Quote Originally Posted by Carighan View Post
Yeah sorry I should sound less snide but I get annoyed by how much FFXIV-y the community seems to be in general, never considering that the existing patterns of FFXIV might be inherently bad in any way shape or form. Don't get me wrong, tons of things this game does are good - it's why I play it - but we see other MMOs do the smart thing and:
  • Look at what works in FFXIV.
  • Look at what doesn't work in FFXIV.
  • Copy the former, at the same time cutting away the latter.

For a very recent example, look at how first GW2 took big inspiration from FFXIV's housing, and then WoW a while later looking at the current state of housing here and specifically copied the parts that worked while changing what doesn't work.

And that's good. That's what you are supposed to do as a long-running game. Why personally trial&error everything if others did all that work for you, take the solutions they've shown you to work.

And in particular in class design, FFXIV is absolutely rock bottom of MMORPGs. For a reason, they intentionally decided to forego even designing classes in favor of opening as much design space as possible for the encounters. It's where "FFXIV raids are more like ballet" comes from, which is what originally drew me here.

But years down the line, as the classes roster expands (for no reason, there's more than enough space among the existing classes for mechanics and ideas) and the classes individually pad more and more skills onto already overloaded hotbars, it's obvious how the system is falling apart and breaking at the seams.

This is usually countered by making classes have specific gameplay niches in either balance (they're better or worse at something) or performance (they do wildly different things to produce the same effect), in turn allowing minimization of class skill breadth because each skill performs comparatively deep functions in the class, and also allowing more classes/specs (depends on game) because they can do the exact same thing so long as they do it in really different ways.

More specifically in regards to tank gameplay, the idea is to give tank either niches in where they are best/worst (this is where concepts as an anti-magic tank or a sponge tank come in) or how they tank. That is, all tanks have a certain amount of mitigation, but they do wildly different things to produce it, not just press equivalent CDs for equivalent effect.
Just to point out the obvious, of course the FFXIV Community is going to be 'FFXIV-ified'. It would likely bet the same if you were to visit the ither MMO forums and that they would be 'MMO-ified' to their specific game. But we also have to be aware that someone suggesting ideas, from say Wow, to put into FFXIV, without adjusting it to fit FFXIV's battle style could also be seen as someone who is trying to WoW-ify the game, aka, making the game something it isn't.

I'm not someone who thinks the game is perfect, far from it, even when talking encounters and jobs. I will criticise the 2 minute meta and have shared complaints about interject and Low Blow not seeing much use in most content, in each case thinking what I see as the pros and cons of each one. For example, to destroy the 2 minute meta, I would go nuclear on it and get rid of all temporary damage raid buffs, in return, allow jobs to play to their own rhythms, have different length bursts, have bursts be different strengths, have the more sustained jobs that only get slightly more damage in a burst phase, or the spiky DPS that bursts hard and fast. Have them be flexible in their rotation or have some be stricter. I don't think many of these ideas could be used if any temporary buff windows continue to exist. For the stuns/interrupts, rather than then stopping attacks outright, they can change properties of attacks. Rather than a raidwide hitting once, it could do half damage with the other half coming out as a bleed, turn that circle AoE into a doughnut etc. this is to help the tank control the damage and try and tailor the fights for the group.

There is an argument to be made that the defensives are different, yes, they all have a 40% mitigation, but Paladin is by far the best at just hard reducing damage and Gunbreaker gives extra health for increased survivability, however, Dark Knight and Warrior just reduce damage by 40%, with them both giving different flavours of healing after the hit. No, they do not have a different cooldown time, but then again, to my knowledge, FFXIV does damage in fights differently to a game like WoW, where WoW seems to be higher, more sustained damage into the tank whereas FFXIV is low damage until mechanics/tank busters. Just this alone is enough to heavily swing how defensives should be handled.

Going to your Death Knight example, having a shield on everything you do is all about reducing that constant high damage you intake, but how would that work in FFXIV's combat? Use a GCD, get a shield, it then either gets used up on the next boss attack, so you don't stack them, or, it stays healthy and you make yourself immortal and take no damage. You could have it so that you build up shields and have to use something to 'activate' them, but isn't that similar to Paladin's Oath Gauge? I also notice you said 'Old Blood Death Knight', I did try looking up some things, which, of course, bought up current Blood Death Knight, but I couldn't see anything that had shields on all GCDs, just auto attacks, (40% shield based on the damage you do IIRC). However, why was it changed? Wow is famous for having certain specs be strong, so, was this considered too strong? If so, should FFXIV follow that as an example if even WoW ditched the concept?

With the Paladin example, it might be that having all that support and healing is really helpful in WoW, but how useful is it in FFXIV? We already know from past experience that FFXIV players will do what they can to get as much damage out as possible, even if it means using defensives to do so. If it is also reducing the cooldown on the bigger defensives, then we run into, how does this play out in combat? Again, FFXIV damage from bosses is spiky, so reducing a cooldown doesn't help unless you purposefully made it longer to force the support to happen.

With Gunbreaker, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Get it wrong, you die, especially if we are loading cartridges over 20 seconds ahead of time (base GCD of 2.5 seconds takes 22.5 seconds to complete 3, 3 step combos). Again, it might be an idea if the damage was more sustained, but it isn't, so reliable defensives is much preferred.

And, to come full circle, you say I am too FFXIV brained, whereas I am seeing you as someone coming in and WoW-ifying the game, making it something it isn't. We can take things from other games, but it has to be adapted to the FFXIV gamestyle and not just a lazy copy and paste job.