Give me your most unhinged Job take that you still genuinely believe in.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Clemency, Vercure, and SMN Physick should not exist. At all.

Clemency and Vercure are fine.

SMN's Physick though, maybe they should give the Job a trait that makes it scale off of INT instead of MND like Vercure does and with similar MP cost to it. Make it Phoenix themed as well.

[Eorzean_username]

Except it's been explained in the past repeatedly why they did not do that, because it was exactly that idea of 'ga'/'ra'/ etc giving the expectation that the spells progress in potency in set tiers, rather than each spell being unique with unique effects as it is here.

This does not make any sense.

Why would "Ra / Ga / Ja" cause "the expectation that the spells progress in potency in set tiers, rather than each spell being unique with unique effects as it is here"...

...but "II / III / IV" supposedly does not cause that?

If anything, it would be the exact opposite. "Fira, Firaga, Firaja" would be intuitively-interpreted as unique spells, whereas "Fire II / Fire III / Fire IV" would be intuitively-interpreted as a chain of direct upgrades.

The number system actually makes it more confusing and inaccurate in XIV's context.

...as evidenced by the periodic posts on Discords and Subreddits asking things like, "I just got Fire 3 but it's really slow, am I supposed to be casting this instead of Fire 1?", or the time-honoured tale of "Just got out of Dungeon run with a healer spamming Cure 3 to heal the Tank".

[Gemina]

I agree with this so much. It feels like healing was made backwards. Our main, and most powerful, heals should have cast times and anything instant should be either an emergency small healing/mitigation ability to buy time or a buff/debuff ability.

oGCD heals are not all built the same. We do have heals that just strictly heal the target for x amount such as Lustrate, Tetra, and Aspected Benefic, but there are situational oGCD heals that allow healers to optimize their use if they know the content they are in. Heals like this are Summon Seraph, Earthly Star, Macrocosmos, Liturgy, or Panhaima all have rewarding returns when used optimally instead of in a whack a mole fashion. You're just not going to find a lot of these situations in casual content. And there's the conundrum. In order to make more use of these skills in normal mode instances, the dev team will need to increase the threat level.

Making GCD heals more powerful is essentially the same thing as those situational oGCD heals in the sense that healers would be required to know the content they are in in order to make good use of them. Standard oGCD heals are support heals believe it or not. They support both DPS output as well as slow reaction times from the healer. They are sufficient enough to support the group in normal mode content because the threat level is so low.

[Silver-Strider]

oGCD heals are not all built the same.

Too unhinged for me.

[VeyaAkemi]

The fact that spells do not follow the FF naming convention of spell > spell-a > spell-aga > spell-aja kinda grinds an old coot like me.

Real Gs use -za spells.

[SieyaM]

Here's unhinged, the dev teams obsession with balance, and their intense focus on designing all jobs to perform optimally in a short fight against a single enemy in an arena has lead to poor job design and relatively shallow play all around. Forget about making sure everything plays the same in savage and design jobs to be fun.

[Gemina]

Too unhinged for me.

Ikr?

Here's unhinged, the dev teams obsession with balance, and their intense focus on designing all jobs to perform optimally in a short fight against a single enemy in an arena has lead to poor job design and relatively shallow play all around. Forget about making sure everything plays the same in savage and design jobs to be fun.

This isn't unhinged. Not for these forums. This is very much go with flow of the general complaints stated around here where the common theme is how poorly the game is designed, and isn't fun.

If you want to be unhinged or to rock the boat, you need to make statements that are contradictory to those views. Your posts won't receive many likes. Many will provide resistance and call out your blasphemy. But at least your views will be your own.

[Rymi64]

Here's unhinged, the dev teams obsession with balance, and their intense focus on designing all jobs to perform optimally in a short fight against a single enemy in an arena has lead to poor job design and relatively shallow play all around. Forget about making sure everything plays the same in savage and design jobs to be fun.

Tbf the playerbase can be pretty dumb when it comes to jobs and if its "not up to par" they will exclude it so making them work in savage is the right choice, just the 2 minute meta sucks making them actually the same. And probably wouldn't be saying that if they did design them purely for fun but your job sucks so you cant get invited to any parties

My unhinged take? Dark knight is fine with its current kit they just need to be more creative with their skills, like making delirium have you wield 2 swords and change your main combo while using bloodspiller. Same with summoner

[Shougun]

On the topic of homogenization, in some ways it's pretty impressive that everything is so similar output wise while still having some differences... but I can see there are a lot of similarities.

One major problem that encourages it is the later content where meta is important due to difficulty- like PvP when synced to PvE, forcing awkward balance changes as seen in games prior to separating them, end game (hard) content does the same to general content. Too much flavor in an ultimate setting means bye bye some jobs.

A blasphemous idea of a what if appeared to me, and that was what if there was full on chocobo tail feathers to the walls 'limited' ('WoL mode') which was the core for all jobs and then balanced distillations of those ideas for PvP and 'End Game' PvE. All normal / MSQ using far looser balance in order to capture high amount of gameplay variety / roleplay. Now none would be intentionally made to be useless but there would very well be 'this does better on that'. Certainly though it would be weird in some ways to do some MSQ primals and then get the savage of the very same primal but engaging them with a different kit... it doesn't feel weird in PvP, imo, but given that we're now discussing easy PvE content with high variety / differences and then highly balanced highly technical PvE.. that there is a difference I feel is harder to ignore.

If feeling crazy also keeping PvP and 'Savage / Mythic' separate from each other. Meaning potentially extremely high skill ceilings being possible (Hard Mode PvE balanced but also very technical).

Though to note I still believe in the rolling mountain, and the 'hero / WoL' forms would come into the content at some point.. a different form of echo. May even have modifiers at that point of wild west ideas, though i'd suggest FFIX style with preset loadouts so end game players can have their goof off roulette and then their meta builds (where you can only use 1% of them lol).

Sounds terrifying, but also tempting in that the majority of content, casual at least, would be made to be unique, fun, and highly thematic with less regard to perfect balance (not 'no' regard, just a lot less). Yet still having an avenue for the people who seek that specific content with natural human behaviors that will unintentionally and intentionally end up forcing very tight very consistent builds by both players and devs.

Alternatively building high flavor but also making it even easier to level and maintain multiple jobs and build a game around the idea that changing jobs is expected, potentially even within the same content (like you make it to a half way in a savage raid, can change jobs at the camp). May bring sub jobs back at that point. Such that high end players would be expected to follow the metas that are created but its reasonable to achieve and intentionally shifting with multiple job options to hopefully satisfy people as it shifts from each content. A sort of modernized FFXI.

[SieyaM]

Tbf the playerbase can be pretty dumb when it comes to jobs and if its "not up to par" they will exclude it so making them work in savage is the right choice, just the 2 minute meta sucks making them actually the same. And probably wouldn't be saying that if they did design them purely for fun but your job sucks so you cant get invited to any parties

My unhinged take? Dark knight is fine with its current kit they just need to be more creative with their skills, like making delirium have you wield 2 swords and change your main combo while using bloodspiller. Same with summoner

jobs have been and will continue to be excluded from parties for not being META, might as well make them fun.