What even is the purpose of all those non melee/blm jobs?

[Valence]

I am starting to get seriously depressed at playing a role/jobs that is underperforming just because somebody decided that they should be balanced on their (subjective) "complexity to play", or is the idea to split balance between "noob jobs" and "serious jobs" really a thing?

It doesn't feel good at all that my role is still picked in savage parties just because it's filling a party bonus 1%.

Why do we get a group of second rate jobs that bring literally nothing worth of value that the group of objectively better jobs don't bring?

Tanks and healers are all always kept tight between each other, and when it's not the case, it gets adjusted, so what's the big deal with DPS jobs?

The recent buffs didn't change anything worth of note to shake up the current state of things.

This is seriously burning my enjoyment of the game and I'm sure I'm not the only one dismayed by all of this.

[wereotter]

People min/max the fun out of the game sometimes. Every job is perfectly viable to take into savage content, but people will see a job even performing 1% better than another and say that is the job you must bring. The jobs being excluded changes over time, like in Heavensward as a monk, I was similarly excluded from even extreme trail farm parties.

It hurts, but its either stick with the job you love, and maybe start your own party finder so you can play that job, or adjust and play a different job. Eventually tides will change and jobs that are considered meta now will fall and others will rise in their place.

[Tiramu]

Most of the time it doesnt matter, with few exceptions all jobs are balanced to be able to participate in all content.

As for "advanced" and "noob" jobs, its more "easier to play" and "advanced technical jobs" which makes a lot of sense for XIV.

XIV isnt a hardcore MMO for hardcore MMO players. Its a Final Fantasy game that attempts to appeal to both casual FF fans and hardcore MMO fans. As a result its important rhat they create jobs that are accessible and performative to both groups of players.

There really isnt anything to be dismayed about, you have a lot of job options and it isnt just 3 jobs that are savage capable and you shouldnt be running into walls outside of Ultimate World First races and maybe a handful of exceptions where particular jobs might be preferrable.

[Valence]

People min/max the fun out of the game sometimes. Every job is perfectly viable to take into savage content, but people will see a job even performing 1% better than another and say that is the job you must bring. The jobs being excluded changes over time, like in Heavensward as a monk, I was similarly excluded from even extreme trail farm parties.

It hurts, but its either stick with the job you love, and maybe start your own party finder so you can play that job, or adjust and play a different job. Eventually tides will change and jobs that are considered meta now will fall and others will rise in their place.

We're not talking about 1%, we're talking about 10% or more. I'm sorry but in endgame, this is huge. Everything has always been clearable by most compositions in the past, but the recent last two major patches have proven otherwise. This is not even about min maxing, it's the message it's sending to players. I don't know what I'm bringing to my group anymore (because i'm literally bringing nothing, unlike 2 expansions ago).

About tides changing, this is not a given considering this sorry state of things has been there since at least Heavensward/Stormblood.

People are attached to job identities, what they bring to the table, how they fare, damage or otherwise. It's not just about number crunching. If people think that the complaint is just about this, I think they're mistaken.

[Valence]

Most of the time it doesnt matter, with few exceptions all jobs are balanced to be able to participate in all content.

As for "advanced" and "noob" jobs, its more "easier to play" and "advanced technical jobs" which makes a lot of sense for XIV.

XIV isnt a hardcore MMO for hardcore MMO players. Its a Final Fantasy game that attempts to appeal to both casual FF fans and hardcore MMO fans. As a result its important rhat they create jobs that are accessible and performative to both groups of players.

There is a fundamental flaw of logic in that statement in my opinion on several levels:

1) A job isn't a linear and fixed difficulty for everybody. All of them, even the "easiest" have layers of difficulty and mastery. All of them can be played at a baseline, intuitive level, and most of them have various optimization and "tryhard" levels of play, with various depth. It's not because a job has a deeper complexity when you optimize it that it's also harder to get into.

2) Job difficulty is hella subjective, which essentially invalidates a lot of arguments for taking it into account for anything even remotely related to balance.

There really isnt anything to be dismayed about, you have a lot of job options and it isnt just 3 jobs that are savage capable and you shouldnt be running into walls outside of Ultimate World First races and maybe a handful of exceptions where particular jobs might be preferrable.

Oh right, because I guess it has never happened to you, so all is fine, am I right? If I don't like it, I can just play another job that I don't want to main, right?

[Quor]

I am starting to get seriously depressed at playing a role/jobs that is underperforming just because somebody decided that they should be balanced on their (subjective) "complexity to play", or is the idea to split balance between "noob jobs" and "serious jobs" really a thing?

This is the crux of good video game design; if something is more difficult to do then it has to have some kind of commensurate reward. While some people like to do things that are more difficult as a form of challenge, the vast, VAST majority of players expect that the reward for doing something will be proportional to the effort put in. More effort equals greater reward. Higher complexity jobs require more effort to play at an optimal level so therefore they should reward the player with greater output when played correctly. Put another way, if a job had a simple 1-2-3 rotation as it's entire kit and it did the same damage as a job that has to manage three resources and a bunch of random procs, all while juggling three separate 4-step combos, people would rightly complain that the simple rotational job is either putting out too much damage or else the complex job isn't doing enough to justify the work.

So there has to be some kind of compensation for complexity or else there's no point in playing a more complex job. I don't think it's accurate to describe the job split as "noob vs. serious" but I do think that SE is trying to accommodate for a variety of play-styles. It becomes a delicate balance though. There are only so many ways you can keep simplicity while maintaining power and usefulness. That's why the approach has largely been that simpler jobs bring more utility while the higher personal dps jobs trend towards the complex side of things.

Anyway, that's the underlying approach SE seems to be going for, but in practice they haven't been doing well lately. SAM is braindead fucking simple now that Kaiten is gone but it performs super well thanks to the ridiculous buffs SE gave it. BLM is the only job with a high skill ceiling that's left in the game because SE's new approach to job balance and design seems to be a race-to-the-bottom in terms of dumping skill floors and ceilings as low as possible. Partially to make jobs more "accessible" but also partially because they are getting lazy when it comes to balancing; they no longer care to try and bring nuance to things and instead are just adjusting numbers up and down.

It doesn't feel good at all that my role is still picked in savage parties just because it's filling a party bonus 1%.

Why do we get a group of second rate jobs that bring literally nothing worth of value that the group of objectively better jobs don't bring?

Once upon a time that wasn't so, at least not for most jobs. But SE has been going out of their way to "balance" things such that the job design team has the easiest time of things they possibly can get. Any interesting gameplay/job design you're going to find anymore seems to be limited to BLM or shoved into limited jobs (BLU) or other such side content.

Tanks and healers are all always kept tight between each other, and when it's not the case, it gets adjusted, so what's the big deal with DPS jobs?

The recent buffs didn't change anything worth of note to shake up the current state of things.

This is seriously burning my enjoyment of the game and I'm sure I'm not the only one dismayed by all of this.

That's a fair way to feel about it. I don't have a better answer except to say what I've already said; SE's job team seems to have, at least in part, given up the ghost when it comes to maintaining some kind of unique feel/value for each job. Ideally there would be a situation wherein each job has a low-ish skill floor, to allow for anyone to get in and pick the job up and play it decently, while also maintaining something within each job that allows for skill expression (i.e. a higher skill ceiling) so that players who want to be challenged can push themselves and their chosen job. Obviously not every job can do this; it's good to have some jobs in each role that are simpler than others, to cater to people who don't have the skill/motivation to push that skill ceiling. You want players to be able to enjoy the main content that the game has to offer after all. But I think part of the current job balance issues we've been running into comes down to SE wanting to broaden the game's appeal to a wider audience and the subsequent dumbing-down that this appeal attempt necessitates.

In short, it's a combo of SE's laziness in terms of job design/balance coupled with their desire to bring the game to as many people as possible and to hell with people who want/enjoy complexity in a job (except BLM because we can't touch the favorite job of the boss).

[Tiramu]

10%, where you getting that figure from?

[Valence]

So there has to be some kind of compensation for complexity or else there's no point in playing a more complex job.

Challenge? Satisfaction to play something harder? Being happy to pull it off anyone? You're conveniently overlooking this while this is literally the main driving engine behind people trying challenging things like savage, ultimates, etc. Your argument is not the crux of video game design you seem to take for granted, I'm sorry to say.

Honestly I'd love for them to just complexify the hell out of those taxed "noob jobs" if just to shut down that kind of argument for good. Having an intuitive design isn't mutually exclusive with having complexity on the side. Just take monk for instance, if you want to optimize, you're in for a ride, otherwise, it's not exactly hard. But then again, maybe some people will find it hard at a baseline level. I know people that can't wrap their head around proc jobs like DNC and BRD so...

That's a fair way to feel about it. I don't have a better answer except to say what I've already said; SE's job team seems to have, at least in part, given up the ghost when it comes to maintaining some kind of unique feel/value for each job. Ideally there would be a situation wherein each job has a low-ish skill floor, to allow for anyone to get in and pick the job up and play it decently, while also maintaining something within each job that allows for skill expression (i.e. a higher skill ceiling) so that players who want to be challenged can push themselves and their chosen job. Obviously not every job can do this; it's good to have some jobs in each role that are simpler than others, to cater to people who don't have the skill/motivation to push that skill ceiling. You want players to be able to enjoy the main content that the game has to offer after all. But I think part of the current job balance issues we've been running into comes down to SE wanting to broaden the game's appeal to a wider audience and the subsequent dumbing-down that this appeal attempt necessitates.

That doesn't make any sense to me. On one end you say that it's good to have approachable skill floors while having high skill ceilings for skill expression, and then say that it's good that some jobs just don't. People can still play a job perfectly happily even if they don't reach the absolute nirvana of optimization, in fact that's 99% of the playerbase.

[Quor]

10%, where you getting that figure from?

Early on in 6.2, WAR/PLD were so far behind GNB/DRK that the functional dps difference between the highest tank (GNB) and the lowest tank (WAR) was nearly 10%. This was addressed shortly after, but the fact that world-first teams were running up against enrages due to this dps difference (Xenosys has a video on youtube that clearly shows the difference between WAR and GNB) is unprecedented. A difference of maybe 3-4% dps would be acceptable but 10%? That's insane. Especially on the back of ShB where the difference between the top and bottom tanks was about 1%.

[wereotter]

Early on in 6.2, WAR/PLD were so far behind GNB/DRK that the functional dps difference between the highest tank (GNB) and the lowest tank (WAR) was nearly 10%. This was addressed shortly after, but the fact that world-first teams were running up against enrages due to this dps difference (Xenosys has a video on youtube that clearly shows the difference between WAR and GNB) is unprecedented. A difference of maybe 3-4% dps would be acceptable but 10%? That's insane. Especially on the back of ShB where the difference between the top and bottom tanks was about 1%.

Ultimately, then, this doesn't disprove my statement. If there is indeed an egregious discrepancy between jobs, the developers will rectify it. But if the differences are minor, then the problem isn't the game, it's the players excluding Job A because Job B does 3% more damage despite both jobs being able to clear the content.