DPS jobs lacking utility?

[Ralph2449]

Threat redirection: Enmity redirection isn't a thing anymore because enmity is really easy for a tank to maintain, and the only two people who need to redirect AoE are the tanks when they are performing a swap. Anyone other than the tank has to do literally literally 10x as much damage as the tank to pull aggro, and rather then bandaging bad secondary aggro management through non-tank cooldowns, the offtank should just learn to maintain secondary aggro so that a problem doesn't exist in the first place.

immunity: BLM and NIN have personal shields. SMN has an AoE shield. The BLM and NIN shields used to be perfect defense actions, completely negating physical attacks outright, but these were deemed OP and changed to personal shields.

20% DR: All rangers have an AoE 10% damage reduction; all casters have a 10% enemy magic debuff; and all melee DDs have a 10% enemy physical debuff.

Personal heals: all DDs except BLM and SMN have at least one self heal. Melee DDs each have at least two.

single target slow, AoE slow, CC, Speed boost: Boss fights are choreographed to fairly inflexible timers. Actions that can affect how a job's rotation lines up with a boss's attacks make for a much more variable end game experience, and the devs have expressed an interest in uniformity of experience to minimize the effect that variability has on a group's success or failure.

AoE bind, dispel, stealth detection: we don't have these mechanics because if we did it would compel the inclusion of the specific jobs that have the actions necessary to handle the mechanics, and the devs have expressed an interest in not compeling specific party compositions.

I know you gave a lot of example but all of them are literally spread across the jobs with none having that much, at least compared to the one class that has all those i described which is why the difference felt so big.

Regarding slows and all I of course was not thinking of bosses in mind, more thinking of world or dungeon content where it would actually be useful since they wouldnt be immune to such things, completely understandable that they nerfed immunities, even in wow immunities are quite broken and often too strong so reducing them to DRs makes sense so they are way less abusable.

Though by melee self heal i assume you mean second wind which can be nice but it definitely doesnt feel like some big personal healing cd considering the amount it heals and the huge cooldown.

Interesting to see they are trying to avoid WoW's meta problem by not giving exclusive things to certain jobs, it does make sense, though dont we already have that in a way with ninja's trick attack or other dps damage boost abilities? Or do they all end up being around the same so at the end the result is similar at high end content?

There used to be more, but "lower skill" players (re: half the playerbase) didn't press the buttons, so they got culled in the name of reducing button bloat. That, mixed with it being bad design to i.e. force healers to rely on their ranged pressing Refresh just to be able to operate.

I am starting to understand their choice in the sense that WoW might have all that utility in a single class but their active dps gameplay is quite dumbed down to 4-5 buttons usually ignoring cds so you have a lot of space for random utility skills while in FF14 i was positively surprised by the depth of some of the dps gameplay, samurai for example at 80 is way more involved than any wow class in terms of dpsing gameplay and you cant master it in a few days unlike the vast majority of wow specs, and samurai even though it has mostly dps skills has already been filling most of my keybinds so i can imagine adding 10 more utility buttons would def cause a bloat but that comes at the expense on being highly focused on just dpsing and not helpful in other ways.

The DPS jobs your are looking for are BRD, DNC, NIN, DRG, RDM. The game is designed on a scale; some jobs deal less damage but provide greater DPS boost to the party where as other provide zero party buffs but have the greatest DPS output.

I was more thinking utility that can be beneficial to you and less buffing others.
For some examples:
-Having a strong heal cd that 30% +16% hot can help if there's some big burst and healer is unable to heal everyone fast enough so you survive because of your heal cd instead of depending completely on a healer aka another person, and I know melee get second wind but the heal feels kinda small compared to almost half your health heal.
-If you ever have trouble with mobs or pulled two much being able to cc one, mass root or mass slow can be extremely useful for kiting until cds come back up
-If you happen to be fighting a mob that has some type of enrage/buff you could dispel while soloing places like bozja or potd
-And in group utility like that is always useful, tank pulled 2 much and cant handle? A mass root/slow can give them enough time to survive, healer used their dispel already you can use yours etc, all these are very different than just being a bottom buffer so they feel more impactful cuz you are making a difference at that moment.

[Shurrikhan]

I havent played all dps jobs yet, only Sam, Ninja, Black mage, red mage but I am feeling DPS jobs dont get much utility or non dps related cds in general to the point it feels like you are only pressing dps buttons and rarely ever anything else.

Coming from WoW where for example the hunter has aoe root, threat redirection, 6s immunity, 20% DR for 6s, personal heal cd, single target slow, aoe trap slow, single target 60s cc, speed boost cd, dispell and stealth detect flare.

Why have the devs felt the need to not give much utility to dps jobs? Have they given a reason for that design choice?

They used to give Stun, Slow, Heavy, Bind, Silence, and Pacify effects across various DPS (and tanks and healers, ofc), but the devs couldn't figure out how to situate them and/or certain player groups couldn't figure out how to use them, so they were trimmed.

The reasons given were primarily along the lines of "No one was using them, so we got rid of them to make room for... (longer linear combos, skills that are only pressable after having used a prior skill, buff buttons that probably should have been traits if not for the fact that traits just don't have the flair on job previews that new abilities do, etc.)."

Sadly the resultant homogeneity has in no way reduced class imbalance, even as it has caused many a player to enjoy their chosen job less and has generally simplified gameplay increasingly towards a lowest common denominator of available design possibilities (see XIV dungeons and their relative homogeneity, since all skills are designed towards such an experience with anything outside it quickly trimmed while dungeons in turn cannot design beyond the tools provided).

[Payadopa]

They used to give Stun, Slow, Heavy, Bind, Silence, and Pacify effects across various DPS (and tanks and healers, ofc), but the devs couldn't figure out how to situate them and/or certain player groups couldn't figure out how to use them, so they were trimmed.

The reasons given were primarily along the lines of "No one was using them, so we got rid of them to make room for... (longer linear combos, skills that are only pressable after having used a prior skill, buff buttons that probably should have been traits if not for the fact that traits just don't have the flair on job previews that new abilities do, etc.)."

Sadly the resultant homogeneity has in no way reduced class imbalance, even as it has caused many a player to enjoy their chosen job less and has generally simplified gameplay increasingly towards a lowest common denominator of available design possibilities (see XIV dungeons and their relative homogeneity, since all skills are designed towards such an experience with anything outside it quickly trimmed while dungeons in turn cannot design beyond the tools provided).

I really dislike the boring job design we have right now. Barely do DF as a result. No threats, just tank and spank and running through. I wish we would at least(!) get diversity back in the over world (like in Bozja) but on a larger scale. Though, I find it comical that in Bozja I have to drink a potion for, say, evasion up on NIN to feel any form of job diversity outside of different DPS animations.

[Dyvid]

I was more thinking utility that can be beneficial to you and less buffing others.
For some examples:
-Having a strong heal cd that 30% +16% hot can help if there's some big burst and healer is unable to heal everyone fast enough so you survive because of your heal cd instead of depending completely on a healer aka another person, and I know melee get second wind but the heal feels kinda small compared to almost half your health heal.
-If you ever have trouble with mobs or pulled two much being able to cc one, mass root or mass slow can be extremely useful for kiting until cds come back up
-If you happen to be fighting a mob that has some type of enrage/buff you could dispel while soloing places like bozja or potd
-And in group utility like that is always useful, tank pulled 2 much and cant handle? A mass root/slow can give them enough time to survive, healer used their dispel already you can use yours etc, all these are very different than just being a bottom buffer so they feel more impactful cuz you are making a difference at that moment.

So in the beginning when 2.0 was still fresh that is kind of how we played; tanks mark targets and dps/healer CC the mobs and took them down one at a time. Once everyone started hitting end game (Level 50) however; the community found it was just faster to pick up two or three packs and AOE them all at once. Dev's noticed this and first started nerfing AoE but later decide to let the community decide on how they wanted to run group dungeons. Tanks decides on how much to pull, healer works on keeping tank alive, and DPS is kill everything as fast as possible. This might be different from what you are used to but it's just how we play the game.

But it sounds like you are looking for of a solo type job. RDM has good self heals along with BLU though BLU was designed to be a side job.

[Katie_Kitty]

We used to have more non-DPS tools but then yoshi-p decided he wanted to gut party synergy abilities and so they began making it so that nobody has to work together at all.

[Burningskull]

I havent played all dps jobs yet, only Sam, Ninja, Black mage, red mage but I am feeling DPS jobs dont get much utility or non dps related cds in general to the point it feels like you are only pressing dps buttons and rarely ever anything else.

Coming from WoW where for example the hunter has aoe root, threat redirection, 6s immunity, 20% DR for 6s, personal heal cd, single target slow, aoe trap slow, single target 60s cc, speed boost cd, dispell and stealth detect flare.

Why have the devs felt the need to not give much utility to dps jobs? Have they given a reason for that design choice?
Yes all those are absolutely situational but they can be extremely useful at the right time and it is nice if you dont have to depend on others so much to survive at times which is something all that utility helps with as well.

I would say it's because it's not needed. Sure the devs could design fights around stuff like that but things like that just tend to be mostly annoying upon repeated runs of something. Which MMOs rely on their players having to run the same stuff repeatedly. In Coil 5 there was a add spawn that would knock DPS into the wall. You had to stun or heavy it and focus it down which just prolongs the fight cause the DPS aren't focusing the main boss and instead having to deal with an add.

[Fellgon]

They used to give Stun, Slow, Heavy, Bind, Silence, and Pacify effects across various DPS (and tanks and healers, ofc), but the devs couldn't figure out how to situate them and/or certain player groups couldn't figure out how to use them, so they were trimmed.

The reasons given were primarily along the lines of "No one was using them, so we got rid of them to make room for... .

Im sure that square knows wich skill players make less use, and change game based in those istatistics.

[Shurrikhan]

Im sure that square knows wich skill players make less use, and change game based in those istatistics.

Doesn't make it any less bull. If you situate something poorly (such that your implementation is scarcely worth using) and then use players' lack of interest in that implementation as indication that they have no interest in the concept, that's negligent at best. More likely: disingenuous.

"Would you like to buy this mount for 300 primal totems?"
"No?"
"Well I guess no one wants the ability to buy mounts with totems. Let's get rid of that."

[Payadopa]

I would say it's because it's not needed. Sure the devs could design fights around stuff like that but things like that just tend to be mostly annoying upon repeated runs of something. Which MMOs rely on their players having to run the same stuff repeatedly. In Coil 5 there was a add spawn that would knock DPS into the wall. You had to stun or heavy it and focus it down which just prolongs the fight cause the DPS aren't focusing the main boss and instead having to deal with an add.

Typical MMO argument. Run something 1.000.000 times and then complain it's boring so it gets streamlined so the next 1.000.000 runs are faster. Logic.

[Ralph2449]

I would say it's because it's not needed. Sure the devs could design fights around stuff like that but things like that just tend to be mostly annoying upon repeated runs of something. Which MMOs rely on their players having to run the same stuff repeatedly. In Coil 5 there was a add spawn that would knock DPS into the wall. You had to stun or heavy it and focus it down which just prolongs the fight cause the DPS aren't focusing the main boss and instead having to deal with an add.

I am not sure how that makes sense, mechanics are created to be annoying and an obstacle, if you remove anykind of mechanic because it is "annoying" you might as well demand you stand still and dps and never have to move cuz doing mechanics or moving and losing uptime is "annoying" O_o

Im sure that square knows wich skill players make less use, and change game based in those istatistics.

I mean you could make the same argument for WoW, if half the dps players never use their dispel abilities even though it can benefit them then should they remove an entire mechanic from the game because of that?