Can anyone clearly explain "job homogenization" in this game?

[Supersnow845]

^i was literally going to point out that a single example I can think of is that Seraphism introduces a form of soft conflict with recitation which is unique compared to either synergy or hard conflict (even if it’s an extension of what already makes SCH unique) but you pre-empted me with no SCH

[Lyth]

I think people tend to confuse 'homogenization' with 'being subject to the same set of rules as everyone else'. Most jobs have to maintain some degree of uptime in order to generate their burst. PCT ignores this. Of course, when you point out a simple balance fix for it, there's pushback. Not because people care about 'homogenization', but because they like knowing that they like being more powerful than everyone else with zero skill investment.

The fact that the devs cater to this sort of mindset is a strong indicator that they probably need fresh views on their five person job design team.

[Supersnow845]

I think people tend to confuse 'homogenization' with 'being subject to the same set of rules as everyone else'. Most jobs have to maintain some degree of uptime in order to generate their burst. PCT ignores this. Of course, when you point out a simple balance fix for it, there's pushback. Not because people care about 'homogenization', but because they like knowing that they like being more powerful than everyone else with zero skill investment.

The fact that the devs cater to this sort of mindset is a strong indicator that they probably need fresh views on their five person job design team.

Or maybe PCT reveals that “everyone hates downtime some just compensate for it slightly better than others” is a flawed design mindset from the outset

WHY DO WE CONSTANTLY HAVE ULTIMATES FULL OF DOWNTIME WHEN EVERY JOB HATES DOWNTIME. This has never made sense to me. The modern job design hates downtime.

[Aco505]

Downtime is one of the things that makes jobs fun, because it changes the way you approach them. If every single encounter was a full uptime dummy, combat would be extremely boring.

[Supersnow845]

Sorry I don’t mean downtime doesn’t make it fun to plan out I mean why is every job (sans PCT) completely and utterly designed for full uptime and barely functions in periods of high downtime then we go and make fights that have high downtime

Like PCT isn’t a “problem” in terms of its core design, it just shows that designing every job so that they barely function with lots of downtime is a dead end of design

[Aco505]

Jobs whose burst is mostly cooldown gated and don't care too much about uptime to build gauge like DRG and NIN scale quite hard when a lot of downtime is involved. You see them doing quite well after PCT in the current statistics.

PCT is simply a "special" new case in which the job is forced to do no damage for X amount of seconds every 2 minutes in full uptime so when this no-damage situation is removed, they gain plenty of potency. However, since it's also coupled with extremely high burst potential, it all sums up to the situation we're in now.

Another example would be SAM, which has some problems in Ultimates due to Higanbana's DoT duration but whose Meditate ability can generate quite a bit of potency if allowed to channel for its full duration. Whether that is enough to compensate or not is a different question though.

The issue is more that there's also lots of jobs that dislike not having uptime due to their gauge (VPR, RPR, MCH, RDM...) but have no decent tools to deal with it. I don't think all jobs should have the same tools however but I would like some more variety in general, for both uptime and downtime purposes.

For instance, many DPS jobs such as DRG have been ninjafied over time: everything is about the 2-minute window with, perhaps, milder 1-minute ones. The main difference between NIN and DRG, then, is that the latter's 1-minute bursts are strong enough when compared to 2-minutes. Since plenty of jobs are now in this paradigm of weak and/or boring filler and very strong burst, what made NIN more unique in the first place (besides trick) has been lost.

It's not an easy problem to solve: do we give all jobs similar tools and thus homogenize them, or do we try to keep them all different enough without digging deeper into the homogenization pitfall we're already in?

It's often said that the latter option poses the risk of alienating (or creating the perception of) jobs from battle content but this has already been happening with roles such as casters for a while, so at this point the issue is not strictly about homogenization but also the agonizingly slow balance passes from SE. We only get adjustments for numbers in (some) bigger patches, thus prolonging any unbalanced state for long periods in any given expansion.

[ovIm]

Love the fact that in a thread where OP outs themselves as an insecure troll unwilling to engage in actual exchange of opinions and trying to "expose" people instead, there is actual good information about the issues regarding the current job design philosophy.

It's not an easy problem to solve: do we give all jobs similar tools and thus homogenize them, or do we try to keep them all different enough without digging deeper into the homogenization pitfall we're already in?

Thing is, this is why Square Enix has actual game designers on their payroll (though the current class design team is really in desperate need for new talent) whos job it is to solve this conundrum. This is a problem they have created and have doubled down on despite the producer of the game claiming to want to break away from it as well. Ideally, classes are able to do similar things in a different way.
While speaking of classes, we also need to keep in mind that fight design is also inherently intertwined with them. Like back in Heavensward, where Paladin was a good tank, but undesired in Raids because they excelled in physical mitigation, and Raid Damage was almost purely magical.

[Carighan]

It's important to keep in mind that homogenization can look different in different games, even of the same genre.

Generally speaking in MMORPGs, you'll see one or multiple of four kinds of homogenization:

* Conceptual homogenization. This is frequent in games with multiple sides, where you want two warrying sides to have a similar type of class with relatively minor differences. For example in Dark Age of Camelot each of the three factions has a "bolt caster", but the Wizard of Albion, the Eldritch of Hibernia and the Warlock of Midgard aren't 100% carbon-copies of each other, either.
* Implementation homogenization. This is the most frequent one, where your effective classes are flat out sharing abilities are entire sub-areas. Branching sub-classes often have this, since they keep the shared parent classes. WoW has this, as its classes have ~3 specs each, but also base elements that they share. All tanks in this game share a Provoke ability, Rampart, a big CD, a short CD, etc. This exists in FFXIV, but it's not as prevalent as what we mostly talk about here, which is...
* Gameplay homogenization. Here your abilities might or might not be different, but that's not the important part. Rather, the resulting player interaction is near-identical. This usually gives itself away because you can set up "similar enough" hotbar setups between jobs of each homogenization group. Also certain scaffolding like limited in-combat rezzing or (the big one in FFXIV) a fixed burst window cycle heavily feed into this as they require classes to ultimately all play the same in many regards.
* Lore homogenization. This is an RPG/Story specific thing, and usually not what people mean, but it's important to bring up: For ease of writing, you might see the origins/story/lore of two+ classes be merged or simplified to the point it might as well be merged. This often happens in expansions in MMORPGs where new area X is found, and new race Y you find there just happens to have melee class A and healer class B, yeah they're both of our tribe, congratulations, you can now also do this.

In FFXIV we usually talk about the third thing. About how our jobs "lost identity", because they all have such similar gameplay. In fact you can set up all 4 tanks virtually identical in hotbar layouts, and by and large you even go through the same button-motions (not 100%, but so much is mirrored it's just weird). Healers are the same, by and large they are copies of one another with 3-4 unique elements each. DPS are a bit better, but my melee jobs are surprisingly similar in hotbar setup, too!

But it's also important to keep in mind that at least implementation and gameplay homogenization cannot be avoided as a game evolves and ages. Simply due to numbers:

* As you add more and more classes - assuming your players want that, sometimes you get lucky and they're not at all interested in "MOAR!" - you will naturally run out of ways to keep first 10, then 20, then 30 classes balances. For ease of tuning, gameplay homogenization is important. If players roughly press equivalent buttons, the profile of damage is similar, so it can be tuned in equivalent ways.
* Likewise, further into a game's life, implementation homogenization becomes always a necessity. You can only conceptualize so many types of nukes, backstabs and heals. You'll have to copy&paste sooner or later.

[Lyth]

??

Jobs are not designed for full uptime. If they were, you would expect sustained DPS jobs like BLM would be consistently on top.

Historically, jobs operated on timer-dependent burst. Jobs which were more burst orientated unsurprisingly did more damage during downtime. So they fixed this, and opted for burst to be resource-gated. Now they've ignored their own fix for this problem with PCT. That makes it a major problem.

It's really quite simple. If you want to burst, you need uptime to earn that burst.

[Supersnow845]

Jobs are not designed for full uptime. If they were, you would expect sustained DPS jobs like BLM would be consistently on top.

Historically, jobs operated on timer-dependent burst. Jobs which were more burst orientated unsurprisingly did more damage during downtime. So they fixed this, and opted for burst to be resource-gated. Now they've ignored their own fix for this problem with PCT. That makes it a major problem.

It's really quite simple. If you want to burst, you need uptime to earn that burst.

We literally have examples of jobs underperforming or falling apart because they don’t work with downtime. The PLD rework in EW, BLM being progressively made burstier and burstier or RPR and VPR currently struggling in phase 1 and 2 of FRU

Jobs like PLD in EW are designed to pull roughly equal damage in full uptime with no disconnects, then they wonder why they fall apart when there is downtime, your own description even supports this. Jobs are made to require uptime to fulfil their burst, so they don’t work with downtime. PCT precisely works because it likes downtime, everyone else just has various ways of partially mitigating it