If there is a job that can do anything

[Enjuden]

With how job balance is, I'm going to say no. Until SE can figure out what they're doing, I would never trust an Onion Knight to be remotely balanced in any content. And no, having them (or any class) balanced after six to nine months is not okay.

[Canadane]

Cast off your soul stone.
Go 1.0 style all over again.

[Miste]

Everyone who commented, Thank you for your cooperation.

Because there was a person who said "I want to make jobs that are not bound by roles" at my Japanese forum, I would like to ask how overseas players are thinking, with such thought Thread was created.

That is so nice of you to come over to ask us too!

Personally I like the system we have now where roles are defined.

I have tried other games where there was no tank/healer/dps trinity like guild wars 2 and I didn't like it since I enjoy healer roles and it basically didn't have a healer play style in a group setting.

Ever since I started playing MMO's I've liked being the healer role. So games that don't have roles I end up not liking them.

[Shurrikhan]

I would like to just chime in that I hate roleless multiplayer games. You feel less like you're working together and more so just working on the same thing and happen to be in the same room.

This is actually how I feel more often in MMOs with tight roles than ones without them, so long as the combat isn't overly lenient. When playing 4-man dungeons in Blade&Soul at or below the recommended gear levels, for instance, I'm dead unless I play my part, and the others play theirs. That requires me to be placing myself so that I can get my CC off on x target at a particular time, be distant enough but not too far to charge-stun y, AoE burn group z before they get their non-interruptable cast off, etc, and for any of that to happen, I need the path between cleared, things baited away from where we'll be AoEing, the cleaving mob drawn and kited, etc., etc., and at any decent difficulty those kinds of things can take a huge amount spontaneous assignment of tasks and nonvocal communication, the very things that make you feel like more than just yourself.

It's also exactly what strict roles remove, allowing you to play as if you were just striking a dummy that merely directed your movement here or there periodically; only the interaction between healers and tanks, or very rarely in timing raid debuffs or timing ones' skills down to those debuffs, remains interdependent from what could have been just about anything and everything.

[Kazrah]

Take your Blue Mage ideas, for instance. You've clearly put effort into matching its previously unique form of skill acquisition into XIV's system by giving them a assigned order and timings, but why should that be necessary?

First off, thanks for reading it! As for the ordering of the skills there, that job concept was designed during HW, so it was designed to roughly match trends at that time and even had the same amount of skills as most (if not all) other jobs from HW as well. The goal of the concept was to show that a Blue Mage was doable in the game (at least at that time), but it would require following the same rules that were in place for every other job and every other melee DPS.

Now if I were to remake it with the new mechanics changes (like I was intentionally, but kept getting sidetracked), it would have a fancy blue gauge to work with and a few more spells to play around with, but it would still have to follow the same rules as every other job to keep it balanceable and manageable. Basically, it'd need to be the opposite of its XI incarnation in order to be sensible in XIV, and a lot of people don't like that.

[Shurrikhan]

Now if I were to remake it with the new mechanics changes (like I was intentionally, but kept getting sidetracked), it would have a fancy blue gauge to work with and a few more spells to play around with, but it would still have to follow the same rules as every other job to keep it balanceable and manageable. Basically, it'd need to be the opposite of its XI incarnation in order to be sensible in XIV, and a lot of people don't like that.

Which I find understandable, even if largely irrelevant, since this isn't XI. Likewise, I have zero loyalty towards XI and am certainly not willing to break cohesion on a job for XIV in order to make it more like something from an entirely different game. That said, toolkits and the thematics they suggest can stand contrary to what XIV currently supports, at which point I'd favor that XIV itself change somewhat, through allowing for the job to remain cohesive with itself and all it could be, rather than the job end up feeling unfinished, lackluster, or contradictory through being pigeonholed into the existing system.

In my case, for instance, Blue Mage seems ripe fruit for new allowances, and while that might sometimes seems like I'm trying to force change upon the existing system (as if just for kicks) in suggesting such a different job concept be allowed for without being cut into a peg square enough for its hole, what I'm really intending is for all the various ways a job could exist to make more thematic, lore-appropriate, and player-visible sense by breaking off some of the guides pretending to be necessary rules.

Why can't we have mob-acquired abilities? Because it would be a system appropriate to or necessary for only one class? But there are multiple popular job concepts that would make use of it: Blue Mages and Beastmasters (or your Shapeshifter/Morpher) are just the tip of the iceberg, potentially. In turn that break from rigid guidelines to what is or is not permissible in ability acquisition, rather than targeting simply overall balance and a satisfying experience to each job in context, could add up vast new possibilities for post-cap or horizontally progressed abilities, whatever the developers are ambitious enough to include later.

And that's why I don't like placing so much effort on fitting things into the current system in my own ideas, and why so many of my own stuff ends up going unwritten here. It chops worlds of potential improvements and future-proofing for later ambitions down to add yet more precedent and suction to what's mundane, giving ever more excuse not to do anything truly new.

:: If interested, though, I can give you the rough notes on what I imagine would be a favorable compromise within a future expansion. Emphasis on rough, since, as I said, I like for things to be contextually vested. Blue Mage and the like are to me the perfect segway into new content and content types through new themes, mechanics, and modes, which taken altogether, can become the basis for a new expansion. Sadly no one part wholly works when on its own.

[Reinha]

I would not like a job that doesn't have a role, because I like the design of having 3 roles in a party. However a job which can become all roles, one at a time, would be very fun. Summoner and Scholar are like this.

[Kazrah]

And that's why I don't like placing so much effort on fitting things into the current system in my own ideas, and why so many of my own stuff ends up going unwritten here. It chops worlds of potential improvements and future-proofing for later ambitions down to add yet more precedent and suction to what's mundane, giving ever more excuse not to do anything truly new.

Pretty sure that was why the combat revamp was a thing: to allow for future development. Additional resource systems like Chakra and the Oath gauge enable a foundation for more skills and abilities that can play off such systems, and newer skills like Foul and Total Eclipse fill in gaps where weak spots or down times were previously present. The problem is that major game-altering changes like these take AGES, and that's not a worry over change so much as just the general internal bureaucratic culture of a Japanese business. A good example of this is the "bowmage" joke that haunted every Bard player I knew during Heavensward, and required the combat revamp of Stormblood to be fixed.

There's still some mold-breaking stuff in the game though. It's just happening in baby steps, and some stuff that we might take for granted in other games like flying is pretty game-breaking when you think about it. Flying in Heavensward allowed us to move properly in a three-dimensional plane, with Diadem attempting to exploit that and failing for a handful of other reasons. What gave us flying allows for swimming, enabling a system in which we could better interact with objects in that third dimension. From swimming, we'll likely get blitzball as a testing ground for advanced actions in fully 3D environments, which would ultimately lead to aerial and aquatic combat, but we're still a long way off from all that because we're still going at baby steps.

The concepts I've made are usually set up with the idea that it could be done with the mechanical systems that are already in place, partially because it gives hope to players that want to see concepts like it happen and discuss how much they'd want to have different, but mostly because I'm no better than any other player when it comes to knowing what new job mechanics we'd get in the future. Just looking at what we have now, what's in demand, what statements Yoshi or the dev team have made on specific jobs, what areas could have ideas for new jobs and then making my guess with the rest of them, that's all I do. As nice as some of the sky-high conjecture is though, a lot of it is coming from players that are either saying something just because they want it or are just unaware of the snail pace that game development goes (and I know I'm not even that accurate on it).

I would be curious about what ideas you have, but I have a feeling it'd be more likely set for a distant future for the game.

[Shurrikhan]

Pretty sure that was why the combat revamp was a thing: to allow for future development. Additional resource systems like Chakra and the Oath gauge enable a foundation for more skills and abilities that can play off such systems, and newer skills like Foul and Total Eclipse fill in gaps where weak spots or down times were previously present.

I'm a little confused by this. The combat revamp added literally nothing in terms of mechanics or underlying code, unless you count Wrath in increments of 10 spent 50 at a time as inherently different from increments of 1 and spent 5 at a time. We had stance-dependent mechanics. We had job-unique resource generators and spenders. The real effect of the change was merely to siphon away already existent status effects from being visible from within a single place, shifting them into a shinier new UI. Worse, that came at the expense of intuitive UI design, seeing as it never allowed for the remaining buffs one would need to track to be visible from within that new UI. It seems, much like many of the less warranted job changes in Heavensward or Stormblood, as change for the sake of change, rather than actually finding a beneficial aim and fulfilling that goal (i.e. more intuitive buff tracking).

The problem is that major game-altering changes like these take AGES, and that's not a worry over change so much as just the general internal bureaucratic culture of a Japanese business. A good example of this is the "bowmage" joke that haunted every Bard player I knew during Heavensward, and required the combat revamp of Stormblood to be fixed.

This is precisely what I'm talking about. Just as the decision to release Deliverance, Fel Cleave, and Decimate each as separate skills/abilities rather than traits simply to fill out the "5 new skills!" reeked of sales attractions over intelligent design, so do did the new UI to me. Heck, even the "bowmage" seems more like at utter failure to test things -- or even reason them out well on paper -- than a split-second idea or something resistant to change due to internal bureaucracies; Bards really were complaining about their dealing top-line damage in high-movement fights only to plummet, relatively speaking, once others were again allowed their full uptime, and wanted either increased personal damage that would scale more as other jobs do or increased support functionality so that they could at least take better advantage of their team's opportunities in such a fight. While classically clunky even after 2 stages of patching, Wanderer's Minuet would have fit a requested direction to the job had Bard's damage outside the stance just been increased to the same extent as the other DPS's from levels 51 to 60.

There's still some mold-breaking stuff in the game though. It's just happening in baby steps, and some stuff that we might take for granted in other games like flying is pretty game-breaking when you think about it. Flying in Heavensward allowed us to move properly in a three-dimensional plane, with Diadem attempting to exploit that and failing for a handful of other reasons. What gave us flying allows for swimming, enabling a system in which we could better interact with objects in that third dimension. From swimming, we'll likely get blitzball as a testing ground for advanced actions in fully 3D environments, which would ultimately lead to aerial and aquatic combat, but we're still a long way off from all that because we're still going at baby steps.

Agreed. These steps are there, and they are vital. But it just seems hard to believe that they were ever planned ahead of time considering the lengths and overcomplications of their design. Flight is only as lackluster as is conventional for any MMO, but swimming? I can understand there not being enough content immediately imaginable to warrant its costs to have it implemented by vanilla release (as per all but a few third-person MMORPGs made in the last 20 years) and that only after two expansions did it really seem worthwhile. But as a separate zone to be loaded each time you surface or submerge, with no combat nor beneficial exploration outside of three short quests? If each was held off to give more "sky" or "sea" emphasis to Heavensward and Stormblood, respectively, shouldn't there be more, then, to flight and swimming? I certainly hope more is coming, but with the technical issues from mobs being able to make a last swat at you even when you're 20 meters off the ground to the strangely awkward physics of the water, always infinite breathe, and the lack of mobs or nodes, I'm seeing evidence only to the contrary, as it seems unlikely that what's in place can support it, and the devs seem generally unwilling to tear out existing systems for anything short of glamours or players reaching unintended areas (the whole reason we lost Shukuchi teleport and Elusive Jump and Repelling Shot actually working in three dimensions, likely to blame for some of the above-mentioned bugginess). I want Blitzball; I want aerial and aquatic combat; I just don't see how that could happen with what we've got.

It was originally deemed "impossible" for glamours to be loaded in PvP for whatever reason, to the point we were told outright in a Live Letter (I'll have to track down which exactly) than PvP glamours would never be available. It took 2 expansions for the glamour system not to shoot itself in the foot as an inventory burden, and even that solution ended up overcomplicated and similarly limited. It feels like they're taking every moment to think only of "what exactly do we need, right now?" with very little to their roadmap for what's ahead beyond a procedural schedule. "What would be cool?" "Got something?" "Okay. Let's spend a whole lot of hours thinking about everything but the system's own repercussions and needs." "And... let's get it in there." Obviously, more was done to try to make things work than I give credit for, but having seen similarly things be produced so commonly across other MMOs and seemingly with better designs both in long and short terms, it's hard to imagine it. I realize also that they've said they're moving away from that and further towards trying to create new things, and that encourages me, but it also worries me that so many projects seem likely to dead-end in less than an expansion's time (airships, submersibles) and/or see little integration (again, airships, submersibles as anything but a menu) or technical salvaging/reuse thereafter. Squadrons are about the only thing that gives me a distinct hope for progressive implementations of a concept across a common roadmap, even if I may personally dislike them.

...but I have a feeling it'd be more likely set for a distant future for the game.

The results wouldn't be possible until a distant future, but the precedents for it have to be set as soon as possible to ever get there. I'll edit some rough details in, via the hidden box, sometime tomorrow.

[Fhaerron]

WoW has specialisation.

For example: Paladin
Retribution = DPS
Holy = Heal
Protection = Tank

Of course you can only have 1 class in there so if you take Paladin, you can only choose from those 3 specs. In this game you have multiple classes / jobs on 1 character so you can do everything with 1 toon instead of having to make a million of characters.