Thread: FFXIV and Party Setup.

There was something rewarding about fitting your character to fill a specific role in FFXI. The ability to change some gear or re-arrange your rotation to fit a different niche within a party to get things done. But, seeing as FFXIV went down the 'dungeon roulette' way we are stuck with 1 Tank 1 Healer and 2 DPS. Where are the support classes? In every MMO I play, support is my go to. Corsair, Bard and Blue Mage from FFXI were so involved that everyone party I was in I would need to re-arrange who/when I had to buff the team.

Why are there no support classes? It seems rigid and non-flexible on a party makeup and individuality.

Increase the difficulty of all monsters/bosses by X amount and add in a 5th slot for a support role? Ofcourse at the moment I play a healer instead and the Astrologian does look like it could be the job i've been looking for. Just wondering what other people think about a lack of a support class and going for a 4 party standard model instead of 5 or 6.

Originally Posted by Arupopo

in FFXI.

This is another game.

Originally Posted by Ultear_Milkovich

This is another game.

Sure is. Just wondering if anyone else liked to play Support classes and not an exact DPS/Healer/Tank Role.

But thanks for your contribution.

Originally Posted by Havenae

snip

no matter what you say or post, this game wont change its mechanics already built in. No changing it. It's a done deal. Either deal with the system we were given or go to a game that has it. I miss a ton of stuff from 1.0 but I'm never going to see that ever again.

Not trying to be rude but expecting any change this far into release and with an upcoming expansion is fruitless.

I would only like to see the implementation of a support role, if and only if, it can be interchangeable with another DPS. Support is yet another specialize task (alongside Tank and Healer) that does not attract a ton of players and as such, just like it did in XI, would increase queue times dramatically. I'm not sure they could balance it to the point where a DPS and a Support could be interchangeable without reworking most of the other classes/jobs as well. They were nice in XI, but waiting for hours for one to log on was hell.

I've been saying we need more diversity for months. The problem is that the mechanics of the game don't really support, well, supporting roles. If you made a job which was excellent at support, something would have to give. Whether that's their overall DPS, such as when Bard casts their songs, or survivability, you need to have some compromise or risk unbalancing them.

And compromise is one this game doesn't understand. Since so much of the game is intended to be beaten solo, too much sacrifice will make content unintentionally difficult to complete for those classes or jobs. You only need look at endgame equipment to understand that this game does its best to maintain the status-quo at all times. Each upgrade indistinguishable from the last aside from a mild boost to the same stats.

I'd love some more options myself, but I don't see it fitting in with the current game model. They'd have to give the game a major facelift to work it in, and I'm not convinced it wouldn't cause more problems than it would solve.

Support classes create a rather troubling dynamic: They tend to be terrible at soloing compared to other classes.
DPS classes blast everything to kingdom come before they take too much damage.
Tanks just sit there and take hits while doling out some damage til everything dies.
Healers are able to basically do what tanks do in a more active means.
But support classes? They can't deal damage like the DPS classes, can't take hits like the tank, and can't restore their own health like the healers.
But what does this mean?
Easy.
It means they're less popular than even the tanks.
Now you have to build encounters around them.
And have slots for them in the queues.
So you have options:
1) Design encounters with Support in mind as a role, and deal with player complaints of the queues being too long (not to mention taking longer since the Support will do less damage)
2) Design encounters to not take them into account and allow it to be flexible, which means the encounters are now much more dull to take into account that groups may not always have a support.

So rather than building support classes, our DPS classes have support options.
Remember: This is not FFXI. And after playing it quite a bit recently, I'm glad for that.

Originally Posted by kyuven

.So you have options:
1) Design encounters with Support in mind as a role, and deal with player complaints of the queues being too long (not to mention taking longer since the Support will do less damage)
2) Design encounters to not take them into account and allow it to be flexible, which means the encounters are now much more dull to take into account that groups may not always have a support.

The other issue that *will* arise is that as people overgear content, the need for a support class disappears as players begin ignoring mechanics that otherwise might need support to mitigate. Personally I hate the way people ignore mechanics, but then I am a relatively undergeared tank who can't quite ignore things the way that others can.