Dear SE, stop homogenizing jobs

[Eothas]

They will stop homogenizing when people stop crying and excluding other jobs from PF because there is a 2.7% or whatever difference in DPS from the meta composition. Anyone remembers WHM in 3.5, Zurvan patch? PF almost completely locked WHM out in favor of AST players, even though WHMs were completely capable of clearing that fight and likely with higher clear rates because there was a bunch of bad AST players at the time.

IMO they do a pretty good job while doing that level of balancing for this kind of gameplay (Savage/Ultimate raiding, i.e.: DPS matters and very strict rotations most of the time). I don't know any other MMO that has savage+ level of raiding, decent balance and very defined and different jobs and class fantasies, all at the same time, seems pretty unrealistic to me.

WoW classic? Not even close, raiding is pretty much a joke. Mages just need to spam frost bolt for optimal rotation, maybe some wanding in between. Some specs are outright excluded from raiding because of poor balance. Is it fun? Yeah, it can be, but there's no way it would work in FFXIV. WoW retail? Lol. Old School MMOs like EQ and Ragnarok Online? Completely different gameplay.

I do think the dev team can do a better job, specially when I think about the old and current Scholar kit but feels like some people here are having unrealistic expectations or are still in the honeymoon phase with WoW Classic.

[Mavrias]

They will stop homogenizing when people stop crying and excluding other jobs from PF because there is a 2.7% or whatever difference in DPS from the meta composition. Anyone remembers WHM in 3.5, Zurvan patch? PF almost completely locked WHM out in favor of AST players, even though WHMs were completely capable of clearing that fight and likely with higher clear rates because there was a bunch of bad AST players at the time.

IMO they do a pretty good job while doing that level of balancing for this kind of gameplay (Savage/Ultimate raiding, i.e.: DPS matters and very strict rotations most of the time). I don't know any other MMO that has savage+ level of raiding, decent balance and very defined and different jobs and class fantasies, all at the same time, seems pretty unrealistic to me.

WoW classic? Not even close, raiding is pretty much a joke. Mages just need to spam frost bolt for optimal rotation, maybe some wanding in between. Some specs are outright excluded from raiding because of poor balance. Is it fun? Yeah, it can be, but there's no way it would work in FFXIV. WoW retail? Lol. Old School MMOs like EQ and Ragnarok Online? Completely different gameplay.

I do think the dev team can do a better job, specially when I think about the old and current Scholar kit but feels like some people here are having unrealistic expectations or are still in the honeymoon phase with WoW Classic.

The simplest way for you to not be "excluded" from PF parties is to make your own, instead of complaining about how speedkill/ parse party leaders do things.

[bezal]

Maybe its just me but my cast regen and spam holy strat doesn't work when I am playing Sch where i have to use shields and aetherflow stacks so clearly both are exactly the same in every way .... even though i have to use different spells and treat fights differently depending on what class I am playing but I guess its all the same since the damage rotation is the same even though the healing part is different and to me that is all that matters when I am a healer

[Billythepancake]

Maybe its just me but my cast regen and spam holy strat doesn't work when I am playing Sch where i have to use shields and aetherflow stacks so clearly both are exactly the same in every way .... even though i have to use different spells and treat fights differently depending on what class I am playing but I guess its all the same since the damage rotation is the same even though the healing part is different and to me that is all that matters when I am a healer

I mean, you do you, but I don't find spamming art of war any different from spamming holy other than the cast time. Nor do I find it that different when I have to stop it for a bit on WHM to use tetra/ weave in an excog on SCH. Are there minute differences? Of course, no denying that. Enough to convince me that they aren't the old "you can copy my homework, but change a few things so the teachers don't notice" trick.

[Saefinn]

Healer homogenisation isn't so much that the skills are homogenised, but how they're used and utilised. For example, I can list SCH and AST equivalents for the majority of WHM's toolkit (and vice versa).

Cure -> Physick -> Benefic
Cure II -> Physick + Embrace -> Benefic II
Afflatus Solace/Benediciton/Tetra -> Lustrate -> Essential Dignity
Assize/Afflatus Rapture -> Indom -> Celestial Opposition
Divine Benison -> Succor-> Nocturnal Celestial Oppositons/Nocturnal Aspected Helios
Plenery Indulgence -> Fey Blessing -> Horoscope
Temperance -> Seraph -> Neutral Sect
Dia -> Biolysis -> Combust
Glare -> Broil -> Maelfic
Holy -> Art of War -> Gravity

In most situations, these more-or-less feel the same to use, because the the effects are similar enough and are almost as effective as each other. To the point, if we're not being pushes, the actual differences are superficial and are apart of the flavour than having any functional advantage.

There are of course parts that are different and parts where AST & WHM only share or SCH and AST only share. The issue is that these wouldn't feel so similar if we got full used out of them where the strengths and weaknesses of each equivalence spell become apparent. When I've got full use out of them (most of the time it's when people are undergeared), then I feel the differences and the jobs then feel more engaging and more interesting.


Over time I've seen "weakness" in any part of a healer's toolkit get patched in favour of there being more balance between them. But to me balance is more interesting when instead of patching out a weakness, you look at how either they work harder to cover their own weaknesses (working harder or smarter) or how to use their strengths and maybe adjust those. This is where I see balance and variety working. But it is probably not as easy to balance. One of the things I keep preaching on the healer forum is that I loved it when SCH struggled to get people's health to max, I had to approach the job differently to make up for this short coming and that was rewarding. Once that got patches, because arguably everything else was in a good place SCH ended up being OP.

[Barraind]

Its the unfortunate side-effect of having this many classes and this few spots for classes in groups or raids.

They need every healer to be able to fill 'Healer' every tank to fill 'Tank' and every DPS able to fill 'DPS'. They already stopped caring about the third part of the holy trinity, they've made actual CC irrelevant in the almost no places it ever existed.

It would arguably take less time and effort to design these classes around doing similar things differently, but they took the path for people who cant be chuffed to bother.

MMO raids moved from being able to have a tank or two that only needs to be good at single target threat and one or two that can focus on ae threat, a healer or two only focused on single target healing and a few mostly group healing and made it "all of you have to do the same thing cause youre hard capped at 2 of each"

Log in queues months after 5.0, sure is dead here.

Login queues are due to how they re-structured everything.

I have 20+ people login queues at 4am when queue times for tanks and healers are at 10 minutes and theres like 5 people in limsa.

[Arthrun]

Looks at PLD vs GNB.

I find GNB far more fun then PLD.....am I missing something?

Complex classes do not always equal fun. when it comes to the content that its being created for. I mean... I use 80% of my abilities whenever I tank. I mean 9 active dps abilities + dps boster CD and 4 or 5 different cooldowns. plus 1 or 2 situational abilities? it makes me wonder what you mean by different and fun.... PLD feels clunky to me while GNB feels awesome.

[Saefinn]

Its the unfortunate side-effect of having this many classes and this few spots for classes in groups or raids.

This is something I sometimes see argued. But I've always understood it the benefit to each job only has one spec with no customisation options has been to make it easier to accomodate having so many jobs. With games like SW:TOR or WoW, whilst they have fewer classes, each of those classes have 3 specialisations on average, which tend to play differently from each other in most cases. Like Shaman in WoW has 2 DPS trees, yet one is a spell slinger, whilst the other is melee focuses. With Smuggler in SW:TOR you can pick Scoundrel or Gunslinger, which didn't play the same. In addition to that you got your own trees, like Saboteur, Dirty Fighting and Sharpshooter. Saboteur had a debuff focus, Dirty Fighting had a CC & semi-melee focus, whilst Sharpshooter had a stronger pure-damage focus. So in effect, there's a lot to balance in similar games with fewer classes because those classes branch out into sub classes to offer variety and has the added challenge of customisation. There's obviously some similarities and cross over, but a dirty fighting gunslinger always felt different to a saboteur.

However, I've always been cool with sacrificing that depth of choice and customisation for more variety in what jobs we get. But if we lose that, then to me it doesn't seem like a good trade off.

[linay]

This is something I sometimes see argued. But I've always understood it the benefit to each job only has one spec with no customisation options has been to make it easier to accomodate having so many jobs. With games like SW:TOR or WoW, whilst they have fewer classes, each of those classes have 3 specialisations on average, which tend to play differently from each other in most cases. Like Shaman in WoW has 2 DPS trees, yet one is a spell slinger, whilst the other is melee focuses. With Smuggler in SW:TOR you can pick Scoundrel or Gunslinger, which didn't play the same. In addition to that you got your own trees, like Saboteur, Dirty Fighting and Sharpshooter. Saboteur had a debuff focus, Dirty Fighting had a CC & semi-melee focus, whilst Sharpshooter had a stronger pure-damage focus. So in effect, there's a lot to balance in similar games with fewer classes because those classes branch out into sub classes to offer variety and has the added challenge of customisation. There's obviously some similarities and cross over, but a dirty fighting gunslinger always felt different to a saboteur.

However, I've always been cool with sacrificing that depth of choice and customisation for more variety in what jobs we get. But if we lose that, then to me it doesn't seem like a good trade off.

I'm not sure about SWTOR, but WoW currently has 24 DPS specs spread over 12 classes and a typical raid group can have 13 spots for DPS in a 20-person group or 17 spots in a 25-person group (not sure about 30-person group, but probably more DPS spots).

FFXIV has 4 DPS spots for 10 DPS jobs.

For Healer role, WoW typically has 5 or 6 spots for 6 Healer specs spread over 5 classes while FFXIV has 3 Healer jobs fighting over 2 spots, and people want more Healer jobs.

It's only for Tank role where WoW has 6 Tank specs/classes for 2 spots while FFXIV has 4 Tank jobs for the same number of spots.

Altogether, WoW still can fit more of its specs/classes than FFXIV can fit its jobs in a typical high end raid. And WoW has only added 3 classes (8 specs) over 7 expansions while FFXIV adds 2 or 3 jobs every expansion so far.

[Eothas]

The simplest way for you to not be "excluded" from PF parties is to make your own, instead of complaining about how speedkill/ parse party leaders do things.

This is completely irrelevant. It's not about me, parser or logs, lol. It's about a portion of the community that sees the meta comp as the only possibly good comp to simply CLEAR things in a PUG, while not realizing that PUGs are completely different from a streamer's static environment. Either the devs will tend to homogenize certain jobs due to that or reddit will be spammed with "delete X job" threads while making that job's players waste a ton of time trying to form a group.