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

[Mikey_R]

Reading a lot of the replies, all I can say is welcome to how schizophrenic this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

Very much this. I'm here reading these replies as well going "so they love Shb/Ew now?"
...

And a lot of these people are the same ones who were saying they're tired of homogezation and bland job designs.

To me, it is the opposite, the ones that are happy with the current design do not complain, or complain about minor things It is the ones that do not like the current design that say the level of homogenisation is bad.

[Rekh]

To me, it is the opposite, the ones that are happy with the current design do not complain, or complain about minor things It is the ones that do not like the current design that say the level of homogenisation is bad.

Forums are a microcosm of the entire community. It's not this left vs right dividing line that's so common in "west" countries. Those not complaining or complaining either quit the game or are still playing; and those from both sides end up at the forum as well.

[Jeeqbit]

welcome to how schizophrenic this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

I think a lot of people complaining about how it is now don't say it was bad back then actually. So people like myself point out that there were a lot of bad things back then, and that probably what they want isn't how it was, but something resembling the sophistication and action synergy there was then, but cleaner and better.

It's never been a fully team synergistic game at all, let's not kid ourselves.

Indeed, except really on a mechanical level in high-end duties. But when it comes to dungeons it's always been the case that an experienced player can shoulder most of the burden and carry people through.

But what we've kinda lost is the trinity ie. a warrior, paladin or probably any tank can just solo a dungeon at level 90, whereas earlier in the game if a healer wasn't there the tank was gonna struggle to get too far.

Very much this. I'm here reading these replies as well going "so they love Shb/Ew now?"

I don't know which replies you mean, but to clarify for myself, yes, I am quite happy with ShB and EW (aside from the lack of a Field Operation/social content/relic grind in EW which SE has acknowledged). However, most people on these forums usually aren't happy with ShB and EW, so I try to meet people half way.

For example, I can agree that the trinity in dungeons has lost its balance and tanks can even solo half way through some current extreme trials or that healers could use a few more attack mechanics or cleric stance. I can't complain about this as a tank main, because being powerful is great, but I can acknowledge it's not right when there is meant to be a holy trinity and that the teamplay just felt a little better in the past.

I could agree with there being a lighter form of sophistication from what we once had (ie. if tanks had a damage stance, it could be a 1% damage difference similar to positionals, rather than a 20% difference). But it is important for the implementation not to create a massive gap between veteran players and new players to where veterans are killing a boss in a fraction of the time it takes new players, because that isn't feasible to balance. I was never comfortable with the gap between veteran and new/casual players in the past, and it's so much better now.

As for synergy, I would kinda like for "harmless synergy" to return. For example, having both DoTs up on a Bard buffed the potency of Sidewinder. If the job is played the way it should be, then there is no difference at all to how it is now. Or procs coming from DoT crits. All these things make no material difference to how it is right now, it just makes it feel like you're rewarded for playing it correctly that's all.

Synergy in Role Actions as this post discusses, like Erase, Mana Shift or MP Refresh is also fair, even if most people don't use them. Since they are harmless if not used, but gave you a few toys to play with.

I like that jobs are more approachable, like how I've found Dragoon playable since Shadowbringers, ranged attacks don't interrupt combos and so on, but it is just being honest to say that jobs have slowly lost their uniqueness. I'm not complaining about that, I just don't want to deny the truth because then I'd be unreasonable. They also just acknowledged job uniqueness was an issue in the last live letter.

And when you think of playing a different job, it feeling different to play, at least a bit, is kinda important, otherwise what's the point in switching job? Animation differences are good and all, but if the functional differences have eroded, then it reaches a point where you only need to pick one job in each category whose animations you prefer. I at least want to be able to say "that one does shields, that one does heals, that one does regens" or "dragoons jump, the others don't". But if that isn't how it is for a role then it's fine, really, I'll just pick the job I like the animations of in that category.

[Valence]

If you give me back manasong in the current system what do you even want me to do with it? It would be like popping troubadour in a dungeon where it just feels like you're trying to cheer yourself up like you're being useful except it's totally useless, and here it would also be totally useless, and even in savage/ultimates on top of it.

It's the whole problem with the current system, it's so one dimensional that all those things that have been removed have been removed because they had no utility left anymore. All the teamplay we had has been axed. The only thing remaining that they can somewhat still fiddle with and give depth to is damage rotations and a modicum of job identity at best, but they have decided that no, this would just introduce too many failure states again into the game, and people would complain again about every little thing being too punishing or frustrating to deal with, and we'll be back to the usual buzzwords in liveletters about "reducing stress on the players" and improving "usability".

[Shurrikhan]

Reading a lot of the replies, all I can say is welcome to how schizophrenic this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

Either way, what we had had some kind of balance between collective and individual. It's never been a fully team synergistic game at all, let's not kid ourselves. And the amount of scripted things was still staggering, even if a lot less so since the whole had a lot more moving parts that could go wrong beyond just fight mechanics.

That's the thing though: most of the past attempts at inter-role interaction pointed out as such... weren't actually interactive across roles except in terms of capacity (i.e., no more than Shroud of Saints or Second Wind did from the start).

In the vast majority of cases, it was either effectively just an in-role CD for which you could more directly and impactfully shunt loss onto someone else (by starving them of resource or crippling their and thereby wasting party output to support your negligence in a way redundant with and less interesting than, say, your ability to greed mechanics), or they simply meant that you now had a group mitigation skill available as DPS (to use of schedule because it's not single-target and is therefore noncontextual/nonreactive anyways). They were uninteresting forms of "free" resource around which the game was tuned anyways (ultimately meaning that you're simply punished for not using them as near to on CD as can be leveraged, with most having no barrier to such thoughtless use for effective play).

________________

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

If I had to pick a single example: Clemency while healers were jailed (A3S, I think it was). ...Or DPS-kiting melee mobs in dungeons while speed-leveling.

More generally, though: Early on, CC, Mana Wall¹, Paladin absorbs/heals (even as small as they were), and tank flat (as compared to %DR) self-sustain if that would ever be considered cross-role. Such allowed DPS to bait, kite, and place enemies without disrupting the tank's gather, to prevent loss of positionals due to unfortunately-timed special attacks moving the tank at just the wrong moment OR to take pressure off the tank in emergencies, emergency recovery tools, etc. Later, Rescue² and maybe Mana Shift³.

¹ BLM's Mana Wall, before its removal, had the hilarious impact of being able either to fully immune a physical AoE or skillshot type boss attack... or to split a split-damage tankbuster with a tank. It was a short-CD, 100%-mitigation-against-a-single-hit personal defensive... with effectively extendable purpose.
² Fun for dungeon speed-running. Would have been more significant in raid-fights, too, had the game not by then already replaced a majority of displacing mechanics with a "Opt out of mechanic" button-press in the forms of Arm's Length and Surecast.
³ Mana Shift was nice in that it didn't produce additional resource out of thin air (except, perhaps, as casted by a BLM when it wouldn't delay their return to Astral Fire) and therefore wasn't tuned around, but could do a lot to alleviate emergencies. As it was single-target, it was also much more responsive.

Honorable Mentions:
If Casters had run out of MP only from using specifically cross-role skills (rez, AoE Phoenix heals, Titan tanking, etc.) and Mage's Ballad had been oGCD, I'd also have considered it as belonging in that list. Not Army's Paeon, though Mage's allowing for greater use of expensive burst tools would have been fine so long as non-casters also were to then use MP, though that would have then partly rendered Foe Requiem redundant even if it had affected all damage. Foe Requiem, if it had been oGCD, though, would at least have engaged enough with party output dynamics that, until this excessive fixation on precisely 2-minute cycles, it would have been a tool that actually feels supportive to use where Battle Voice and Radiant Finale, imo, do not (since it's up to everyone else to use their shit when you pop it, with you simply holding maybe once or twice per fight based on boss jumps). Similarly, Palisade could have been decent... if there were actually just the right number of emergencies throughout content that it could be relied on while also requiring it to be reactive; too many, and you find alternate solutions that render it redundant, while too few make it feel pointless.

Finally, enmity skills on non-tanks would have had at least a bit going for them... so long as their having any impact were no longer dependent first on enmity-multiplying tank stances (i.e., those Enmity stances being replaced with passive bonuses and non-tanks' Diversion skill instead giving that modifier briefly to said non-tanks) and tanks now-disgustingly-high passive eHP bonuses (which are mostly just a change to make non-tanks go squish even faster) weren't so high. As it stood, though, their use cases were limited to mechanics that would otherwise require very precise tank swaps on things that nonetheless wouldn't clobber non-tanks any harder than tanks, which would be beyond awkward to shoe-horn into any significant portion of fights. And even if we had all those things, we'd have been better off with just slightly more sophisticated enmity modification through positioning and slightly greater control over our moment-to-moment throughput (and therefore Enmity) dynamics through slightly increased bankability... rather than requiring a whole discrete selection of Enmity-increased skills. Especially so long as Enmity remains solely a way of determining who gets the auto-attacks and certain special attacks.

While the way CC diminishing returns work needed a rehaul and a few (sparing and situational but impactful) extra tools would have been appreciated, those did far more than "Esuna but better because oGCD" or "hit this to save your tank, assuming equal gear and skill, ~30s of damage loss (so long as everyone else with this ability also presses it)" or "use on CD so your casters are allowed a normal resource economy" ever did. Of those auxiliary "inter-role" skills, all but maybe 10% or 20%, depending on how broadly one defines them, were uninteractive, one-dimensional uninteresting tools. In short, bloat. They should have been trimmed down to those few that were capable of more and then started bending design philosophy slightly around those.

[Jeeqbit]

If I had to pick a single example: Clemency while healers were jailed (A3S, I think it was).

I'd have to agree with this example for tanks at least. PLD was ahead of its time, with actions like Cover and Clemency, which are now regular features of tanks with TBN, Nascent Flash, Intervention, Aurora and Heart of Corundum. And with their raid-wide mit that compares to Divine Veil. Even in ARR, PLD had Cure and Stoneskin instead of Clemency.

I remember saving an A11S run due to Clemency because raid-wides were actually hard then with it being mostly GCD healing back then + vuln stacks + RDM wasn't a thing.

I've since done that lots of times with actions like TBN and Nascent Flash, which have been the sole difference between clear or not clear even in savage, by saving a rezzer.

[Shurrikhan]

I'd have to agree with this example for tanks at least. PLD was ahead of its time, with actions like Cover and Clemency, which are now regular features of tanks with TBN, Nascent Flash, Intervention, Aurora and Heart of Corundum. And with their raid-wide mit that compares to Divine Veil. Even in ARR, PLD had Cure and Stoneskin instead of Clemency.

I remember saving an A11S run due to Clemency because raid-wides were actually hard then with it being mostly GCD healing back then + vuln stacks + RDM wasn't a thing.

I've since done that lots of times with actions like TBN and Nascent Flash, which have been the sole difference between clear or not clear even in savage, by saving a rezzer.

An aside, but...

My opinions on tank external- and especially AoE-support are a bit mixed. Cover, for instance, I think is quintessentially "Tank", and Passage of Arms more so than not, but Divine Veil to me feels more like an awkwardly-placed healer ability, as it's neither (A) impactful enough to really be done in response to situations not specifically carved out to kill you without X% DR in otherwise irrelevant externals nor (B) interactive with any considerations we generally seem to feel are "tank-like" (intercepting attacks, baiting things out, or other deliberate and/or specific means of thwarting enemy offenses).

Granted, that may be largely due to mere context: If healers, in turn, didn't have any regularly available AoE skills by which to increase party maximum eHP, then Divine Veil could save healers from needing to rapidly barrier every non-tank before a big AoE. Even then, though... that just seems to step on healers' shoes more so than augment party play overall, whereas something like a passive Cover-like mechanic could allow tanks to stack on and absorb some of the damage for two squishies, allowing healers just enough time to fortify everyone else (be that for immediate survival alone or just to avoid dropping low enough to be afflicted by an additional DoT, or to purge a DoT-removed-only-by-getting-back-above-X%-HP in reasonable time and MP, or the like could feel more targeted, impactful, and responsive without stepping on healers' toes. I.e., interplay without excessive redundancy.

[Elkanah]

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.

If a warrior was in the party, you could get away with not needing a NIN (since they also had the slashing debuff with our storms eye). DPS stance were mandatory vs being in tank stance the entire fight (because of the debuff to tank stance being active). Warrior also had a locked buff for 15 seconds where you couldnt use any skills in that time period once berserk ended. And still needed to keep aggro at the same time. That was fun though lol. It was a challenge that I could enjoy without needing to have tank stance on (other than for dungeon runs and normal raids/alliance raids)

[Jeeqbit]

Cover, for instance, I think is quintessentially "Tank", and Passage of Arms more so than not, but Divine Veil to me feels more like an awkwardly-placed healer ability

I don't agree on that because I believe that tanks' job is to protect the party from damage. Some of this is achieved by making enemies attack the tank, but it's also achieved by applying damage-reductions to the party, such as a tank limit break, passage of arms, cover, intervention, or indeed Divine Veil.

It's only since EW that it has crossed into healer territory a bit by also healing the party. I think it is specifically heals that are stepping into healer territory, but it can also be argued that the concept of a "barrier healer" is stepping into tank territory.

(A) impactful enough to really be done in response to situations not specifically carved out to kill you without X% DR in otherwise irrelevant externals nor (B) interactive with any considerations we generally seem to feel are "tank-like" (intercepting attacks, baiting things out, or other deliberate and/or specific means of thwarting enemy offenses).

All I know for sure is that in situations where, say, health is low or the party have a lot of vuln stacks, hitting Reprisal + Divine Veil has the potential to increase the amount of them that survive.

Granted, that may be largely due to mere context: If healers, in turn, didn't have any regularly available AoE skills by which to increase party maximum eHP, then Divine Veil could save healers from needing to rapidly barrier every non-tank before a big AoE.

I think that is exactly why a barrier healer steps on the toes of the tank role. It seems quite logical that a tank should have to reduce the incoming damage, then the healer should heal any damage that got through.

The way it works now, SE is just saying "a tank OR a healer can do all the work". Which helps account for situations where one or the other is a new player and has no idea what they are doing, I suppose, but it affects the concept of a holy trinity.

[Shurrikhan]

I don't agree on that because I believe that tanks' job is to protect the party from damage. Some of this is achieved by making enemies attack the tank, but it's also achieved by applying damage-reductions to the party, such as a tank limit break, passage of arms, cover, intervention, or indeed Divine Veil.

If damage reductions, let alone specifically party-wide damage reductions, are the domain of tanks, what the heck are Sage and Scholar? Is their main feature just that they're role-swapped tanks?

I think that is exactly why a barrier healer steps on the toes of the tank role.

I hard disagree. If you make simple acontextual barriers the domain of tanks, you degrade the far more versatile and nuance-capable aspects of positioning and mob-control to cover for allies and thwart enemy defenses, both things far, far more quintessentially "tank".

Look at any other game and you'll find that offering external sustain, especially AoE sustain, is predominantly an element of healing, not tanking. Because tanks would otherwise step on their own toes, even, and to net less interesting resultant gameplay for them if tools were ever powerful or cause those tools to feel increasingly like mere bloat otherwise. Because they're overly redundant.

All I know for sure is that in situations where, say, health is low or the party have a lot of vuln stacks, hitting Reprisal + Divine Veil has the potential to increase the amount of them that survive.

Outside of the most unfortunate of timings against unavoidable damage, it's all or none. And that's ignoring the fact that the damage is tuned around it anyways.

What does the "control" of Reprisal and Divine Veil --those tools being in the game and certain AoEs therefore being tuned around them-- offer that less blanket, more flexibly timed tools like Succor or Sacred Soil did not? Apart from more Broil spam, of course.

but it affects the concept of a holy trinity.

Especially when something as straightforward as proactive sustain can be considered by some to be a tanking element rather than healing element, I don't see why anyone would make adherence to a mere summary (and apparently nebulous) term like "holy trinity" a priority.

What should matter is that whatever roles (be they 2 or 3 or 5 or 12) the game decides ought exist should not have its most interesting/synergetic skills rendered redundant by others among their own skills (to the net result of less interesting play -- say, if Paladin could just spam AoE barriers instead of bothering with positioning) nor rendered directly¹ or consistently² redundant other roles' skills (such as there being so many cross-role AoE miti skills that the difference between inevitable death and zero GCD shields being necessary becomes a finer and finer point of balance).

¹ "Rendered directly redundant" here meaning that Role A's more individually interesting or keystone/capstone skills (those necessary for their role to feel as complete, fleshed out, and fun as it should) would be rendered redundant even when following the same party strategy... as opposed to, for example anti-magic mitigation being made redundant through silences and constantly breaking the enemy caster's lines of sight before they can complete any casts (which would make it indirectly rendered redundant).

² "Consistently" refers to, regardless of whether something can always be rendered redundant even if indirectly so, such as CC never being useful simply because one can always kill all enemies before tanks run out of mitigation. However, that's almost always more an overarching tuning issue, be that through relative role strength or simple lack of difficulty.