ZephZaeora discusses job balance and how it's gone downhill in Endwalker. Thoughts?

[ReynTime]

Homogenization will always be a problem as long as players are unwilling to communicate that it's OK for jobs to excel at different niches. In a GAME WHERE YOUR CHARACTER CAN HAVE ALL THE JOBS and leveling 2 or 3 jobs to the max is trivial at worst.

Oh and of course, the alt-unfriendly manner Square-Enix made gearing up for endgame continues discouraging the idea of maintaining multiple jobs at max.

[Deceptus]

Homogenization will always be a problem as long as players are unwilling to communicate that it's OK for jobs to excel at different niches. In a GAME WHERE YOUR CHARACTER CAN HAVE ALL THE JOBS and leveling 2 or 3 jobs to the max is trivial at worst.

Oh and of course, the alt-unfriendly manner Square-Enix made gearing up for endgame continues discouraging the idea of maintaining multiple jobs at max.

Gearing extra jobs (on 1 character) vs gearing alt characters are pretty much completely different.

[RyuDragnier]

Most people that play this game at a high level would at least have a passing familiarity with that name.

If you don't recognize it, it's probably a decent indicator that this discussion isn't super relevant to you.

Sorry, been raiding since Coil, don't recognize that name nor have I heard of them. Not knowing them isn't an indicator that the discussion isn't relevant to a person, it means that individual just doesn't watch streamers. Hell, I only found out who Xeno was last year.

[LittleImp]

Sorry, been raiding since Coil, don't recognize that name nor have I heard of them. Not knowing them isn't an indicator that the discussion isn't relevant to a person, it means that individual just doesn't watch streamers. Hell, I only found out who Xeno was last year.

You've been raiding casually since coil.

'High-level' means like week 1 tier clears and on-content ultimates, which are reasonably the only people that actually interact with job balance in a meaningful way. Frankly, if you aren't pushing a final fight during the first week, job balance discourse like this is going to be essentially totally irrelevant to you.

[RyuDragnier]

You've been raiding casually since coil.

'High-level' means like week 1 tier clears and on-content ultimates, which are reasonably the only people that actually interact with job balance in a meaningful way. Frankly, if you aren't pushing a final fight during the first week, job balance discourse like this is going to be essentially totally irrelevant to you.

So in other words, only relevant to less than 1% of the playerbase...which is nonsense and you know it. You're incorrect on job balance discourse going to be irrelevant if you're not part of that small group, anybody who uses fflogs and runs EX/Savage notices when something is under/overtuned.

[LittleImp]

So in other words, only relevant to less than 1% of the playerbase...which is nonsense and you know it. You're incorrect on job balance discourse going to be irrelevant if you're not part of that small group, anybody who uses fflogs and runs EX/Savage notices when something is under/overtuned.

Why would that be nonsense? Balance is relevant where balance actually matters, that should not be surprising. People who don't interact with the margins where balance matters shouldn't bother participating in this discussion.

People should have no problem admitting the current state of balance is bad, and causing people to have negative experiences with the game. I don't understand the interest in participating in this weird denialism that it somehow doesn't matter.

[Enjuden]

Why would that be nonsense? Balance is relevant where balance actually matters, that should not be surprising. People who don't interact with the margins where balance matters shouldn't bother participating in this discussion.

People should have no problem admitting the current state of balance is bad, and causing people to have negative experiences with the game. I don't understand the interest in participating in this weird denialism that it somehow doesn't matter.

Frankly, because the idea that only a subsection of players that do specific content are the only ones that know how things work in an mmo is delusional. The game isn't hard to figure out.

I don't have to clear week 1 savage to know that specific jobs are not going to do well, or will only do well because it is the beginning of an expansion, or their job design frankly doesn't suit particular fights. I don't need to clear week 1 in order to say that "X will be bad in Abyssos because it's bad in DSR" is a terrible argument. Maybe some are good at math and predicting where said numbers will go and can figure it out from there by just analyzing data. Maybe they're not so great at playing the game itself. They might know what to do, but executing it? Not so much.

Do I have the ability to do week 1 clears? Probably. Do I have the time? No. Why does this arbitrary goal post that you will move if it isn't 'good enough' anymore matter?

By the way, you haven't cleared week 1. So why are you talking? You should stop, by your own advice. Does this mean you're a "casual raider", as you so called it? Or are you going to blame it on something because you happened to not be good enough this time?

[Sotaris]

Someone points something out.
"Calm down". Ah, yes. Sure. If it makes you feel better I am now perfectly calm thanks to your sage advice that was very much necessary and saved my day because I was definitely very upset.

I ask who person named in title is. You act like I killed your parents or something.
But I’m glad I could make your bad day into a good!

Most people that play this game at a high level would at least have a passing familiarity with that name.

If you don't recognize it, it's probably a decent indicator that this discussion isn't super relevant to you.

Then the forum is probably not the place for discussion if it’s aimed for what you deem to be “high-level”. Most people here don’t do that “high-level” raiding, cause according to you, if you been raiding since 2013 and not week 1 clearing or doing ultimates - you’re casual.

[Pyro2hell3]

also when somebody outright bars jobs from joining their pf it affects all players of that job the same way regardless of how "good" they are. Granted anybody does this probably wouldn't be any fun to raid with anyways but still

[Alaray]

I don't care about the balance, it doesn't affect me in any meaningful way except for people who don't understand where the detrimental aspect of the balance discrepancies actually apply.

As, those discrepancies being a genuine roadblock to a clear outside of crit RNG is pretty limited to a week 1 experience, and even then, if someone picked up a tome weapon or something, it kind of offsets that.

But;

I remember reading Zeph's post and more or less agreeing on his points, not really in the context of numbers-balance, but from the perspective that 2m burst windows across the board are boring and uninteresting design. There's very little room, if any, to manipulate burst windows (as he brings up), which is a facet of skill expression and can make utilization of otherwise uninteresting buffs more interesting in how you have to think about the when/why/how of application instead of "hit on cd, hold it if you can't get it through fight-event that doesn't make you lose a use based on your group's kill time".

It can also help raw-damage for meeting checks that are otherwise not being met, by finding reliable damage elsewhere. Rather than relying on Crit/DH RNG which is out of your control.

Complaining about the increase in boss hitbox size is something I also complained about in the past, though I always kind of understood my opinion was squarely in the minority (and came primarily from a tanking consideration, less so from the consideration of "With how large bosses are, melee are essentially never pushed truly off the boss, so the ranged tax argument for full uptime becomes moot").

For me, it had more to do with ways to move the boss -- how can I better position the boss so our group can receive more uptime? How can we tweak this strat so the boss can be hit-able by everyone in the party? How can I move the boss into new positions earlier so there's less adjustment needed for the next sets of mechanics? etc... -- it made the act of tanking feel a lot more interesting, since you could optimize the fight for your group simply by how and where and when you're tanking the boss (and could lead to more interesting strategies, or convoluted and messy ones that Somehow Work even though something better would come along later -- making strats is fun! Even if they suck, it's fun to problem solve).

Ever since the loss of enmity management, tank stance utility (with the abilities that came with it) and as the hitboxes got larger and bosses moved themselves... or were stationary, being a tank (for me) felt like being a mediocre blue melee dps and nothing other than that (hitting defensive cd's isn't really that engaging, I'll be honest, especially when you have so many. When there were less, or more niche types mixed in, it could be fun to think of application as to how to maximize healer damage GCD's, but I don't feel like that still exists as it used to from expac to expac).

It's largely why I don't play tank anymore, I find it incredibly dry and boring compared to what it used to be (and there are definitely avenues that could be explored that fit within the current design philosophy -- to an extent -- but I don't think they will be explored, so)

And, granted:

When it does come to damage output, there are some things I do agree with that can feel bad (and not necessarily from a week 1 perspective). Classes where so much of their overall potency is placed into 1 ability do suffer from feeling worse when their large hit doesn't crit or dh-crit. If you know that so much of your damage is tied to that rng event, and there isn't a meaningful way to make that loss back on average over crits/dh-crits in the rest of your kit throughout the fight... it kind of just feels like your performance is showing worse in metrics than it ought to -- non crits aren't really a player's fault, nor are all crits and dh-crits. And then classes feel too centric around that 1 ability, which is extended to a reliance on a dice roll.

Not to say big hit abilities that can crit really hard aren't fun -- that was the reason I played Samurai in the past as an off-job. But even that's kind of being taken away, anyway, as the potency of abilities are lowered when SE decides they will auto crit-dh anyway.




tl;dr:

For me it's more of the gameplay interactivity and ability to have more skill expression in class design/encounter design, than the hard numbers. Hard numbers feel particularly bad, from a gameplay perspective, when it feels like so much of your class relies on an RNG dice roll on 1 particular, overly-high potency ability as whether it crits or not is out of your control (additionally, due to that issue, more abilities are being lowered in potency when they gain the "auto-crit" feature, which also kind of dampens the fun those styles of abilities can be).

I think damage up buffs that you press and forget are boring. I think damage up buffs you press off cd without much other brainpower into it, are also exceptionally boring. I wouldn't really mind if they were removed and replaced with something more interesting, or were things that could be fun to interact with from a mix of gameplay and theorizing.

Tanking could be better.

Also, double down sucks.

* Barring jobs from PF is abject idiocy.

It's a long post, but I felt like ranting a little.