GNB feedback.

[Carighan]

Yeah I'm not toooooo happy with it either.

But for a different reason than many it seems. To me it's just... pointless? Like, it doesn't do anything. Why even make the changes then? It didn't make gameplay more involved, it didn't functionally make GNB stronger or weaker (that depends on the numbers), it didn't open up some new gameplay avenues, it's just some guy in an office worried they're getting fired if they don't make more changes before the patch so they did this mechanics-shuffling-around.

The only cool part is that Double Down is back after we had Single Down for so long. That's positive. The rest is... eh, why?

[mallleable]

I'm still on a 'wait, and see' basis for getting an extra charge of Gnashing Fang, I really don't like how it incentivizes saving both charges for No Mercy when synced below level 100. But the Bloodfest change is actually really nice -- especially in dungeons. I still think the Lionheart combo could be changed so it has its own Continuation procs.

[Rithy255]

GNB was my favorite tank and I despise these changes. I liked prepping my carts leading into the burst phase and managing downtime, now the job feels completely braindead. I've watched all my favorite jobs one by one get dumbed down and homogenized into one big bland soup this expansion and now there's nothing left. Pretty depressing.

I do agree in the broader sense that I think the state of job design is generally depressing bland soup.

For me as much as GNB changes are easier for me to play, I do not main GNB, I mostly play PLD or DRK if im tanking I really think GNB changes should only really appeal to GNB players rather then warrior mains who want to get into GNB and have that job simplified for them.

Another thing was I didn't even really like kaiten on samurai, but yet again I'm not a avid samurai player Just because a job becomes more appealing to me someone who will casually play all jobs, doesn't mean I think it should happen, because the inverse like the PLD rework that completely changed a lot what I liked about the job previously, now I've had to learn and accept that my job is just kinda braindead and bland.

I think Jobs should try to appeal to different players, they should do things such as make a Proc based Tank, Proc Melee, a core hard GCD tank, Healers with more then one damage buttons, instead of copy and pasting a very similar formular for each job because it gets insanely boring very quickly.

[Carighan]

I think Jobs should try to appeal to different players, they should do things such as make a Proc based Tank, Proc Melee, a core hard GCD tank, Healers with more then one damage buttons, instead of copy and pasting a very similar formular for each job because it gets insanely boring very quickly.

I'll stick to the fact that of the four basic gameplay types used in MMORPGs (or even RPGs in general) (proc-based, resource-based, dynamic branching and static rotation) it's insanely boring how everything in FFXIV has to be static rotation. Even Dancer and Red Mage got their proc chances meddles with (and the effects trivialized enough) so that they play exactly like a static-rotation-job does.

It's soooo sad. It should be the rarest type, usually reserved for the purest variant in each job as it lends itself well to the "simple enough in concept, difficult in perfect execution"-creed and hence works well with conceptionally pure and hence simple setups. Samurai, Black Mage, Paladin maybe, White Mage. Those could fit it. Everything else ought to be of a different basic type!

And then there's the identity differences we're also missing. We don't have a drain tank, not even warrior. We don't have an anti-magic tank, we don't have an anti-physical tank, we don't have a damage tank, we don't have a dodge tank, etc etc. It's so lame and boring!

At the absolute bare minimum, I'd focus:

• Paladin more in support. A lot more!
• Dark Knight as a retaliatory punisher.
• Gunbreaker as a preprogramming gameplay job where you load different cartridges in sequence and then have to use them as-loaded.
• Warrior as the ultimate bash bash job, virtually no combos, 0 resource management, lots of 5-15 second CDs to juggle all at once.

[CidHeiral]

I completely agree with you, I totally despise what they did, I used to play 2.45 which was my comfy middle sks. It actually challenged me to think about how to use all my GCDs on p1 FRU to fully optimise my rotation, and now I feel like I've been lobotomized. I know they'll never revert it but I can hope...

Yeah, fast GNB was my favorite and now it's dead.

For me as much as GNB changes are easier for me to play, I do not main GNB, I mostly play PLD or DRK if im tanking I really think GNB changes should only really appeal to GNB players rather then warrior mains who want to get into GNB and have that job simplified for them.

Totally agree. The devs seem to be going down the list and simplifying every job to appeal to people who hate it while giving the finger to the mains of the old design. This is a very shortsighted strategy as I outlined previously when they gutted DRG:

Say you have three jobs: Job A, Job B, and Job C. Keeping in mind you can play every job on the same character, Job A is played by 50% of players, Job B by 40%, and Job C by 20%. The devs look at those numbers and think "Job C is so unpopular, let's redesign it to be like Job A and Job B." They do so and sure enough Job C is now played by 50% of players as well. However, that increase in player count is mainly comprised of people who like the design of Job A and B and are now playing the reworked job as well. People who liked the old design of Job C now have nothing to play so they're driven away from the game. All you've ultimately accomplished is alienating that 20% of people — it's a net negative in player count.

I think every time the devs lobotomize a job they see positive feedback from Job A and Job B enjoyers and take that as a huge success without realizing they're losing the Job C crowd every time. Or maybe they do realize it and they just don't care, who knows?

I think Jobs should try to appeal to different players, they should do things such as make a Proc based Tank, Proc Melee, a core hard GCD tank, Healers with more then one damage buttons, instead of copy and pasting a very similar formular for each job because it gets insanely boring very quickly.

Definitely. When your job is boring you're only going to have fun the small percentage of time you're figuring out a new encounter. When your job is fun and engaging you can find the fun doing almost anything. There should be a mix of different playstyles and complexities in each role so there's something for everyone.

I'm a big fighting game fan and I often think of job design like a fighting game roster. Most noteworthy fighting games have a couple easy straightforward all-rounder characters that are extremely popular, like Ryu in Street Fighter or Sol Badguy in Guilty Gear, but the larger roster will have all sorts of wacky characters with wildly different playstyles to cater to different player preferences, even if some are very niche. Right now FFXIV is like a fighting game where every character is Ryu. That's awesome for people who like Ryu, but if you like grapplers, puppet characters, stance characters, etc your only option is to learn to love Ryu or quit. That's is not good for the long term health of the game.

[Rithy255]

Snip

Here's a simple concept Magic vs physical damage tank, Back in HW (I think anyway i did not play that far back, ive only done some reasearch into it) Pld was physical and Drk was magic, but the main issue with that is fights used magic 90% of the time, So PLD became useless

But Imagine if a fight used both? The PLD and Drk would synergize and have to use cooldowns to cover for each other, that could be a semi intresting dynamic, Heck I know it might be silly but I had a idea of DRK being able to augment their defensive skills such as turning Dark mind physical which would reward fight knowledge Because DM has a shorter cooldown ect. Instead 10% physical was slapped on which somewhat undermines what made it different and don't get me wrong It did suck to have no way to get value out of a physical only fight I don't want to defend a skill just being useless sometimes or really good sometimes for no reason other then someone made a fight physical or magic.

I think the main primary point I'm making is theirs actually room to have Tanks shine in different areas; Maybe not a magical or physical split because it would turn out somewhat similar to barrier Healers, But I don't like people saying it can't work at the very least because it was never tried in a balanced way, kinda like tank stances people complained so they got removed but I feel like it could have worked if it was more the tanks job and less the parties job to aggro manage. Now will anything like that be added? No. I think SE has made it very clear they will not return to HW or SB which is honestly fine, aslong as the direction they take is interesting.


I think tanks having stronger niches and also having different dps styled kits would breathe a lot of life into them which is needed, I won't get into the flaws of 2 minute meta much, but that needs to go and not be replaced by a "1 minute meta" or any set buff timer meta, you might aswell not have buffs if all it does is restrict job design and its something a DPS/healer presses once every 2 minutes and forgets about.

PLD being a support tank would be fun, I love it already for being highly supportive more of that would be amazing it honestly fits the tank who's a knight protector with holy white magic, DRK rewarding timing and punishing enemies would be fun, TBN kinda does that but it's more of a neutral cost, GNB having a wild gameplay loop with different catridges sounds pretty interesting, warrior like that also sounds so much more interesting.

They just need to try stuff, 5.0-7.4 has been so bland with job changes everything feels boring the only shake up to a job design has been to make it easier, name one job design that's got more interesting or complex? not always necessarily bad changes all the time but theirs not been a single change to a job that has been bold or took it in a direction that's interesting as of shadowbringers. I'm fed up with dreading expansions seeing "what jobs next?" or I would be but theirs hardly anything unique left anymore, maybe that's the goal because its very easy to balance jobs when they are all the same and fit the same niche, but frankly it just makes for a very poor job design system, and for a game that puts jobs and being different jobs on the same character as a centre choice just makes no sense sure Balance is important but at the same time having a fun game to begin with is even more important then balance, because if it's not fun why bother.

[Carighan]

I mean to a degree I get it.

We know from multiple generations of MMORPGs that the tighter players want their balance to be, particularly in high-end content, the more homogenized classes of a single role have to effectively be. We also know that FFXIV uniquely wants to produce its combat complexity and difficulty via the encounter, not the class you play.

And look at the DPS forum. Despite only a +/-5% variation in damage output across all damage jobs (so including PRanged+Summoner!), clearly some want even more homogenization and hence tighter numerical balance. Though to be fair WoW said they're happy with 3% variation to not have to overdo homogenization, not 5%, and also they were far less homogenized at the time than FFXIV is right now.

But, there's an important detail lost here, maybe: WoW seems to be less homogenized, especially back then late TBC / early WotLK. But it ain't. It's highly homogenized, but it hides that part. It pretends to be unique. Instead of all 4 tanks having exact equivalences ("This is my long CD", "This is my 1-2-3 combo", etc), they can be wildly different, so long as they effectively homogenize when used in an actual fight. Whether somebody can press a 40% damage reduction every 3 minutes versus whether someone suffers 40% less damage automatically against big enough boss abilities and that has a 3-min-ish CD... sounds like a big deal, but actually makes zero difference if the fight isn't designed to particularly produce said difference. And yet playing the class it feels like a huge difference since a whole - rather important! - button isn't there on one class!

That's where I wish they'd do more, "pretend variation". I'm alright if they have to effectively homogenize because well, players clearly want even more numerical balance than we have right now already. But I don't need to produce that balanced DPS with a roughly equivalent rotation with roughly equivalent CDs on every job, it can be produced any number of ways!

[Mikey_R]

We don't have a drain tank, not even warrior.

I don't know why not Warrior, but I will assume you mean a tank that heals itself based on the damage they do and not a fixed potency value. The problem, you cannot balance it as it will either be too strong, which further pushes healers away (which is already an issue), or it is too weak to mean anything. As a reference from my PLD, Fast Blade does ~5% of my max HP in damage and Sepulchre does ~10%. How much healing would you want out of this? As another point of reference, the 400 potency heal off of the magic attacks is ~7.5% of my max HP, we then have to consider burst, which has stronger attacks, so more healing.

I cannot see it being balanced and if you go the way of it being weak, so it is essentially flavour, can you really call that an identity?

We don't have an anti-magic tank, we don't have an anti-physical tank,

Every tank has to be able to tank everything as SE do not want to discriminate against certain tanks. From there, if you were better against magical damage, does that provide any benefit to the healers in saving resources? In most cases I would say it wouldn't, so again, it becomes more of a flavour thing rather than an actual benefit.

we don't have a damage tank

If a tank does too much damage ahead of the other tanks, it will be an automatic pick, especially combined with the fact that it has to be able to tank everything.

we don't have a dodge tank, etc etc. It's so lame and boring!

Dodge tank would be pointless. You cannot dodge any major mechanic, so you still need the defensive profile to be able to take a hit, so all you would really do is evade the odd auto attack here and there.

At the absolute bare minimum, I'd focus:

• Paladin more in support. A lot more!
• Dark Knight as a retaliatory punisher.
• Gunbreaker as a preprogramming gameplay job where you load different cartridges in sequence and then have to use them as-loaded.
• Warrior as the ultimate bash bash job, virtually no combos, 0 resource management, lots of 5-15 second CDs to juggle all at once.

1. PLD already has more support than the other tanks with Passage of Arms and Cover that the other tanks cannot replicate. They can also Holy Sheltron themselves and Intervention someone else in a short timespan. The closest another tank gets to that is Dark Knight with TBN on themselves and Oblation on someone else, but Oblation is far weaker than Intervention, even ignoring the extra mitigation that Intervention can be given via Rampart/Guardian.
2. Which would mean DRK would want to MT as much as possible, where, anytime they have to OT, they lose damage. You could add in a skill that still allows the retaliatory action whilst OT, but that then that just proves the initial premise was flawed.
3. So, Mudras for Gunbreaker? I thought people didn't want the jobs to be the same. Oh, different combo enders give different resources? Just like Samurai then, except it is a mash up of the Mudra and Samurai concepts. With what I have read, many people would just make the claim that you are making the jobs play the same (I'm not going to make that claim though). Also, if there is any damage focused options, they will be used over the supporting ones, every time.
4. Line up your GCDs from highest priority to lowest priority, hit in that order as they light up. Sorry, it might appeal to some, but that doesn't sound exciting at all. Current Warrior would be better and it is simple as anything.

You can have your own ideas about jobs and what you want out of them, but unless it fits in with the game's framework, it isn't going to work.

[Zairava]

Yikes. rough crowd.

GNB has been at least in my top 2 tanks since it launched, I've never *not* liked it, I've never hated it. I see that hyperbole thrown around quite a lot regarding these changes despite virtually the only things that have changed is that you use Lionheart every minute instead of two and you aren't perma-fucked for the entire fight if you either died or drifted too far out. That's not consequences that are reasonable or punishment you can recover from and feel satisfied about it. It just feels like trash. I'm all for punishment/consequences for messing up, but that ain't it. If you want to be balls to the wall you still can be freely and the literal only thing that's different is...LH every minute.

If you want to say that's just more Warrior...well...it's not like it wasn't already on the border anyway. The only thing stopping that is GF being every 30s, not Lionheart. It's much more fun to use every minute. Even that's nothing compared to how often I spammed it in FFVIII itself.

It's always been the more fun of the four tanks in my opinion, since my (maybe ex-main now, we'll see) DRK got lobotomized in ShB and still hasn't recovered.

Also...Speed GNB isn't dead? It just isn't literally top of the chart dps meld for GNB. That's not dead lol. I play 2.4s GCD and perform just fine, feels great. You're really going to let a number dictate the way you play? That's the other half of the reason every job has been hacked at left and right (and they still are wishy-washy at best with balancing for half an expansion or more despite that.)

Right now it's in the best spot it's ever been. The most fun it's ever been.

and look, I would like a pure magic/pure physical mit tank as much as some other people here but they simply just aren't going to go back to it. The best you'll see is magic mit being more potent than phys mit or vice versa.

Also, regarding "pre-programming and use as loaded", no. It sounds cool on paper, but, nah. I'd rather have a draw and junction system that augments abilities in the offensive kit with different elements that have different affects. (i.e, fire->Lionheart combo gives stacking burn DoT, turns into scorched (more potent DoT) after 3 total applications, wind->Haste buff to the GNB, thunder->enhances lightning shot by turning it into a thunder spell, increasing the level as your level is higher. 50 would be thunder, 70 would be Thundara, etc.)

I have concepts in mind for the other tanks too but that should be made in a separate thread, honestly.

[Zairava]

I think this iteration of Gunbreaker, while obviously less "challenging" in the preparation of your burst, actually comes with other optimization options as a "new challenge", which is something I unironically enjoy on Gunbreaker and previously also Black Mage on the 7.2 change (I was a huge fan of that job prior to it to begin with).

The flexibility it provides allows for some good ways to interact with raid mechanics without having to ride very cooldown to its upmost limit. Doubling the Cartridge limit with Bloodfest is also nice.

That said, "speed tank" would be nice as this is something we havent had in quite a while (I miss you Stormblood DRK ;n; ) and PvP GNB in I think 5.X days had an iteration of Speed Tank where using cartridge Actions built stacks of speed you had to maintain with more cartridge spenders or in the previous case Lightning Shot. While not the strongest, it felt quite different and refreshing.

Thumbs up across the board.

StB DRK, you'll forever be missed..