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

[Lunalepsy]

What identity? They all look and taste the same.

[Absurdity]

Honestly had they put half of the raid buffs on 1 minute and the other half of two minutes most people, myself largely included, wouldn't have THAT much of a problem. Less than ideal mind you but still. I had a ninja in my asphodelos static and none of us minded the raid buff situation because we had to line up with trick every minute. As soon as that changed in 6.1 is when people started having a problem with the 2 min meta.

I would still have a problem with it, because it barely changes anything. Most jobs are already designed to do their burst every 1 minute, they just have a slightly bigger burst every 2 minutes. So changing some party buffs to be 1 minute would still result in you playing the exact same way you do now, the damage spikes just get a bit lower.

[Shurrikhan]

I would still have a problem with it, because it barely changes anything. Most jobs are already designed to do their burst every 1 minute, they just have a slightly bigger burst every 2 minutes. So changing some party buffs to be 1 minute would still result in you playing the exact same way you do now, the damage spikes just get a bit lower.

^ This. ^

___________

It's the fact that nigh everything can be saved for the 2-minute bursts (from, for instance, giving 60s CDs two charges) that leads to the time between 2-minute bursts feeling so empty, not merely the fact that the raid buffs all occur per 120 seconds...

...and it's the sheer amount of potency (relative to sustain / average ppgcd / individual rotational, positional, or uptime optimization rewards) that can be put out in 15 seconds per 2 minutes that causes the problems with the Crit/DHit damage variance between parses with identical actions, far more so than the effect of stacked raid buffs.

(Remember, we used to have things like ~30% damage multipliers [e.g., DRG's old Blood for Blood] stacking atop 10% Trick Attacks, 10% Foe Requiem, 10% Contagion, 10% crit Litany, and 10% AoE Balance [late HW], etc.; buff multiplicity was far more impactful in the past, before the "2 minute meta". What we didn't have back then, though, was attacks hitting for some 3x our average potency-per-GCD.)

[Raikai]

It reminds me of the old "Let's buff Piety, Tenacity, and Direct Hit so they're all real choices and each role would have its own best stat. But, let's also remove Skill/Spell Speed from the game, since it's just an annoyance," or "Consolidated combos would remove all the complexity of jobs, because you'd just hit the one button over and over!" all while shutting down any discussion of branching actual, real decisions (where what's optimal would rely on context and foresight) or combo actions being separately usable with actual synergies instead of just being finger-traps.

So many here seem to prefer a pretense of complexity over any actual depth in practice. Le sigh.

I really wish they would just revamp those stats to make them something more interesting.

Sks and Sps have absolutely no business in being separate entities. And then there's the question (which I don't know the answer), but how to make speed attractive to more jobs, especially non casters?

Why direct hit even exists? It's just a different form of crit. If there's something to take note from WoW, is the mastery stat. Something that interacts directly with your job's kit, which could be potentially interesting.

It would be cool if we had one side of the armor kits dedicated to offensive materia, and the other side to defensive/utility materia - and that could open to stuff like movement speed, leech, damage reduction, etc.

[Eorzean_username]

Sks and Sps have absolutely no business in being separate entities. And then there's the question (which I don't know the answer), but how to make speed attractive to more jobs, especially non casters?

Well, as you probably know already, the answer in other games is for "Haste" to reduce all action cooldowns, instead of just GCDs.

So hypothetically, the temptation of gaining another usage of many different cooldowns would override concerns about not coordinating with party buff windows, as seen with styles like ShB Trance Rush Summoner.

You could also start tying a lot more systems to be affected by "speed" — such as autoattack-based procs, dot-tick-rate based procs (and allowing Haste to accelerate dot tick rates), etc.

...That said, trying to implement this in XIV is more-or-less a lost cause, especially without dismantling the extreme gains from piling everything into coordinated buff windows (which has, for example, helped to push SpS Summoner further and further into the margins each new gearing tier), and the game's opposite-direction design moves (with, eg, dots being wiped-out), and the game's priding itself on precise and exact encounter timelines, and... etc.

So, I guess the fundamental problem is really that "going faster" as a reward tends to fight XIV's entire design and structure, and become more of a wet-squib or even a punishment.

At this point, can that even be "fixed" ?

[Raikai]

Well, as you probably know already, the answer in other games is for "Haste" to reduce all action cooldowns, instead of just GCDs.

So hypothetically, the temptation of gaining another usage of many different cooldowns would override concerns about not coordinating with party buff windows, as seen with styles like ShB Trance Rush Summoner.

You could also start tying a lot more systems to be affected by "speed" — such as autoattack-based procs, dot-tick-rate based procs (and allowing Haste to accelerate dot tick rates), etc.

...That said, trying to implement this in XIV is more-or-less a lost cause, especially without dismantling the extreme gains from piling everything into coordinated buff windows (which has, for example, helped to push SpS Summoner further and further into the margins each new gearing tier), and the game's opposite-direction design moves (with, eg, dots being wiped-out), and the game's priding itself on precise and exact encounter timelines, and... etc.

So, I guess the fundamental problem is really that "going faster" as a reward tends to fight XIV's entire design and structure, and become more of a wet-squib or even a punishment.

At this point, can that even be "fixed" ?

Right, that's exactly why I can't think about how haste can work as the commonly known concept from other games. If the 2min meta remains, haste will never be a desirable thing, unless everyone coordinates under similar haste levels... which is quite unrealistic to think about.

[Kacho_Nacho]

My opinion ?
In one word: WEIRD

We have positionals but only on certain jobs. Some jobs have almost no skill ceiling other still have. We have a lot of healing but the necessity for it is missing.
We have ranged tax on certain jobs but others dont have that. We have mana but almost no mana-management (hey to all BLM out there).
We have a lot of stats but in the end its crit - dh - det as if we could delete the rest ?
We have BLU... don't know... it exist, i guess.
We have AST but its lore is ignored.
We have WAR which is at the moment all the jobs at once (DPS+healer+Tank) for some reason.... also i do wanna know how the love story in the old WAR Jobquest ends SE!!!!!!

I could go on but who cares.... my answer is weird and sometimes unsatisfactory.

Best post in the entire thread.

Easy, you could ignore the entire Lily system and play more or less exactly like HW WHM, just without MP issues thanks to Thin Air.*snip*

I know that's what I did back then. There was zero reason to use the Lily system in SB. I'm happy that has changed.

Now, in my humble opinion as a slacker who hasn't done (can't do) the really tough stuff, I have to say I'm not in love with healing. EW is the first expansion where I played jobs in other roles and maxed levelled them.

Maybe that's what Yoshi P intended but it feels bad. I want to enjoy healing but most times it feels like I'm as necessary as training wheels on a motorcycle. I should be feeling challenged when confronting something new, not unneeded. In their effort to not scare away new healers, Square Enix has only ruined the role for the more dedicated players.

Tanking seems imbalanced with Warriors being the better job in everything.

[remiff]

For me endwalker is by far the worst extension in terms of job balancing, the jobs have been homogenized, there is still a significant DPS disparity between the Melee and the rest, except black mage, which is the only exception since 6.4.

The 120s meta is boring,
DPS/tank roles have too much team heal/hot effect it's ridiculous
even if it's a big design mistake, and the players who did it are excellent, it made TOP possible without healers which should never be possible on FF14, and which proves that he has a serious problem with the healers on the game who are far too
unnecessarily assisted by regen/heal effects which affect all the team that no jobs in the DPS/TANK category have claimed from the devs all the more.

the Warrior in the dungeon has almost no need or even no need healer so much this balancing error has healing/regen effects that are exaggerated and that he shouldn't have as many.

The rework of the summoner which has lost all the depth of its gameplay, all the management has disappeared
and the job became a ranged physical DPS with 4 casts/minutes,
the rework had good bases, but square enix made it the most lazy rework of the game and was ultimately totally botched.

He has so much to say about endwalker balancing that we're going to avoid saying them all or we'll end up releasing a complete encyclopedia.

[Shurrikhan]

I really wish they would just revamp those stats to make them something more interesting.

Sks and Sps have absolutely no business in being separate entities. And then there's the question (which I don't know the answer), but how to make speed attractive to more jobs, especially non casters?

Why direct hit even exists? It's just a different form of crit. If there's something to take note from WoW, is the mastery stat. Something that interacts directly with your job's kit, which could be potentially interesting.

It would be cool if we had one side of the armor kits dedicated to offensive materia, and the other side to defensive/utility materia - and that could open to stuff like movement speed, leech, damage reduction, etc.

Personally, pipedream though it be, I just want to see...

1. weapon types available to each job varied more significantly and functionally (tower shield vs. targe vs. buckler, buster sword vs. montante, greataxe vs. dual axes, longbows vs.shortbows, carbines vs. muskets, piercing vs. blunt vs. slicing fist weapons, light spears vs. heavy lances, grimoires vs. manuals vs. codexes, etc., each having different recast timers on certain/affected skills and particular advantages/disadvantages),
2. Armor Class divisions scrapped (no more Scouting only for NIN / NIN can only use scouting; no more Striking only for MNK & SAM, and MNK & SAM locked to Striking, etc.; anyone can technically pick from anything, though higher Armor Classes [say, "Plate"] would come with increasing penalties opposite their increased Defense, so they'd be a decently costly investment non-optimal for non-tanks), and
3. STR, DEX, MND, and INT actually each be different stats (instead of 4 different names for simply Power) and each primary made useful to every job, though to different soft caps and for different, sometimes niche, purposes.

I'd love to see a more melee-focused RDM be able to run, say, INT=DEX >> STR > MND, for a more Ninjutsu-nuke-based NIN run DEX > INT >> STR >> MND, or one focused more on Armor Crush (revamped so the skill name and animation make sense) be capable of taking fairly high STR, for a MND-high MNK to be capable of off-healing/support, for WAR to be given the occasional option of going low-STR to act as a frenzied, high-speed dps wielding dual axes and getting double Beast Gauge from either one's crits, etc., etc.

Would there still be optimal builds for each fight, just as there are optimal jobs? Of course. But, at least there'd be some damned customization beyond whether to play at the minimum GCD speed for the given job or to play faster as not to get bored but lose some throughput for doing so.

[SquirrelDerp]

Reaper is a lot of fun and I like playing it

No idea about balance, but it plays like slicing butter or something. It's smooth and fun.

My understanding is most melee classes are like within 10% though so that's pretty good.