Your Opinion on the Current State of Job Identity/Balance in 6.4?

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

PvE could use with cutting done on button redundancy. Like, on Scholar, I'm often confused on why I have multiple abilities that do the same thing (and share the same or close to same cooldowns) with that "one" ability out of the bunch just being better in most situations.

[Reimmi]

The dps are overall okay other than summoner
Tanks are too samey, would love to see them diversified a bit
healers lol, pick your 1 button rotation

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

The dps are overall okay other than summoner
Tanks are too samey, would love to see them diversified a bit
healers lol, pick your 1 button rotation

I wouldn't say Tanks are the same. Dark Knight isn't the same as Warrior at all other than both having a combo system. Warrior is much easier for less experienced players to play as, while Dark Knight is much squishier (and way less self-healing) and takes more skill.

[Jeeqbit]

I wouldn't say Tanks are the same. Dark Knight isn't the same as Warrior at all other than both having a combo system. Warrior is much easier for less experienced players to play as, while Dark Knight is much squishier (and way less self-healing) and takes more skill.

The main thing about Dark Knight is the amount of abilities to press at level 90. There is the opener with almost the entire kit ready to be weaved and you've got to pick 1-2 every GCD depending on your ping. And a bunch of them restore MP making it easy to overcap. Warrior is so much more compact than that and doesn't have this at all. You also have to try not to spend 50 of your blood gauge right before Living Shadow, and maintain 3,000 MP for TBN. But these are all things you get used to when you play it regularly for more than a day, and then it becomes relatively braindead.

Still, when I want to play an easy tank I choose Warrior, not Dark Knight, because of that. Which is most of the time to be honest.

[DiaDeem]

tanks getting nerfed

...Wait, you mean the role that barely needs healers anymore?

[Dzian]

...Wait, you mean the role that barely needs healers anymore?

That's less a job issue and more a content / difficulty issue. They deliberately tune content damage low because they don't want healers to be stressed or panic and scared of the role because its too hard.

That's a big part of why tank self sustain is perceived as too high. Because incoming damage is too low and heavily predictable.

This has always been the case though. Every expansion. Even ARR /HW. It felt like there was amassive disconnect between the team designing jobs and the team designing content..

Old school paladin. The iron fortress tank. Low dps high defence and mitigation...

Old school whm. Pure healer class.

Old school monk. Single target king but crap at aoe.

All sound great but content designed entirely around dps /aoe meant none of those job designs ever fit in.

It's the same even amount dps.


Melee should hit hard but have the survivability to take a few hits due to be danger close to the boss.

Casters should hit even harder at the cost of reduced mobility there survival comes from spells like sleeps binds or magic barriers. Casting those spells costs dps.

Then physical ranged always used to be the glass cannon jobs. Super high damage super mobile. But squishy enough a falling leaf from a tree would drop them.

However xiv content is designed around unavoidable raidwide damage and stuff so every role type has to make a trade off for survival and that trade is always damage.

So now physical ranged is a highly survivable highly mobile but low damage role in a game where damage is all that matters...

Even magic ranged is highly mobile highly survivable and again low damage role. And melee Reighn supreme as a result.

All because of content design and unavoidable raidwides.

[DiaDeem]

That's less a job issue and more a content / difficulty issue. They deliberately tune content damage low because they don't want healers to be stressed or panic and scared of the role because its too hard.

That's a big part of why tank self sustain is perceived as too high. Because incoming damage is too low and heavily predictable.

Right, I can see what you're saying. It's just the phrase "Nerfed tanks" just felt really weird to me.

[TheDustyOne]

As far as DPS goes, there's at least a lot of gameplay variety, even when there's a few similar mechanics. All the jobs feel different enough to where it's not a massive concern on homogeneity. Balance within the roles is a different story, but that's not something I'm massively concerned with as someone who does mostly casual content nowadays, haven't touched savage throughout EW except for P1S.

RDM and MNK are my go-to DPS jobs with some BLM on the side, EW Monk I think is probably the best iteration of Monk, and Red Mage feels good to play. The only concern I have with some DPS jobs is in gameplay depth (mostly SMN). But in terms of identity, DPS are varied in playstyle and don't feel too similar to each other.

Tanks however, are starting to blend in with each other. WAR and DRK have been way too similar ever since DRK got reworked back with SHB launch, it just spams more oGCDs. But now even GNB and PLD are slowly becoming similar, not to the same degree as WAR and DRK, but close enough for me to complain about it. Goring Blade is now just Sonic Break, FoF is a carbon copy of No Mercy, Bow Shock/Circle of Scorn, Blasting Zone/Expiacion, Burst Strike/Holy Spirit. Even the blades combo and Confiteor could be seen as similar to the Gnashing combo if it was locked behind Double Down instead. About the only major difference is Atonement spam, which up until recently may as well read "we have a 6-part combo where you see the same animation overcap your MP for the 100th time this fight".

I miss old PLD... There's potential to make the new PLD work much better than the old, but currently it's just a mess of old abilities they somehow had to make work in a new rotation.

As for the healers... good lord they need a ground-up rework. SCH and SGE are near carbon copies outside having to press Eukrasia before a heal or pre-placing a fairy. The kits are a complete mess, we're so bloated on oGCD heals that we never want to touch a GCD heal, and our reward for ignoring said GCD heals is to spam the same button over and over again. MP means nothing except press Lucid on cooldown. There's not enough incoming damage to actually make use of the amount of healing our kits are capable of, and increasing that damage is only going to drive less skilled healers away from a role that's already feeling underplayed. The end result has us spamming Glaroilificosis, only being broken up by the occasional Combiodiasis every 30s, even some of the most sloppy raid clears has healers churning nukes at least 5 times more than any other button. Energy Drain is the only thing keeping SCH interesting and AST cards are alright, but not as engaging as it used to be IMO.

They all start feeling very, VERY samey when I'm pressing only 2 buttons for 80% of a fight.

[Shurrikhan]

...

So, agreed on most of this, but...

Old school monk. Single target king but crap at aoe.

Monk was putting out 6 GCDs in a row of 186 ppgcd while DRG could only do 154 with Doom Spike (121 with Ring of Thorns).

It just had the same problem with maxing out its burst that BLM had via Flare --3 minute CDs [Perfect Balance <> Convert/Ether]-- but without the then-150 effective ppgcd of Fire II (100p * 1.8 via AF3, but a 3s cast / 2.5s GCD) to fall back on. Heck, WHM was up there with the AoE burst powerhouses back then, just due to Holy's ridiculous original potency (atop its originally 5s stun).

On the other hand, MNK had no significant single-target advantage without high-SkS builds that would require Army's Paeon to a degree wasteful to anyone else (though Goad would later help with this). DRG outcompeted it in rDPS for most of ARR before in turn being outshined by NIN. Optimized BLM play likewise generally outperformed it, especially if Foe uptime didn't have to be squashed in favor of extra Paeo.

Old school paladin. The iron fortress tank. Low dps high defence and mitigation...

Likewise... not really a thing. Though it had virtually no defense, originally, true, Warrior also had a lower damage ceiling than Paladin, and remained that way throughout ARR, especially if/when tier included a faster-attacking sword to synergize with Sword Oath.

The difference was that Warrior could (A) AoE, and (B) eventually (for real content, too late) outscale content with its 33.3% uptime on 25% Leech and up to a 1633 relative potency (or 2450 if the heal-from-damage could also crit back then; I forget) burst-heal via Inner Beast.

And because Inner Beast's damage bonus could only be accessed from tank stance, Warrior generally ended up occupying a more MT position in the neutral (neither having and/or needing preemptive defensive CDs), as Defiance was less punishing to damage even if it also gave considerably less eHP.

All in all, the most pivotal difference jobs brought was kill order and the degree of Paeon use.
No job was designed strictly as an "ST king", and BLM AoE was quickly nerfed back into check with the very next expansion.

[Aravell]

My opinion of the current state of job identity is that it's stale, most of the jobs feel almost the same and some are almost 100% identical during burst windows. As for job balance, it's an utter failure. Despite making jobs roughly the same and gutting the identities of the jobs, they still manage to mess up balance so badly that some jobs are still seen as useless.