Korean Live Letter and Job changes (Translated)

[Zojha]

After 4 years, I am beginning to lose faith that the fine folks behind ARR will figure out how to do anything but feed the moar dps meta [...]

There's not really anything they can do about that: In each and every fight in this game, you "Win" if the enemy HP reaches 0, which requires damage and nothing else. As such, it has an innate supremacy in importance over anything else. Healing and Mitigation are useful, but only insofar as that they allow you to get more damage in, which goes over countering the damage that you cannot avoid taking. And just that damage, not more.

Except they're already so immensely powerful that we need to have hard enrages to limit their power. Worse, since healers are so immensely powerful, a lot of mechanics in so called "non-faceroll content" are insta-gib or otherwise crippling mechanics to prevent the healers from nullifying them - which in turn also makes it impossible for them to allow Damagedealers to actually deal more damage by allowing them more uptime, which however is the only way for more healing than is necessary to counter the un-avoidable damage to be useful. Even worse, they can deal non-insignificant damage themselves, so even if they COULD allow Damagedealers more uptime, the benefit of that would have to compare to the Damagedealer just doing the mechanic right and the healer DPSing in the meantime. And tanks got it even worse than that because even the best mitigation at best can only increase healer DPS, not that of damagedealers.

And that's not even going into the issue of different skill levels and overgearing - If you make a good tank only tank, a bad tank will just die. Similar goes for healers. If a healer in i270 can't contribute much DPS, a healer in i250 will likely just fail. But if you tune for a lower level, DPS supremacy kicks in -> Hello DPS meta old friend!

The only thing they can realistically do about that meta is to design fights in which damage isn't needed to win - which in turn would make Damagedealers and like 80% of all skills obsolete. They can try to nerf healing and tanking into oblivion so that only great players in those roles can do more than focus on their core, but that would be highly unpopular among established tanks and healers and would likely deter new players from joining these roles as well. Other than that? Not a great many options.

[Kosmos992k]

There's not really anything they can do about that:**snip**They can try to nerf healing and tanking into oblivion so that only great players in those roles can do more than focus on their core, but that would be highly unpopular among established tanks and healers and would likely deter new players from joining these roles as well. Other than that? Not a great many options.

That's just depressing, the logical conclusion of your argument is to roll a Samurai in 4.0 and forget everything else.

Joking aside... the game I played before FFXIV had tanks, healers and DPS with a skill system that allowed players to create hybrid builds and no trinity focus or restriction built into the combat system. However even there I felt a bit more like a tank or healer depending on my skill build, than I often do in FFXIV. Given the stricter definition of the jobs and trinity of roles in FFXIV, I cannot for a moment believe that it's impossible for SE's team to balance the game in a way that values all 3 roles distinctly.

[ChloeGrace]

the logical conclusion of your argument is to roll a Samurai in 4.0 and forget everything else.

Unfortunately, it's not a joke. The devs have a horrible habit of making whatever is new and shiny grossly overpowered, until they nerf the daylights out of it AFTER people have invested time and effort into leveling and gearing it.

[VeliusVire]

AST/DRK/MCH were Grossly overpowered and then nerfed constantly? Uhm.... /thinkingreallyhard

[Dualgunner]

Unfortunately, it's not a joke. The devs have a horrible habit of making whatever is new and shiny grossly overpowered, until they nerf the daylights out of it AFTER people have invested time and effort into leveling and gearing it.

AST and MCH beg to differ. Both were released brokenly weak and only recently were overbuffed to compensate.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Unfortunately, it's not a joke. The devs have a horrible habit of making whatever is new and shiny grossly overpowered, until they nerf the daylights out of it AFTER people have invested time and effort into leveling and gearing it.

What? At release, Machinist and Astro were basically garbage while Dark Knight saw niche usage until Gordias came out and made Paladins everywhere cry. It took nearly two years and buffing Astro into Scholar and Warrior levels just to finally convince people to start playing it. Likewise, Machinist saw frequent updates throughout the year before it finally jumped into the meta. If anything, XIV's track record suggests Red Mage and Samurai will be weak not overpowered.

[Krysanthia]

There's not really anything they can do about that: In each and every fight in this game, you "Win" if the enemy HP reaches 0, which requires damage and nothing else.

This is technically true, but Ichorous Ire is a good example of how they can make boss fights much less focused on doing absolute max DPS and instead focus on other mechanics. Now whether or not they can make those kind of fights engaging consistently is another matter, but the possibility has certainly been proven by them.

[Zojha]

This is technically true, but Ichorous Ire is a good example of how they can make boss fights much less focused on doing absolute max DPS and instead focus on other mechanics.

In the process making Damage dealers irrelevant. I don't know about you, but in that fight, I only /sit where the spriggan spawns and wait for the tank and healer to do the job. Sometimes, I even just tab out and listen to music because tank and healer can easily kill the spriggan themselves.

As I said, it's an option indeed. You can also punish DPS for doing good via insta-gib mechanics like in Ifrit EX. Heck, you can even make a boss that insta-gibs you if you deal more than X DPS, or a boss in which damage dealers are prohibited from joining the instance in the first place. You can make a boss where you need to heal an NPC against the boss to win or a poison chamber boss in which all you need is to survive Y minutes without any enemies present in the first place.

It's quite possible to brute-force it if you really want. Is it good design, tho'? Is it fun and rewarding? Or are you just designing it to prove a point?