Why balance jobs to just high-end raids?

[Payotz]

Complexity from content is no where near the same as Complexity/Depth/Nuances from your favorite Job... Content mastery will never be as meaningful to me vs Class mastery in almost any MMO I ever played, yet I am being sold on FFXIV that its the reverse here which is a load of horse radish. It's soulless.

I've had a conversation with a friend who's trying to convince me about how good FFXIV is again the other day and it's funny how we both kinda agreed on the fact that spamming ONE button in Path of Exile is more satisfying than doing your entire rotation in FFXIV just because of how interesting the interactions are in PoE than in FFXIV.

Apples to Oranges comparison I know, but it kinda illuminated the fact that there's not really a lot of meaningful interactions in PvE job rotations in the Shadowbringers era compared to the ARR->HW->SB era. "Difficulty" in PvE job rotations right now are basically pressing a bunch of Shinten clones on cooldown in-between GCDs without any thought put into it, which makes it a lot less engaging compared to games with less buttons but with more meaningful interactions behind their actions.

I guess the proper comparison is the difference between the PvP and PvE toolkits, with PvP having more interactions and thus more engaging gameplay with less button bloat, and with PvE having filler 250 potency OGCDs that you press on cooldown, and the rotation of every job being designed around having full striking dummy uptime 24/7 with as little friction as possible (proved by the fact that every player moans about their cooldowns whenever you get forced to downtime in like 3 fights or something).

I can relate to you though. The only reason why I sub every now and then is to talk with friends. I just kinda treat this game as Gaia online successor with tacked on raiding.

[CelestiCer]

I've had a conversation with a friend who's trying to convince me about how good FFXIV is again the other day and it's funny how we both kinda agreed on the fact that spamming ONE button in Path of Exile is more satisfying than doing your entire rotation in FFXIV just because of how interesting the interactions are in PoE than in FFXIV.

Apples to Oranges comparison I know, but it kinda illuminated the fact that there's not really a lot of meaningful interactions in PvE job rotations in the Shadowbringers era compared to the ARR->HW->SB era. "Difficulty" in PvE job rotations right now are basically pressing a bunch of Shinten clones on cooldown in-between GCDs without any thought put into it, which makes it a lot less engaging compared to games with less buttons but with more meaningful interactions behind their actions.

I guess the proper comparison is the difference between the PvP and PvE toolkits, with PvP having more interactions and thus more engaging gameplay with less button bloat, and with PvE having filler 250 potency GCDs that you press on cooldown, and the rotation of every job being designed around having full striking dummy uptime 24/7 with as little friction as possible (proved by the fact that every player moans about their cooldowns whenever you get forced to downtime in like 3 fights or something).

I can relate to you though. The only reason why I sub every now and then is to talk with friends. I just kinda treat this game as Gaia online successor with tacked on raiding.

Someone freaking gets me!!!
I feel that way with other MMO's I used to play.

And that's purely why I stay subbed, not cause I enjoy content? but because I enjoy doing anything with friends. Content is boring though. I will do Savage while watching Netflix at this point. I became a housing decorator/Gposer even though the appeal was the Story? that turned into Samurai and Raiding... ironic... That what made me love FFXIV is the PvE combat of Samurai and raiding with my Samurai. What makes me despise it? are the changes to my Job and what PvE combat has turned into and raiding...

I'm not wishing it to fail either... I want it to improve otherwise I would not be posting or ranting so much about it. I wished it at least be as fun how it used to be for me... but for now? it's just Housing honestly and helping friends and party finders clear fights.

[HyonaCookie]

Wait, casual content requires effort? Since when?

I wouldn't say casual content requires a lot of effort, but if you look between jobs in a role you can see the skill floor for jobs varies more. For instance it takes less effort to do dungeons as WAR than as a DRK, the difference being for one tank you only need to press one button to succeed while the other requires you to press many at a time. The same can be said for WHM versus other healers. I just think that the skill difference between jobs when doing casual content shouldn't be so different, unlike high end content where it doesn't matter because people will find a way around it.

[Jeeqbit]

I don’t see the point in balancing jobs to high end raids.

So that the raids... are balanced. Raids have enrages. Normal content doesn't and is meant to be easy, therefore the balance doesn't really matter.

Even if you balance jobs so they’re all playable in high end content, raiders will still meta chase and use mods and tools to make their experience easier.

Not everyone does these things. Only some people do. It's not worth caring about the people that do, as you said, because they will do those things regardless. The content should be designed for people who don't do these things, such as people who join a PF ignoring metas, or using a PS5 that can't have mods.

[ForteNightshade]

I wouldn't say casual content requires a lot of effort, but if you look between jobs in a role you can see the skill floor for jobs varies more. For instance it takes less effort to do dungeons as WAR than as a DRK, the difference being for one tank you only need to press one button to succeed while the other requires you to press many at a time. The same can be said for WHM versus other healers. I just think that the skill difference between jobs when doing casual content shouldn't be so different, unlike high end content where it doesn't matter because people will find a way around it.

... you can't possibly be serious with this? While yes, Bloodwhetting is hilariously broken in dungeons. You're actually trying to argue that Dark Knight having to press TBN, Rampart and maybe Oblation is enough of a "skill" difference to warrant focusing balance on dungeon farming? If the "skill" necessary for Warrior in an AoE pull is 1/10 then it's 2/10 for the other tanks. At which point who even cares? They're all incredibly easy and overpowered because we're ridiculously higher level than the mobs.

[Semirhage]

... you can't possibly be serious with this? While yes, Bloodwhetting is hilariously broken in dungeons. You're actually trying to argue that Dark Knight having to press TBN, Rampart and maybe Oblation is enough of a "skill" difference to warrant focusing balance on dungeon farming? If the "skill" necessary for Warrior in an AoE pull is 1/10 than it's 2/10 for the other tanks. At which point who even cares? They're all incredibly easy and overpowered because we're ridiculously higher level than the mobs.

No no, Forte. You don't understand. We need to dumb all of the jobs down as far as possible so it's fair. You might need to press two buttons instead of one and that's such a difficult imposition.

Oh but it's dirty cheating toxic elitist raiders who *really* want the game as easy as possible. Coming up with strategies for difficult content means they just want easy clears. This isn't projection at all.

[Leifei]

Man I'd kill for just... jobs feeling GOOD across all content. 90% of this game tosses you into downsynced content that feels like shit to do because you're missing skills or you're cockblocked from even pulling off your rotation. This insistence that the only content allowed to flow well and feel good should be limited to a small niche area of the game is so lazy. I'm thinking now of when Yoshi told healers to just play ultimates if they wanted an engaging experience. Literally the most niche 1% tier of content in the entire game. So what the head dev is telling me is that if I'm a healer and I don't want to fall asleep in your game, 99% of the content available isn't going to cut it. That sounds like a cop out to me. If the gameplay loop is fun at its core, then doing ezmode content becomes enjoyable because the job you're playing is fun.

Hell, even outside the realm of downsynced content, in the vast majority of level 90 content stuff dies before it can even do its mechanics, healers feel totally unnecessary, downtime/mid-fight cutscenes will occur right as players are about to go into their bursts (which all feel railroaded thanks to the new 2m setup we're forced into, yet we still have situations like these that feel like shit), I could go on. Euphrosyne for example, is level 90 content that's normal difficulty and it feels like a boring slog because the outgoing damage is pitifully low, the dps checks are a joke, the mechanical aspects are recycled from older content, the bosses have so little hp that they melt before they can even finish teaching you their mechanics, and they have this gross habit of disappearing right as your railroaded 2m burst comes up, as if the devs knew how hard they were pigeonholing us with this 2m meta and then decided to just ... go out of their way to blueball us on purpose.

You're making some really good points there.

[Minarisweet]

I don’t see the point in balancing jobs to high end raids. Even if you balance jobs so they’re all playable in high end content, raiders will still meta chase and use mods and tools to make their experience easier. Meanwhile, because jobs aren’t balanced to casual content, some jobs take more effort than others to clear content because of the huge discrepancy in how much skill is needed to play a job, which doesn’t exist in 8-man content because that’s where jobs are balanced. In 4-person content such as dungeons, the effort discrepancy between the job that requires the least effort to play and the job that requires the most effort to play is big to the point where it’s not worth playing certain jobs in 4-man content. But in 8-man hard content, even the job that requires the most amount of effort is not that different compared to the job that requires little effort.
I don’t get why casual players need to put more effort in playing the job they like in content they want to play while high end players get to put the same amount of effort into each job to do the same thing. I think jobs should be more balanced towards casual content because so the amount of skill and effort required to clear is not so wide between jobs while it doesn’t matter if the skill gap is wide for high end content because raiders often just end up gravitating towards the easier job anyways.

Because they sucked at balancing for 3 expansions now they are overcompensating.

[Themarvin]

They should not make jobs easy to play, a fewof them is, and they tend to be used for savage and ultimates as well, because they can't deal with actually having a difficult job to play.

Fun should go way beyond one button behaviour... and I think it is torment and punishment enough that you have a one button game for the first dungeons and group contet in game like Satasha.

[Ransu]

I wouldn't say casual content requires a lot of effort, but if you look between jobs in a role you can see the skill floor for jobs varies more. For instance it takes less effort to do dungeons as WAR than as a DRK, the difference being for one tank you only need to press one button to succeed while the other requires you to press many at a time. The same can be said for WHM versus other healers. I just think that the skill difference between jobs when doing casual content shouldn't be so different, unlike high end content where it doesn't matter because people will find a way around it.

This right here is why the trust system is bad. This post made absolutely no sense lol. Literally all the tanks can sleep walk through normal content.