Dps jobs share at least 90% of their abilities

[Vandso]

If your job is a dps it probably has at least 90% of these abilites:

- Deals damage, fills some gauge/gains a marker;
- Deals AoE damage, fills some gauge/gains a marker;
- Deals damage, applies a buff/debuff/dot;
- Deals AoE damage, applies a buff/debuff/dot;
- Deals damage but OGCD;
- Deals AoE damage but OGCD;
- Spends gauge/marker, deals big damage:
- Spends gauge/marker, deals big AoE damage;
- Deals damage but ranged (if your job is melee) or instant cast (if your job is magic dps);
- Some gap closer/movement tool;
- Some instant gauge/mark filler
- A couple of self buffs (probably a damage buff or a defensive);
- A couple of party buffs;
- Fill the rest with combos/procs.

Which means that all the jobs identities are on their gauge management and that's it. There's no cool unique ability that a single job does that no other doesn't unless it's some weird thing that doesn't apply in gameplay very often.

[Irenia]

Yeah, and iirc it's because they don't want a situation where a DPS is shunned because it doesn't have the correct seasonings, so to speak.

If you look at this particular bit of job design as a way to influence in-game community behavior,it makes more sense.

[Stormpeaks]

Yeah, and iirc it's because they don't want a situation where a DPS is shunned because it doesn't have the correct seasonings, so to speak.

If you look at this particular bit of job design as a way to influence in-game community behavior,it makes more sense.

And in turn makes everything absolutely boring to play because they are actual copies of each other

[Mikey_R]

Design a job that doesn't.

I am actually intrigued as to what someone could come up with.

[R041]

[R041]

Design a job that doesn't.

I am actually intrigued as to what someone could come up with.

It's more complicated than just designing a new Job, they've pigeonholed all design. A class/character in a video game is a reflection of it's environment and the ways it can navigate said environment.

The worst problem is they don't want to design varied environments and encounters. So what happens is you're forced to basically give everyone everything to complete them. When you only have 1 hallway, you need to make sure everyone can get down that hallway. CC, buffs, debuffs, encounter management.. None of that is required.

There are ways to design new characters, but we've both boiled everything down into their pure meta form AND have given the existing characters everything. So really the only thing we can do is just make new Jobs that have different ways to build/spend while staying within the strict meta of timing.

At this point in XIV, there needs to be a complete shift in environment/encounter design - Or we're going to just continue to boil and release more mary sue builder/spender jobs.

[Mikey_R]

It's more complicated than just designing a new Job, they've pigeonholed all design.

The problem is, you cannot have some sort of CC that is unique to one job to the point where you NEED to have that job for an instance, not only does this go against what the devs want, in that all jobs have to be able to clear in any (reasonable) composition, but it could also reduce the impact of attacks.

Going with stuff commonly queued through DF. You get a dungeon/trial that has a mechanic that this one job can stop/change in one way or another. If you happen to have the job, great, however, if you do not have this one job, you cannot make that mechanic deadly as you cannot guarantee that one job is in the party.

Going onto extremes and to a higher extent, Savage and even Ultimate. This one mechanic is likely to be deadly, so you need to bring this one job in order not to die to it. This would be even worse in Savage raiding/ultimate encounters. Imagine getting to the last boss of Savage, or the last phase of Ultimate, and wiping because you did not have this one job for this one mechanic, however, noone has this one job levelled/aren't good enough to raid with it. You effectively halt all progress for something silly.

If you have another unique way a job can function, then by all means, explain another way. Even if you have to change the fight design slightly, I'm all ears.

[VirusOnline]

At this point in XIV, there needs to be a complete shift in environment/encounter design - Or we're going to just continue to boil and release more mary sue builder/spender jobs.

This will never happen. We'll continue down this road, else imo we'll have a situation on our hands very akin to how WoW approaches class/encounter designs.

What I would like to see if the bringing back of risk vs. reward type abilities. i.e. cleric stance.
I also remember a time when wars had an ability that gave them quite a good mitigation but after the ability wears off it debuffs them with a detriment. Concussion, was it ?
It would be nice if dps had to actually manage this type of thing.

[Payadopa]

Design a job that doesn't.

I am actually intrigued as to what someone could come up with.

It's a feedback forum so the actual game designers have an idea of what the community wants. I don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that when a rocket explodes it was probably faulty. Nor do I need to design a new one. lol

[R041]

...

All you did was repeat what I said, but praised it. lol

This is game design 101. Characters need to have faults to introduce challenges. Encounters need to allow multiple methods of dealing with them. Even moreso in an MMORPG, or it's just a singleplayer beat-em-up. I cannot rely on you, if there's no reason to rely on you. There is nothing in the design outside of healing players that is emergent or reactive. It's all passive and learned. This is especially true for the Job rotations/mechanics.

I am 100% saying we need to stop being damn carebears about everything, and understand that not every job should be able to do everything, with perfect precision, in the same timing, for all content. This isn't the gotcha you think it is, it's not a good thing. It's the reason we're in this situation to begin with. Even Melee no longer have the fault they were designed for.

It's difficult to come up with a solution to this, because they've made it almost impossible over the years with how efficient they've made every encounter. You are thinking within the box that they've so thoughtfully put you into.
If raid is so important to force every class to be viable at, they don't need to introduce these class faults into them that teeter on full failure, but they do need to introduce class faults overall.

Godamn Super Mario Bros 2 has more complex environment and class design than FFXIV.