Feedback for the devs on their over-fixation with job balance and homogenization

[Yoshiyuki]

This is feedback for the FFXIV devs about the state of the game: job balance and identity, and player retention. The devs have over-balanced and homogenized most of the life out of the game's jobs and battle content. Quality of life changes creep into outright gutting of what made each job unique. It's heavy-handed.

I've been playing since the beta for ARR, watching the game grow and recede over the years. Casual content like expert dungeons used to be far more demanding than they are now. This led to players excluding others and gatekeeping: requiring relics to farm the level 50 Amdapor Keep dungeon for weekly tomestones. The devs didn't like this, so they responded by easing up on the game's difficulty over time. Whenever a job had a reputation as "difficult" like the original AST with their old cards, the same thing happened. The devs' response to any sort of player tension has historically been to nerf content, or to overcorrect by balancing around less experienced players. They will rarely leave something as it is, such as the final 4.0 trial at level 70 on Stormblood's release.

What I've noticed is that there's less general tension with random players in DF these days. In the old days, it was a coin toss whether or not we would get through a simple roulette. Thanks to additions like the Hall of the Novice and other quality of life changes, the game is streamlined. DF is far less of a headache than it used to be several expansions ago. This is great for new players who want to learn and stick around, and for veterans who just want to quickly finish content and go on their way.

The problem we've run into today is the near-absence of tension. The game is now stagnant and afraid to change. The devs don't want to risk any repeats of failures from the past -- for FFXIV or Square in general. This paralysis isn't a good business model.

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Job homogenization and loss of unique identity

As many of us know, Shadowbringers homogenized a lot of the jobs in the game. I think the devs saw the explosion in player population around this time, and started to believe this was a step in the right direction. Endwalker even continues a lot of the same trends introduced during Shadowbringers. But Shadowbringers' success had little to do with job gameplay. The game was in the right place at the right time with the larger WoW exodus. This expansion's story is also beloved within the community. I won't get into the new writing conventions we've seen with the story since then with Endwalker, but there is a parallel here. This new convention of leaning into fanservice at the risk of alienating older players who don't care for it. We're an inflection point of a pre-ShB vs. post-ShB playerbase, with some in the middle who just tolerate things as they are now.

Stormblood was arguably the precursor to this homogenization with the introduction of job gauges. At the time, they were neat UI additions that gave many jobs a quality of life boost. Now every job must have a job gauge. Even if it's mostly useless (scholar).

The problems boil down to the devs stripping away job identities over time. Dark knight lost its unique gameplay with skills like the original Dark Missionary, Sole Survivor, and Blood Price - and they no longer had to manage MP, which made it stand out from the other tanks. All tanks had their similar defensive cooldowns boiled into role actions. Astrologian lost its unique cards in favor of soulless Balance copies that all increase damage. Scholar had its DPS spells gutted, with Eos and Selene dumbed down into identical copies of one another. Multiple melee jobs had their positionals cut down and others suffered skill removals for the sake of avoiding "bloat" (SAM - Kaiten).

The summoner rework is emblematic of this entire philosophy of dumbing down the jobs in favor of...what, exactly? An easier job that more players can pick up and play? The job identity for summoner right now is excellent. It's actually a summoner. But the devs have alienated older summoner players to boost their internal stats saying that more than X% of people play the job now. They favor the cold, hard statistics over the spirit and culture surrounding each job. They seem to believe their duty as the developers ends at a perfect balance between all jobs in the game. There's more to it than that.

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Ideal job balance: low skill floors and high skill ceilings

The devs need the jobs to be perfectly balanced. They don't want the nightmare scenario of AST or WHM or PLD or whoever else getting excluded from entire raid tiers because of underperformance. That's their goal. But our goal is to play jobs that are fun. Jobs that continue to be fun throughout the constant repetition of the same content week in and week out -- until the next patch update. "Just take a break" doesn't change the fundamental issue of bland gameplay and the illusion of choice between each job.

Every job is easier to balance when there's little variety to balance around. Can't balance an encounter around AST randomly drawing old Arrow to boost attack and spell speed for their party members? Just change Arrow and every other card to boost damage, and ignore frustrated players abandoning the job. Can't balance dungeons around scholar having the freedom to keep DPSing with Miasma II, Shadow Flare, Bane, and a competent healing/buffing fairy? Just gut their pets to be exactly the same, remove their other DoTs other than Bio, and force them to spam Broil/Art of War like the other healers - and, again, ignore disgruntled players abandoning the job.

I'd say the only job that doesn't suffer this issue is black mage. BLM has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. The job is easy to pick up but difficult to master. To correct the ongoing issues with homogenization, this could be the model and the standard to balance more jobs around. Not every job needs to be this way, but we could benefit from additional options like this.

The homogenization we have right now should be the new base. Add just a bit more complexity by returning some of what made each job unique. A good example is how each job plays in PvP these days. I only enjoy PvP because of the unique job identities and skill expressions -- not because actually like PvP. For PvE, give DRK its old job identity back and stop relegating it as a WAR clone. Give each healer back what they lost before. Give SAM its Kaiten back -- and stop hoping players will just "get over it." Because after everything fun and unique the devs have removed, soon there will be no more just "getting over" things. Veteran players will have no choice but to unsubscribe.

Personally, I love sage. I'd be happy to see it improve with the changes I propose below. But I'm jaded. I'm concerned that the devs will dumb down the job at some point. I'm tired of switching mains within the healer role -- first SCH, then AST. I even switched to tank main during Shadowbringers. If the same thing happens with SGE, I'm done.

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Unengaging jobs balanced around the lowest common denominator

And if balance isn't the issue, then the devs will insist on balancing jobs or dungeons around the least experienced players. That's fine up to a certain point, but not for everyone else. Why should we all have to play with training wheels on? Yoshi-P tells us to go play Ultimate if we want something more "engaging." This ignores the heart of the problem. The foundation for most jobs is still bland whether it's Sastasha or The Epic of Alexander. Healers are still only healing scripted damage and pressing 1112111 during downtime. Tanks either use all of their cooldowns or just invuln tank busters. DPS have the most variety, so of course it's the most-played role in the game. Or in any MMO.

There's more than enough feedback on this already, but this is a way to address the low skill floor and higher skill ceiling: add some optional DPS rotations for healers that are in-line with their unique job identities.

If button bloat is an issue, find a way to work around this. I never cared for how clunky Cleric Stance was back in the day: having to wait precious seconds to switch back and forth. A less clunky Cleric Stance that changes our hotbars to new damage buttons would be a decent compromise. We already have this functionality with the old pet bar for ACN, SCH, and SMN. We still have it with the magitek mounts in the Praetorium that change our hotbars when we're riding. Let us press a simple button to change hotbars.

Give WHM some DPS spells like Flood and Tornado and Quake and return the AoE Aero III. Give AST more starfall spells like Macrocosmos for DPS, make their cards more interesting, and give back their old tools like Time Dilation to really drive home their identity with support skills and skillfully-delayed heals. Give SCH their Bane and DoTs back and return Eos and Selene to how they used to be. Give SGE more Greek-inspired doctor spells for DPS. These can all be entirely optional. Anything to heal our current monotony in every single piece of content in the game, from level 1 to level 90.

Please.

We don't need to change the scripted battles. We don't need to copy the job model in FFXI where each job is extremely unique, but at the cost of wonky balance and a rigid meta that excludes certain jobs from content. We don't need to change our years-long meta of red DPS, blue DPS, and green DPS. I can accept nearly every design decision in the game: single-corridor dungeons, the same old tomestones and weekly lockouts, and so on. I feel a limit creeping in with the boredom in locking us out of our abilities when syncing down for lower level roulettes -- again, for balance. This is something I tolerate, but I would like to see change. If only to encourage more people to queue for roulettes.

I have to draw the line at job identity and skill expression. The least we can have are unique jobs with distinct identities from one another. Jobs that play differently and aren't afraid to be different. There's more work involved with balancing jobs that are easy to pick up and difficult to master. But, again, that is part of the devs' jobs. Balancing jobs that are, in fact, balanced -- and also fun and unique to play. Jobs that are varied enough to where players can take off the training wheels if they want to.

I hope that the devs can find a new balance philosophy around this idea. This idea of reimagining more jobs with a unique identity that are easy to pick up and difficult to master. Placate both new and veteran audiences by giving us this gameplay flexibility. Because eventually, the new players may reach a point where the novelty wears off. They'll reach this same boredom and also start to unsubscribe. That would be a waste.

[Jin-]

That's why ffxiv is more like a chat box for me, if I'm subbed. Combat is boring for the most part and classes feel the same without their own unique quirks.

[dspguy]

FFXI wasn't a perfect game by any stretch, but I learned a few things from playing that game for a decade:
- Some jobs were more sought after than other jobs for certain content
- However, nearly all jobs were useful in some content

What I mean to say is... you wouldn't bring MNK to Fafnir/Aspid/Behemoth since they would just feed the mob TP. But, MNK was a beast to gain merit points to spend on other jobs.

BRD, BLM and SAM were welcome in most content.

Healers and support (WHM SCH RDM BRD) were welcome in all content.

The thing is, in that game it was very hard to level a job to the level cap (before the game went easy mode). So the problem was that if you didn't have one of those "welcome jobs" you would be excluded. However, if you did have your "fun job" and then BRD, BLM, WHM, etc - you could go on your fun job for some content and then your necessary job to other content.

In FFXIV, leveling is so easy. They don't need to balance the jobs. Let's say RPR is not all that great in savage (just an example), just bring it for your daily expert roulette and tear stuff up. It isn't like you aren't going to clear roulette dungeons.

We are sacrificing too much for balance.

[Jeeqbit]

They used to be fine with AST being difficult and even talked about it. They used to talk about jobs being unique and this being the most important factor. Starting around Shadowbringers, that changed and they became less interested in job identity and being unique and more interested in making them intuitive and easy to play. I stopped seeing words to the effect of "unique" being mentioned in interviews as well.

It's not necessarily a bad thing for classes to be intuitive to play nor is it necessarily a bad thing for them not to be overwhelming to play, but some of it has gone a bit too far. I felt that Astrologian was fine when Shadowbringers released but with Lord/Lady now just being a heal and a damage attack with no interaction with the other cards and only working toward a personal buff, it's less fun. The amount of cards that had to be juggled when Shadowbringers released was a lot but it was fun. I felt like I was actually juggling in an alliance raid and barely had time to focus on mechanics.

They will rarely leave something as it is, such as the final 4.0 trial at level 70 on Stormblood's release.

Can you elaborate? All that happened is our item level increased from 270 to 400 over the course of the expansion. The Echo gets added to old content and this isn't specific to the 4.0 trial. We have had a lot of potency increases and stat changes over time. But except for P8S I don't remember any nerfs since midas.

Dark knight lost its unique gameplay with skills like the original Dark Missionary, Sole Survivor, and Blood Price - and they no longer had to manage MP, which made it stand out from the other tanks.

It does manage MP. You have to save enough MP for The Blackest Night, while spending enough on Edge of Shadow to not overcap. This becomes braindead once you are used to it, but it's still MP management.

All tanks had their similar defensive cooldowns boiled into role actions.

Tanks always had homogenized mitigation. Going back to ARR, Paladin had Rampart, Sentinel and Hallowed Ground while Warrior had Thrill of Battle, Vengeance and Holm Gang. Their functions were not exactly the same but they achieved the same effect. Dark Knight released and had Shadow Skin, Shadow Wall and Living Dead. They all had a misc flavor mitigation that was trash, a tank stance, a ranged pull attack, an enmity aoe and an enmity combo with some form of damage reduction debuff they could apply which is now replaced with Reprisal. That's a lot of homogenization that they had, but it's what they had in addition to all that which made them unique. So being homogenized is fine if there is some uniqueness on the top of it.

The problem is that a lot of the uniqueness they had was trash. Paladins had Shield Swipe, Bulwark, Awareness (to prevent crits), Convalesence (to increase incoming heal potency), no attack potency on their enmity aoe, no aoe attack at all except Circle of Scorn. Paladins had to aim their shield at enemies for a chance to block physical attacks. Most of this sort of mitigation was what we would spit upon or useless against magic. Nice against dungeon trash but it was all RNG mitigation.

Warrior had Foresight (which raised physical defense based on the defense stat so it was not really a priority to use), Raw Intuition (which parried all physical attacks from the front in exchange for crits from behind which people would cross-class Awareness from Paladin for), a dot separated from the rotation, an attack you can only use when the enemy is at 20% health.

During Heavensward the idea of parry and how it was useless on tank busters was attacked so much that they almost completely got rid of it from everything in Stormblood and made Paladin's blocks work on magic. The concept of cross-class was also in question because we had lots of useless abilities available through it that weren't buffed by traits and the system had been abandoned, so that went away and was replaced with what people were asking for, Role Actions (which you can argue is a form of homogenization). The result of getting rid of useless mitigation like parry was that Raw Intuition was homogenized to be like Rampart (the crit penalty had been ignored all this time by cross-classing Awareness so that went too).

My point is, a lot of the homogenization of tanks actually happened in response to player feedback and players were happy when it happened because their feedback had been listened to. It's only after a while that people started forgetting it was in response to player feedback and began attacking SE for it.

Scholar had its DPS spells gutted, with Eos and Selene dumbed down into identical copies of one another.

People just chose one and stuck with it a lot of the time anyway.

The summoner rework is emblematic of this entire philosophy of dumbing down the jobs in favor of...what, exactly?

The reaction to the EW job actions trailer probably sums it up. I enjoy SMN as it is now. It's actually a summoner.

Multiple melee jobs had their positionals cut down and others suffered skill removals for the sake of avoiding "bloat" (SAM - Kaiten).

I agree that wasn't necessary.

[Ralphe2449]

You think it is bad now where people dont want machinists in their groups because they heard others say it is in a bad spot while in reality it is just slightly behind other dps but we know clueless tryhards think even 2% dps loss is the end of the world.

Just go look at games that have different classes and builds like WoW, good luck getting into a group that does high end content if you dont play the "meta", you will be spending most of your hours ingame waiting to find a group rather than play because the community has degenerated so much to tryhard metaslaves they unironically believe underperforming classes are unplayable for some types of content.

The class design in ff14 does not allow for an encounter to be approached in multiple ways, that is why it is far more balanced than games that allow for deeper customization.

Which honestly doesnt matter because at the end of the day tryhards will demand you play the "meta"/"optimal" build so all the customization the devs worked on is pointless cuz the majority will just copy paste what a guide/streamer tells them. Tell me, are you gonna be making your own builds if customization/uniqueness exists or just follow what X guide tells you is "best" for high end content which invalidates the point of uniqueness/customization.

I might not enjoy the lack of customization as one of the few people who actually use customization instead of doing what a guide says but I understand why the FF14 devs have chosen that way instead of going to the disaster that is wow design for example.


A class if DESIGNED correct animation and gameplay wise it can feel fun even if it is technically just pressing the same buttons in a slightly different way

[Dzian]

FFXI wasn't a perfect game by any stretch, but I learned a few things from playing that game for a decade:
- Some jobs were more sought after than other jobs for certain content
- However, nearly all jobs were useful in some content

What I mean to say is... you wouldn't bring MNK to Fafnir/Aspid/Behemoth since they would just feed the mob TP. But, MNK was a beast to gain merit points to spend on other jobs.

BRD, BLM and SAM were welcome in most content.

Healers and support (WHM SCH RDM BRD) were welcome in all content.

The thing is, in that game it was very hard to level a job to the level cap (before the game went easy mode). So the problem was that if you didn't have one of those "welcome jobs" you would be excluded. However, if you did have your "fun job" and then BRD, BLM, WHM, etc - you could go on your fun job for some content and then your necessary job to other content.

In FFXIV, leveling is so easy. They don't need to balance the jobs. Let's say RPR is not all that great in savage (just an example), just bring it for your daily expert roulette and tear stuff up. It isn't like you aren't going to clear roulette dungeons.

We are sacrificing too much for balance.

XI problem was more down to the bestiary than the jobs themselves..

Had the bestiary been more diverse then the jobs would have fared better honestly..

But even now you can go to old school sites like ffxiclopedia. Look up the bestiary and find that once toau came out it all went to pot. Why did every Mage merit ice and thunder and nothing else? Because 90% of the mob types in game were weak to one of those 2 elements..

Same deal with physical damage types and piercing vs blunt and slashing...

The other issue that killed jobs in xi was how sub jobs and abilities scaled. Everything had hard caps.a cure1 would never heal more than 35hp no matter how much mind you had. Making it an effectively useless sub job..

It definitely wasn't perfect but it did also have many strengths the flexibility in party make ups for one.. monks could tank many bosses solidly with counterstance, samurai were able to tank solidly with seigan, dancers could tank very effectively, so could blue. A working party was more about the players than the jobs..

If they hadn't screwed up the bestiary so much and shoehorned everything into the same weaknesses many of the jobs would have been seen more positively..

[RyuDragnier]

A class if DESIGNED correct animation and gameplay wise it can feel fun even if it is technically just pressing the same buttons in a slightly different way

Dancer and Reaper are good examples of this, both are insanely fun, and press the same buttons over and over again most of the time (with variations depending on if you're in a Step or Enshrouded).

[TabrisOmbrelame]

What is difficult to do is to manage the Skill Roof and Floor.

Widening the Gap between the two will only lead to more "bad player". If you balance any encounter around that "gap" (Let's call it like this for easy understanding), then a bigger number of player won't be able to clear Extreme content or things more difficult.

We have to take into account that we have some casual player who absolutely don't care about "Performance". They are just here for the fun, not for the number.

This casual player are often so bad in playing their class that they don't even want to talk about it and will constantly fail difficult encounter DPS check (Even Extreme one yes.)

Lowering the skill floor will increase the number of "Bad player", and Increasing the level of the Skill roof will NOT add more good player. Instead, this may lead to toxicity, and people constantly trashing player about how bad they are at playing that class because they do consistently better than them while playing them.

That said, I agree on the point where we need a more clear definition of identity for each classes. Healers are pretty much the same with 2 DPS Button to spam, Tank have short CD that look really similar to each other (Except for Paladin who can almost spam it through the fight and take the advantage of the HoT being there for 3-4 minute in total during the fight, leading to absurd healing) DPS are all tied in a Two minute rotation that must be respected in order to get the most output out of it instead of DPS having some sort of Selfish DPS buff allowing for a Solo Burst. One minute window reflect that a bit, but not every job got one in the form of a buff.