What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[Shurrikhan]

Three pieces to that:

1) That isn't a problem inherently. It's one thing if someone is making a hardcore game that is billed and executed as a hardcore game (Wildstar, say). But, if that's not the design intent, it's really not a problem.

In any place tight balance doesn't matter... this discussion is irrelevant from the start.

2) That aside, it's not like we have this in any game anyway. Every MMO in history has some classes with higher skill ceilings and some with lower.

Sure. Some variance is inevitable. But there's a hell of a difference between one having 90% the optimization effort of another vs. having only some 40% or less.

There are also ways to differentiate things that work well. Compare SMN and BLM. BLM's rotation is obviously quite a bit more difficult. It has a high gap between skill ceiling and skill floor. Skill floor (ice mage?) does pitiful damage. Skill ceiling is really competitive, though, and one of the top/leading DPSers. SMN, on the other hand, has a low skill floor and ceiling, a narrow gap between them, but also does less damage.

No... just... no. The latter is a bad thing. It means that now one is pushed towards SMN if at or below a certain level of willing effort, and then pushed away from it for anything above that.

You end up with hugely fewer real choices up to that point (X is overpowered), and one fewer real choice after that point (X is underpowered).

Building out kits organically from intuitive, accessible parts to a fairly high ceiling (resulting in nearish to the same skill ceiling, albeit it in varied ways) is always better for offering players breadth of choice than would be purposely stratifying the roster into S, A, B, C, and D tier jobs, where each is better than those above it up until a particular effort threshold and then worse past that threshold.

[AmiableApkallu]

There are other Jobs to pick, some which will have limits below your level, some at your level, and some above your level. Everyone, of all skills, has the same choice, just a different slate.

Again, every MMO I'm aware of has always done this. Every one I've ever played has had some easy, some medium, and some high difficulty classes. The only one I can think of that might not have (which I didn't play) was Wildstar, specifically because it was made exclusively for a hardcore audience.

WoW vaguely gets around this with talents, but we don't have those yet in FFXIV. But even there, there are some classes where no matter the talents you pick, it's still easy (or hard, in the case of the hard classes). So it's not even a perfect solution there. In FFXIV, we don't have that option, so this is what we get instead.

You're ignoring what I've said: Every player should be able to choose any class/job they want based on "identity"/"aesthetic" and find fulfillment in this game.

That's how this game is set up. At no point are you asked, "Would you like to play a hard job or an easy job? Would you like a large gap or a small gap between the skill floor and skill ceiling?" You are simply presented with a slate of jobs with various looks and feels and stories that you can choose from and play.

Or perhaps as someone else put it:

Building out kits organically from intuitive, accessible parts to a fairly high ceiling (resulting in nearish to the same skill ceiling, albeit it in varied ways) is always better for offering players breadth of choice than would be purposely stratifying the roster into S, A, B, C, and D tier jobs, where each is better than those above it up until a particular effort threshold and then worth past that threshold.

Every job in this game has a kit consisting of "intuitive, accessible parts" that, to varying degrees of success, aligns with the job's aesthetic and identity. The question is where the skill ceiling falls. And to some extent, that also flows from a job's aesthetic and identity. There is some intrinsic difficulty in being a glass cannon turret on an active battle field (BLM). There is some intrinsic simplicity in powerful, direct HP restoration (WHM).

But there is a problem when one confuses "intrinsic simplicity" for "the skill ceiling must be buried six feet under ground."