FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[kaynide]

One of the joys of FFXI and older MMOs was the variety of jobs and what they were capable of both alone and in combination with certain other jobs. Certain jobs simp,y were better or worse and X.

The problem of allowing all jobs to do all things is not easy to fix, but in a game where every player can be every job it seems very odd to make them so homogeneous. There is only so much you can do until it feels like Smash Bros with everyone having near-same move sets.

This is ultimately the result of a game that puts too much emphasis on instanced content (dungeons/trials) and not enough on open world/exploration/niche content.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think Roe, as well as many of us who frequent healer discussions, mutually understand that when discussing the high points of SB design in regards to healers, that we're referring to the overall feeling of Scholar and Astrologian while White Mage is more of a black sheep in this regard. Not every job was holistically superior in SB, but on a grand scale, more jobs had a much greater sense of identity and gameplay feel than those that didn't, and it's a quiet acknowledgement that we wouldn't want to return to White Mage, or perhaps a few other examples like Ninja. Rather, White Mage should take what it's gained from EW and expand on it moving toward the general feel of SB as a whole.

I understand that this may not be clear to the casual lurker, however, so it's worth clarifying.

Yep, basically everything Ty said (thank you for clarifying). I said 'a lot of classes would say SB was the best', not 'all' because there are some odd ones out like WHM. Thanks to the obsession with parsing, and RDPS not really being as big a thing at the time, the effects of stacking 'raidbuff classes' and feeding every buff into one person to 'pad' them was also out of control in those days, leading to much wilder looking numbers. SB class design, with RDPS as the main metric, might have had some bizarre damage variances still, admittedly, but it'd be a better baseline to start balancing from than 'this is how much damage a BLM does. And this is how much a BLM does, if they have Trick, Litany, Dragonsight, Battle Voice, Chain Strat and every Balance card the AST draws (with singletarget royalroading, for good measure)'. And as Ty says, my aim wouldn't be to just rewind the clock and go back to exactly SB as it was in 4.5, rather, to take the parts that did work and expand on them.

So back to healers, the idea isn't to just go back to a 1:1 copy of SB as that screws WHM. Instead, we should take the parts that worked (converting damage spells to use MND instead of INT, changing Cleric Stance to be 'not a noob trap'), and build on that, and excise the parts that did not work (for example, we don't need to go back to the original Lily system). Also consider, thanks to certain other 'decisions' which you may or may not agree with, other jobs felt more useful. NIN was always in demand due to Trick yes, but it also had aggro management tools that were very nice to have. Not 'necessary', but 'nice to have'. Phys ranged are suffering atm, having a tax on their damage because of the 'utility' they bring, but not bringing utility enough to justify that tax. Back in SB, they had Refresh and Tactician, being the 'resource battery' of the party and being extremely crucial to the raid's success as a result. Now we have all the MP using classes being MP positive, or for healers, able to function at base Piety, so that 'utility' is no longer required.

Ironically, at the end of HW, I had an idea for SMN to have it's three summons be OGCDs, and Enkindle to have a 20 second CD that generated Aethertrail Attunement, the resource you needed 3 of to get into Dreadwyrm Trance. Basically, the current rotation, but fitting into the systems that existed in HW/SB times (Aethertrail and such). Current SMN would have fit well in SB, and been a good base to build from going into SHB and onwards. For comparison, look at how RDM was back in SB, barebones as heck. I find it ironic that we got a design for SMN that could have fit SB, 4 years too late to be in SB. If we had gotten it back then, we'd have had 2 expansions of additional kit to add to it, and it'd feel more 'complete' now.

The problem of allowing all jobs to do all things is not easy to fix, but in a game where every player can be every job it seems very odd to make them so homogeneous. There is only so much you can do until it feels like Smash Bros with everyone having near-same move sets.

I keep hearing that at the time, one of the main complaints people had about MOP (the expansion of WOW that this game took inspiration from when the rebuild happened) was that everyone could do everything. Feels like there's almost 'too much MOP' in this game now in that regard. The writing was kinda on the wall even as early as Stormblood, when they gave WAR Onslaught after they saw DRK had Plunge and got mad that they didn't have a gapcloser too. Now every tank has a gapcloser.