The problem with WoW-type raid-focused gameplay.

[Bishop81]

Limited and banal ability sets.

Why? Because of the need to keep tight raid balance. If any one Class/Job gets a slight edge, the player base explodes in self righteous fury.

Any time the developer wants to add anything, they have to be ultra careful with how it affects balance. Want to add something because you think is cool or interesting but will impact raid balance? Forget it.

Banal gear

Same problem as with ability sets. "How will it affect raid balance?" becomes the overriding concern instead of "Is this interesting or fun for the player?".

Want gear with Poison resist? Nope. If there is a raid boss that uses a lot of poison, acquiring said gear becomes "mandatory" and players explode with self righteous fury that the game dare make them do something that they might not be interested in.

Banal items

Same story. If raid balance says, no. It's not happening.

In general, raid balance constrains the game's creative direction.

Want to introduce some new cool lore but it might clash with existing (balanced) player abilities? You either don't do it or you break suspension of disbelief by introducing a contradiction.

WoW is the logical conclusion of this approach. Raider's needs run the game. Everything is sacrificed to their benefit. Lore is shot. The world is boring.

People complain that 3.0 is "more of 2.0". Well of course it is. Any kind of change will have to be made from the perspective of maintaining the precious raid balance. The developer's hands are tied - with rope of their own making but tied nonetheless. They can't just introduce any old cool idea they get willy nilly.

Is there a way out of this dilemma?

IMHO just make raids Job-only and keep Jobs (and their equipment access) limited, boring but balanced - i.e. like now.

With Classes, go wild. Introduce all sort of strange cross-class skills usable by classes only. Have all sorts of weird gear with odd effects for Classes.

You can probably sense by now I'm not big on raiding. I play the game for atmosphere, to explore a fantasy world, kill monsters is just one of many "activities" to me.

[Unaki]

Classes only exist because they tried a new thing in 1.0 and uh...no one liked it. They wanted the old stuff. Besides, Yoshi P already said in a recent live letter that they won't be doing anymore Class/Job stuff and are looking into ways to removes the classes themselves.

[Ryel]

Your points were good and then you kinda lost it at the end bringing up classes.

1.0 somewhat tried this when jobs first came out, they were advertised as only being necessary when doing full party endgame content and that classes were supposed to stay relevant when doing any other activity (low man / solo). This obviously didn't work, classes have no place really and are generally uninteresting in comparison to jobs.

If you want to change the need to keep raid focused balance then the way raids are designed need to be changed from the ground up.

Excessive reliance on DPS checks as measure of difficulty works for balancing content for the Duty Finder as people will eventually meet those checks via over-gearing but leaves no room for unique jobs / ability types that aren't focused around doing more damage. Where does a support fit if they only buff and don't actually contribute damage to the raid? The party might feel they're better served just getting another damage dealer instead to meet to DPS check.

The same goes for items like resist sets etc, the question becomes does it help kill the boss faster? if it doesn't then it becomes instantly worthless.

Change circular arena design and the timed DPS checks for raids, give us more fights with levers to pull (Leviathan EX) or adds to kill in addition to the bosses (Bismark EX) but don't tie them to an overall DPS check and you might start to see some variance in the types of jobs, abilities, and stats that we'll see.

And in regards to adding crazy cross class options to classes, why not just add them to jobs? as it is the cross class options for jobs are cookie cutter and boring really, I'm sure the argument will be made that players will find a "best set" of cross class actions but it'd be nice if i could pick and choose from more abilities tailored towards various fights.

There is no fundamental reason why jobs cant operate on the cross class system the same way classes can other than the fact that we just aren't allowed to, i would much rather see that changed before trying to make classes relevant in any way (even in solo content), sorry.

[Unaki]

Where does a support fit if they only buff and don't actually contribute damage to the raid? The party might feel they're better served just getting another damage dealer instead to meet to DPS check.

The easy solution: Rip BRD apart. Just...destroy it and throw the person who keeps suggesting its a DPS in the board meetings out the window and make it what its supposed to be. Replace it with Ranger and add in BRD as a 100% support class. The only thing they would have to do with an actual BRD is make its support buffs, especially any damage buffs, make up for the loss of DPS.

[Sapphic]

*snip*

DPS checks are gear/skill checks for DPS. As the typical is checks for gear/ability of the tanks and healers. No DPS checks then just throw tanks and healers at it instead.

To the rest of it, no you wont. Even in FFXI, DDs maximised their damage output through gear. Ever heard of burn parties? Or stacking certain jobs to burn things faster? AKA THF and SAM. Stacked because they outputted the most damage.

@OP you cant have pure support jobs, as the are even less popular than tanks and healers. Also how would they l;evel? It would just make it even less popular is to level you basically sat there while everyone else killed stuff for you. Some may like, but not enough, not anymore.

Also you would prefer jobs to not be balanced? You enjoy being excluded from content because you don't have that job you dislike levelled and geared for it? But instead prefer t o play a different job, simply because you enjoy it? How popular do you think it would be if you are forced to level and Jobs you do not enjoy whatsoever just so you can do content? Yep, not at all.

If you are going to come up with an idea, try and look at the while picture, the reasons why FFXIV is popular, how it would affect the game. Would it chance it totally (aka your idea would)..

The easy solution: Rip BRD apart. Just...destroy it and throw the person who keeps suggesting its a DPS in the board meetings out the window and make it what its supposed to be. Replace it with Ranger and add in BRD as a 100% support class. The only thing they would have to do with an actual BRD is make its support buffs, especially any damage buffs, make up for the loss of DPS.

AKA no-one would play it. How are you going to level? Unable to do anything unless some others held your hand through everything? You like not playing the game and have others carry you through content because the job you have is pure support and can't do anything, which is what you are asking. Oh design content to level to require a BRD. Then you have the problem of not enough want to play pure support as proven time and time again with older MMOs, getting hold of support jobs in FFXI for content was harder than getting a tank or healer, much harder, pretty much every LS was always wanting support. They would have to redesign the game from the ground up to implement a pure support role. Even FFXI BRD with the right subjob could do damage, of course not as potent as a DD job, but still.

So how much would their buffs do? You would have to make it increase the DPS by more than 1 DPS job could which would make it overpowered and over needed for any content as it would need to be designed for bringing a BRD.

This is not and never wil be forced party content for everything. That playstyle is dead and gone. Also most jobs in FFXI where designed as multi role, it was the playerbase that shoehorned them into singular roles. RDM, refresh bot, SCH stun bot, BRD song whore, NIN tank or sub for tank/soloing. SMN, healer. DNC sub job. All of those jobs where capable of much more, but the playerbase said no, not the developers.

Simple fact is upport jobs where never that popular and stymied party play because content had to be designed around having them. You think it's hard to get tanks? Try increasing that by 20 fold if they added pure support, theres a reason they split support amongst other roles in any MMO in the last 10 years.


Tl/dr Bad ideas are bad.

[StrejdaTom]

I would rather see them introduce like 5 types of the same gear with same stats but different bonus effects (that could be switched by some gem) than rework whole jobs and classes system.
For example.. adds burning DoT effect to every skill.. adds 10 sec stoneskin to every skill etc etc.. teams would be able to tell each member to have different bonus and could kinda change their own gameplay.

[Kallera]

As a crafter i do agree with the op's points that there are problems caused by raids having a monoploy, with the potential of everything else purposefully tuned down to sate the raiding ego.

[Assirra]

So how about actually explaining what in the world you just typed.
All i got from was "banal" and "balance is bad"

[Fendred]

Classes only exist because they tried a new thing in 1.0 and uh...no one liked it. They wanted the old stuff. Besides, Yoshi P already said in a recent live letter that they won't be doing anymore Class/Job stuff and are looking into ways to removes the classes themselves.

I'm not sure you are qualified to say what other people wanted or did not want from FFXIV 1.0. From my personal experience, the concepts employed by the classes were interesting, but the rest of the game just sucked. The classes were just unrefined. It was released in alpha state.

[Ryel]

DPS checks are gear/skill checks for DPS. As the typical is checks for gear/ability of the tanks and healers. No DPS checks then just throw tanks and healers at it instead.

To the rest of it, no you wont. Even in FFXI, DDs maximised their damage output through gear. Ever heard of burn parties? Or stacking certain jobs to burn things faster? AKA THF and SAM. Stacked because they outputted the most damage.

Job stacking in XI was a thing because XI fundamentally approached content differently, also XI had this weird sort of... rolling balance/imbalance in that jobs constantly were buffed/nerfed so their place on the hierarchy constantly changed (some took much longer than others to become relevant). Gear / stats and subjobs also threw most attempts at balance out the window anyway.

As for burn parties those were only really a thing for gaining Exp in most cases (Duty Finder prevents this in XIV) if there was ever an over abundance of certain jobs at endgame those jobs were nerfed (hi2u Souleater on HNMs / sup Ranger nerfs) or the bosses buffed to encourage varied damage types, granted it wasn't perfect but they at least tried. XIV already punishes excessive job stacking anyway with loss of stats (party buff) and reduced limit gauge building, if they wanted to they could make further adjustments towards that end.

They can still change the dynamics of raid bosses in a way that wouldn't cause preferred party compositions, add levers or shields that you have to hit in certain phases, or give bosses abilities that alternate the type of incoming damage they can receive (physical / magical or melee / ranged) it isn't impossible to design raids to be obstacles without having to resort to simply being a DPS or heal check, give us more adds so that DPS cant have full uptime on the boss or have use items (raid given) to apply debuffs etc.

look at some of the mechanics we got in CT and leveling dungeons (Great library / Qarn) and ask why they cant be applied to a raid.