invisible walls. It's 2019. If I want to jump down into a ravine I expect to die. If I jump off a cliff, I expect to die. What's the deal with the zones and constant loading screens? What's the deal of FFXIV utilizing under 1gb of ram? PS4 should be able to easily handle a world.

This game won't last long at this rate. The story was excellent and I love the music, but the story ends and you can listen to the music on Youtube or one of the several streaming services.