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

[Deo14]

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.

Mind telling me how you found out that GW2 is free? It has free trial similarly to FFXIV, it let's you level all the way to 80 and do all base game stuff with some limitations. But it's still buy once to play and has no subscription fee. There's no denying you talk out of your ass when you don't even know this.

Speaking about talking out of your ass, you still didn't tell me where did you get the data which concluded that GW2 is unpopular/dying.

[Shurrikhan]

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

Except, when DoTs perform as varied of functions as they did for SCH, in asking for the (continued) removal of DoTs, you're not just asking for "tracking DoTs on enemies" to go away. You're also asking to trim away from healers...

• variably reduced costs for GCD healing / dynamic opportunity costs for GCD healing [relative to filler spam alone],
• soft CDs, and the still-flexible rotational complexity that comes with them,
• having less than 83% of offensive GCDs spent on a single spell,
• and arguably more.

Which of those things will "more DoTs" fix?

• Nothing else to press,
• nothing synergetic with abilities, and
• no rotational complexity during downtime.

All decently important, especially given what little can be accomplished when people insist on not raising the skill floor of healers by affecting the relative healing requirements.

If you're going to make Healers into worse DPS with some support abilities, you might as well just get rid of the role.

First, that is not the same thing as...

you'd be better off just deleting the four Jobs instead of trying to change them

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.

While it could certainly have been be better in early game, you still had most of the gameplay available to any Trinity game. It mostly just didn't remove as much gameplay as Trinity games make a trend of.

• Could certain professions [classes] heal others? Yes.
• Were there times where, even among multiple capable of healing others, one person had lower opportunity costs for healing than others would, or could longer sustain that capacity than others? Yes.
• Were those times frequent enough to often have a player who took an overarching duty to keep others alive, even if others may rotate in and the mechanics were still leverageable by all? Yes.
  
  
• Could you mitigate? Yes.
• Could you affect enemy targeting, drawing attention to yourself to at least indirectly mitigate for others and to decrease your party's overall damage intake (increase average volume of mitigation)? Yes.
• Were those times frequent enough to often have a player who took an overarching duty to keep others alive, even if others may rotate in and the mechanics were still leverageable by all? Yes.

All that was really lacking were your "Trinity" negations/simplifications/truncations like these:

• Was redirecting enemy threat reduced to the task of a single, inflexible role that an entire class would then be locked into (and others out of), removing that gameplay from others?
• Was recovering lost health (outside of CDs or actions of pitiful value) reduced to the task of a single, inflexible role that an entire class would then be locked into (and others out of), removing that gameplay from others?
• Were burst/sustain dynamics and decently involved gameplay loops removed from those with either of the above tasks?

I would hate "next MMO" being action RPG.

...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.

How would the latter likely not be an 'action RPG'?

Moreover, you realize we've had MMOs that have met that description for over a dozen years now, right?

[BaconBits]

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

New summoner is all flash and no substance, a caster in name only, and the shining example of what a rework looks like at the hands of these devs.

Perfect for players that don't have a single synapse firing off in their brains.

[Deo14]

New summoner is all flash and no substance, a caster in name only, and the shining example of what a rework looks like at the hands of these devs.

Perfect for players that don't have a single synapse firing off in their brains.

EW SMN is all that is wrong with current job design. Removing all the nuances, roles that mean nothing (but you still get taxed for it, except in cases where you don't), job which plays itself, depth replaced with flashy and over the top effects. SMN doesn't control summons in any way, they're merely a VFX, you could easily remove each summon and say that it's you who casts those spells and call yourself elementalist or something and nobody would notice.

[Silver-Strider]

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

BLM is probably the worst example you could've chosen because its toolkit is actually well designed and built to fit in with the game's fight design. It has the tools necessary to allow it to move during fights without missing uptime with abilities like Triplecast and traits like Thundercloud. Healers do not have that design philosophy built in to their toolkits because its all largely disjointed from one another, consisting of mostly standalone skills with next to no interaction with one another.

Why the hell would I have any confidence in the Dev team at this point? It took them almost 4 years to finally axe Selene after they removed all her functionality in ShB and AST is slated to get yet another rework 4 expansions in a row since its inception. They don't know wtf they're doing with healers and it shows every day.

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.

This got a chuckle out of me. The Mist Dragon in the Burn has more engaging and complex fight design than half of the 24 man raid bosses because they're just health sponges. Even in their haydays, there have been very few 24 man bosses that were actually challenging enough to justify the state of healers as they currently are and the few that could have been used, all existed in a time when Healers still had more DPS options available to them. As for how the majority of people play healers, we don't know how they play outside of what we as players experience. Tales of Duty Finders has a metric ton of stories about incompetent healers going on for years now. I legitimately don't trust any random healer I get in Duty Finder whenever I actually attempt to go in as a non-healer that I generally focus on using my own healing/mitigation abilities rolling as much as possible and its saved me on more than 1 occasion. We have new players saying that healers are boring to play. We have people that freely admit they like healers because they can just semi-afk and watch Netflix. What evidence do we have that suggests that people that are currently playing healer actually enjoy the Healing aspect of the job? We don't have any, just our own biased answers towards the state of it.

[Renathras]

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.

That's their choice.

One of the world firsts had a BLM. His reason was "Because I like it." One of the world firsts had a DRK when DRK was considered the hardest Tank and somewhat sucked. "Because I like it" was his reason, too.

As long as Jobs output the same performance, PF generally isn't going to discriminate. And high end Ultimate players are so good, they kind of get to play what they like (world first races, I mean).

Moreover, that's still far better than the solution of either sticking with the Healer Jobs we have now - where half the people are upset - or changing them all to make those people happy, just alienating the other half - where half the people are upset now, too.

All things being equal - and equal DPS potential IS all things being equal - choice is better than no choice.

Or would you rather we just keep the Healers the same as they are now so you can pick any of the four and not be blacklisted because they're no different?

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.

I guess Tanks are like Healers - people feel a lack of identity and distinction in the Trinity role - but with even more "responsibility" (or the feeling/perception of it; tankxiety is real). So you end up with Blue DPS not being popular because the people who want to TANK don't feel like they're Tanking as a DPS, and if they're going to play a DPS, they're going to just play a DPS Job.

Same thing with Healers, just it's somehow (?) even worse with Tanks.

To be fair, Tanks are much closer to "Blue DPS" than Healers are to "Green DPS", complete with having DPS-lite rotations.

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

Maybe, but I still contend it would be nice if they had split old SMN into (a) new SMN and (b) Green Mage DoT based Job.

Except, when DoTs...

I may need the Judge Judy "Help me with this one" meme. Ahem, okay, I'll try to keep this on point:

1) Old SCH was not NEARLY that dynamic. You used your DoTs on duration for refreshes, and Quickened Aetherflow was unreliable and often janky. You also spent the bulk of your casts on the same button. Yeah, you had LESS Broils than you do now, but still a pretty significant portion. What was REALLY different is you actually had to heal back then.

2) "all decently important" - yeah, but not highly distinct from what you have now. It won't keep you interested for months and years on end if the encounter designs are still "press one heal every 45 seconds or so". I dunno, maybe that's enough for you, but it isn't for many of us.

3) "While it could certainly have been be better in early game, you still had most of the gameplay available to any Trinity game." - not really, no. I played as the elemental mage class, since that was the CLOSEST thing to a healer (and one that had healer specs at high levels). There was no way for me to actually go dedicated healer early on. Best I could manage was a few aoe field healing effects which didn't matter since anyone who would group with me was self-healing and dodge rolling (because that's a thing in that game) mechanics anyway. People generally didn't party up when I was playing, and I played up to the mid-20s, going from what I guess was the Human starter area, to the zone to the south, and then I got bored and poked my nose into the zone to the east, another zone to the south and around a lake or something into a big capital city that was confusing as hell, I think was the hub to expansion areas and high end content/dungeons I couldn't do, and then across the water I remember a cave with jumping puzzles and...a ghost pirate or something, I think. (I didn't hate the game, I just couldn't get into it mechanically or thematically.) People largely just...didn't group at all, or only did so for the big FATE Boss things.

4) You can berate what other people like all you want - that doesn't change the fact other people like those things.

5) "How would the latter likely not be an 'action RPG'?" - because if you don't want the ARPG elements, you just play one of the classes that doesn't work that way.

6) "Moreover," - No, we haven't. Which MMO is that? GW2 isn't that. I don't think you can play any class as a FPS or fighting game, and their tab targeting caster doesn't really work as one. FFXIV doesn't work that way, for similar reasons with the exception BLM, to an extent RDM, and the Healers DO act as casters. I can't think of a single MMO that meets that description. Which are you thinking of?

New summoner is all flash and no substance, a caster in name only, and the shining example of what a rework looks like at the hands of these devs.

Perfect for players that don't have a single synapse firing off in their brains.

If you have to insult people to make a point, you don't have a point worth making.

New SMN is fun to play. It's a Caster, though as you level, you hardcast increasingly less (though there's also a BLM rotation that is all instant casts, even if it is absurd, no one calls BLM a non-Caster because of it). New SMN has a lot of things going for it:

1) It is what it says on the tin.
2) You DON'T have to use extensive out of game resources to understand how to play it correctly.
3) It more or less lines up properly with the way the game is currently designed to play (2 min cycles).
4) It doesn't have mechanics that require you to spend as much or more time glaring at your hotbars or Job gauge as you do on the boss encounter.
4b) It can be played by feel as a result, which is really nice (that is, fingers on buttons and rolling through your known cycles).
5) It's also not static, or only as static as you want it, as you can move various pieces of your rotation around.

SMN is the Job that actually fits the "just read your tooltips" paradigm; as it's one you CAN "just read your tooltips" and play optimally. It also just works, something a lot of Jobs don't do, or don't do without massaging. And it doesn't require one to do hours of theorycrafting or try to wade through the toxic cesspool that is The Balance discord to figure out how to play properly.

I DO think (as I said above and have said before) that what old SMN was should have been retained in some form (Green Mage/GRM being my go-to for that), but new SMN itself is not only fine, it's a really good design. It's not a design EVERYTHING SHOULD BE - as I say in my 4 Healers Model, the problems come when things are identical, not when they are distinct - and it's nice to me that the Caster subrole has three Jobs that all feel distinct from each other. Say what you will, but no sane person is going to say that BLM, RDM, and SMN play alike. Caster is arguably the most diverse - in terms of playstyle and "feel" of play - of any of the Roles/Subroles in the game right now. And that's a good thing.

Would it be better if GRM was there alongside them? Oh absolutely.

BLM is probably the worst example you could've chosen because...

Irrelevant.

If the argument was - and it was - that fights are too movement oriented to use GCD heals, then they'd also be too movement oriented to use GCD damage casts. And while BLM has insane movement if prepped for it and rolling through their various movement tools, it's not INFINITE. BLM isn't SMN. Meaning if BLM can get away with it in current content, so can Healers.

Hell, WHM already has this. Swiftcast, natural Dia refreshes, and up to 3 Lilies (4 if we include Misery) is a ton of free movement when you need it. Bonus points, Dia can be used as a movement tool for (minor) DPS gain since it has that initial damage. And 1.5 sec Glare casts means extensive slidecasting. SCH can go to Ruin 2spam if it really really needs to move a long way. SGE can Icarus and has up to 3 Toxicons, up to 2 Icaruses, and can even use Eukrasian shields for a 50% damage refund (a DPS gain over "doing literally nothing") if needs to go a super far distance.

BLM is also not the best designed toolkit, it just happens to have been well adapted; something you could easily do for Healers without much difficulty.

Also: You realize shifting Healers to their SB kits would be a rework, right?

.

This got a chuckle out of me.

It's true, though.

Not to mention the Shadows of Mhach and Ivalice raid series were BOTH legendary for their difficulty at release. Orbonne had to be nerfed. A LOT. Like...it wouldn't surprise me at all if the nerf total was more than half a dozen, or possibly even a dozen. TG Cid, in particular, is legendary for wiping parties, and Orbonne was the only non-Extreme/Savage instance I can recall ever timing out on, and it wasn't just the one time.

"Tales of Duty Finders" are mostly anecdotes, and many are probably made up entirely. It's a thread where anyone can post whatever they want with no evidence.

We have as much evidence people playing healers enjoy it as we have that people do not - anecdotal stories and individuals posting that they like or dislike it.

[Silver-Strider]

Irrelevant.

If the argument was - and it was - that fights are too movement oriented to use GCD heals, then they'd also be too movement oriented to use GCD damage casts. And while BLM has insane movement if prepped for it and rolling through their various movement tools, it's not INFINITE. BLM isn't SMN. Meaning if BLM can get away with it in current content, so can Healers.

Hell, WHM already has this. Swiftcast, natural Dia refreshes, and up to 3 Lilies (4 if we include Misery) is a ton of free movement when you need it. Bonus points, Dia can be used as a movement tool for (minor) DPS gain since it has that initial damage. And 1.5 sec Glare casts means extensive slidecasting. SCH can go to Ruin 2spam if it really really needs to move a long way. SGE can Icarus and has up to 3 Toxicons, up to 2 Icaruses, and can even use Eukrasian shields for a 50% damage refund (a DPS gain over "doing literally nothing") if needs to go a super far distance.

Other than Lilies, none of your examples are GCD heals and you had to resort to DPS spells for movement in your argument, proving my point that GCD heals cannot work in the current environment that would be necessary for the Traditional Healer gameplay loop of healing. Also, Dia was nerfed in EW so that it requires, at minimum, 15s to have passed before refreshing it so that it's not a DPS loss to do so. The 120 upfront potency of ShB was much more substantial to facilitate it as a movement tool back then, especially before the cast time changes but now, not so much. Finally, that only accounts for WHM. Ruin 2 is a DPS loss, Toxicon is DPS neutral for the 1st 3 shots and any accumulated during downtime but is otherwise a DPS loss. AST is just screwed entirely since using Lightspeed is not an option due to their 2 minute burst window being too busy without it.

Not to mention the Shadows of Mhach and Ivalice raid series were BOTH legendary for their difficulty at release. Orbonne had to be nerfed. A LOT. Like...it wouldn't surprise me at all if the nerf total was more than half a dozen, or possibly even a dozen. TG Cid, in particular, is legendary for wiping parties, and Orbonne was the only non-Extreme/Savage instance I can recall ever timing out on, and it wasn't just the one time.

Even in their haydays, there have been very few 24 man bosses that were actually challenging enough to justify the state of healers as they currently are and the few that could have been used, all existed in a time when Healers still had more DPS options available to them.

Mhach and Ivalice existed at time periods when Healers had more DPS options and they worked just fine. Your own argument is working against you.

[fulminating]

That's their choice.

One of the world firsts had a BLM. His reason was "Because I like it." One of the world firsts had a DRK when DRK was considered the hardest Tank and somewhat sucked. "Because I like it" was his reason, too.

You think a lot more highly of this playerbase than I do if you’re sincerely comparing the world first racers to the average player.

We have seen the collapse of the red mage playerbase since Eden presumably for the reason that summoner is utterly trivial to outperform it on and the raise has no value when you’re already dead.

You already know that I think sacrificing everything for this bizarre attempt at perfect balance is stupid. It necessarily means there’s a correct composition because all jobs now compete for the same niche. If all were allowed a significant degree of uniqueness and they didn’t tune the dps checks according to the theoretical best composition then I think it would address a lot of my issues with job design. Of course this would mean two minute burst windows are at least severely diminished but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

I reject your opinion about new summoner being fun.
1) bait and switch 8 years in. Not what it says on the tin. No pets no dots.
2) in other words no optimisation to speak of?
3) it fits perfectly in a widely derided system?
4/b) ??? You can do any job by feel. It gets really bad when you go “oh it’s illusory time” internally coming up on the 2 minute burst on any job with a modicum of involvement.
5) shifting 3 blocks around isn’t really that much flexibility. Most of it derives from the other fifty something seconds of physical ranged gameplay.


Could the argument not be made that their legendary difficulty is entirely due to the average competence of any random player? It’s content open to all with incentive for all to run. Tg cid has a slight degree of personal responsibility (take the tether nontanks, don’t overlap the big red bleeds, get in the blue claw stack thingy) and that’s all it takes for everything to crumble.
I think there’s a lot more truth in the duty finder stories than you’re admitting. The cesspool site at least expects screenshots and logs where possible to verify things. The angle you should have taken is “normalcy isn’t notable” or in other words it’s self-selecting for the abnormal. At the same time, a lot of the reason I play warrior and scholar in casual content is that I can force mitigation on tanks or hp on any party member.

[GaiusDrakon]

BLM is probably the worst example you could've chosen because its toolkit is actually well designed and built to fit in with the game's fight design. It has the tools necessary to allow it to move during fights without missing uptime with abilities like Triplecast and traits like Thundercloud. Healers do not have that design philosophy built in to their toolkits because its all largely disjointed from one another, consisting of mostly standalone skills with next to no interaction with one another.

Why the hell would I have any confidence in the Dev team at this point? It took them almost 4 years to finally axe Selene after they removed all her functionality in ShB and AST is slated to get yet another rework 4 expansions in a row since its inception. They don't know wtf they're doing with healers and it shows every day.



This got a chuckle out of me. The Mist Dragon in the Burn has more engaging and complex fight design than half of the 24 man raid bosses because they're just health sponges. Even in their haydays, there have been very few 24 man bosses that were actually challenging enough to justify the state of healers as they currently are and the few that could have been used, all existed in a time when Healers still had more DPS options available to them. As for how the majority of people play healers, we don't know how they play outside of what we as players experience. Tales of Duty Finders has a metric ton of stories about incompetent healers going on for years now. I legitimately don't trust any random healer I get in Duty Finder whenever I actually attempt to go in as a non-healer that I generally focus on using my own healing/mitigation abilities rolling as much as possible and its saved me on more than 1 occasion. We have new players saying that healers are boring to play. We have people that freely admit they like healers because they can just semi-afk and watch Netflix. What evidence do we have that suggests that people that are currently playing healer actually enjoy the Healing aspect of the job? We don't have any, just our own biased answers towards the state of it.

lol why r u guys even talking to him seriously.

he barely even does savage, much less ultimates. he literally doesn't know how to heal

Not to mention the Shadows of Mhach and Ivalice raid series were BOTH legendary for their difficulty at release. Orbonne had to be nerfed. A LOT. Like...it wouldn't surprise me at all if the nerf total was more than half a dozen, or possibly even a dozen. TG Cid, in particular, is legendary for wiping parties, and Orbonne was the only non-Extreme/Savage instance I can recall ever timing out on, and it wasn't just the one time.

like

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/428968

guy's literally unironically spitting out takes that were previous titanmen troll threads... lmao just watch on the sidelines and laugh

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

Mind telling me how you found out that GW2 is free? It has free trial similarly to FFXIV, it let's you level all the way to 80 and do all base game stuff with some limitations. But it's still buy once to play and has no subscription fee. There's no denying you talk out of your ass when you don't even know this.

Speaking about talking out of your ass, you still didn't tell me where did you get the data which concluded that GW2 is unpopular/dying.

It's literally free on Steam. You would know this if you even played the game.

Now whose talking out their ass? You. As always.