What happened to job inter-play? Was it any good?

[Shurrikhan]

In this game, by the ways usually pointed out? No. No it wasn't very good. 90% of the time, you hit unengaging CDs on CD or just prior to raid damage as pre-scheduled. Outside of Rescue, the few that could be more than that were sadly never given any real time to shine.

Could interplay have been quite good? Certainly, but that would have come through people using their mostly typical actions deliberately differently rather than adding on especially uninteresting or inconsequential bonus actions atop unaltered 'solo' play.

[Local_Custard]

BLM used to be able to grant an ally magic defence [Apocatastasis] and also had an ability that gave mana to an ally [Manashift]

There was also interplay between party compositions as certain jobs would give certain buffs -slashing, piercing etc etc the problem was there was a very clear advantage to certain comps. BRD/DRg was pretty much mandatory and instead of reworking the idea of these party interactions they just removed them all. Just like they deleted the aggro system and most jobs utility outside of very basic dmg reduction mits. It's been very frustrating to see all these interesting but flawed systems get completely removed instead of iterated and improved. I feel like if we had these extra things to consider still in the game then the simplified jobs wouldn't feel *as* bad although...not by much >.>

That's a shame. I love doing little and big things to support the parties I'm in- it is why I play AST a lot. Does makes me wonder what these systems may have looked like if they stayed up into Endwalker

Tanks had to actually balance things like self healing doing more damage/getting more enmity. They had 2 paths for the 123 combo and they weren't a copy paste between the 3 tanks; war was like damage + enmity and the other 123 was buff and healing. With Drk it was enmity path and the other one was damage path (iirc), and paladin was the mess it's always been haha.

I keep hearing paladin was particularly messy back then, can you tell me a bit of how paladin was messy under that system?

I miss when Bard and MCH could regen MP and TP for the party

I would have enjoyed a bard and machinist with more supportive skills added to their existing kit. given tht TP no longer exists, I'm contemplating what it would maybe be instead

In Stormblood, it was "manage eachother's MP like crazy". Bards/Machinists could regenerate the MP of other players, allowing for example, a Paladin to spam Holy Spirit (which had to be nerfed into the ground as a result), and to generate more MP for healers to heal and resurrect with.

thank you for taking the time to write this long response! I may not respond to my threads as often anymore (mostly bc I have energy problems) but I do like when people give me info like this.
what did Holy Spirit look like before the nerf?

Astrologians could also regenerate MP in a similar way. Most of the time this wasn't useful, but in situations like needing to rez a lot or PLD it could be. It was discouraged on BLM because they managed their own MP and it didn't affect DRK. I don't think it mattered on SMN or RDM (unless they needed to rez) so the MP wasn't that useful overall.

probably. It is something small that could be done back then though I wasn't around so I'll trust your judgement.

There was also an ability on casters to "Mana Shift". It allowed you to transfer your MP to another and was often used to transfer Mana to a healer, allowing them to rez. This was especially helpful if the healer had just died and had no MP, and could significantly turn around the run where it would otherwise wipe due to lack of healer MP.

Oh that's an interesting angle for MP management to take- I think I like that. how often was this used?

But there was argument to be made that MP buffs altering PLD's attacks so significantly, and being capable of affecting others so drastically, that it could have undesirable balance effects, so I suppose SE changed it so everyone just manages their own MP to keep it simple.

Meanwhile, we had TP, which was a physical version of MP for physical attacks. Most of the time, you didn't notice that it existed so it was pointless, but if DPS was low during trash pulls, you would notice it and need to use your TP restore abilities. At this point, Astrologians could apply a TP buff (depending on card RNG), while melee DPS could apply Goad to regen TP on a party member. Again this was useful only if the DPS was low really. It was a flat out annoying mechanic the rare times it mattered, so it's little wonder TP just got removed.

in what situations would dps run low on TP? Do you think anyone would have changed if TP could run out in more ways?

Tanks used to generate enmity in two ways: turning on tank stance and attacking (but this also reduced their incoming and outgoing damage), and doing a special enmity combo. So typically you would turn on tank stance, do your enmity combo while in stance to generate enough enmity, then exit tank stance and do your highest damage combos.

However, the amount of time required to stay in tank stance, if any, depended a lot on the DPS and enmity generation of the party. If they were not very good players, you wouldn't even need tank stance to hold the boss. If the healer spammed heals, they might rip the boss from you. If the DPS were really good, they might rip the boss from you as well. This could be prevented by doing the enmity combo 3 times in tank stance usually, but the party could reduce the need for this by using their enmity reduction abilities such as Lucid Dreaming, Diversion and Refresh. This became extremely common to see in Expert roulette, but as you didn't really know if the players would do it, you couldn't always count on it anyway.

Reminds me of how sometimes as astrologian I will wait a small amount of time during a raid when I was paired woth another astrologian just in case they would use their divination first so that I could plan around not overwriting their's or having mine overwritten for maximum usefulness.
So this kind of problem of party uncertainty seems to have existed since the beginning. kinda interesting for me to think of.

But again, there were issues with stances. Many of the "raider" tanks would use DPS stance as close to 100% of the time as they could, while non-raider types would "believe" that "tanks" should use "tank stance" 100% of the time because it reduced incoming damage. But it also reduced outgoing damage, and that's hard for a lot of MMORPG players to accept so many of them will try to get away without it if they can!

What was the optimal tank stance strat? How were players intended to use their stance dancing?
I know the first question can seem kind of vague depending on what you are measuring. I think for this question measure for a balance of emnity generation + damage.
How well would tank dancing work into the current version of ffxiv?

You would even get a tank that would spam their lower-damage enmity combo in stance, when they could mostly get away with using their damage combo in stance at least, if they were going to remain in stance. So SE just did away with stance dancing and enmity combos, and made incoming/outgoing damage adjustments a trait you can't remove (so tanks will always have reduced damage as a trait now). And tank stance got massively buffed to make up for enmity combo removal and just playing a tank like a DPS makes enemies attack you now. So there was no use for enmity control actions on other jobs now.

Ah. I cannot say if I feel disappointment or not- I really wish there was a way to play with old systems so that I could form opinions on this properly.

I like the idea of them but they were also not used that often by people tbh. We had Erase to do a small heal and remove DoTs on people. We had Apocatastasis to reduce magic damage on a party member and Palisade to reduce physical damage on a party member. Drain on casters to heal them whilst also attacking (this is basically Blue Mage's Blood Drain, virtually only used for soloing). If people used them, you knew they were trying to be good and that was nice to see, but just was rare to see in this game full of casual players so I guess they couldn't justify keeping them.

Has Esuna replaced Erase? Drain sounds a bit like energy drain for some reason.

You mention the large population of casual players and I am curious if that has always been a fact of this game or has the proportions of casual to less causal players has shifted over time?

Arguably, tanks have more interplay than in the past in the sense of being able to apply things to other players, such as: Nascent Flash, The Blackest Night, Intervention, Aurora, Heart of Corundum. They also didn't used to all have raid-wide mitigation like Shake It Off and Dark Missionary. Reprisal used to exist in the form of specific damage downs (STR down or INT down) as part of the tank combos, but it's more versatile as an ability that can work on all damage types. So overall, I actually find tanks have more interplay than before.

How do interplay abilities for tanks stack up now (numbers for each tank) compared to before?

Although we had Apocatastasis and Palisade to reduce magic and physical damage as DPS, we have Addle/Feint/general damage reduction on physical ranged DPS instead. Although we had drain, SMN gets a good heal with Phoenix now, RDM can heal themselves and BLM is just hardmode like usual but has a powerful shield.

I do enjoy my blm shield. I like to press it when I feel threatened and unsure if the healer will get to me

In this game, by the ways usually pointed out? No. No it wasn't very good. 90% of the time, you hit unengaging CDs on CD or just prior to raid damage as pre-scheduled. Outside of Rescue, the few that could be more than that were sadly never given any real time to shine.

Could interplay have been quite good? Certainly, but that would have come through people using their mostly typical actions deliberately differently rather than adding on especially uninteresting or inconsequential bonus actions atop unaltered 'solo' play.

What was your favorite interplay interaction that existed back then (and may or may not still exist today)?

[Mikey_R]

Oh that's an interesting angle for MP management to take- I think I like that. how often was this used?

It was effectively a 1:1 mana transferal. If someone was struggling with MP, you could give them the MP, but that MP deficit was effectively pushed onto someone else (as IIRC, in SB, you couldn't be MP positive). The exception to this is BLM, as they have, what is effectively infinite MP, just due to how the job works.

in what situations would dps run low on TP? Do you think anyone would have changed if TP could run out in more ways?

TP was used for all weaponskills, which boils down to all physical GCDs. AoE actions and ranged attacks used ~2 times the amount of TP your single target actions used. This is where problems with TP in dungeons come from. You didn't want to go full into AoE, as you would drain your TP very quickly, which meant you swapped to single target, so that you could at least keep attacking. Jobs did have Invigorate to recover TP, but it was on a long cooldown (2 mins IIRC) and even with optimal use, was TP negative, even in single target scenarios. This does mean longer encounters with a single enemy, ie. trials and raids, could see you run out of TP and be prevented from attacking.

Now, whilst there were jobs that could grant TP (and MP), you couldn't guarantee they were in your party, unless it was premade and even if they did show up, it was a coin toss as to whether that actually used the TP/MP refreshes.

What was the optimal tank stance strat? How were players intended to use their stance dancing?
I know the first question can seem kind of vague depending on what you are measuring. I think for this question measure for a balance of emnity generation + damage.
How well would tank dancing work into the current version of ffxiv?

I don't think anyone knows 100% what the devs intended for tank stances, however it would be a safe bet that you would be in tank stance whilst you were top of the enmity list and in DPS stance when you were supporting. What actually happened was tank stance + enmity combos for a bit, then swap to full DPS.

As for enmity generation, this is how things tended to flow. Tank stance and enmity combos was the most enmity, followed by Tank Stance and DPS combos, then DPS stance and enmity combos then DPS stance with DPS combos. The issue here is the enmity combos provided no resources (MP/Beast Gauge/Blood), which put you behind in other areas.

If they were to re-introduce tank stances as they used to be, it wouldn't really work out. With so much emphasis on damage output, you would still aim to be in DPS stance as much as possible. It then start getting complicated about how to balance an enmity system, especially with so many variables, like ilevel, which can play havoc with balancing.

If you want to read more about tank stances and different perspectives, you could try reading this topic. However, it is long with a lot of different points of view, so I don't blame you if you want to skip reading it.

Has Esuna replaced Erase? Drain sounds a bit like energy drain for some reason.

Esuna has always been there, erase was only for SB but I also believe it was only for caster DPS and a DPS losing out on 1 GCD of their damage rotation is much more costly than a healer using Esuna. The same for Drain. You could argue usefulness for solo content though.

How do interplay abilities for tanks stack up now (numbers for each tank) compared to before?

Basically the same.

I do enjoy my blm shield. I like to press it when I feel threatened and unsure if the healer will get to me

BLM used to have 2 shields, one for physical damage and one for magical, they have since been combined. I also do not believe you could Apoctastasis yourself either, so it wasn't anything extra you could use on yourself (same with Pallisade).

While I do miss the system I think it's for the best that it was removed, though I would like to peak into a game where they figured out how to make it work without it being frustrating. It was the cause of so much balancing issues, and and was the center ALOT of points of frustration.

If you want my honest opinion, I don't think a game like that can exist.

[Jeeqbit]

I keep hearing paladin was particularly messy back then, can you tell me a bit of how paladin was messy under that system?

It was mainly that in Heavensward it had physical mitigation when many bosses dealt magic damage, so to solve this problem all the mitigation was homogenized to just reduce all damage by a %. Paladin also never had self-heals except Clemency, which required you to stop dealing damage, which makes it "invalid" to use in the eyes of many MMO players. It wasn't until Endwalker that it got more self-heals, so it was extremely squishy until Endwalker compared to other tanks. It also had Divine Veil, but this had to be triggered by a heal unlike on other tanks, which was seen as unusual.

I would have enjoyed a bard and machinist with more supportive skills added to their existing kit. given tht TP no longer exists, I'm contemplating what it would maybe be instead

It would be nothing, tbh. They'd only be able to have the MP regen, damage down and damage increase buffs.

what did Holy Spirit look like before the nerf?

Same as it is now, but higher relative potency. It's actually pretty good now, last I checked, because the way it works now you wouldn't want to spam it and this makes the potency at range decent. But back then, if you could spam it, it became better than your combo due to its potency. You normally couldn't spam it, because you only had enough MP to use it 5 times without the help of Bards/Machinists, whereas now MP is sort of unlimited on Paladin.

It is something small that could be done back then though I wasn't around so I'll trust your judgement.

Yes, Astrologian's cards were about buffing different things depending on RNG - MP, TP, Skill Speed, Spell Speed, Mitigation, Damage, Crit. But the only ones seen as valuable by many players were Damage and Crit. So SE changed them all to be damage cards, where 3 means melee and 3 mean ranged, and the goal is to get 3 unique symbols. Which I think is a good alternative.

If we looked at it today, TP would be useless, MP would be useless except for healers, Skill Speed at least wouldn't result in TP depletion like it used to, Spell Speed may be useful, Mitigation is useless in this game mostly because we have so much of it already, Damage and Crit would be the most sought. So that's really why it ended up this way.

Casual players would value the mitigation over damage, and use it all the time, similar to the "tank stance vs DPS stance" thing on tanks. Yet you knew as someone that understands the game that the mitigation just wasn't valuable because the game isn't that damage intense normally.

Oh that's an interesting angle for MP management to take- I think I like that. how often was this used?

Mana Shift got used a lot, particularly in 8-person duties. People would request it, especially healers, when they needed more MP. Often casters just volunteered their MP to help the healers resurrect. I remember seeing it used a lot in A12 just because people died a lot there.

in what situations would dps run low on TP?

They would run out of TP if they took an extraordinarily long time to kill mob packs in dungeons. An amount of time that just wasn't the case when I was a DPS ie. the party was undergeared or not playing properly. This was unfortunately quite common in Stormblood. They would also run out of TP if Astrologians gave them a Skill Speed card, which was essentially trolling. Bards once had a ranged AoE attack called Wide Volley which also would use a lot of TP, so the melee version was used instead (as a result, SE removed Wide Volley).

Do you think anyone would have changed if TP could run out in more ways?

Maybe, but the way it worked, you rarely noticed TP existed (pretty much like now). So on very rare occasions, you noticed it existed because you couldn't attack at all! And this was just an annoyance, especially when it was due to things like low DPS.

So this kind of problem of party uncertainty seems to have existed since the beginning.

Yes, and SE has slowly tried to remove this uncertainty over time. I don't necessarily think the uncertainty should be there if it's avoidable. For example, if someone is about to be hit by an attack and is low on HP, there is no uncertainty on whether I should use The Blackest Night on them. So if it can be done in a way where we have the information we need to be more certain, I think that's good. SE making the same jobs overwrite eachother's buff is probably not a good thing or they could just prevent matching duplicate classes in DF.

To a degree we had a lot of information with the enmity because you can see the enmity difference between you and the healer/DPS, so usually your judgement was going to be correct. But if they did generate a lot of enmity, you just had to figure out "is this a good player? will they use Diversion/Lucid?"

What was the optimal tank stance strat?

Depended on the tank, really. Many Warriors just flat out never used their stance, or used it while a buff was up which nullified the effects of tank stance temporarily.

For PLD, the optimal thing was probably just to have people use Diversion, but personally, I needed to: tank stance+enmity combo 1 time in Heavensward, and tank stance+enmity combo 3 times in Stormblood. I also just used tank stance the entire time for mob packs so I could hold them and do damage (instead of using my damageless enmity generator called Flash). PLD suffered from the stance switch being a GCD, unlike the other tanks.

DRK could use both tank and DPS stance at once, and had a lot of strong enmity tools that didn't require their tank stance, but turning on their tank stance was an option if it was needed, and didn't use the GCD. So for DRK it was really just use the damage stance and use tank stance if needed, but also an option was using Dark Arts on certain attacks. Dark Arts was an ability that transformed the effects of most abilities ie. to increase mitigation, add enmity, significantly boost damage, depending on what it was buffing.

In raids, at least in Stormblood, I'd often just have a Warrior pull since they generated enmity better and had a buff to nullify the downsides of tank stance, then they could shirk me so I didn't need to stance on PLD.

How were players intended to use their stance dancing?

My impression is SE just wanted us to stay in tank stance the entire time lol. But MMO players aren't like that. Except the ones that are and that's why SE had to decide for us by removing the decision.

How well would tank dancing work into the current version of ffxiv?

Tank stance now generates a lot more enmity than it used to (and it already generated a lot). Virtually 1 hit secures enmity for the rest of the fight or a long period of time now. So the dancing now might be 1 hit then switch. Then again, I tanked an entire dungeon on GNB in Shadowbringers without tank stance and held aggro the whole time. So it depends on if the party is even good enough to out-DPS the tank...

I really wish there was a way to play with old systems so that I could form opinions on this properly.

You can watch videos on youtube. I'd say the stance dancing was fun and made old dungeons fun for me, but I also understand why it had to change. Maybe they could have just reduced the damage penalty of tank stance to 1% and the increase of damage stance to 1%, so that there isn't as large a gap between people who do it right/wrong. You can see this mechanic being used in Thordan Unreal currently, where adds switch between Shield/Sword Oath.

Has Esuna replaced Erase?

Esuna was always there for healers. Erase was just an additional (role) action for caster DPS.

You mention the large population of casual players and I am curious if that has always been a fact of this game or has the proportions of casual to less causal players has shifted over time?

The game has always been mostly casual/new/returning players that don't really optimize. That's actually the case for all healthy MMORPGs generally. If it only has the hardcore players that know everything, then it's probably a dying MMO that isn't attracting new players.

How do interplay abilities for tanks stack up now (numbers for each tank) compared to before?

To be honest, tanks had a lot of depth in the past, but it was selfish depth (except on PLD due to Cover, Clemency and Divine Veil). Whereas now they, jobs lost a lot of their selfish depth, but tanks were given selfless depth parity with PLD.