Could have SE unknowing set FFXIV to fail....

[Massterchef]

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The only difference between lotro and FF meta was that they had a support class with healing capabilities in captain. It had the exact same trinity that exists in XIV Tank/Healer/DPS. Endgame raids at the time like ToO/erebor required pure tanks/healers before they completely broke the system with HD and stopped producing any new raids...not to mention LoTRO is in heavy decline. But going back to XIV, dungeons like AK have been completed with 4 DPS at 2.0, and I'm sure if people were willing to put in the time current dungeons could also be completed without pure tank/healer. However similar to LoTRO without pure role classes, time spent completing a dungeon will take longer.

[Lord_Zlatan]

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Read my post about LOTRO and I said the exact same thing as you, and its the same in all games... in middle/intermediate content all of these outside the box things work... try it in a true endgame situation and they will rarely work.

As an aside, Captain was different in that the 3 specs truly did different things... it had a healer shell but buffed different things in different specs.

On topic... Ive done WP as a WAR w/ 3 BLMs. Ive tanked Low Level dungeons on WHM and BLM (purposely). I've DPSd as a PLD. I've DPSd as a WHM. Ive tanked as a DRG. All on purpose, all with a game plan in mind. I would never dream of doing any of those things at all endgame.

FFXI permitted things like that to happen end game. There was a boss(es?) that were much easier with a BRD tank... the game allowed it to be so. Id like a fraction of that present in FFXIV at the end game level.

[Niwashi]

The only difference between lotro and FF meta was that they had a support class with healing capabilities in captain. It had the exact same trinity that exists in XIV Tank/Healer/DPS.

No. LotRO uses a four role system with Tank/Healer/DPS/Support, and the game is structured so that the Support role is every bit as vital as the other three. (In fact, you ideally want two Support classes in a group, one focusing on buffs and another on debuffs/crowd control, so it could be thought of as five roles, though two of them fall under the category the game just calls "Support".)

Each class there also has a more versatile set of abilities, so it will be really good at one of those four roles and passable for simple or intermediate content in a second role. The ability to take on a secondary role is replaced here in this game with the ability to simply switch to a different class or job when you want to play a different role (something you can't do in LotRO except by switching characters completely, as each character can have only one class).

There isn't really a replacement here in FFXIV, however, for the missing Support role that LotRO uses. Instead, SE just tacked a few random support abilities onto classes that need to be primarily filling one of the other three roles. I see that as the biggest weakness in FFXIV's battle system, as it eliminates the most dynamic of the parts we could play.