What If we have 1 more dps for Light Parties and 2 more for Full Parties?

[Denji]

We have 4 Healers, 4 Tanks and almost 12 Dps. This is a ratio of 1:3. Since there are way more dps than other roles, shouldn't we have more dps on instances? You'd have to rebalance the whole game for that, but I think queues would be significantly better.

wow.
you mean you want how wow does it - at least for the light parties. i can't remember the full/raid ones.

[NekoMataMata]

Would be more fun if during heavy parties we had 5 DPS and just 1 healer.

[Renathras]

We have 4 Healers, 4 Tanks and almost 12 Dps. This is a ratio of 1:3. Since there are way more dps than other roles, shouldn't we have more dps on instances? You'd have to rebalance the whole game for that, but I think queues would be significantly better.

It's an idea that has been proposed before (also to make a fourth "Support" role and have it slot in), but the reality is that it would require pretty massive changes to do. The game's back-end party systems are all built around the parties as they are now. They can clearly make small group content 5 member (they did with Crystalline Conflict), but it's unclear if they could increase the max party size (8) without causing a lot of coding and backend issues.

A better option might be to have normal ques use 24 man rules of 1 Tank, 2 Healers, 5 DPS, or 1/1/6 or just make small group stuff 1/1/4 for a 6 person party or something. But I'm not sure if that would be good or not and what all the implications might be. It'd also be weird that all dungeons up to level 90 were 4 mans, then everything from 91+ would be 6/8/whatever mans.

They did appeal to the masses... thats the issue, a lot of easier jobs are picked far more over the more complex so SE solution is to ease up everything for the larger casual group but in turn making it boring for the smaller groups that like the complexity...

The problem is the solution needs to be a hybrid. Make some complex, some easy. The issue is the people wanting complex want them all complex and refuse to give ground on it, so the end result is "Fine, they're all simple now."

[Rithy255]

I wouldn't mind 5 man dungeon parties, but I'm really not a fan of the idea of 10 man raids, I prefer small-medium sized groups personally.
Besides yeah everything will need to be rebalanced even though older content is already wacky and outdated.

[AnotherPerson]

It's an idea that has been proposed before (also to make a fourth "Support" role and have it slot in), but the reality is that it would require pretty massive changes to do. The game's back-end party systems are all built around the parties as they are now. They can clearly make small group content 5 member (they did with Crystalline Conflict), but it's unclear if they could increase the max party size (8) without causing a lot of coding and backend issues.

A better option might be to have normal ques use 24 man rules of 1 Tank, 2 Healers, 5 DPS, or 1/1/6 or just make small group stuff 1/1/4 for a 6 person party or something. But I'm not sure if that would be good or not and what all the implications might be. It'd also be weird that all dungeons up to level 90 were 4 mans, then everything from 91+ would be 6/8/whatever mans.

Yeah, it isn't a viable solution to increase max party size for duties. Not even including fights that are designed with spread markers split into 8 even locations to handle mechanics, we have the issue of the buff bar being too limited (some fights already start to struggle with having too many status effects, causing buffs like "leylines" to suddenly miss and not activate).
Having a role dedicated to support implies this role either has capability in buffing/debuffing/healing/cleansing/shielding, and all of those usually affect the number of buffs/debuffs available in the party. While it would be nice change, it's just not feasible.

[IckeDerTyp]

Considering most of the non-current content already gets melted so quick you barely have to do mechanics, I don't think another dps would make things more fun.

But hey, maybe if they were to rebalanced things, sure why not ^^

[dspguy]

I would like to avoid what those geniuses behind overwatch 2 did with their 6v6 -> 5v5 move. It's likely more apparent for that game, but even in FFXIV, there will be plenty of unwanted consequences for changing something so fundamental.

From top of my head:
- Reaching buff limit and other problems associated with too many buffs stacking
- Most duties (250+) will need to be reworked. Not just numerical changes, EX and higher mechs are made for 8 people. This would often include even arena's floor change, since it's often split into 8 pieces.
- Players will have weird positions, instead of cardinals + intercardinals, players will need to be 36 degrees apart
- This split won't be symmetrical, since melees want SW/SE spots because of positionals
- Positionals will also need party comp with 2 melees max, otherwise some melees will have no access to positionals.
- If there is someone who still plays with other's VFX on, then even they will turn them off.
- Higher likelihood of duplicate jobs. This is more serious than for tanks/heals, since they can smiply just swap to different tank/heal, because they share same gear.

As for positives, I don't really see many, and definitely not enough to outweight even these few examples that I've listed.

I think that really sums up the problems. If it was limited to rebalancing based on the damage split among the party being something like 25/15/30/30 (Tank/Heal/DPS1/DPS2) and they would add another DPS to make the split more like 15/10/25/25/25 (Tank/Heal/DPS1/DPS2/DPS3) it would be a matter of some arithmetic on their part. However, for all the reasons you stated, it is a much larger task. They did well (IMO) with the 24-man raids after changing them to 1 Tank, 2 Heal/ 5 DPS. But when they changed the ARR 24-man from 2 tanks to 1 tank, it really wasn't balanced well. I wouldn't have much faith that they would get it right the first time.

If they did add a 5th party member, I'd like to see a crowd control / buff / debuff party member. But one with real buffs, not these short term 5% to 10% buffs. Or enemies that if you don't sleep them, they will obliterate the party. I also don't expect to see that in FFXIV. If I really wanted that, I should've just played a different game. Crowd control has not been a thing since ARR and we've always had the tank/heal/dps trifecta. I would not expect that to change.