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

[Deo14]

Nah, it's an honest question. I see GW2 praised every so often, yet despite being free and supposedly so good... Not a lot play it nowadays.

I'm surprised that they didn't already make a GW3. Would have made a lot of sense since WoW's star is dying (thanks to Blizzard and a dated game that takes forever for basic QoL changes).

"Not a lot play it nowadays" based on what data, if I may ask? There is no official data, but average consensus seems to be that GW2 has half the daily playercount of FFXIV in droughts, and 1/3rd of FFXIV when patch drops. GW2 compared to FFXIV has very steady playerbase, unlike FFXIV's cycles of droughts.

All of that with virtually no marketing and without having "Final Fantasy" in their name. You remember that Sia song for Endwalker? 10/10 CGI trailers? I bet that did cost more than total marketing of GW2 per expansion. Considering all of this, and that GW2 has much more customer friendly business model and is made by much smaller company, I would say that game is doing incredible.

Thinking that MMORPG should just make a sequel is deranged from reality. Why do you think that WoW 2 isn't a thing? FF11 and FF14 are not sequel, they're very different at the core, same as GW1 and GW2. MMORPGs are about long run, nobody wants to lose all of their progress just to switch to sequel which just iterates on prequel. And if you make sequel different, then original players will be against the changes, which is exactly what happened with GW2. Either way, players will be mad.

[Deo14]

I kinda wonder what is the general opinion of the JP community about the job design, since they might be a big voice as well there, but from the auto-translator in their forums I couldn't really see a lot about this subject. Are they happy with the 120s meta, or how jobs are homogenized, or the state of healers...

I've checked JP forums on SAM for fun, and found someone back in january saying that circle Tenka is dumb and that they want cone back. This has 36 upvotes, all around are similar comments with 10+ upvotes each. Then there is someone who said that "who cares, just double the circle Tenka range" with single upvote. Guess which one of these two suggestions they implemented in 6.4.

As for the other things, it's hard to say where the general consensus for each topic is, but I've heard that JP think that devs ignore them and listen only to EN, while EN thinks they listen only to JP. So I would say it's just that devs do not listen at all regarding job design, both EN and JP universally hate the Kaiten removal yet devs still ignore both.

[Kaliesto]

I'm not sure what the developers are thinking and what they're trying to accomplish with the job design currently.

It can be anyone's guess.

These people are faceless compared to the main head developers we all know.

[Renathras]

Sure, but was that because they disliked having soft-CDs and variable ppgcd costs of healing, and the added skill ceiling that brought with it, or because they occasionally had to look at the Target's Status Effects (Debuffs)?

...or, it could be because some players don't enjoy DoT gameplay.

For my part, I've never seen a game with a native UI that makes tracking DoTs at all enjoyable or really functional. Contrast with other upkeep effects - WAR's self-buff is a tiny buff icon, so easy to miss if it falls off, vs NIN's which is on its Job gauge and easy to tell at a glance what you need to do to interact with it.

...speaking of: DoTs, to be at all interesting, must interact with the kit. A good example of this would be BRD's old DoTs which actively would proc its various abilities and Sidewinder working like Fester with a damage increase based on your DoTs on the target. While the latter of these is what I would call "token interaction", the former is a good example of DoTs really interacting with the kit. A lesser example of that is BLM's Thundercloud procs, which can be used for optimization as well as movement tools, and the BLM even has some control over them with Sharpcast.

The SCH DoTs, at the time, where the boring "token" version of this, and WHM and AST's were the completely inane "upkeep to do damage, has no interaction with anything in your kit" versions, which are the most obnoxious things possible. Imagine if, instead of Dia being a 30 sec duration DoT that does 770 damage, WHM just had a Plegma-ability with a 30 sec CD that did 770 damage. It would be the same exact thing, except the Plegma-like ability would be more functional to use AND more interactive in the sense you benefit by lining it up with burst since it would benefit from all the increased effects while DoTs are more normalized (e.g. crits and the Feast or Famine thing).

The DoTs were only interesting on SCH in that they interacted with Bane, which itself is only interesting if fights have cleave components, which most modern boss fights do not.

Wait, so...

Who said anything about skill floors?

Where is thos "goalpost shift"?

I'm saying that DoTs don't actually fix anything. The people who are bored now will be bored again a few months after getting their extra DoTs, and then we'll be back to the same place we're at now: That Healers will be mostly hitting a single button, that encounters don't require use of their kit, that they feel redundant in content, that Ultimates are being cleared with 1 or 0 Healers, that 4 mans are being cleared with 1 Tank + 3 DPS, and that the better you get at healing, the more boring your gameplay becomes.

Which of those things will "more DoTs" fix?

None of them.

So it seems to me the better solution is to actually address the actual problems, since we can either do it now or we can add more DoTs, still have the same problem, and still have to address it then anyway; except then we'll also have less Healer players.

What you're describing here...

If you're going to make Healers into worse DPS with some support abilities, you might as well just get rid of the role. Give RDM Vermedica, give DNC's Curing Waltz a 30 sec CD, and now you just don't need the Healer Jobs anyway since why bring them when your other roles can already heal the content AND do more damage? You'd have to buff the damage of all the Healers up to around RDM levels to make them viable in content (AST to DNC levels) since their healing at that point isn't needed.

If you're going to completely gut a Job's role and identity, then you're already removing them from the game. As many (including some present company) have said, they feel like SMN was removed from the game, not merely "revamped" to "better fit" the current game design direction the Devs are going for. CLEARLY it's still there, but many would rather it have just been outright removed instead of "killed" and lingering as what it is.

I say let them quit.

And that's why the game Devs shouldn't be listening to you.

That's like saying all BLM players should quit because encounter design doesn't allow for hardcasting spells.

...except it does, it just needs Jobs to have tools to do so. BLM has quite a few. RDM is actually more immobile, but has several. WHM's GCD healing is mainly done with Lilies, which allow completely free movement, etc.

And if you've so little confidence, then you must believe they won't be adding more DoTs anyway, so it's a moot point.

.

I do think a BIG problem with Healer discussion is when high end players talk about Ultimate/Savage as if there's no other content in the game, despite those being the minority content in the game played by a minority of players. And while you can argue other content doesn't need all that healing, it doesn't change the fact that's how players actually play and engage with the encounters and Jobs. Ultimates are cleared by single digit percents, and even just attempts (not clears) of Savage make up around maybe 30% of the playerbase. The bulk of the game and players aren't engaging with the Jobs or content that way, and couldn't care less if an Ultimate is zero-healed by a stacked party of some of the absolute most skilled players on the planet in a feat that very few others can likely even accomplish, much less that should be used to make sweeping generalizations about the game overall.

Ultimates, in particular, are REALLY bad about this, since they aren't designed around healing, they're designed almost exclusively around DPS checks and exact performance of a mechanics dance, which in some phases has no outgoing damage and untargetable bosses. This is so divorced from most encounters in the game, like the average 24 man boss, as to be an entirely different game, not what Jobs should be entirely designed and based around.

No no no, you can't do that. Only agree with Shougun, no disagree. CFR 29 ShougunIsTheForums section B paren I- no disagree.

lol.

1) I do agree that SCH's original design was more as a Support/DPS kind of a thing, like an Everquest Druid or something. I also think there should be a place in the game for that - I've long opined against how FFXIV's encounter design, roles, and combat system are far too RIGID, which is also why we couldn't get a proper Cloromancer/Blood Mage/Discipline Priest as SGE. I was more just saying there are SCH players who weren't ever fans of the DoTs and played the Job in spite of them rather than because they liked them. There were some SCHs who were not at all upset by the simplification of their DPS kit. I do agree there were people who liked it. I'm just saying here that not everyone did.

2) Consider that, as recently as SB (the "high point" that people who don't like modern healing point to as when they enjoyed healing), Tanks had very little party healing (Clemency was about it), and that DPSers tended to have Second Wind and Bloodlust other than RDM with Vercure. Abilities that weren't useless, but weren't really strong, either, and had long CDs for their use. The zero Healer clear of TOP would not have been possible with SB era Tank/DPS kits because they would not have had the healing they had. The party that 0 Healer cleared TOP used WAR, DNC, and SMN healing that just didn't exist in the SB era kits, which would have made such a clear impossible. CLEARLY it's not a complete redesign of literally everything in the game. If we went back to SB era Healer kits BUT ALSO to SB era Tank and DPS kits (what's good for the goose...), then zero Healer clears wouldn't be possible. But we could also do that by just going back to SB era Tank and DPS healing/mitigation levels.

...moreover, I'm not sure everyone likes the EW direction of encounter designs being 95% movement and massive oGCD healing, no damage taken by doing mechanics properly, etc. That is, again, an EW design philosophy. If we can readily go back to SB Healer kits, and that ISN'T a problem, why can't we go back to SB Tank kits, DPS kits, and encounter design? Why is that a bridge too far when reverting Healers to SB is not?

3) Oh, I agree you can do more - did I not even say so? SCH to its SB form, SGE with a DPS rotation? - my point is, that doesn't actually FIX anything. The people who are bored now will still be bored then. You'd have to make the rotations akin to DNC or RDM levels before they wouldn't be bored, and at that point, you'd be alienating Healer players that play Healers because they don't like DPS rotations. I find DPS rotations boring or tedious. It's why I don't play DPS Jobs other than occasionally SMN and rarely RDM. The rest aren't fun, they're obnoxious, and RDM straddles that line. It's also why I like WAR and PLD, am meh on GNB, and dislike DRK. I actually like the PLD rework a lot because it's on the one hand relatively simple to follow (it's honestly easier to keep up than WAR since you don't have to juggle a self-buff or pool gauge for burst, no DoTs to speak of since Circle is "use on CD" anyway, no procs to speak of since Divine Might is entirely predictable), but it's also flexible (you can use Holy Spirits in any 1 of 6 GCD spots, and you can even use it outside of that for only a mild DPS loss). Likewise, SMN has a rotation, but it's pretty variable since you can move parts around kind of how you want, and insert Ruin 4 or your Ruin 3 filler per cycle wherever, with again no DoTs, procs, or upkeep things to have to juggle, and other than a short delay on Demis, you largely just use things on CD anyway.

But the point is, a lot of people who play Healers do so because they enjoy healing people (go figure), not contributing scratch damage to bosses that you can't even see a change in their health bar from doing in real time (unlike player health bars, where the response is immediate and apparent), and which requires reactive thinking instead of rote muscle memory and juggling clunky timers with an archaic UI.

This is why my personal position is what I call "The Four Healers Model", where we use the fact we have four Healer Jobs to...make them all distinct in playstyle so that there's one which appeals to each player type. At this point, we have the design space to do it, they just have to be balanced to contribute about the same level of DPS to the party on the whole (since that's what the game is balanced around), but how they play can be quite distinct. The bulk of SCH's damage coming from DoTs while the bulk of WHMs comes from Glares while the bulk of SGE's comes from a 1-2-3 combo and upkeeping a -4 buff (like WAR or NIN's base rotation) while the bulk of ASTs comes from having Cards be GCDs with no CD that it maintains uptime on the party with can all exist in the current design space and require no encounter or expansive whole-game redesigns at all. Wouldn't even be that hard to plot out - the only tricky one would be getting AST's buff %s right.

My general position is that the way to make the most people happy is to offer Jobs that are all viable but have different ways of getting to the same ends, and then let players gravitate to the ones they enjoy.

The problem with Healers (and to a lesser extent, Tanks) right now is they're all so...samey. They're all so similar to each other.

So changing Healers where they're all different than they are today...but all THE SAME different...doesn't fix that problem. You go from a bunch of people dissatisfied with Healers now to a different bunch of people dissatisfied with Healers then. The far better solution is to change some but not all of them, and make the ones you change different. In this way, players have a choice of how they want to engage with the gameplay instead of being moved from one "one-size-fits-some" box into another, equally alienating, "one-size-fits-some, but this time, a different some" box.

4) "Also nothing wrong with being green dps, tanks are essentially blue dps and I like them more for it." - I also have to disagree with this. Strongly. Every Job just being a flavor of DPS isn't good for a game with a Trinity system, and isn't good for gaming in general. It's not been really successful when tried, with even GW2 semi-abandoning the idea in high end gameplay. It's also the root of the problems with FFXIV right now. Go to the Tanking forums and tell them being Blue DPS is a good thing and you won't find much agreement. Most Tank players opine for the days of agro management (even if you an debate how much that was actually a thing), boss positioning (which WAS a thing, and an important one), and their more distinct old kits. Most Tank players do not enjoy being merely "Blue DPS", and most Healer players don't enjoy being "Green DPS". Those that do play WAR, RDM, or DNC already - and enjoy those Jobs for those features.

...and there's nothing wrong with that. But we shouldn't make all the others that way, too.

5) Which is more or less my position, just from a different angle. I don't think the gulf between our positions is TOO wide, it's just different in approach.

4also) Not everyone likes busywork.

I think this is the problem in proposing sweeping redesigns - people tend to misunderstand that what they enjoy, not everyone else enjoys. A lot of people don't like new SMN. But a lot of people like new SMN. While some people love juggling DoTs and complex rotations, some people clearly do not love those things, and love other things instead. And while those who love those things are tempted to insult and berate the people who do not, the reality is, different people like different things. If someone likes classical music and someone else doesn't, preferring JPop instead, it's not right for the classical music lover to berate the JPop lover as lazy for preferring JPop to classical. What is right is to accept people have different tastes and accept that. Some people like bland food and some people like spicy food. The bland food lovers shouldn't berate the spicy food lovers for being unable to appreciate their tastes, nor should the spicy lovers berate the bland lovers for not having the intestinal fortitude (literally, in this case) to withstand their heat.

Sometimes in life, people should just accept that other people don't like what they like, and be accepting of that, especially when it doesn't hurt them (or anyone else) to do so.

Hence: "4 Healers" model.

Funny thing about that, GW2 back-pedaled quite a bit on that whole "no trinity" design.

This.

People forget it was such a failure that they've more or less completely abandoned it and fully embraced the Trinity in high end content.

There was a YouTube video I saw a while back as to why the Trinity exists that I thought was actually pretty interesting:

"Why Do So Many Games Have Tanks, Healers and DPS?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QuKpJTUwwY

It's an interesting discussion in general and I'd say give it a watch when you have time. The SUPER short version is - it gives players in group content a quick way to sort party responsibilities and actions (as he notes, this is even true in sports) and to allow players to quickly sort themselves but also work out team strategies on the fly based on their roles, as opposed to everyone being jack-of-all-trades and going into uncoordinated free-for-alls and hoping for the best. For example, AST being a support with damage dealing buffs knows that it should use damage buffing cards on DPS Jobs over Tank or Healer Jobs, all things being equal, without requiring other inputs to make that decision. While it can be further divided by which DPS, the point is, using a Card on a Red icon instead of a Blue or Green is the obvious choice and requires no words and just...works.

Players do this naturally in games that don't naturally allow it or are designed not to do it (he talks about GW2) because it's simply more efficient to do so than to not do so.

And while there are a few variations on this theme - he talks about a variation of "interacting with the environment" (something Pantheon wants to do as well) - most are ultimately variations on separating Healing and Support where the former is more focused on party health bars while the latter is more focused on party combat effectiveness, often combined with decreasing the enemy party's combat effectiveness. Classes like GW's Mesmer or Everquest's Enchanter, and an arguably fourth leg of the "Trinity" that often gets shoehorned into Healer (most of the time) or DPS (or rarely Tank) toolkits rather than being made its own Role, despite how often people want to play that fourth role.

But regardless, whether Trinity or Quaternary, games that try not to do a Trinity/Quaternary system either end up as bland and sloggy messes, or completely crumble in the first place.

That's the big thing people tend to forget, it wasn't Endwalker that brought us this incredibly boring job design, Endwalker just continued what Shadowbringers had started. Endwalker's biggest sin is simply doubling down on it.

Pretty much this. People like blaming EW, but ShB started that trend. Though, honestly, SB really started the trend, people just didn't see it. Some things were better in ShB (WHM in SB sucked absolute arse and the ShB version was far and away better; to this day, I don't know who thought the SB Lilies were a good idea on the Dev team - like who read that and thought "Looks good. Ship it.") and some in SB. EW's taking that and then slapping the 2 min meta on everything, super high movement boss fights all over the place, hyper-rigid encounter mechanics that are entirely pass/fail in most cases (especially Ultimates) rendering healing and combat Raise utility meaningless due to body checks - just broke what worked decently well in ShB.

I don't think I want to go back to SB, and certainly don't want to see HW type design ever again, but we definitely should revert back towards ShB in 7.0 and beyond.

Personally it's also about how little the combat has changed/evolved for the majority of classes from SHB to EW.

Depending on class, going from ARR to HW to SB to SHB saw a decently big addition. Some classes like BRD was basicly 3 different jobs from ARR to SB, while job gauges added to each job, for better or worse.

I think this is a double-edged sword, though. Take SMN. Completely different Job. Some people love it, some people hate it. A lot of people hate AST's constant changes every expansion, and liked various former incarnations of BRD, MCH, PLD, MNK, etc.

That isn't to say change is always bad, but some people like having the same Job just with a shiny new button or some interesting new mechanic it didn't have before, as opposed to effectively a total redesign every expansion, like BRD.

I don't have a great answer, and could probably write a very long guess but, I would say that GW2 has a surprisingly large amount of really fun systems. I think my greatest annoyance is how delayed mounts were

I did find that (the mount thing) particularly off-putting for some reason.

For me, it was because there was no Trinity.

I play Healers or buff Support in most games, and there wasn't that. You get it later on, but for the first 40 levels (or more) until you start doing dungeons (which is around that point), it doesn't exist. When you team with people, it's just to go around killing things faster, as you're all entirely capable of doing the same thing solo at a slower pace. There's no party/team/community dynamic until you get to higher levels, which I just found bland.

I liked the visuals and the world (though the story seemed meh, I loved finding the exploration points where it would zoom the camera out, pan it around, and show you the views), but I just couldn't get into it because there apparently isn't a team/party dynamic - one of the main things I play MMOs for - until higher levels, largely because there was no Trinity - and because there was no dedicated Healer class for me to really get into, so I couldn't get into it at all.

I did like the megaboss spawns, make me think of Hunt Trains or the superboss FATEs in FFXIV, just with a more regular schedule and cinematic flair, even automatically zooming your camera out to appreciate the massive scale of the bosses and the players fighting them. And yeah, the cash shop being so in your face all the time was...intrusive and immersion breaking. They have some things I like, but not having Healer classes really broke it for me, so that's why I don't play it. I also generally dislike ARPGs. I prefer either tab targeting or FPS/3PS over ARPGs in almost all cases.

I would hate "next MMO" being action RPG.

I HAVE thought before that there is a solution to this, which is to have different classes have different playstyles. Like imagine, JUST AS A FOR EXAMPLE, if MCH in FFXIV was a over the shoulder third person shooter (No Man's Sky or that sort of thing 3PS combat) while BLM was the tab targting hardcaster and MNK played like a character in Smash Bros (much more ARPG). I'm not sure how ultimately feasible such a game would be to create, but with modern technology, it should be entirely possible. Hell, Titanfall 2 did this a decade ago, with the FPS on foot combat + the (I think?) 3rd person combat when you were in the mechs. Modern hardware is definitely able to have those two game systems working alongside a tab targeting wizard in the back casting spells. Remnant: From the Ashes semi-does this with the weapon mods/magic existing alongside the 3rd person shooter main element, as do the Borderlands games, the latter complete with talent trees like 2000's era WoW or Rift. It wouldn't be too hard to make a class there that hardcasts spells instead of shooting guns. Smash Bros semi-manages this, too, with a number of different forms of combat, some of which are very distinct - characters like Ken and Ryu playing more like traditional fighting game characters, ones like Dragon Quest Hero having semi-menu based combat like an old RPG, etc. Games like No Man's Sky and Star Citizen have worked out, as Titanfall did before, that you can have FPS on foot combat and vehicle/space combat in the same game, instead of being limited to only one or the other, and Xenogears did this 30 years ago in RPG form, Battlezone did it 35 or so years ago in FPS form.

I feel like the solution for "the next MMO" is actually to embrace multiple game styles in a single game. The first game that lets FPS/3PS fans play alongside "sword and spell" RPG fans alongside fighting game fans will unlock a pretty massive market.

[AlessaImpera]

WAR is perfect, GNB is almost perfect to me

[Kaliesto]

Having the next FF-MMORPG be Action RPG would solve all the problems that FFXIV has.

[fulminating]

If job A could do 10,000 dps by nodding birding one button or job B 10,000 dps by using a dozen or so different abilities in a structured rotation the latter will be more engaging but people will choose the former for consistency and ease and hate it. The “four healers” model as you put it is unworkable for the same reason new summoner is fundamentally incompatible with the game design.

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

"Not a lot play it nowadays" based on what data, if I may ask? There is no official data, but average consensus seems to be that GW2 has half the daily playercount of FFXIV in droughts, and 1/3rd of FFXIV when patch drops. GW2 compared to FFXIV has very steady playerbase, unlike FFXIV's cycles of droughts.

All of that with virtually no marketing and without having "Final Fantasy" in their name. You remember that Sia song for Endwalker? 10/10 CGI trailers? I bet that did cost more than total marketing of GW2 per expansion. Considering all of this, and that GW2 has much more customer friendly business model and is made by much smaller company, I would say that game is doing incredible.

Thinking that MMORPG should just make a sequel is deranged from reality. Why do you think that WoW 2 isn't a thing? FF11 and FF14 are not sequel, they're very different at the core, same as GW1 and GW2. MMORPGs are about long run, nobody wants to lose all of their progress just to switch to sequel which just iterates on prequel. And if you make sequel different, then original players will be against the changes, which is exactly what happened with GW2. Either way, players will be mad.

Gw2 is free yet has way less players than ff14 and WoW. There's no denying it.

Gw2 is dated. Even WoW looks better than it after it's Legion updates and that game is dated. It's silly to believe that a gw3 shouldn't have been in the works as gw2 isn't gaining a lot players over time anyway.

[Niroken]

I feel the devs are hard focused on trying to increase tank numbers that everything else is secondary right now.

Doesn't look like it's working either.

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

If job A could do 10,000 dps by nodding birding one button or job B 10,000 dps by using a dozen or so different abilities in a structured rotation the latter will be more engaging but people will choose the former for consistency and ease and hate it. The “four healers” model as you put it is unworkable for the same reason new summoner is fundamentally incompatible with the game design.

New summoner is way better than old summoner by far and actually fulfills the summoner fantasy.