Should the ability to change your job at the starting point of Frontlines be removed?

[NekoMataMata]

You can change your job at the starting point of FL for those who don't know. You can do this at any time during the fight, as long as you're at your base camp.

The reasons you might want to do this is for the experience of course. Whether you're just doing your FL daily or whether you're actively camping FL for fun, this allows you to queue as a job that you want to gain experience in and then switch to a job that you enjoy or are more capable with.

Sounds absolutely amazing right? I mean it's a great way to motivate people to actually make an attempt at playing pvp by letting them do their daily as a job they enjoy. One small problem though.

Due to poor balance in pvp, most people who know about this will instantly swap to Summoner. It's not uncommon for me to get into frontlines and see over half of my 8-person team's icons swap to summoner within the first 30 seconds.

I probably don't need to explain the whole balance issue of Summoners being able to drop their enormous Bahamut LB AoE on entire objectives in FLs to easily wipe out other groups clean off the map or simply dissuade them from going near the objective while their team claims it. And I don't really need to explain that Square isn't going to balance pvp for FL.

We can curb this a little bit by jus removing the ability for people to swap jobs in FL though. Summoner isn't really the entire issue anyways, since this just proves that if you give people the ability to gain experience on whatever job they want while playing anything else, they're likely to pick whatever is at the top anyways.

Soooooooo would anyone have any issues with removing the ability to change your job during FL?

[RobynDaBank]

Lol. Hell nah.

[Kemiko]

What you're suggesting wouldn't fix the issue. Most likely what would happen is the first week this goes live you see what you want. A lot of diverse jobs in the roster accompanied by a lot of complaints by those that don't read patch notes or read them close enough to scrutinize the PvP section. After that, those only do their daily Frontline roulette for XP will find the experience worse than they already do (as the PvE and PvP game design is only more different than ever before) and likely just stop queueing for it altogether - while those that enjoy PvP or are grinding the GARO achievements will merely queue up as the meta jobs anyway.

tl;dr
It'd only change things for about a week and for the worse.

[NekoMataMata]

What you're suggesting wouldn't fix the issue. Most likely what would happen is the first week this goes live you see what you want. A lot of diverse jobs in the roster accompanied by a lot of complaints by those that don't read patch notes or read them close enough to scrutinize the PvP section. After that, those only do their daily Frontline roulette for XP will find the experience worse than they already do (as the PvE and PvP game design is only more different than ever before) and likely just stop queueing for it altogether - while those that enjoy PvP or are grinding the GARO achievements will merely queue up as the meta jobs anyway.

tl;dr
It'd only change things for about a week and for the worse.

This is sadly more accurate. I didn't think about that :/ Anyone that does FL casually or just for the daily would just stop. Competitive players would be more numerous and they'd have no issues with slaving to the meta constantly.

[LaylaTsarra]

No thank you it's fine the way it is right now.

I probably don't need to explain the whole balance issue of Summoners being able to drop their enormous Bahamut LB AoE on entire objectives in FLs to easily wipe out other groups

Summoner needs a nerf and bet one is coming.

[NekoMataMata]

No thank you it's fine the way it is right now.



Summoner needs a nerf and bet one is coming.

But if you nerf summoner people will just switch into something like WHM since the potency on their LB is actually the same, the aoe is just a bit differently shaped. Do you simply just go through every job nerfing all the aoes at that point?

I don't really think balance is SEs strong point here.

[Deveryn]

The only part I like about this is it might force the less committed people out of FL, if they can't be there to level their least favorite job.

[LaylaTsarra]

But if you nerf summoner people will just switch into something like WHM since the potency on their LB is actually the same, the aoe is just a bit differently shaped. Do you simply just go through every job nerfing all the aoes at that point?

I don't really think balance is SEs strong point here.

I don't see whm as that powerful in frontline. Summoner takes out entire parties and the number of them is a bit too much. It's clearly overpowered in my view and I run frontline quite a bit on my main and many of my alts. Should see the circus in Japan with parties full of summoners.

Edit: 13 Summoners in the 3 alliances for Adder as I just queued into it in Japan. Yeah it's not broken.

[UkcsAlias]

I don't really think balance is SEs strong point here.

Wipe capable AoE's is the exact reason why overwatch as competetive game is simply not good. It takes out any tactical aspect and brings the focus purely on ult timings. In moba's this is generaly compensated since ults there have very diffirent utility, and there are a lot of mitigation methods to negate those. Add in the massive variety in classes and its generaly a lot more difficult to exploit these things in such way. The best counter would be to have a class capable of fully negating the summoner ult and make that ult easier to use (and generaly more spammable as in 1 of these classes can handle 2 of the other). The moment such ults become easy to counter, they wont be as popular anymore, and instead will fall under a niche in which players are more willing to take the risk to face them because they get better advantages from the other classes.

Class changing is however on that the worst, as it simply will force players to revert back to the same meta every map. But this is generaly required to exist when there is no draft phase. Otherwise the team composition can be the deciding factor instead of skill.

But this means that for it to work, they have to take it to moba levels of balancing. For a mostly PvE driven game i think that would be bad.

[Rowde]

But if you nerf summoner people will just switch into something like WHM since the potency on their LB is actually the same, the aoe is just a bit differently shaped. Do you simply just go through every job nerfing all the aoes at that point?

I don't really think balance is SEs strong point here.

They already announced that FL adjustments are incoming
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...ac1af14c1e3107

"Balance Adjustments to Jobs in Frontline

As I mentioned above, focusing our resources on balance adjustments to Crystalline Conflict, the new PvP mode, has regretfully resulted in certain jobs being over or underrepresented in Frontline.

It has taken us more time than we hoped, but adjustments to Frontline will resume in Patch 6.18. The following changes are currently planned:

① Adjustments to damage dealt and taken by all jobs in Frontline

In light of the fact that the number of participants and the length of matches vary greatly between Crystalline Conflict and Frontline, Frontline-specific adjustments will be made to damage dealt and taken by all jobs to bring them in line and better balance matches.

② Adjustments to frequency of limit break usage

As with the first adjustment, the rate at which Limit Breaks can be used should be appropriate to the number of participants on the field, so we are working towards bringing their frequency of use in line as well.

We have already begun making the above changes to ensure they can be implemented in Patch 6.18, but we have more specific changes in mind for Frontline in Patch 6.2 and beyond, including functionality allowing us to make further Frontline-specific adjustments.

Our aim for not only these changes, but all changes we make to Frontline in the future, is to preserve what makes the mode so special: casual, large-scale battles, where players have the freedom to change their job at will─no strict role requirements involved."


Based on those statements it's not really possible to predict what the meta will shift too since there are FL changes incoming in both Patch 6.18 and Patch 6.2
It also sounds like they might be laying the groundwork for FL PvP to behave differently from other modes if need be which could mean FL specific Stat and Potency adjustments