Concerns Regarding DPS Balance: Physical Ranged, Red Mage, and Summoner

[Taranok]

Mao gonna say one more thing about jobs. If Devs waitings until 8.0 to fix jobs then Devs doing this all WRONG. Job design should be constant part of playtestings and should be worked on ALL THE TIME. If has to wait for future expansion to roll out changes then Devs taking BIG risk of seeing game crash and burn before "The Promised Day" comes. Is some peoples like Mao whats just not has time to waste while waitings for 8.0. Mao kinda worried that is might be little or no serious playtestings goings on. If Mao right about this then Mao also worried that this might mean SE nots has enough staffs assigned to FFXIV to be able do this work.

It's not really a lack of playtesting. It's the general problem of an echo chamber mixed heavily with designing themselves into a corner. Every MMO does this to a degree, but FFXIV has been designing itself into a corner since ARR.

The 'corner,' specifically, is the class/encounter design interaction.

For example, WAR couldn't tank twintania (and was awful in 2.0 in general.) Solution: Give WAR tanking cooldowns like PLD had. PLD couldn't tank magic damage. Solution: Make it so PLD could. SCH couldn't heal like WHM. Solution, give it WHM's kit (in HW.) AST couldn't heal, period. Solution, turn it into WHM.

The more recent kick, started in late ShB, was that the devs ran out of ideas to design new and interesting encounters. The solution was to make the mechanics artificially harder by forcing more movement.

When you look at all of these, you see the worrying trend. All tanks tank identically to how PLD tanked back in ARR. It's boring, stale, and binary. All healers heal the way WHM did back in ARR, because Medica 1, medica 2, and cure 2 are so horrifically overpowered. So every fight was turned into a collection of endless tank and party busters.

The 'movement meta' that was started in ShB has more or less devoured the caster DPS and healer role to the point where there isn't a true caster left. Some of it done in the name of not clipping oGCDs, most of it done because "Well, if every caster (except BLM) has a 1.5-2s cast time, may as well design content around a 1.5-2s cast 2.5s recast design!"

So now every fight is filled with 2/4/8 (lite party/partner/spread-stack) mechanics with a ton of movement with casters who aren't casters because you can't have fights like P7S or DT EX1 with a class like heavensward black mage. The design and classes are fundamentally at odds with each other. Hell, I still remember when mechanics targeted one role almost entirely, even caster-specific things like leviathan's 'stop standing on top of each other' AoEs.

And, as if that wasn't bad enough, since every fight is filled with tank busters that come in swinging for 200%+ EHP, the only valid way to tank is with mits and barriers, instead of WoW's triage meta tank design that allows things like drain tanking or deferred damage manipulation tanking (brewmaster.) Even barriers aren't good for multi-hits that have slowly crept in. Healers have the same issue where you either have a heal like medica 1 or 2, or you can't heal the fights. So every party buster can only be handled with any of a veritable plethora of party mits, barriers, or raw burst healing.

Let's throw in the veritable plethora of party mits and how it watered down rphys DPS and their party mits, or how reprisal showed up on tanks, and how addle and feint are so close to tactician that they may as well be tactician and we can see this problem extends to every aspect of class and encounter design.

So now the devs are so deep in a hole, where every mechanic has to be a party buster, or a tank buster, and has to involve every player running around giant arenas, and we can see that the devs have homogenized tanks, healers, ranged DPS, and even mitigations. The burst meta isn't even a foot note on the amount of homogenization the devs have done and just how bad it's forced the devs to design the game. There used to be a time when downtime actually happened even when the boss was up, and it didn't cripple classes like BLM or melee to boot. Where rphys had full uptime and could do unique things like baiting a cyclops around the arena before healers specifically got to shoot it with a petrify cone.

I have to wonder if the devs realize all of this is the problem. But at this point I assume the devs either don't notice or don't care. Or worse, are designed into a corner because they're not allowed the resources in their oppressive update schedule to ever address any of these problems reasonably enough to fix the core homogenization issues.

[Valence]

I do agree fully but on the specific point of mechanics becoming more movement and uptime based than ever I feel is a conscious, wilfull decision in direction on their end. This is something that affects melees the least across all expansions history, but it also removes a lot of what made other roles gameplay, rphys among the most.

One just has to take a look at the new Hall of the Novice stages they showcased for 7.1. It's very enlightening to look at tutorials in order to see what the devs think is the core gameplay of a game. It was already starting to be made evident by all the older dungeon reworks that turn everything into stack markers, spreads, chariots and dynamos and all that jazz, and you can see the exact same thing with the new Hall of the Novice.

They do not want the game to keep its classical RPG elements anymore, they want to tailor it fully to the action RPG experience.

[Lyth]

...

Damage-type specific mitigation has always been terrible design. Mitigation is pass/fail to begin with. Having a pass/fail button that you can't use for an entire fight is just a waste of hotbar space altogether. It also lends itself to that idea of 'partial homogenization'. Why put up with physical-only blocks on PLD or magical-only defensives on DRK when WAR does both without issue? Why should you put up with a magic-only Magick Barrier on a 120s recast when Tempera Grassa works on all damage types and is on a 90 second effective recast? This is significantly worse than homogenization, because you have one action that is mathematically better than the alternatives. But you'll see people weaponize the 'homogenization' argument in defense of the status quo. Not because they care about job identity or uniqueness, but because they like being more powerful than everyone else.

Modern fight design in FFXIV has its origins in Stormblood, not Shadowbringers. ARR and Heavensward fights are so different in their design that they could be from another game. I'd say that they have more in common with Warcraft than they do with the current designs. There was a lot of experimentation, which lead to creative ways to bypass mechanics. The first two entries in Binding Coil used soft enrages, which lead players to use the soft enrage to bypass Allagan Rot on ADS. 'Uninterruptable actions' could be interrupted through forced movement. Spinning a mob prevented it from executing actions.

The latter point in particular came under scrutiny during Creator, which is the main reason why fights moved away from looping phases with percentage-based transitions to scripted timelines at the start of Stormblood. Over the course of that expansion, FFXIV's style of 'choreography' became its unique selling point which was celebrated at the time. But it relied on heavily scripted encounters and automated positioning to conceal underlying janky programming of mob movement.

I wouldn't say that there was less of a movement focus in early expansions. Do you remember A7S? The fight with the giant balls that travel randomly around the arena? Cat phase? The Corporal Punishment baits on the square platform just before the final phase? If anything, I think Stormblood through to Endwalker favored more static, predictable fight designs with less of a movement focus. What likely had the biggest impact is all the complaints about 'meleewalker' during Abyssos. So now we're starting to see a change in the fight design philosophy again. What needs to happen is a greater focus on tank-controlled movement and positioning over scripted movement.

The focus on mitigating spike damage is not new, either. A lot of pre-Stormblood fights hit very hard. This was partially due to STR gearing, but there were a lot of untimed cleaves and autos that you needed to keep track of. T9 had four tankbusters in the first phase alone, and cleaves hit you for roughly half your health. Living Liquid had you counting auto-attacks to predict when those cleaves would land. What's changed is that mitigation has been simplified to make it more accessible. Tankbusters occur at fixed timestamps with a lot of signposting, and there's fewer of them. Autos don't randomly crit. Most things get resolved by either invuln/swap or kitchen sink, and that terminology dates back to ARR.

Support functionality always takes a backseat to dealing more damage. To use your T7/T7S Reynaud example, did you know that it eventually became optimal for the SCH to just handle everything on their own, kiting included? And that's just a byproduct of the core game design. DPS takes priority over support. When support functions are pass/fail, and doing damage is the only way to optimize, then damage becomes the single most important consideration. I think that Expedient breaks the mould here, but support actions that can feed into optimization are few and far between.

The main thing that has changed is that people are a lot more outspoken about gaining advantages for their respective jobs. But the problem is that it usually takes the form of complaints around job difficulty. What people don't realize is that complaining about difficulty doesn't actually get you more DPS. It gets you job simplifications. Having to plan your movement and time casts was supposed to be the gameplay highlight that you looked forward to, not the thing that you complained about. We should be celebrating skill differentials, rather than using them as negotiation points for DPS advantages over other players. Is the resulting simplification that surprising? It always comes back to the Monkey's Paw.

[Carighan]

Why put up with physical-only blocks on PLD or magical-only defensives on DRK when WAR does both without issue? Why should you put up with a magic-only Magick Barrier on a 120s recast when Tempera Grassa works on all damage types and is on a 90 second effective recast?

Because if well designed, those come with tradeoffs. That is, the generic case would be universally weaker, in return for being, well, universal.

So in your examples:

* PLD can only block physical, does so all the time, and overall avoids a lot of damage if its physical but nothing if it's magical. DRK OTOH has a very strong anti-magic CD, but of course can't use it against physical. The WAR got a very weak CD, but it works on all types of damage.
* Magick Barrier would be a single oGCD and is stronger against big hits, while Tempera Grassa works on all damage but requires more pre-planning to apply since it takes two non-consecutive oGCDs.

[Valence]

Celebrated... I think I missed the day of celebration.

[ElysiumDragon]

I will reiterate.

I'm a Phys Ranged because I want to bring 50 billion damage to the table, or carry the group on my back.

I'm a Phys Ranged because who else is going to herd the cats, so to speak?

Who else is going to safely adjust for a mechanic, AND maintain a perfect DPS rotation, AND throw down support options, AND call mechanics?

[Derio]

I dont think it will be solved in the 7.X patch cycles. But I do think in 8.0 when they release the 4th physical ranged dps they can fix physical ranged dps and be in a better position.

[Lyth]

Because if well designed

No. I'm saying that physical/magical only mitigation tools are intrinsically poorly designed. And that's after ten years of putting up with them.

The devs are of the mindset that hotbar space is at a premium, to the point where they generally refuse to add new actions without replacing old ones. It does not make sense to have a button on your hotbar that is completely unusable on certain fights. The end result of Heavensward's approach to conditional mitigations was that PLD/DRK was treated as a singular 'slot' where you were expected to swap between both jobs on a fight-specific basis, and you'll see that on pretty much all early clear videos from that era. WAR was a guaranteed slot, similar to how PCT is today.

If you want to see a really blatant example of why this is a problem today, look at Shake it Off vs. Dark Missionary and Heart of Light. It really only takes a mechanic like Harrowing Hell to make the imbalance incredibly obvious. PCT is in a similar boat with Tempera Grassa for Casters. I don't think having a second button press to toggle between personal mitigation and raidwide mitigation is a skill check, especially not when it's on the slowest job in the game.

There's no reason for having physical/magical only mitigation. Flat damage reduction vs. percentage based damage reduction can create flavor and variety, because they're still useable across different fight conditions. But mitigation effects should work against all damage types.

[Supersnow845]

Are we going to just continue to ignore that magic barrier also provides healing up

It’s a bit disingenuous to argue that Tempra grassa is just objectively better than magic barrier when you ignore one entire effect of it

[Carighan]

No. I'm saying that physical/magical only mitigation tools are intrinsically poorly designed. And that's after ten years of putting up with them.

That's a very myopic view to take. Different types of damage are not a new thing, and we can readily look to other MMOs both successfully abolishing this and successfully working with them. Usually in a restricted manner that's actually quite comparable. The common one is not physical vs magical, but autoattack (or "flat" damage) vs special (or "spike" damage). But of course they can also be abolished, yes, and other MMOs have also shown how to do that!

It's not necessary to just look inside FFXIV, despite what many in the community seem to think FFXIV is in no way special when it comes to design, apart from maybe how outdated the underlying patterns in its class/job design are nowadays even comparing older but more-updated MMOs. Mind you, not the specifics, but rather the underlying elements (such as fixed-rotation being the only real type of class, the GCD vs oGCD split with animation lock, such stuff).

The devs are of the mindset that hotbar space is at a premium, to the point where they generally refuse to add new actions without replacing old ones. It does not make sense to have a button on your hotbar that is completely unusable on certain fights.

And I don't disagree, I think even now all jobs are ridiculously overdesigned and use way too many buttons to achieve too little (a result of the very GCD vs oGCD split I mention above). That does however not mean that I'm inherently against hyper-specific buttons, but they'd be 1-2 buttons in a total loadout of 15 or so, not the current 10-15 among 25 most jobs have. It's not like we don't have 10+ abilities that are pointless "press whenever up" stuff that could easily be cut!

But, as said above, that also doesn't mean I'm against removing the distinction! I just wanted to say that such stuff can easily work, it just needs to be designed to work, which the current implementation is not.