Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Connor]

You can’t design encounters and job mechanics to high specifics when you are capping party sizes to 8. This is the fundamental reason they have to make sure every job in a role can do the same thing and that no encounter requires specific skills from specific jobs.

The only way you are going to see old style class systems is if the entire game is built non-instanced with non-capped player encounters that allows for loose class compositions.

Surely they can have homogenised gameplay whilst still having unique things for each job though? There’s already good examples of jobs that have a lot of homogenised elements but whose unique traits are just as satisfying (putting aside any balancing issues for now. Dancer has all the standard trimmings of the ranged DPS role but still feels fun to play as a job and not just as a role because of the unique elements it has (like Steps / Improvisation / Curing Waltz).

Surely they can homogenise gameplay without it coming at the cost of job uniqueness. I mean, there’s more than enough room for them to have both the ‘standard role’ kit and stuff that differentiates the job from others in terms of the number of abilities we have now. I feel like they should try to find some kind of happy medium between the two at the very least

You’re right that stuff loose class compositions can’t work in FFXIV because of the party design. But at the same time, even if every party is limited to the 2 melee 1 ranged 1 caster paradigm (if that’s what it even is), I feel like they can still make jobs feel different from each other within that restricted paradigm