Your Opinion on the Current State of Job Identity/Balance in 6.4?

**Hyperia** · 06-19-2023 02:03 AM

How I feel about the current state of healing:

I’m a White Mage…err… Healer…err…DPS

Self sustain currently is broken so much…

I got distracted in real life and died at the start of the last boss in the dungeon. I watched the warrior self heal and keep everybody else alive. Tank busters, WAR healed to full, AOE on everybody, healed to full.

I never felt so useless in this game at that moment. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they eliminate healers sometime within the next 10 years or less.

**Khan_Sado** · 06-19-2023 03:20 AM

Job balance is fine now, I don't see any jobs being locked of PF, or being always picked. They solved a lot of PLD and MCH problems this exp. I played all raid tiers and did DSR, and never felt a single job was a must or was terrible in any fight.
A lot of ppl cried about BLM being way too strong compared to RDM and SMN, but RDM and SMN is always being picked for prog for obvious reasons, believe or not, damage ISN'T everything in a prog scenario, or even on PF reclears, some things like ress has a big impact.

Now about Job Identity... We all know how everyone feels about this. When thinking about bringing identity back to the job its better to think about small advantages one job can bring instead of small problems they have that made them unique.
PLD back in HW couldn't block magic damage, this is something that made him unique in a sense, but its a awful way to make a job feels different, what made PLD felt good for me in StB was how cover could be used in different mechanics.
BRD felt unique in ARR because it was the only job who could regen party MP and TP.
SCH now is the only job with a support movement speed spell.
They need to bring more unique support skills/spells to every job, without being too OP or too weak, and remove some aoe Buffs that doesn't interact with the job, pressing a 120s CD that boost % damage doesn't help job identity at all(looking at you Battle Litany, Chain S., Searing Light)

Also, remove DHit from tanks and make SkS and SpS the same substat (Haste), so PLD and get faster spells casts please.

**SargeTheSeagull** · 06-19-2023 10:10 AM

Job identity and balance are 100% the worst they've been since I started playing in 3.3. The only role that isn't either horrifically unfun, terribly unbalanced, and/or homogenized beyond belief is melee DPS and they certainly have their share of problems too. I mean my keybinds for all tanks/healers are almost 1 to 1 copies of each other. On 2 of the 3 roles in the game, I can swap jobs, turn off my hotbars so I cant even see what buttons im pressing and act like im playing the job I was just on, and i'll still have no problem doing any piece of content because they are practically identical. Tanks and healers don't feel like 8 distinct jobs. Tanks feel like 2 jobs with 2 specs each, and healers feel like one job with four specs. It's ridiculous.

**SilversLyu** · 06-19-2023 11:10 AM

Job balance is basically the summary of this games problems: casualization and depth that gets sucked out in the name of balance, whatever they think that is. It is a dumpsterfire.

**Mithron** · 06-19-2023 08:28 PM

Originally Posted by SilversLyu

Job balance is basically the summary of this games problems: casualization and depth that gets sucked out in the name of balance, whatever they think that is. It is a dumpsterfire.

It's both more casual and less balanced.

**Deceptus** · 06-19-2023 09:21 PM

Tanks, Warriors specifically, shouldn't be allowed to fulfill every single role.

Self sustain is ridiculous.

**Esmoire** · 06-19-2023 09:46 PM

PvE balance has consistently been good. For context: in a game with asymmetrical options, perfect balance is never going to happen. Something will always be the best and the worst, and even the best dev teams accept a reasonable margin of differential. In games with bad balance, character/class x is more than twice as good as class y. I think if you can keep that within like 10% performance difference at a high level that's good, and FFXIV has succeeded; FFXIV community is super sensitive to even like a 5% performance difference. Which is not to minimize it, especially when people getting hitting enrage with just 1% more HP to go. I get it.

Identity is however severely lacking. Started the game in Stormblood and sad to see us lose more and more. It's funny, because they add more buttons, yet the outcome somehow is increasingly stagnant. In PvE, there just isn't a lot of imagination in the class design. RPG games from over two decades ago have more interesting classes. PvP kits are nice because aside from being less bloated, they consistently tell me more about the jobs than PvE has in years. Over twice as many buttons and PvE struggles to do that.

**Tanis_Ebonhart** · 06-19-2023 10:22 PM

Originally Posted by Deceptus

Tanks, Warriors specifically, shouldn't be allowed to fulfill every single role.

Self sustain is ridiculous.

I'm gonna take your word on this as you've mastered all the jobs. Geez, that's a lot of 90s.

**Deo14** · 06-19-2023 10:26 PM

Originally Posted by Esmoire

PvE balance has consistently been good. For context: in a game with asymmetrical options, perfect balance is never going to happen. Something will always be the best and the worst, and even the best dev teams accept a reasonable margin of differential. In games with bad balance, character/class x is more than twice as good as class y. I think if you can keep that within like 10% performance difference at a high level that's good, and FFXIV has succeeded; FFXIV community is super sensitive to even like a 5% performance difference. Which is not to minimize it, especially when people getting hitting enrage with just 1% more HP to go. I get it.

That applies for games with actual builds and diverse ways to play each class. If some job deals 1-2% less than other job in FFXIV, then that's much more serious problem than some GW2 build having 10-20% less damage than other build. This is problem with FFXIV balance, game is so straightforward with no variance at all, all they need to do is to balance jobs within their role properly. There's 19 jobs that have only one way to play them, and you only need to balance 3 groups of sizes 4, 4 and 11 properly.

Look at tanks, they are still somehow unbalanced, devs cannot even balance 4 goddamned jobs that have no variance whatsoever, other games need to handle balancing endless amount of various builds. Look at metabattle.com, GW2 has 9 professions, with 3 specializations each, 5 distinct modes, most of the time there is at least 1 meta build for each profession and mode. Look at elementalist for example, there 5 metabuilds (with some having another variant of the build) just for regular PvP, 3 meta builds for fractals, 4 for open world, 4 for raids/strikes, 5 for WvW (3 for roaming, 2 for zerg). This single profession has at least 21 distinct builds which are considered meta by community, so devs need to balance literal 100s of builds across 9 professions, all of which does evolve all the time. If you do tiny change for single trait, that can ruin multiple builds and create more different new builds.

Lines between trinity roles are hair thin, you can take Guardian as base profession, choose either core guardian or 1 of 3 elite specializations. If you pick Firebrand specialization, then you still don't even have set role. You can either go condi DPS or you can do healer/support build, depending on other 2 talent trees, your stats and your choices of weapon sets. This single profession has more choices than all FFXIV jobs combined. And don't get me started on FFXIV's lack of any CC effects, jobs having no choice of weapon, or DoTs that only do bland damage.

To sum it up, FFXIV simply doesn't have any excuse to be anything less than 99% balanced, everything is straightforward, there is no variance, everything can be calculated, yet we still have balance issues and inconsistent balance philosophies.

**GoatOfWar** · 06-20-2023 03:18 AM

Tank healing needs to go down, but mostly just war's. Dark knight doesn't really have any and is the only one that gets punished for using it's shortest cooldown outside of raidwides or tank busters through dps loss.
The other 2 are mostly fine though.

Thread: Your Opinion on the Current State of Job Identity/Balance in 6.4?

Thread Tools

Search Thread

Display

Tags for this Thread