#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Shurrikhan]

But "I want a wide variety of unique job/class identities and play styles" and "I want things to be roughly equally viable" is an extremely difficult set of things to combine, and the more jobs/classes/whatevers you add to the mix, the closer it becomes to actively impossible; you largely have to pick one or the other.

I worry this is splitting hairs, but I feel like I should elaborate on a couple points.

First, I don't think people tend to assume that the best possible run with a job under best possible play by self and party, best possible composition, and best possible RNG with a given job should need to be within 1% of another job's... so long as that 1% is minute compared to other elements of variance unavoidable between runs.

The more varied the strats, the more that can go differently without blatant error, the wider the margin of acceptance. I'm not sure anything beyond that asymptote (in which the more of A, the larger the lenience for B) is worth worrying about so long as whatever community-noted net advantage is shuffled enough over fights and/or over time (early prog, later), compositions, etc.

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But anywho, that's arguing theoretical bounds and is therefore far, far less practical, so long as there's any desire to make the game more fleshed out regardless. More practical then is HOW kit may interact with content.

For that, I'd be most interested in ensuring that we have a great many (perhaps even overlapping, if need be) categories for capacity and seek to ensure that jobs' efforts required to provide that much and the maximum they can reasonably provide in practice are roughly on par with one another by crafting content in such a way as to pull on each of those capacities at roughly equal volume.

Put more simply, imagine each job as having a irregular decagonal radial graph showing their various powers. You want to slice what content makes use of in such a way that the volumes by the content from each kit used are roughly equal, even if the shape of that content's own "graph" so to speak varied wildly.

Which is far, far, from easy, I understand. But it does start first with those categories and imagining in what ways one can even indirectly but meaningfully near an encounter's goal, be it healing something to X% HP, reducing its HP to 0, moving it from point A to point B, or whatever else.

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Sidenote: One other way to balance jobs is to instead balance their gambits. For instance, when players can only really afford (in terms of time or account-wide time-locked content) to level one job per role, they tend to stick to that one job per role and parties tend to take a more lenient view of acceptable inefficiency (so long as the party can still clear content). However, as it'd stand for XIV this would require massive losses to XIV's unique selling points, to accessibility (in terms of time and allowance for more indecisive/choice-anxious players), and customizability of gameplay at the player and party levels.

A potential compromise, though, is just to have more content where specific utility advantages are decently frequent but in roughly equal portion and are especially valuable (relative to raw output) and the exact encounters are largely randomized. In those cases, without knowing who will come out on top, again a larger variance tends to be acceptable so long as, chances accounted for, each enters with roughly equal risk.

[Packetdancer]

MCH wasn't locked out because it wasn't viable, MCH was locked out because it was far enough behind that the 1% stat boost and their personal damage wasn't enough to bridge the gap between them and a melee, something that is happening again this tier btw.

Okay, fair enough; instead of saying MCH wasn't viable, we'll say that MCH was technically viable, it just wasn't optimal, hence why it got excluded.

What the dev team should do is to stop trying to break player-created metas, it's not worth the problems that it creates. Make unique and fun jobs, then make sure they're all viable, that's all they need to do.

Except you yourself point out in the quote above that even with MCH being viable, the fact that it wasn't as optimal as other things meant it got excluded. (Granted it was a dramatic lack of optimization, but still.)

I would argue (and have argued) that viability alone is not enough for how this community optimizes fights, and that need to have things not just viable but more or less functionally equivalent in overall damage contribution (within a certain margin of error, anyway) introduces a significant limiting factor on how distinct and different from each other you can make jobs within a role.

A potential compromise, though, is just to have more content where specific utility advantages are decently frequent but in roughly equal portion and are especially valuable (relative to raw output) and the exact encounters are largely randomized. In those cases, without knowing who will come out on top, again a larger variance tends to be acceptable so long as, chances accounted for, each enters with roughly equal risk.

I agree with this; I think the fact that FFXIV's encounters are so rigidly scripted is potentially a significant part of what constrains the dev team design-wise. The fact that we can make a rigid timeline for a fight means we can literally mathematically break down what is optimal to take into a fight. If there was a bit more variance and random chance, that would be a (slightly) more nebulous situation to solve for.

[Aravell]

I would argue (and have argued) that viability alone is not enough for how this community optimizes fights, and that need to have things not just viable but more or less functionally equivalent in overall damage contribution (within a certain margin of error, anyway) introduces a significant limiting factor on how distinct and different from each other you can make jobs within a role.

And I'm pointing out that it's a big mistake to care about player-created metas. If every job is viable, people that lock out certain jobs in regular PF would be seen as the memes that they are, as long as the jobs are reasonably balanced.

So someone will lock out jobs that aren't optimal, so what? WHM was never optimal except for 1 patch and nobody really locks out WHM. You can't achieve a balance that can completely break a player-created meta unless every job does the exact same things with different skins, and I don't have to point out why that's a bad idea.

[Bobby66]

And I'm pointing out that it's a big mistake to care about player-created metas. If every job is viable, people that lock out certain jobs in regular PF would be seen as the memes that they are, as long as the jobs are reasonably balanced.

So someone will lock out jobs that aren't optimal, so what? WHM was never optimal except for 1 patch and nobody really locks out WHM. You can't achieve a balance that can completely break a player-created meta unless every job does the exact same things with different skins, and I don't have to point out why that's a bad idea.

That "so what" seems to be a crux of SE design philosophy. To get that SE to change from that philosophy a major shift would have to happen within the community. Their track record has shown they are not a fan of player created meta that excludes certain jobs, at one point they were sure but the community did speak out against such metas.