Homogenization and Job Identity - Are they mutually exclusive?

[Dzian]

The age of a system has nothing to do with it's value. There are things we love in video games that are approaching 40 years old. Innovation is not automatically good, often times it ends up terrible or worse off. The core mechanics of ff14 arn't what are hurting it's jobs, it's a lack of creativity in implementing those jobs that is.

The creativity is restricted by the stupid concept that everything has to be perfectly balanced and perfectly viable for every piece of content. Pair that with duty finder and you put a lot of limits on what you can do with jobs.

You will never see for example an evasion tank. Nor will you see a glass cannon dps job. Or even an aoe king that's weak at single target damage. You will never see content that require crowd control of any real form. Balance is the reason sleep has never been utilised in oven for example. The second you require mobs to be slept you tilt the scales in favour of blm for example which breaks the balance. However you could have a fight where magic damage isn't effective and balance the job that way.

Duty finder also because well what happened with tanks basically. Get 2 p aladins in your party amazing defence but good luck clearing those dps checks. 2 wins raw healing power but no support or utility same problem. Theres no flexibility in party composition. Taking a whm for example doesnt mean you only need one healer because there so powerful. But sch and ast you might need 2 but they offer more deeps.

The very design of the game places a lot of limits on there creativity and options.

Which goes to back to my earlier post and tanks.

Paladin used to be the ultra defence tank. Warrior used to be the ultra offence tank. Now though they're exactly the same. Only the weapon is different

[Yorumi]

The very design of the game places a lot of limits on there creativity and options.

Which goes to back to my earlier post and tanks.

Paladin used to be the ultra defence tank. Warrior used to be the ultra offence tank. Now though they're exactly the same. Only the weapon is different

You're looking at it the wrong way. A class should not be defined by how much of a stat it has, but how it does it's job. A tank should not be defined by how much defense or offense they have, those are just numbers. Think of it this way, if you took two tanks, gave them both the exact same kit, literally identical skills, with just different names and animations, but made Tank A have more mitigation, and tank B have more potency on the skills we'd all say that's boring as all hell. Lets look at the opposite extreme though, both tanks have exactly the same mitigation, and exact same dps, but they both play radically differently. They have different resource management, totally different combos and playstyle. We'd all be praising the design. Here's the thing, since both have the same mitigation and same dps they fulfill that requirement of all classes being viable on all content. You're also not worried about getting multiple of each one in duty finder.

Now with different class design it could mean that skill ceilings are higher and not everyone is capable of performing on a class. That shouldn't be a problem though as long as there are accessible classes. The good players will enjoy the high skill classes and others need to get get good or play another class.

Even when it comes to things like sleep, or CC in general. They could easily define a 4th role of support and it's classes all have buffs and CC and dubuffs and such. Likewise since it's already required, nothing is really stopping them from giving CC to healers and requiring it. They could even implement other types of CC that fit with other classes, like stunning fear: "Your rage filled shout makes enemies so afraid they cannot move or act, effect ends upon taking damage."

It's all there if they want to use it. However, as long as classes are defined solely by how much defense, or how much offense they have, yes you're right there's not much they can really do.

[Duelle]

You will never see content that require crowd control of any real form. Balance is the reason sleep has never been utilized in oven for example.

Not really. Poor design and their inability to fix a simple problem is why the devs don't allow Sleep to be used.

Instead of having to give themselves even more work by creating barriers between dungeon sections, they only needed to:

- Remove Deep Sleep: No more AoE sleep.
- Set dungeon mobs to ignore the boss room barriers: Means you can't just ignore mobs and run to the boss. The train will follow you into the boss room, through the barrier and obliterate you.
- (Optional) Make trash hit harder so that it is a lot easier to die if you pull a lot of mobs.

CC would need to become more spread out, or involve adds in boss fights. I think of the Kel'thuzad fight that mind controls raid members, requiring your mages in the raid to polymorph MC'd members until the MC wears off, and ask myself why SE doesn't do anything like that, for example.

The second you require mobs to be slept you tilt the scales in favour of blm for example which breaks the balance.

Machinist

22 Tranquilizer Dart - Puts target to sleep. Receiving damage will cancel the effect. Duration: 30s

Astrologian

38 Stop - Prevents target from moving or performing any actions. Receiving damage will cancel the effect. Duration: 30s.

Red Mage

15 Versleep - Puts target to sleep. Receiving damage will cancel the effect. Duration: 30s.

Dark Knight

46 Torment - Draw out hallucinations that confuse and torment target, preventing them from moving or taking actions. Receiving damage will cancel the effect. Duration: 30s. Cooldown: 60s.

I think with that, we have enough CC spread out that we can go ahead and make CC a little more important throughout content.

Paladin used to be the ultra defense tank. Warrior used to be the ultra offence tank. Now though they're exactly the same. Only the weapon is different

Being the ultra defense tank is what got PLD flushed down the toilet last expansion. If you want to create differences between tanks, you need look no further than parts of the tank paradigm and go from there.

By comparison, none of the WoW tanks had anything about damage (at most, Death Knights developed a knack for soloing older content because of how the Vengeance mechanic worked in combination with Death Strike/Blood Shield). Two of the tanks used sword and shield, one getting angry when hit and the other using holy magic to partially reflect the damage. One turned into a bear with high armor and high HP to make up for their lack of blocks and parries. One drained HP from their enemy over the course of a fight (Death Strike healing + Bloodworms) and could shield themselves as long as resources allowed while still having some basic mitigation cooldowns. One relied on keeping effects active (+dodge, +parry) and managing a mechanic that split damage taken (80% on hit, 20% over 12s), along with a self heal. These are the sort of distinctions you want between tanks. Making one the "defense tank" and another the "damage tank" is laughable when you compare it to that.