Job changes you'd like to see in Endwalker?

[Shurrikhan]

the problem is it already did and all the players cared about was the balance card.

Because they failed to remotely balance it and all but two forms of that "utility" were just different, worse shades of damage contribution.

If there is literally no way for a card which usually does 60% the contribution of another to do more than 105% the other's, even under perfect play, why would anyone care about it?

That's a balance issue, not a fundamental design one.

Take Warriors gap closer off that meter.

So that it can be pigeonholed into damage-dealing, rather than functioning as a gap closer?

If it had two charges, Onslaught would be the best gap closer by miles; as is, it's still arguably the best.

"Free" oGCD potency isn't free; it factors into the ppm of the job as a whole and therefore always comes at cost to elsewhere in the kit. A job as a whole may be overtuned over a period a time, but it's not going to be because their gap closers had more potency or less resource cost attached to them. Design for the gameplay you want; the numbers assigned to a particular skill will be ultimately irrelevant except insofar as they influence said gameplay (e.g., through breakpoints by which they change what, optimally, should be prioritized in a given situation).

[Nyarlha]

So that it can be pigeonholed into damage-dealing, rather than functioning as a gap closer?

If it had two charges, Onslaught would be the best gap closer by miles; as is, it's still arguably the best.

"Free" oGCD potency isn't free; it factors into the ppm of the job as a whole and therefore always comes at cost to elsewhere in the kit. A job as a whole may be overtuned over a period a time, but it's not going to be because their gap closers had more potency or less resource cost attached to them. Design for the gameplay you want; the numbers assigned to a particular skill will be ultimately irrelevant except insofar as they influence said gameplay (e.g., through breakpoints by which they change what, optimally, should be prioritized in a given situation).

And the obvious solution to that as already pointed out in this thread is to finally remove potency from gap closers. Let them be what they are supposed to be : utility, and not damaging OGCDs.

[Shurrikhan]

And the obvious solution to that as already pointed out in this thread is to finally remove potency from gap closers. Let them be what they are supposed to be : utility, and not damaging OGCDs.

There's a place for different jobs having different advantages. The closest we get to a truly unfettered gap closer is one which has next to zero net potency change from its use, and such would therefore be advantageous to have in terms of mobility.

Unless we want even more homogeneity, however, there's no need to absolutely standardize all of them to each share that subtle mobility advantage. It's fine for some jobs to have their mobility tools be aimed more purely at mobility and others to offer, through their presence, offer a slightly higher proportion of burst damage to the overall kit or the job's damage profile.

Perhaps more importantly, it's fine for some jobs to have to gameplay through which they weigh the value of that mobility against its windowed potency bonus while others can keep the tool more situationally reserved and therefore straightforward.

My point was only that if Lubu was seeing the gauge cost as holding back Onslaught's mobility affordances, he's got it slightly backwards.

[Firework]

Because they failed to remotely balance it and all but two forms of that "utility" were just different, worse shades of damage contribution.

If there is literally no way for a card which usually does 60% the contribution of another to do more than 105% the other's, even under perfect play, why would anyone care about it?

That's a balance issue, not a fundamental design one.

It had nothing to do with balance. Yes, Balance card was used over Arrow or Spear cards because the damage was just better, but those were the only damage buffs. Bole, Spire and Ewer were pure support cards and they rarely or never got used because they were situational. Even in situations they would be helpful, they aren't necessarily needed and damage buffs are more valuable to people, therefore Balance is chosen over them. It's similar to the gap closer situation, damage is valued over utility.

If AST is going to have more utility, it can't be tied to cards. That doesn't necessarily mean it'll be found useful though. AST used to have other utility such as Disable, but that was also removed. As to why it was, I don't know about that one

[Shurrikhan]

It had nothing to do with balance.

It had both primarily and ultimately to do with balance.

Bole, unless providing a unique or necessary affordance (at which point it becomes either broken good or one should have just been in Noct Sect instead), is ultimately a damage card; it merely allows for more healer offensive uptime. Because its affordances, however, were virtually never (i.e., outside of incredibly particular undergeared dungeon pulls) unique or necessary, it remained merely a lackluster card in the same vein as Balance, Arrow, and Spear, and generally inferior to them. it was not tuned strongly enough to be otherwise.

Arrow, meanwhile, could only barely surpass Balance under absolutely perfect conditions on two jobs. While it could improve healing throughput, no healing requirement would be uniquely met by a mere 10% increase to Spell Speed. Thus it, too, ended up merely an inferior Balance.

Spear is scarcely worth talking about. The first design was fundamentally flawed in its requiring all CDs to be readied to maximize its use. This had unique affordances (such as an extra Hallowed per run), but was too finnicky for typical use. This design, I'd argue, could have nonetheless been saved. The second design, however, was literally just a slap to AST players. A 10% increased chance to do some 40 to 60% more damage averages a mere half a Balance, and carries zero unique affordances. It was in every way just an inferior Balance.

To put it another way, balance doesn't just require parity in granular, on-paper strength; it also requires parity how useful the given increase in a given capacity is likely to be in context.

For instance, if there were both a "magic tank" and "physical tank" which were equally strong towards their types, but only the magic damage were likely otherwise to one-shot the eventually necessarily CD-empty tank, then it'd be by far the more useful in a given fight. If, however, magic were not so threatening and physical damage was instead, or if neither was and physical damage dealt a greater portion of the overall damage or damage events that must be immediately healed beyond scheduled oGCDs, then it'd be the more valuable. That's still with exact parity on paper.

Here, that parity runs instead between the different ways through which cards have contributed -- damage, healing, mitigation, increased ability refresh speed, mana, and TP. There is no threshold to the usefulness for a damage buff, since all fights in XIV are ultimately won through damage and, with zero regenerative phases or the like, no damage is ever wasted. But there are significant thresholds in buffs to all else and below those thresholds they amount solely to far less direct damage increases.

If the other card effects were nonetheless balanced for such in most situations (e.g., if a Bole placed on the MT before a particularly damage-dense 30-second period were to provide as much damage from extra healer GCDs available as would be produced from a Balance on your best 30-second period of DPS on any given ally or halved across the whole raid), that could have still been okay, as it'd at least reward game knowledge instead of simply remembering whether a BLM is (A) melee or (B) ranged. Ideally, though, they should have been balanced around a greater strength that'd allow those effects to cross a significant threshold, or, at minimum, a RR rework that didn't always favor Expand nor nerf Empower and thus could take advantage of strength enough to reach such a threshold where the opportunity arose.

But they didn't. The game increasingly moved to rewarding less healer action per %mitigation over time, through the increased portion of oGCD healing, devaluing Bole; RR remained painfully imbalanced in its favoring Expand, offering nothing of value to Extend by disallowing multiple cards on the same target, and by making Empower a mere trap; and no tuning polish was done at the level of all cards together (to better reach useful thresholds for more context-limited effects) nor between the individual cards in view of what those different effects would actually amount to in context. Both directly and indirectly, they failed to balance the cards.