i'm sick and tired of the excuse for not having unique or varied jobs

[Minarisweet]

hey remember when monk was unique and varied and then noone played it until they took away all the things that made it unique

Monk was the most unique during stormblood and was fairly popular, then the population dropped hard in shb since they first removed a lot of things from monk and made it a clunky mess and could not fix that for the whole expansion.

The issue wasn't monk being unique, the issue was the dev team being incompetent.

[EnigmaticDodo]

Go back to WoW if you hate FF14 jobs so much. Unique and varied jobs will only lead to imbalance between jobs. It's the compromise that they have struck and for most players it's working very well. All jobs are viable. And if it takes just a bit of homogenization then I'm all for it. Besides, the jobs all play very differently from each other right now. The only commonality is the shared role actions.

Hey, genuine question... What if you've never played WoW and you still think FF14s job design sucks? How can I go back to something I've never been to in the first place?

I feel like a lot of you defenders of this casualization are being disingenuous.

How would jobs suddenly become unviable if they weren't all reskins of the same thing? How is playing the same thing on every job even remotely fun to people?

[RitsukoSonoda]

Hey, genuine question... What if you've never played WoW and you still think FF14s job design sucks? How can I go back to something I've never been to in the first place?

I feel like a lot of you defenders of this casualization are being disingenuous.

How would jobs suddenly become unviable if they weren't all reskins of the same thing? How is playing the same thing on every job even remotely fun to people?

TBH Job/class balance in terms of small percentiles of performance is negligible. People knitpicking over that is a player problem, not a developer one. Now Job/class imbalance like there was in RF Online with the Accretian Mercenary class that once fitted with top tier equipment could solo tank 400 players + support NPCs at the same time during the game's PvP events was a problem.

[Nizzi]

I would rather my job be fun and be dumpster tier than be meta and boring as hell

[Striker44]

I'm very confused on this "all jobs are the same" thing, because I don't see that at all. There's a reason my 3 main classes are PLD, SCH, and RDM. Because I've played other tank, healer, and DPS roles...and guess what? They play differently. And I prefer the 3 I mentioned. RDM is a caster that has a bit more mobility, as well as the occasional melee sequence. SCH is about shields and AoE healing, as opposed to something like WHM focused on direct heals and single-target. PLD has more defensive tools and the alternating sequences of physical and magical DPS. I find every single different job I play to be unique - and it's a TON of fun

[EnigmaticDodo]

I'm very confused on this "all jobs are the same" thing, because I don't see that at all. There's a reason my 3 main classes are PLD, SCH, and RDM. Because I've played other tank, healer, and DPS roles...and guess what? They play differently. And I prefer the 3 I mentioned. RDM is a caster that has a bit more mobility, as well as the occasional melee sequence. SCH is about shields and AoE healing, as opposed to something like WHM focused on direct heals and single-target. PLD has more defensive tools and the alternating sequences of physical and magical DPS. I find every single different job I play to be unique - and it's a TON of fun

It comes down to things like -

Healers: You have a DoT and you just spam one attack, use your same potency heal moves in between that.
Tanks: All AoEs are the same, you spam 1,2,3 and burst in a 60s window
Phys DPS: All feel like they have similar combo structures and being able to self buff dmg, that kind of thing. 60s Burst
Ranged DPS & Magic DPS: I will admit feel a bit different, but in content like dungeons, it's just reskinned AOES.

There's probably someone who can define this more eloquently than I and in more detail, but yeah. I'm not really a DPS player, so take that as you will as well. Maybe this is more so a Tank/Healer thing where it feels particularly samey.

[pikalovr]

I'm very confused on this "all jobs are the same" thing, because I don't see that at all. There's a reason my 3 main classes are PLD, SCH, and RDM. Because I've played other tank, healer, and DPS roles...and guess what? They play differently. And I prefer the 3 I mentioned. RDM is a caster that has a bit more mobility, as well as the occasional melee sequence. SCH is about shields and AoE healing, as opposed to something like WHM focused on direct heals and single-target. PLD has more defensive tools and the alternating sequences of physical and magical DPS. I find every single different job I play to be unique - and it's a TON of fun

casters are prolly the most unique jobs we have rn. as i've said before balancing black and white mana for a big melee combo, great, amazing, a good EXAMPLE of what i want other jobs to do. not be like DRK and WAR where they both basically do the same thing except DRk has MP management and esteem and WAR has crit/stupid self sustain. i mean hell we're lucky we still have a few seperated mitigations dark missionary being a groupwide anti magic defense (heart of light essentially doing the same sadly) but PLD giving the party a shield based on getting healed or WAR just giving a flat out shield to the party if we got more phys raidwides i wouldn't mind GNB being more anti phys oriented since WAR is going with a party shield. also when you really get down to it PLD only really got unique thanks to their new burst finisher which actually breaks the mold of 60s burst windows for tanks.

a job having like 2-3 unique things does not make them unique when 90% of their kit could literally be played by someone else. GNB is the most unique tank we have rn thanks to continuation combo and being a good all rounder compared to the other 3 who lean way too heavily into one side or the other. PLD a defensive support tank and DRK and WAR being unga bunga DPS burst heavy tanks.

SCH falls into the SMN category it's kind of hard to not make them different cause if they're not using their summon then it's not a SCH to begin with. but even then i mean look at fairy gauge you get ONE ability to use with it and it's basically a targeted regen. and when most people bring up uniqueness in healer aspects they mainly talk about downtime aka what you'll be doing 90% of the time. which is throw dot on keep it up and spam single target or AOE occasionally throwing out a heal oGCD here or there or your one maybe two damaging oGCDs. they need to expand on systems like SCH aetherflow stacks/fairy guage, WHMs lillies, SGE toxicon/addergall stacks, AST cards/seal system. AST cards being one of the biggest offenders going from unique cards with seperate effects to hurrdurr green card melee damage bonus pink card ranged damage bonus. also the seal system was changed from being a super valuable system that was worth rerolling cards for (group damage buff based on the amount of different seals). to a slight personal buff even if you hit all three seperate seals. i mean ffs undraw still exists.

in the realm of phys ranged. DNC and BRD are only different in the buffing department really BRD songs gives the party a bonus and himself a personal bonus (pretty much just procs that allow him to use other abilities or be slightly faster GCD wise.) meanwhile DNC has a single target buff and party buffs but they're more burst oriented. gameplay wise they both play alot like waiting for procs to deal damage wether it's mages ballad procs to spam bloodletters and wanderers minuet to proc pitch perfect or waiting for symmetry/flow to build up through the proc chain for fan dance 3 procs. they both also have a buildable gauge that they use for big damage hitting attacks. MCH is the most unique of them gameplay wise building up multiple gauges to enter high speed burst phases and summon the queen with a heavier focus on timing and making sure everything lines up correctly for maximum damage.

melee is slowly losing it's uniqueness as time goes on. TA being moved to a personal DPS buff and the party buff on mug makes jobs with one minute burst windows feel worse now cause every job has to conform to two minute burst windows even tho there are jobs that need to dump resources/use CDs every minute.

DRG we're hoping doesn't get neutered when they look at it cause the jumps, dragons eye, and blood/life of the dragon were what made DRG unique and thankfully they haven't messed with it alot.

SAM lost it's feeling of building up to big attacks which was the point of kaiten using your gauge to build up enough reserve for kaiten before every big hit for their burst window. but sadly thats gone now as well and ALOT of people aren't happy about it because that was SAMs thing big juicy hits that you build up towards not just hitting the button and getting a guaranteed free crit.

MNK has gone through so many changes it might as well be ryze from league of legends. we literally have no idea what'll happen to that job but i think they know it's in a good spot now so hopefully nothing too drastic. not to mention they basically got ninjas mudra mechanic but imo worse version of it.

RPR is prolly the most unique one we have so far building up two different gauges to use abilities and having a transformation similar to DRG but lasting shorter and being more burst oriented. also their gauge spenders at least require you to alternate them making them automatically better than like 80% of gauge spenders out there. my only real gripes is how going into phantom form gets rid of literally all responsibility as you no longer even have positionals to worry about just alternate use the burst skill after alternating once alternate again communio. then you go back to spamming 1-2-3 (occasionally 4 to keep up your damage buff) while you wait for your free here's 50 gauge/use the guage two times button to show back up. it also benefits from giving everyone a damage buff with arcane circle giving them access to plentiful harvest which is essentially a free shroud form. there's only TWO other jobs in the game that get a benefit off buffing others DNC with espirit guage and BRD with his procs (and no buffing themselves alongside the party is not a benefit)

and thats mainly why it's so annoying cause we see a really unique job being released (RPR) which shows they have the means to do it they are just choosing (or SE is choosing which is most likely the case) not to for the sake of simplification, and as others have said to prevent "meta" or job favoritism. also with the removal of skills like kaiten which hurt SAMs identity to alot of people who mained it. and moving NINs party buff to 2 minutes, it just homogenizes alot and hurts jobs that want to be different like 1 minute burst window jobs

[hagare]

Monk was the most unique during stormblood and was fairly popular, then the population dropped hard in shb since they first removed a lot of things from monk and made it a clunky mess and could not fix that for the whole expansion.

The issue wasn't monk being unique, the issue was the dev team being incompetent.

interesting.
Where can I see the numbers for that?
Though I guess SB being the "monk expansion" couldn't also have anything to do with it.

Btw, how reliable is xiv census?

[Hezhi]

I'm very confused on this "all jobs are the same" thing, because I don't see that at all. There's a reason my 3 main classes are PLD, SCH, and RDM. Because I've played other tank, healer, and DPS roles...and guess what? They play differently. And I prefer the 3 I mentioned. RDM is a caster that has a bit more mobility, as well as the occasional melee sequence. SCH is about shields and AoE healing, as opposed to something like WHM focused on direct heals and single-target. PLD has more defensive tools and the alternating sequences of physical and magical DPS. I find every single different job I play to be unique - and it's a TON of fun

I feel the issue people describe with job variety is that for example even if a caster might have more mobility than another or some extra utility in the form of Raise, they're still virtually interchangeable. Unless you're a world first DSR racer you pretty much never have a situation where you'd think like "Oh I think we should bring a BRD because the extra BRD dispel would be useful". Fights and jobs are clearly made like that because they don't want people to be excluded from groups but by the same token this uniform design approach makes it so the higher rDPS jobs are inherently more desirable. Jobs end up feeling the same because JOB differences as opposed to ROLE differences being ironed out of the game make so every job is reduced to a number on a parse.gg spreadsheet instead of "the trick attack burst provider", "the anti magic damage tank" or "the aggressive healer" they used to be.

Take a step back and look at things from a wider scale. In the past I had to point at other games to describe how similar FFXIV jobs are because they all fulfill nearly the exact same purpose within their role and people would give me shit for it. Now I can point to PvP to demonstrate what job diversity actually could be like. You can look at any role in PvP and see how very different all the jobs within it are and how they effectively fulfil different niches. For example look at PvP healers, you have:
-WHM has strong CC and burst with their ultimate and polymorph
-SCH offers more offensive pressure to multiple targets thanks to multiple spreadable DoTs and a healing down debuff
-AST is the support healer with an AOE slow, strong healing potential and damage buffs to teammates
-SGE offers a zoning tool with ultimate and reduces enemy damage
Then you look back at PvE and you have... These two healers have shields, and these two other healers have HoTs. [Glare] + [Aero] spam with a big serving of OGCDs. Riveting! AST kinda sticks out from the rest because it has Macrocosmos that can be used to counter that one p3s phase i guess but that kinda utility is very fringe.

This is what people mean when they point out jobs are becoming too uniform.

[Saraide]

I feel the issue people describe with job variety is that for example even if a caster might have more mobility than another or some extra utility in the form of Raise, but they're still virtually interchangeable. Unless you're a world first DSR racer you pretty much never have a situation where you'd think like "Oh I think we should bring a BRD because the extra BRD dispel would be useful". Fights and jobs are clearly made like that because they don't want people to be excluded from groups but by the same token this uniform design approach makes it so the higher rDPS jobs are inherently more desirable. Jobs end up feeling the same because JOB differences as opposed to ROLE differences being ironed out of the game make so every job is reduced to a number on a parse.gg spreadsheet instead of "the trick attack burst provider", "the anti magic damage tank" or "the aggressive healer" they used to be.

Take a step back and look at things from a wider scale. In the past I had to point at other games to describe how similar FFXIV jobs are because they all fulfill nearly the exact same purpose within their role and people would give me shit for it. Now I can point to PvP to demonstrate what job diversity actually could be like. You can look at any role in PvP and see how very different all the jobs within it are and how they effectively fulfil different niches. For example look at PvP healers, you have:
-WHM has strong CC and burst with their ultimate and polymorph
-SCH offers more offensive pressure to multiple targets thanks to multiple spreadable DoTs and a healing down debuff
-AST is the support healer with an AOE slow, strong healing potential and damage buffs to teammates
-SGE offers a zoning tool with ultimate and reduces enemy damage
Then you look back at PvE and you have... Two healers have OGCD shields, and these two other healers have OGCD HoTs. [Glare] + [Aero] spam with a big serving of OGCDs. Riveting! AST kinda sticks out from the rest because it has Macrocosmos that can be used to counter that one p3s phase i guess but that kinda utility is very fringe.

This is what people mean when they point out jobs are becoming too uniform.

PvP has given up on the holy trinity. That and pvp only being a side event in this game allows them to go ham. Throwing the entire combat design overboard in PvE content is a horrible idea from a game design point of view.

You are correct on healers however, there is massive room for uniqueness. Right now the biggest differences boil down to exactly do you want panhaima, lilybell, expedient or macrocosmos.