Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[AvoSturmfaust]

Tbh you dont balance around Dungeons or anything else, you Balance around Savage/Ultimates and maybe ex Trials, where your Endgamerotation and everything else really matters so i would say yes

[Carighan]

Tbh you dont balance around Dungeons or anything else, you Balance around Savage/Ultimates and maybe ex Trials, where your Endgamerotation and everything else really matters so i would say yes

This is good (to a degree) general advise for say, Overwatch 2 or so. Games where the gameplay and the context are fundamentally the same between all tiers of play.

But that's not so much true in MMORPGs, in particular in a design such as these. Dungeon gameplay and Savage gameplay has very little in common, even before you get into the differences between the types of players that have each as their highest level of gameplay they engage with. You don't get matchmade into an Ultimate by the DF because you do too well in Dungeon runs is what I'm saying, basically. The contents aren't part of one broad spectrum.

The following all, ideally, need seperate class design consideration:

* Dungeons
* Normal Trials+Raids
* Extreme+Savage
* Criterion Savage
* Ultimates
* Solo combat (to a very minor degree, that should be trivially fulfilled by the type of class design FFXIV uses)

I excluded PvP since that has classes which are fully distinct from the PvE ones.

The thing is, you can't just look at ultimates. If you balance for that, you cannot also balance for say, Extreme Trials. The fights are just too distinct in their basic design. But you will have plenty players who will never ever ever look into Ultimates, and don't they deserve a balanced class setup, too?