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

[Carighan]

I'll leave you with one question though, how exactly does the same timing = the same task? How are you going to say nin is homogenized with drg or sam or reaper? How about blm smn rdm and pict? How about brd mch and dnc? Do you even play this game? I don't think you do outside of limsa lominsa + mods.

Look, at this point the problem of trying to answer your questions is just this: I can explain it to you, but clearly - because it has already been tried - I can't understand it for you. That you aren't able to understand such a simplistic concept of MMORPG class homogenization and how it looks, feels, appears and why or how the latter happens is not our problem. We all understand this stuff. Because it's that basic.

[HikariKurosawa]

Look, at this point the problem of trying to answer your questions is just this: I can explain it to you, but clearly - because it has already been tried - I can't understand it for you. That you aren't able to understand such a simplistic concept of MMORPG class homogenization and how it looks, feels, appears and why or how the latter happens is not our problem. We all understand this stuff. Because it's that basic.

So, you can't do it.

[NegativeS]

Are people really still in here taking this dude's bait? This forum sure is something else.

[HikariKurosawa]

Are people really still in here taking this dude's bait? This forum sure is something else.

What's the bait though? I propose a question and they can't formulate an answer. The reddit post that guy referred to is like a 2000 word essay that literally says absolutely nothing. Just like most of the posts in this thread criticizing the game's level of "homogenization". It's not that hard to be succinct, if you have to write so many words just to say nothing, it's probably because you don't have any real position to state. I ask a simple question and nobody can offer a real answer. That's this thread in a nutshell. It's like gameplay politics, just a bunch of manipulative gishgalloping but no real substance or meaning.

I know you gaslight yourself into believing that you had this massive incredible "gotcha!" in this thread by "exposing" those that have a different opinion than you, but the reality is - your takes are as hollow as your choice of ignorant words, and everyone with half a days worth of knowledge about how game design actually works would never take your takes seriously.
But it is okay, understanding that you write these things because you are afraid that you will not be able to actually play this game unless everything is super simplified, means that we can take you as serious as you deserve to.

Thank you for this thread though, it allowed actual competent people to exchange some good ideas and expose actual issues with how the game is designed.

like this post for example hahahha.

Is job homogenization in the room with us right now?

Saying that the 2min meta is making burst more complicated is a little pushing it, especially when everyone just has one or two buff buttons to press when they come off cooldown every 2 minutes... Not exactly rocket science. It's something we tend to read from players that came during ShB or especially after. ShB didn't have the 2min meta yet and even in its extreme series of simplifications raid buffs still required some thinking in order to see what jobs would align with each other within each different party composition, and how to make the most of it. Even RDM actually still had a magic damage Embolden back then and it only affected specific jobs (casters) and not the rest (mostly), which informed specifically when to use it and for who.

And then we can go back in time and start looking at certain jobs that had completely unique and different buff patterns, like AST that had no divinitation or anything but cards, and those could be played at any time, giving it a lot of flexibility and rewarding actual skill expression for when to use them into buffs. It is still partially the case but the removal of systems like Royal Road have made it only a shadow of what it used to allow (namely big AoE party buffs of all kinds), especially in combination to other freeform raid buffs, notably, Foe Requiem and Hypercharge.

So what about Foe Requiem? Well, during HW and SB, Foe Requiem was a freeform raid buff with a very low recast (below 10-15s iirc?), because its main limiter was based on actual resources, here MP consumption as long as the buff was kept active, which depleted MP relatively fast. A good BRD could trigger this raid buff at 0s, then 60s again for a lower gain at half MP if it made sense for example. Or actually, the team could find clever synergies and give the BRD MP refreshes so that the BRD could use this buff in patterns like 0min, 1min, 3min, 4min, etc, trying to cover as many different buff patterns for different jobs (60s, 80s, 90s, 120s, 180s). It wasn't uncommon in SB to see the caster manashift the crap out of the BRD in order to refresh MP for more Foe Requiem, but then, you also had as a BRD to take into account that Battle Voice still doubled song efficiency back then, and finding ways to still get the most out of BV was also a thing. This was during Stormblood by the way, which had already simplified a great deal raid buffing on the role that was actually designed to play heavily around raid buffs. In HW Foe Requiem (and old Hypercharge on MCH) still consumed MP and could be refreshed by clever plays, but it was also possible to change the song and play for example Mage Ballad which was the MP party refresh on BRD (manasong), and that could be doubled by BV in effectiveness as well (and manasong was mandatory in the old battle system for prolonged fights). On MCH's side, promoting the turret to swap to MP/TP regen could also be doubled by Hypercharge.

Just to put things in perspective of how much the system has been pruned of in terms of job skill expression, uniqueness, and raid buff synergies and tactics, and this is just about 3 of the job roster. I didn't even bring Ninja and Smokescreen/Shadeswalker to the table.

This post is a good articulation, but it's also like "Wow I'm glad the game isn't like that anymore." It's also less about homogenization, and more about the gameplay becoming polished and refined rather than pedantic and offputting. To each their own, but I am truly glad the game has moved away from that direction. I don't enjoy the idea of having job meetings prior to pulling a boss over and over. That's not the complexity I like in gaming, and it's clear that the developers don't like it either. It makes the game unapproachable and way too niche to be successful.

If you guys want this niche type of gameplay, try making the game yourself. It's never going to be part of final fantasy xiv anymore.

[ovIm]

like this post for example hahahha.

Is job homogenization in the room with us right now?

Ssshhh, its okay. The evil complexity can't hurt you. You can stop being mad at nothing. {/comfort}

[AlgernonBlackwood]

Are people really still in here taking this dude's bait? This forum sure is something else.

I'm fully convinced that the vast majority of this forum is actually being used to facilitate some type of masochistic ERP session.

[VentVanitas]

Are people really still in here taking this dude's bait? This forum sure is something else.

i've been away from the forums for like 5 months and it doesn't surprise me at all to know that this guy is still saying the exact same things as they did before DT even dropped

[Lyth]

If people are getting stuck on a word, the best thing to do is express the idea using different terms.

Job designs naturally converge over time. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is player demand. In ARR, tanks didn't have gap closers. In HW, DRK was added, and became the first tank with a gap closer. It didn't take long for other tanks to demand the same thing. Now it's a standardized feature of the role.

A second consideration is job balance. In HW, WAR's identity was commonly cited as a 'damage tank'. In modern times, the idea of a job doing more damage as its primary 'identity' is hopefully more universally viewed as unbalanced (although the caster job designer just doesn't seem to get this). Other points have become apparent as well. All things being equal, burst is more powerful than sustained damage. As a result, most jobs have moved towards individualized gauge systems in which burst is resource-gated rather than timer-gated. That allows you to balance burst against sustain without having wild swings in balance depending on downtime (again, another concept that the caster job designer seems to have missed).

A third consideration is encounter design. As more raid tiers are released, developers have a greater understanding of how fights are designed and how players react to them. As that happens, a standard develops around encounter design, and jobs converge to stay relevant under those conventions. An underlying set of 'rules' develops as players become more efficient in learning encounters.

That's not to say that divergent design isn't possible. You can experiment with encounters and job designs, which leads to iterative changes to game direction. But sudden, dramatic changes on individual job designs lead to unfair advantages. Having a singular job that ignores uptime to generate burst is an obviously bad idea. It's such a powerful effect that you'd have to redesign all jobs to be just like it, just to allow it to exist. But that's a convergent force in itself.

Divergent design works best when you're comparing apples and oranges. Like which is better - a movement speed buff, or a teleporter with fixed charges that connects two points in an arena? But you also need buy-in from the playerbase for this to work. If the movement speed buff players start demanding a teleporter on their job, and the teleporter players start demanding a movement speed buff on their job, then you end up back in the convergent case.

Homogenization is treated like it's a bad word. It really isn't. There are convergent forces to establish parity and emphasize individual player skill over job choice. There are also divergent forces to keep gameplay fresh and novel. The only truly bad design choice is partial homogenization, where one job has the same action as others, just more powerful. That's neither novel nor balanced. And more often than not, the 'homogenization' argument gets thrown in to defend such design choices, to preserve the dominance of an overpowered job over its counterparts. But unfortunately, the word is bandied about so often that nobody actually stops to think about what they really mean by it.

[Carighan]

Divergent design works best when you're comparing apples and oranges. Like which is better - a movement speed buff, or a teleporter with fixed charges that connects two points in an arena? But you also need buy-in from the playerbase for this to work. If the movement speed buff players start demanding a teleporter on their job, and the teleporter players start demanding a movement speed buff on their job, then you end up back in the convergent case.

Yeah that's true.

I think this came up in the thread about talent trees, but Blizzard tried this before, try to give each spec 6 triplets of picks, and none of these had to do with a spec's primary role. So damage dealers had none of these 18 options affect their output. But they did things such as allow them to be completely invulnerable to a single hit, or teleport briefly every so often, or passively build a 3% shield every 5 seconds stacking up to 15% or so. Meanwhile a tank would of course not get options 1 or 3, but might have option 2!

It didn't work, because players really did not like not being able to pick talents for power. Even though of course the moment those exist, there's a standard spec everyone picks anyways. Our equivalent given the ease of switching jobs here is that unbalanced jobs within a single role lead to default layouts to teams, yet we want these jobs to have elements that make them stronger in situations and weaker at others at their primary job (say, a Picto deals more damage, or that most Black Mage players think BLM ought to do more damage or so). Even though that inherently undermines the ability to flexibly pick your playstyle.

It's a tricky situation. I forgot the name for the concept but it's this thing that as humans we desire the very thing that then becomes our doom.

[Supersnow845]

The problem with partial homogenisation is the fact that partial homogenisation is basically always caused by attempting to maintain surface level gameplay differences while the classes get shoved closer and closer together

There is no better example of this than SCH and SGE. SGE is a blatant copy of SCH that ripped off a lot of its abilities but changed them on the surface to maintain “gameplay” differences and in almost every situation SCH’s version just ends up being objectively superior so SGE ends up suffering for attempting to be too similar to SCH

deployment is better than Zoe
Recitation is also better than Zoe
Seraph is better than panhaima
Dissipation is better than rhizomata
Seraphism is better than philosophia

If SGE hadn’t been shoved so close to SCH because of healer homogenisation then SGE may have actually had a niche to exist in rather than being the “I play SGE because I’m afraid of dissipation” class