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

Originally Posted by Oizen

This sort of line of thinking is really standard in this community for some reason.

It reminds me of the old "Let's buff Piety, Tenacity, and Direct Hit so they're all real choices and each role would have its own best stat. But, let's also remove Skill/Spell Speed from the game, since it's just an annoyance," or "Consolidated combos would remove all the complexity of jobs, because you'd just hit the one button over and over!" all while shutting down any discussion of branching actual, real decisions (where what's optimal would rely on context and foresight) or combo actions being separately usable with actual synergies instead of just being finger-traps.

So many here seem to prefer a pretense of complexity over any actual depth in practice. Le sigh.

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

It reminds me of the old "Let's buff Piety, Tenacity, and Direct Hit so they're all real choices and each role would have its own best stat. But, let's also remove Skill/Spell Speed from the game, since it's just an annoyance," or "Consolidated combos would remove all the complexity of jobs, because you'd just hit the one button over and over!" all while shutting down any discussion of branching actual, real decisions (where what's optimal would rely on context and foresight) or combo actions being separately usable with actual synergies instead of just being finger-traps.

So many here seem to prefer a pretense of complexity over any actual depth in practice. Le sigh.

I really wish they would just revamp those stats to make them something more interesting.

Sks and Sps have absolutely no business in being separate entities. And then there's the question (which I don't know the answer), but how to make speed attractive to more jobs, especially non casters?

Why direct hit even exists? It's just a different form of crit. If there's something to take note from WoW, is the mastery stat. Something that interacts directly with your job's kit, which could be potentially interesting.

It would be cool if we had one side of the armor kits dedicated to offensive materia, and the other side to defensive/utility materia - and that could open to stuff like movement speed, leech, damage reduction, etc.

I miss Warrior's cone AoE. It felt unique, and made playing it a little more involved since you needed to face the enemies you wanted to effect. Now it's just the same AoE combo that every other tank has.

NIN main, and NIN feels great to play. The class is very well designed - opener/burst/rotation feel great, the aesthetics hit right (Goka Mekkyaku and Fleeting Raiju are some of my favorite ability animations in the game), and the mudra system captures the Naruto ninjutsu vibe without being too fiddly. NIN is killing it.

What identity? They all look and taste the same.

I am happy with BLM, MNK, DRK, GNB...the only job that i am not happy with is RDM.

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Splitting up the raid buffs wouldn't have an impact on the relative penalties of death, to be clear. They'd still be used on cool down in order to get as many uses and potential sync-ups as possible within the fight. The main difference would merely be that the shorter the CD, the more likely a death is to delay its activation, punishing self and especially the party.

I assume that they're referring to how screwed someone is if the timing of their death wipes out one of their 2-minute burst sync-ups, or the resources accumulated for it, since so much potency magnification occurs in those windows. In that sense, if you still had a round of 60s buffs coming up, you could at least try to rebuild resources and hit those, vs. right now, where you just end up in a pure deadzone (minus maybe a stray AST card) until the next 2m mark.

If you made no other change, it would still have the same amplitude at the 2m mark since the 1m's would just line up again there, but you'd have shallower valleys in-between those peaks and your 60s dumps would be more valuable, which would work to spread out the total damage distribution a bit and give you some "consolation prizes" in between the 2m dumps.

Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

...

This happens anyways. I can think of several jobs that have a 60s personal burst with a bigger 120s window that aligns with burst. There are some inequalities in terms of the opening burst vs. the subsequent two minute windows, because some jobs are more traditionally timer driven and others actually require you to pool resources, although hopefully these get addressed next expansion. What's really interesting is when you can reallocate resources from your 60 second window into your 120 second window for the purposes of tincture or a mechanic like Everburn from last tier.

As for the fight design itself, mechanic checks are deliberately designed to align with burst windows. This is sensible really, and lends itself to some entertaining optimization challenges. It's especially interesting when you also have 'placeholder GCDs' that you can use to offset the timing of a cast or positional to work around little variations in mechanics timings (i.e. if I get debuff X, I use a placeholder to alter my GCD timing, but if I get debuff Y, I don't). They've deliberately given some fairly soft checks this last tier, so it's really more about understanding mechanics than anything else.