Dear SE, stop homogenizing jobs

[RoyalBeef]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...al-Fantasy-XIV

Yes, the game has literally been dying since release, if you believe people on the forums.

Yes thats the thread I was looking for, thank you

[ForteNightshade]

Fair enough. I have not been paying attention to the current meta, pretty much skipped this tier to play classic, but this is kind of my point in general. In a PUG having ~10% less DPS in exchange for raises can be pretty acceptable, just decrease the gap a little bit. Sure you can argue that if someone needs raise in the first place they are doing something wrong, but then I'd say you can still get a clear out of it, unless it's cutting edge raiding. Remove RDM raises and increase its DPS and it will be just another copy, keep its raise and it will be the new FoTM. If we assume everyone is playing perfectly there's no way to have variety without having a clear best job for its function. What I'm trying to say is that I think RDM is not useless, it's weaker in a optimal run, but that's to be expected if we don't want homogenization, right?

About Zurvan, Astro would cut what, a few dozen seconds from a run? That's assuming optimal play. I don't think that's enough to lock out possibly great WHMs for possibly mediocre Astros. In a Static where everyone is expecting the best or in an actual speedrun PF, sure. I think that kind of attitude we saw in 3.5 slowly affects how the developers manage balance, they don't want to have a job branded useless because it has ~10% less DPS. I don't say anything about WHM's healing advantage because Astro also had an extremely powerful healing kit (CU used optimally was just waay too strong) but you get my point.

Except it isn't. People do not like playing jobs which feel decidedly inferior to their counterparts. A slight increase is exactly what the devs cited for Range, and it won't save them. Why would it? You can just take two Black Mages and it be safer. The big three (Monk, Black Mage and Dragoon) outright allow for more mistakes because of how enormous the gap between them and the bottom five is. We're not talking small amounts either. A friend of mine ranked top ten for Red Mage in one of his more recent clears. Guess what? A slightly above average Black Mage still beats him. He literally can't get better. I've died and nearly beat the 97% Dancer in my group despite her having better gear than me. I just happened to be playing Dragoon. Under no circumstance should that ever be acceptable. Not only is it discouraging for people who enjoy those jobs. It's straight up poor design by the dev team that absolutely should be called out. There is no reason for 1,500+ rDPS gaps between the Melee and every other DPS not named Black Mage.

Astro rDPS in 3.4 was absolutely absurd. It shaved off far more than seconds from a run if said player was mildly competent. And when you're farming upwards of 99 runs, even knocking off ten is pretty nice. Regardless, White Mage wasn't locked out of Primals with any regularity. Sure, it happened, but rarely. In fact, there were more White Mages in Creator than Astros currently. That bears repeating. 5.0 Astro is so widely disliked, the disparity now is worse than when White Mage was objectively the worst healer by a wide margin.

There's an easy solution to avoid that branding. Don't scale jobs so they're arbitrarily 10% weaker. There is zero reason Summoner and Red Mage have to be so laughably weak compared to Black Mage. And there's equally zero reason them and the Range are over thousand rDPS beyond every single Melee DPS. You can't even make the utility argument because Monk has a better version of Nature's Minne. All the Range have now is 10% mitigation on 180s CD—which the tanks also have at only 90s—and mobility the tier doesn't require outside a couple instances here and there. They're weak because reasons. If the devs don't want them branded as useless. Stop making them useless.

[Saefinn]

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.

In fairness WoW also has 10 person raids versus our 8 and we also have 24 person groups. WoW also has smaller numbers than that for completing heroic dungeons. The difference I expect is that the harder modes of raids require more numbers. But big raids aren't the only thing they are balancing for. And we have big raids of our own.

SW:TOR had a choice between 8 and 16, where 16 is designed to be easier.

But that said, even Wow has become more homogenised and they embraced the dumbing down of jobs, though of course, also like FFXIV this didn't used to be a problem.

[Reynhart]

In fairness WoW also has 10 person raids versus our 8 and we also have 24 person groups.

Savage alliance raids
3 tanks, 6 healers, 15 DPS, and completely inconceivable to expect 5 MNK, 5 BLM and 5 DRG.

[Barraind]

Altogether, WoW still can fit more of its specs/classes than FFXIV can fit its jobs in a typical high end raid.

Boards ate my really long response, but its basically this.


short version of long answer:

SWToR effectively had 11 different specs, or 14 if you really want to die on the "but the sub-classes are different!" hill for anything but the casters. In practice, serious raid tanks mostly played Shadow/Assassin, because the only thing that mattered for tanks was cooldowns, and Shadsassins had the absolute best, BY FAR. Funny enough, in 14, they would be the least played, because their damage is ~7% below the other tanks. The 3 healing specs all worked vastly different, but you could take any 2 and make it work in a raid. You would have 3 vastly different healing experiences, as one was a shieldbot, one used regens and one used direct heals. It was basically "HERES HOW YOU HANDLE 3 HEALERS: THE PRIMER" (if you ignore WoW and Rift's healing designs for some reason). The DPS was... look, you played either of the good dps specs and they were all within 3% of each other, unless you were a caster, and then you were 1-2% behind. If you played the really bad / not raid designed specs, you did another 4-8% less damage. Your jedi melee had different button presses, but other than "my weapons look different", there were really only 5 classes per side (I separate Caster and Shadow/Assassin because THAT is the textbook example of how to actually make a base class work doing two different things, and the other 3 classes are basically different weapon options).


WoW has 36 specs, but 12 of those are on classes that are only DPS, and you're going to pick one of those specs and only change when you cant use the good one (like mages not being able to use fire for a year because lol fire immune things in the fire raid zones), or you're going to get a few people that go "BUT I WANNA BE THE BOOMKIN" when its 6 years before moonkin is actually viable.

Also, Wow experienced exactly the same issues 14 currently is when its 10mans took off. Balance, and what classes you wanted to bring, was horrendous, at best, at several times.


Guild Wars 2 is another one. It has 10 man raids and 27 (though its really 19, because base warrior is raid viable, but base anything else loses a lot) specs, but it solves this by giving 2-4 specs the ability to cover every job. Need group buffs? Take 2 of Quickbrand, Banner Warrior (either Warrior or berserker), Boon chrono, or Boon renegade. Need a healer? Take Druid (the best healer, run in a lot of groups, but swapped out as your raid gets better because their damage is low) or any of the other 6 specs that provide some amount of group healing. GW2 further makes its bosses immune or highly resistant to one of its 2 damage types; Power, hitting something in the face, or Condition (Condi), which is dots. If you want to raid seriously, you're generally expected to be able to play at least one of each condi and power damage, and most likely also have a support of some kind, either boon or healer, because you WILL have to switch between bosses in a raid wing.

All of those specs play differently, and each weapon set in a spec plays differently. My Quickbrand plays significantly different than my condibrand. Its the same spec of the same class, but uses different weapon sets, different utility slots and has completely different rotations and functionality with its f1 and f2 skills. neither of those plays similar to my mesmer or banner warrior, and those are significantly different than each other.

As a side note, GW2 doesnt (Currently, that is. A worse version of the current 3rd party addon that handles that is coming at the end of the month) have an easy way to change gear and specs (no press a button, change your class and equip a preset gearset + skill set , and top end gear is account bound, so its only slightly more difficult to have 4 different classes for 4 specs you want to play than it is having one character that can do all 4.



14 balancing raids around 8 people hurts it a lot. Even 10 vs 8 is an extra tank, healer, or tank AND healer they can expect you to have, which opens up an incredible amount of options.

How was BA anymore of a raid over everything else in this game?

It used significantly more players, required coordination among a large number of players (Alliance raids dont have that), required more than just tunneling on pewpewpew, and wasnt entirely in a large square/circle you could fall off of, with mechanics on every encounter that tried to push you off the platform.

It was a nice throwback to actual raid content that isnt "Platform Quest: Lol dont fall off XD lolol".

[Mistyregions]

Nah what they need is more diverse approaches to encounters than simply whack it till it's dead.

Create actual options for groups to handle things based on there set ups.

Oh hey theres adds spawning. Off tank go grab them..

Only running 1 tank. WellWe got a blm let's sleep them ..
Oh we dont have a blm but we do have a smn let's bind them in place or have a titan egi hold them..

Probably not the best example but give groups options and different ways of dealing with things rather than just round it all up and whack it till it's dead....

Reminds me of early 2.0 days when you had to sleep mobs in huge pack pools.

[linay]

If the game was only Trials and Raid bosses where every fight was contained and sterilzied around the strict script I could see this work, but there are still 200+ duties, solo quests, Deep Dungeons, Eureka, Role Quest and not to mention: MSQ solo duties where close to no healing or even much coordination is required all I think would benefit from jobs being a world apart and play entirely different.

Those other duties don't need jobs being worlds apart and play differently, though they can.

In fairness WoW also has 10 person raids versus our 8 and we also have 24 person groups. WoW also has smaller numbers than that for completing heroic dungeons. The difference I expect is that the harder modes of raids require more numbers. But big raids aren't the only thing they are balancing for. And we have big raids of our own.

FFXIV alliance raids are designed to be 3 groups of normal raid size and you're mostly working within your own group, so it's not comparable to a WoW raid of similar size. That and the fact that alliance raids are low enough in difficulty to not warrant people being selective in jobs. As far as I know, WoW hasn't had a 10-person raid since at least Warlords of Draenor expansion in 2014, if not earlier than that. There is flex, which technically can scale down to 10 (I think), but that's not a typical size as it would also scale up to 30 (again, I think), and the highest difficulty, Mythic, is set at 20.

As far as dungeons are concerned, WoW uses 5-person party as opposed to FFXIV's 4-person party, and I'm told balance is also somewhat of an issue for their Mythic Keystones difficulty. Heroic dungeon is queueable so balance there is not really an issue either.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Reminds me of early 2.0 days when you had to sleep mobs in huge pack pools.

The reason for that wasn't because the mobs were difficult or because CC to help burn down certain ones, in most cases.

The reason mobs were slept was because they didn't have artificial locks in the dungeons, like certain mob kill requirements in AK, or tonberry's dropping oil in WP. So we slept the mobs and pulled bosses to skip trash.

Hence why the locks exist now.

[Vulcann]

Yeah no, EQ 1 raids were basically giant 72 person zergs you did with your guild, no one was left behind, not even rangers during classic which was probably the weakest class in any MMO ever lol. Shit only hit the fan when entitled casuals started complaining bc they couldn't gather the force needed for raiding, so devs decide cut the raid size down. Once that happens, of course you have to pick by what classes are most effective. It's a problem that casuals introduced because they still wanted to raid without having to make more than 7 friends lol.

talk about revisionist history or someone who didn't play EQ1. it was actually the "raid guilds" that wanted smaller raids and for the devs to "stop the zerging of content" not the casuals. because as with most raiders if there is a way to exclude people from content and make them feel superior they are all about it.

[RoyalBeef]

talk about revisionist history or someone who didn't play EQ1. it was actually the "raid guilds" that wanted smaller raids and for the devs to "stop the zerging of content" not the casuals. because as with most raiders if there is a way to exclude people from content and make them feel superior they are all about it.

I played EQ hardcore in it's prime from 1999 till 2006, thanks. You seem to be the one basing your statement on some bare bone skeleteon leftover versionof EQ that had to tune raidsize down due to the fact that like 95% of the playerbase was gone at that point. And the content itself did a great job of keeping people out of content they weren't ready for, there was no need for raiders to be concerned with that. I never saw people in subpar gear not knowing how their class worked expecting to be getting carried through GOD, or Time, or Anguish :P