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

Only maybe two kits feel basically complete and capable of any significant rotational nuance.

Even encounter-based difficulties are being shrunk in ways that homogenize the fights and thereby our experiences with them.

A quarter of some kits can be consolidated without cost to depth of said kits (this is meant as a complaint about lack of available nuance to them, not just wasteful button counts).

Even roles' agencies inherent to that have been starved: we have very few dps checks beyond enrage and raid buffs are now timed automatically; tanks went from a poor balance state between defensive and offensive options to outright zero decisions to be made beyond that of dps with a handful of extra CDs to be used on a fixed schedule; healers lack the damage intake to situate any decisions between immediate or stronger healing and more MP-efficient healing, any risk opposite their damage weaving, and generally spend less than 3% each of their CPM on 60% of their kit while hopefully never touching a sixth of it at all.

It could be worse, but it feels like difficulty curves, relative and contextual balancing points (the whole reason for this or that option within play itself feeling like a satisfying and competitive decision), and the whole general midcore part of the game has been stomped down on pretty hard in favor of a low-as-possible floor (as if one didn't have 90 levels to become familiar with the jobs, if we just hadn't dumbed down even the mechanics and intensities players are exposed to in leveling) that becomes increasingly incoherent with the skill ceiling.

Ill just go down the list with my personal opinions:

DPS
All Melee DPS: Fine where they are. I'm a Sam main so I might be bias, but I don't really care when other jobs do like 1% more dps in some encounters on logs
Black Mage: Gud
Machinist: Finally close to where it belongs
Bard: Needs something special like a combat peleton on llike a 90s CD exclusive to bard
DNC: Fine as is although I never touched dancer after getting it to 90
Summoner: I don't have an answer for this, but you shouldn't be able to functionally one button macro SMN. Feels bland. Needs more integration with summoning primals in a certain order + maybe you could pick to glamour some primals.
Red Mage: Pays the VerRaise Tax and I think it should stay that way unless they make it so you cant.

Tanks: Remove Damage from Gap Close
Warrior: I'm kinda salty its doing the most damage atm while having some of the best mit and its party mit only being topped by PLD because PLD has Divine Veil + Passage
Paladin: I hate Goring blade the way it currently is. I like the atonement combo changes. Clemency sucks when compared to Oblation and Equilibrium
Gunbreaker: Aurora feels kinda useless. Otherwise, I'm bias towards liking how GNB is overall although I do kinda wish SKS didnt make the job into an optimization nightmare.
Dark Knight: Feels like there's not much reason to play it after the GNB and WAR potency buffs

Healers:
Astrologian: I don't know what AST needs but I dropped it as soon as I hit 90 because unlike all the other healers you are punished by the random RNG that is Astrodyne and Lord/Lady of Crowns
Sage: This job is so strong and convenient to play I think it actually makes me worse at other healers.
White Mage: heavily struggles in the mit department compared to AST
Scholar: I don't know how Aetherflow and Energy Drain still exist when Addersgal and Addersting is such an insanely better alternative. I don't have any reason to ever play Scholar the way it currently is

Additional Mini-Rant about healers:
Everyone complaining about healings thinking that adding more dots would improve the job don't really know what they want or what they're asking for.
You would just pog out during the announcement and then after a couple days feel like healing is no different and if anything is worse because you have to spend more GCD time re-apply dots which may conflict with mechanics and cause drifting.
The entire approach to encounters and damage would have to change for them to rework healers unless they just give healers combo actions and a rotation that magically heals up the party with some oGCD cooldowns for mits or topping up individuals

Originally Posted by Shougun

I assume you're referring to old SCH...

I liked your first post in this thread, but couldn't disagree more with this one.

1) Not all SCH's liked the DoT focus. /raises hand

2) SOME players appreciate WAR, many do not. Many Tanks want to play a tank and not a healer. Many Healers want to play a healer and not a tank or a DPS. Making Healer Jobs into DPSers and telling them to go play WAR if they want to heal seems bad on all counts.

3) RaionKansen is right that "more dots" isn't the answer. At best, it papers over the problem of Healers feeling unnecessary in even current content. It doesn't actually fix the problem, it just lets them be even worse and more braindead (but SLIGHTLY less braindead) DPS Jobs. Say SCH got a 15 and 18 second DoT, one with a cast time, and an AF spender that did more damage based on DoTs. Is that really going to be more compelling for long? You're not hitting Broil as much...but you're not hitting it THAT much less often. If it makes up 80% of your casts now, it'll still make up 70% of your casts after the change, and it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to go "look under boss health bar, make sure it has my three DoTs on it before hitting Bane, repeat until AF all gone".

...at WORST, it just makes the role into worse DPS and alienates people that genuinely like healing into quitting the game or leaving those classes. If someone likes healing - and I mean "filling up people's HP bars - and not DPS rotations, then all "more dots" will do is encourage them to play RDM or possibly SMN or DNC instead, maybe WAR or PLD, or quit the game, neither of which is great for the game. Groups will start dropping Healers, as why take a Green Job that has the rotation of a Tank but does even less damage and brings nothing useful to the table when you could just bring an extra WAR and an extra DPS instead and clear the encounter just fine, and faster?

I do think there's some design space in making the Healer JOBS more distinct - SCH having DoTs and SGE having a combo rotation, for example, leaving AST and WHM basically how they are now; that might work - but "more dots" won't actually fix the problem, and even giving just SCH more and SGE a combo rotation won't really fix anything, it'll just steal some of the hyperbole from the people who want to be "dps-lite Support" and want to coopt the Healer role into being that when the Tanks are already that and they don't want to play those because they don't want "the responsibility" or...something.

4) If you're going to remove Healing from the game, you'd be better off just deleting the four Jobs instead of trying to change them into "dps-lite Support". You'd also need to make Jobs for the people that play them now that they might vaguely enjoy, meaning you'd need some DPS Jobs that have an automatic DPS rotation for the people that don't really care for DPS rotations, and that would just be stupid.

Originally Posted by Renathras

I liked your first post in this thread, but couldn't disagree more with this one.

1) Not all SCH's liked the DoT focus.

Sure, but was that because they disliked having soft-CDs and variable ppgcd costs of healing, and the added skill ceiling that brought with it, or because they occasionally had to look at the Target's Status Effects (Debuffs)?

DoTs' place in SCH gameplay wasn't just that they were debuffs, nor just that they were over time. They were integral to its offensive kit in numerous ways.

RaionKansen is right that "more dots" isn't the answer. At best, it papers over the problem of Healers feeling unnecessary in even current content.

Wait, so... we refuse all other options on the basis that they'll excessively raise the skill floor (to... what it was for the first 3 versions of the game / over 60% of its lifetime), leaving only the ability to make better use of downtime, which in turn we constrain on the basis that utility would be too situational or, if rDPS focused, bloated (AoE) or parser-demanding (ST)... leaving us with one tool that best allows for flexibility and leverageable depth together.

But somehow, even after having cleared all other possible solutions off the table, DoTs can't even be AN* answer???

*(Despite this goalpost shift of yours, few if any have ever made the claim that they must be THE sole answer, only at most the best of what remains.)

If you're going to remove Healing from the game, you'd be better off just deleting the four Jobs instead of trying to change them into "dps-lite Support".

What you're describing here is in no way suggested by what you're quoting, nor has almost ever been suggested except in jest or as a description of what healers, having so few responsibilities, already are --simplified/braindrained [green] DPS with a mostly noninteractive collection of abilities to be used according to a particular fight-specific script.

Even were the game to turn into the likes of GW2, though, how would simply removing 4 jobs in a tantrum, DPS or otherwise, be healthier for the game than revamping those 4 jobs to better fit that context?

Originally Posted by Renathras

...at WORST, it just makes the role into worse DPS and alienates people that genuinely like healing into quitting the game or leaving those classes. If someone likes healing - and I mean "filling up people's HP bars - and not DPS rotations, then all "more dots" will do is encourage them to play RDM or possibly SMN or DNC instead, maybe WAR or PLD, or quit the game, neither of which is great for the game. Groups will start dropping Healers, as why take a Green Job that has the rotation of a Tank but does even less damage and brings nothing useful to the table when you could just bring an extra WAR and an extra DPS instead and clear the encounter just fine, and faster?

I do think there's some design space in making the Healer JOBS more distinct - SCH having DoTs and SGE having a combo rotation, for example, leaving AST and WHM basically how they are now; that might work - but "more dots" won't actually fix the problem, and even giving just SCH more and SGE a combo rotation won't really fix anything, it'll just steal some of the hyperbole from the people who want to be "dps-lite Support" and want to coopt the Healer role into being that when the Tanks are already that and they don't want to play those because they don't want "the responsibility" or...something.

If you're going to remove Healing from the game, you'd be better off just deleting the four Jobs instead of trying to change them into "dps-lite Support". You'd also need to make Jobs for the people that play them now that they might vaguely enjoy, meaning you'd need some DPS Jobs that have an automatic DPS rotation for the people that don't really care for DPS rotations, and that would just be stupid.

I say let them quit.
The game is not designed to need to be constantly filling Health bars. In fact, it's so far in the opposite direction that 0-1 Healer runs are even a thing, even in Ultimate content. Fight design actively discourages the usage of GCD heals, not only because of enrage times but because of how movement heavy some fights are. Couple that with the fact that multiple mechanics go off back to back and that most GCD heals are either too slow to hit in time or don't provide enough of a heal to matter if someone screws up and there is just no fundamental way a traditional healer would work in the game. Everything nowadays boils down to either mitigation checks or body checks that healing in and of itself has very little value outside the bare minimum required to clear the content, which is something several non-healer jobs are capable of meeting, leaving the actual role of Healer to be questionable at best. You're already a worse DPS regardless if you're hitting 1 button or 30, it makes no difference.

As far as I'm concerned, SE already started to delete Healers in SB and nothing they've done in the past few years has really instilled any confidence that they'll be changing course any time soon.

I like the jobs that have less buttons to worry about. Let's me stay more focused on mechanics and having fun.

PvP has better job identity representation than PvE and that's just plain sad.