The current job design system is not fit for purpose

[Stanelis]

Anyone who says Ninja, Monk, Dragoon, and Samurai, or Black Mage, Summoner and Red Mage, or Dancer, Bard, and Machinist feel similar are absolutely full of it, or are just looking from the outside in. The tanks have the issue of feeling rather homogenized, true, but Gunbreaker and Paladin still have enough uniqueness to them to make them feel different enough to play and have fun with. Dark Knight also has a lot of ability expression as well, though at times it can feel just as shallow as Warrior, which 100% got the short end of the stick this expansion. Can't feel too bad about that last one, though, they were kings of the mountain for a LOOOONG time.

What you don't understand is that people don't talk about homogeneisation in terms of thematical approach of the jobs but in term of what they actually do during the encounters. BLM and SMN deals damage. MNK, DRG and SAM too, etc but that's it, hence the homogeneisation. Even jobs that are said to bring "utility" only bring it in terms of DPS increase and pay for it with lower self DPS (hence, it isn't real utility in the way snares or CCs used to be). Let me remind you than back in the early day of FFXIV, you actually had to use CCs in some of the coils floors (T7, namely).

Look at how controversial the ability for RDM to heal or raise easily is (one of the only thing that isn't shared by all casters) and the DPS tax they get for it.

[Bhearil]

On DPS jobs the job identity is more or less preserved with some exceptions even if balance and/or fun factor is not doing so well (Monk is in dire need of a complete rework since its a real mess just to mention the worst case) but on Tank and Healer jobs the homogeneization is far more blatant by gutting kits or making them copies of each other.

People wanted to make jobs interchangable and avoid the meta of X/Y/Z job doing insane synergy with each other, while keeping job uniqueness and identity, but they took the easy way out removing those parts of the kit and/or outright giving jobs the same skills with different names...

[Awha]

As a healer, I want more DPS buttons to press.

[Raiya]

I'm not against all the changes but I'm certainly against what happened with the healers myself, WHM for example is still good but they REALLY should have not taken Aero III away from it if anything they should have changed it to work like how Thunder III/IV works now to make it possible to mass dot group pulls, SCH was a disaster they took all their dots including Miasma II for a generic aoe and while I wasn't a big fan of the cards myself on AST I really felt it lacked some proper DPS before and now it's just utterly cumbersome and too much of a pain to play outside levelling it (I default to WHM over SCH/AST because it's the only healer that still feels fluid enough for me to play).

I do like a fair bit of the changes to the tanks even if they're a little homogenous atm, the aoe abilities are far better than before even the overhaul to MCH is nice (though it currently has far fewer Job actions right now than any other in the game). I'm not happy they took away Drain from BLM which now lacks any self recovery spells of it's own only a shield. Honestly they should just have let BLM have Drain instead of lucid dreaming it's redundant on BLM due to how it's playstyle works. They also never fixed Physic for SMN it's utterly and completely reduntant after lvl50 and doesnt scale with INT still! BRD is nice but I wish they'd change one thing: Instead of Sidewinder and Shadowbite sharing a CD I wish it would be seperate and that using Sidewinder would have the added effect of spreading DoT's to nearby target's so that you could chain it with shadowbite, would help an absolute ton with damaging mobs. One other thing that would be nice is if they were to replace WHM's Fluid Aura with water instead that did AoE damage (upgrades to Water II/III) and change Holy to a OCD with heavy damage + Stun, it would allow WHM to aoe DPS without granting mobs stun immunity after a while. (Side note PC's currently do not have water spell casting animation (BLM has Fire/Thunder/Ice, RDM Fire/Thunder/Earth/Wind, WHM (Only has Earth (used to have wind till Aero III was stolen from us, water spells are the only one missing, rest of the caster jobs have "unaspected" casting).

Realistically though I don't like them pruning abilities's if anything I'd rather see lower level actions be upgraded or replaced at a certain level with newer abilities, this would not only prevent action bloat but would allow a job to be more "advanced" in playstyle the higher your level is.

[Aldora]

I'm not against all the changes but I'm certainly against what happened with the healers myself, WHM for example is still good but they REALLY should have not taken Aero III away from it if anything they should have changed it to work like how Thunder III/IV works now to make it possible to mass dot group pulls, SCH was a disaster they took all their dots including Miasma II for a generic aoe and while I wasn't a big fan of the cards myself on AST I really felt it lacked some proper DPS before and now it's just utterly cumbersome and too much of a pain to play outside levelling it (I default to WHM over SCH/AST because it's the only healer that still feels fluid enough for me to play).

I also miss my AoE DoT on my WHM. (T_T ) It's such a pain in the bum to dot everything, especially when you can use Presence of Mind and spam Holy instead for AoE Damage.

[Marxam]

I pretty much summed up my thoughts on tanks in the tank thread but in general I agree that maximizing buttons is ok and homogenizing skills is okay to an extent but the current design comes off as very safe instead of the crazy fun factor of 2.0-3.0. The serve fixation on balance has essentially created some fluff skills, a personal peeve of mine, is the lack of player accountability. As a tank since 2.0 I miss the stance dance as it rewarded those who learned and mastered the class but can punish even the greatest tanks if they use it at the wrong time. So instead of keeping the stances and just making all tanks share the same ogcd as WAR they just removed everything. This is also one of the reasons why WAR and DRK are complaining they need dmg buffs compared to PLD and GNB because all jobs play the same but one job does better by default because it just has better weaponskills. Before the player made the job great now it doesnt matter because balance. Stories like the war who beat vanilla T5 due to sheer skill is no longer a thing.

As much as I agree with OP I think the days of 3.0, tank diversity is long gone. The problem is elitism + poor raid design = dev playing safe. The reason why pld sucked so hard in 3.0 was because most, if not all, the raid fights had magic damage for a tank that exclusively excelled in physical mitigation. I honestly thought that PLD was great in what it did and if it had Clemency at that time things would be very different but the insane self sustain and damage of WAR and magic mitigation of DRK was just too good. FFXIV has been scarred since then and it finally led us to where we are currently with all tanks having the same cds, the same answer to any situation and roughly the same damage output. I put the blame on not just elitists but the Devs as well for lacking foresight.

Just to note some things that tanks lost on the way to Shadowbringers:
-cross class skills (pld used to have raise outside battle via CNJ fyi)
-niche abilties like mercy stroke
-Job exclusive interrupts like DRK low blow procs
-Physical and magical damage exclusive defensive cds
-enemy debuffs like int down or str down (debatable if removal was a good thing or not)
-Cd synergy like Raw Intuition and Awareness
-Threat management, there was a time where you actually had to tank to make sure the dps or healers won't steal hate.
-Tp management (also debatable)
-Job exclusive tank stance (imo they got lazy with DRK tank stance since its just a reskin or PLD)
-Off tank stance tied to gcd or long ogcd (requied thought as using at the wrong time may end up losing boss aggro)
-Stance dancing
-Bloodbath rotation
-Berserk-Infuriate-Inner Release rotation of 3.0
-Utility heavy tank vs damage heavy tank vs magic mitgation tank These used to be PLD, WAR, DRK respectively but now all tanks have an answer for each situation
-Skill based tanking tanks used to have a high skill ceiling that separated the player base (debatable if it needed to be removed completely)

These are just off the top of my head and I'm sure I'm missing more since I've been with the game since 2.0 beta as WAR and been through the highs and lows and currently its a low for me imo.

[Connor]

Just want to come here representing Bard.

The devs claim that they stopped designing Bards to be support-oriented because Dancer will be support-oriented. Hence the removal of things like song buffs and Foe Requiem.

But then you look at tanks and healers, and it’s like, these are all jobs that function very similar to each other and have quite a lot of overlap besides flavour skills.

Why is it ok for tanks and healers to be very similar in what their abilities can do, but then Bard and Dancer have to be completely different with no chance of any overlap. Like, it’s ok for all three healers to be ‘support healer that mostly does damage’, but it’s not ok for Bard and Dancer to both be ‘support-oriented dps’? Even if they were to have different support options to each other? And whatever happened to Machinist lol? Why aren’t they allowed any utility like Dismantle? Because it’d overlap with Bard and Dancer?

Idk I just feel like ranged are suffering quite a lot from how job design works right now. I mean, you just have to look at the fact that they literally copy and pasted a utility skill between all three jobs and try to pretend that they’re separate skills (Troubadour, Shield Samba, Tactician). Instead of just making it a role skill and giving them something unique.

It’s like devs want to go out of their way to make any job that might be ‘supportive’ have as little to do with that support as possible. Whether it’s healing, enmity management, party buffs or utility skills. Right now they’re basically sending the message ‘if you don’t want to play a pure dps then find a different game’. And then they gave healers just 2 DPS spells to use for around 80% of the fight lol, so it’s like, ‘what do you want us to do?’ Lol. We can’t support the party, you’re not allowed dps beyond the bare minimum, but we never have to heal either. And then they went the opposite direction for Bard, and made it so they’re only allowed to DPS and nothing else even though there wasn’t anything majorly wrong with their single utility gcd Foe Requiem in the first place (on its own at least)

[Jirah]

“I don’t want 50 buttons” as a ranged DPS I don’t even use most of my role buttons. Not every skill needs to be Hotbar’d I actually stopped assigning AOE skills when doing certain fights and gives me a lot of room

[Goji1639]

It's funny, because homogenization inevitably results in more variety. Making jobs overly unique and disparate creates more imbalance. Eventually what we end up with is a few optimal class choices, and a bunch of other classes that never get used because they're "not allowed" in the meta and heavily frowned upon even in casual content.

I don't really see any situations like "Party LFDPS, no RDM please!" or people abandoning duty if they see a DRK tank, in this game. People play the classes they want and no one has an issue with it, because they're all relatively balanced. THAT'S priority 1 in MMO design. I think the classes feel distinct enough; there's no reason to go down a bad road.

[SinisterJoints]

To OP,

In my opinion it all boils down to one thing. Because the game is so casual by design (as stated from Yoshi P himself) I guess it's very difficult having a diverse and complex job system? The more casual it gets the less diverse the jobs seem to be.

I will say this though, your whole argument about the debuffs being taken away is flawed. They NEVER did anything useful to begin with. Never worked on bosses etc. they missed the boat with that one from the get go so. I do wish the world felt more dangerous (like how it feels in Eureka)


As far as combat goes, I don't miss having that many buttons. I do think they might have went too far or in the wrong direction entirely. My own personal opinion would have been to kept it how it was but move the combo's to how the pvp combos are now. that would have eliminated SOME buttons while also keeping the choices there.