We cannot achieve balance while DPS jobs have utilities

[Shurrikhan]

I feel like collapsing ‘ranged’ into one category simply isn’t possible so long as the role skills exist, unless they were completely reworked for said merger. Though, maybe they should look into the role skill system itself too, since it’s mostly sat untouched for a while now

Why, though? Sometimes %DR is the more worthwhile, other times rez, other times flat shields. Why not let a party pick what all utilities and what degrees of mobility they want, or the least of each (BLM)?

While it would force physical ranged to actually be a bit better balanced against other roles, I don't see why that'd be an issue. I'm sure Physical Ranged wouldn't mind being taken for more than just their % bonus.

(Personally, I'd like to see the bonuses increased for the first in each role in full party content, 2% each for the first tank, melee, ranged, and healer, and just 1% for the second, reducing the relative penalties of single-healer, single-melee, etc., compositions. Such in turn increases the incentive not to be complacent with imbalances between roles. Naturally, boss HP would be increased by some 3.3-4.9% to compensate -- 4% still obliging standard comp or 3.3% offering 1 slot of leeway, same as now.)

[Connor]

Why, though? Sometimes %DR is the more worthwhile, other times rez, other times flat shields. Why not let a party pick what all utilities and what degrees of mobility they want, or the least of each (BLM)?

While it would force physical ranged to actually be a bit better balanced against other roles, I don't see why that'd be an issue. I'm sure Physical Ranged wouldn't mind being taken for more than just their % bonus.

(Personally, I'd like to see the bonuses increased for the first in each role in full party content, 2% each for the first tank, melee, ranged, and healer, and just 1% for the second, reducing the relative penalties of single-healer, single-melee, etc., compositions. Such in turn increases the incentive not to be complacent with imbalances between roles. Naturally, boss HP would be increased by some 3.3-4.9% to compensate -- 4% still obliging standard comp or 3.3% offering 1 slot of leeway by comparison.)

I meant to go back an edit it, but I meant ‘role skills as they are currently’, because again it’d end up with a weird situation where either caster stuff goes on ranged or vice-versa. Idk maybe I’ve misunderstood what ‘merging into one ranged role’ means.

If they reworked the role skills somehow, whether making it so different jobs within the same sub role had different role skills as required, or just making things like Swiftcast part of caster’s toolkit like the damage reduction skill all phys ranged have. Or idk if there’s a third option, just that they’d need to clean up how role skill distribution would work. It’d be a different story in that case. But as of yet there’s no indication they have any plans of changing them.

I mean, if they just stuck all the caster and ranged abilities into the same pool wouldn’t they end up with double (give or take one or two) what the others had?
They’d kind of have to adjust it by necessity, and since we’re unfortunately dealing with ‘small indie company SE, I imagine they’d mark that as ‘far too much work’.

Though it would be funny using Lucid Dreaming as a Bard lol (“How do you do fellow casters?”)

[Shurrikhan]

I meant to go back an edit it, but I meant ‘role skills as they are currently’, because again it’d end up with a weird situation where either caster stuff goes on ranged or vice-versa. Idk maybe I’ve misunderstood what ‘merging into one ranged role’ means.

I think it was referring simply to the party bonuses, whereby we could then take 2 of whatever we like among any ranged DPS, physical or magical, not that the role actions would necessarily be changed up, rather than being forced towards 1 Melee, 1 Ranger, 1 Caster, 1 Any DPS?

[Lyth]

I think you'd need to look at both.

Currently, party compositions are enforced based off of LB penalty and damage bonuses. You take additional penalty to LB generation for each violation of a standard composition that you have (i.e. solo tank, solo healer, or duplicate jobs). You gain 1% damage for each unique role you have present. Creating a combined Ranged category would mean that you could bring any combination of two out of seven Ranged jobs that you like to meet these requirements. This also would mean that jobs within this Ranged category would only need to be balanced internally against each other in terms of utility, and that you would stop penalizing jobs for bringing utility.

A revision to the role action system would help with this as well. The current system is archaic and has a lot of genuinely strange actions that have niche functionality. For an action to be designated as a role action, it should be something that you want to remove from balance considerations, because everyone has it. Raise is a good choice for this. Right now, Raise jobs are progression jobs. They do less damage, and then you swap out to a job like PCT to meet the DPS check. At the same time, you can't really get rid of non-healer raises, because if both healers go down in casual content you need a way to get one back up again for LB3.

Because Raise presents a balance problem, I think it would be a great candidate for a Ranged role action. That way you have standardized access to Raise and a fixed number of Raise providers, so nobody is penalized for bringing it. Just call it 'Phoenix Down', and give it a fixed recast or set number of uses depending on content difficulty. Now it doesn't influence job balance. Raid mitigation tools and % healing buffs are other things that you could standardize as well. Raid movement tools are another. Petolon is restricted for out of combat use only. What if it was a Ranged role action that provided a short duration group movement speed buff, like Expedient? Role actions allow you to incorporate really powerful effects without worrying about individual job balance, because everyone has access to them in a consistent way.

You'd have to decide about what to do with Swiftcast and Lucid, but I think these can easily be integrated in a job specific fashion to Ranged jobs that use them.

In short, just rework the Role Action system so that 'mandatory utility' is role dependent rather than job dependent, which removes the need to penalize individual jobs for having access to them.

[GoatOfWar]

Locking “true DPS” to 1 slot out of 4 or 2 out of 8 would be a mess in this game, the game already suffers from supports (as in tanks and healers) being 50% of the party while being like 25% of the playerbase

I could see 1/1/2/1 maybe working but it would mess up a lot of the game’s content to rebalance everything from 4/8/24 to 5/10/30

I’d also imagine people who play classes like BRD and DNC like a DPS wouldn’t like being forced into being supports

And they're doing a really good job at making their existing support players not want to play support.

[Tunda]

categorizing range as a support job is not a good idea..

and I don't think would be healthy for the game..

Machinist is great job as DPS roles.. it just need a fix on their risk and reward aspect, example PvP Machinist kit would be healthy for the job.

After thinking about it I have these hot takes:

1- Remove role skills: As a black mage I use swift cast only while using flare star(they can make flare start instant cast and that's it), Addle I don't use it and I don't think it is healthy for BLM to use it.
other jobs fit more for these skills.

2- Job gauge problem in the game:
game just introduce new systems that overlapping with mana, Warrior rage, Monk chakra, Reaper gauges.
these systems killing the resource management in this game.

if we are for example introduce a "true support job" logically one of their skills is to restore party mana like Astro and I think white mage before.
increasing mana is type of increasing not only damage but healing and tank utility.

Removing mana regen in combat would be a solution and mana regen would be weather 123 skills or specific abilities like BLM ice phase.

3- Add some kind of boss rage mechanic (new bar other than HP):
some other games have the ability to increase boss rage (in this phase boss damage increase and defense decrease)
it is like prime time for support jobs.

4- party composition
Light party : 2DPS/1SUPPORT/1HEALER/1TANK
Full party : 4DPS/2SUPPORT/2HEALER/2TANK

we can increase the difficulty for dungeons and raids in the context of increasing damage received.
raids and dungeons need to be bigger