Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Connor]

I totally agree that variety and nuance have been thrown out the window for FFXIV because of the extreme rigidity of encounter design. I also feel like maybe the community is taking the ‘perfect balance’ thing a little too far without clearly understanding the pros and cons (and there are plenty of both). This extremely rigid style of battle content has severely limited the scope with which they can develop ‘unique’ classes.

To use the most extreme examples, a DPS with healing capabilities is functionally redundant from the get-go because of damage output predictability being extremely easy to plan around for healers without much effort. For this same reason, not DPS and Support oriented style healer would be functionally redundant if they ever tried to design one (why waste a spot on a healing/support focused job when you can just stack DPS oriented healers). Support jobs (e.g 2.0/3.0 Bard in concept) are, unsurprisingly, functionally redundant, because the absolute predictability of encounters means that any support that isn’t a direct damage increase is worthless, especially if it drops the users dps. If it does increase damage it’s overpowered and has to be removed. They can’t even have shared resources on this kind of thing for balance; players why would anyone ever use a support skill (e.g Minne / Paean) over any damage increasing skill because fights can be planned to the last detail to absolutely minimise all requirements that aren’t DPS, meaning that utility/ support is useless by definition (why would you ever want to use an ability like Minne when you know healers absolutely should not need the extra healing in if the first place)

That said, the community is extremely resistant to the idea of unpredictable fights or encounters that utilise more unique mechanics that aren’t the same couple of attack patterns with different animations that we’ve been seeing for around 6 years now. The developers have already tried making content that deviates from the standard, and it’s been consistently and universally despised. The most salient cases of this are the original Steps of Faith, the original Pharos Sirius and Eureka. They might have been awfully designed (that’s a different debate) but the fact is that they’ve tried making an effort quite a few times in the past to make ‘unique’ content, and it’s always met with extreme resistance. The sad thing is that the result is the developers either nerfing the content in Oblivion (Steps/Pharos), or they just flat out give up and pretend the content doesn’t exist anymore (Eureka)

If anything, I imagine any abilities that exist that aren’t a direct damage increase to the user will be removed more in future. We already have Red Mages and Summoners calling for Vercure/Verraise/Resurrection/Everlasting Flight to be removed (and subsequently replaced with direct damage abilities). Bards begged for Ballad / Paean / Minuet / Paean to be removed for the vast majority of 2.0/3.0 because of the damage loss associated with them. Ninjas seem to want the removal of Trick Attack so that they can have their personal DPS increased. Hell, people are now still asking for Scholar to become a DPS healer and have the utility side removed to compensate. I think a lot of Scholars would be extremely happy if Sacred Soil was deleted for Shadowflare and Adloquium/Succor were deleted to become DoTs

My tl;dr is: the community have been asking for non-damage abilities to be removed from the game basically since it came out. As a result the devs are like ‘let’s just make content never need anything like this ever again’. So encounter design naturally becomes heavily focused on damage output (because the only mechanic they have left to use). The community is exposed to encounters that are basically just four floors of DPS checks for like 6 years. Then the community naturally comes heavily preoccupied with DPS (because it’s the only mechanic that matters now)