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

[SieyaM]

Job design and job identity are steadily going downhill. Considering that there are no builds and jobs have only one way to play them, unlike other games where each job can have multiple distinct ways to play, then I would say balance is pretty bad too. SE just doesn't have any excuse to have bad balance, everything is predictable and there is minimal amount of variance, yet they still can't do it. All nuances are being removed, skill ceilings and skill floors are often few centimeters apart. Someone supposedly beat p12s with 5 deaths and DNC who forgot to DP, all of that in week 1. So what's the point of balance, when DPS check in current hardest content is so forgiving. Another lazy way to ensure that no job is discriminated because it's bad. What a lazy way of "solving" things.

Removing Kaiten was so incredibly out of touch, game has 4 job designers and it shows. Plenty of jobs just feel like unloved children.

Game is still good, but 6.X patches are kind of let down, and job design is just bad in all regards.

Honestly the jobs never had any different builds, and there was always just one way to play them. During ARR you had to level other jobs in order to get all the skills you needed, notable BLM for Swiftcast if you were playing any kind of healer. In other games that have different builds or skill tress it inevitably comes down to one build or skill path being optimal and then enforced by the players, there is no real choice there if you want to participate with others. The jobs as they are now though are very similar across roles, with abilities having been pruned away in favor of a simpler and similar playstyle that is easier to pick up but leaves players wanting to change jobs more often. The instant job change mechanic is really hampering design in this way because it allows the developers to simply tell people to change jobs often if they are getting bored with one, instead of creating jobs that are fulfilling to play for any length of time.

[Vulpixi]

Honestly the jobs never had any different builds, and there was always just one way to play them. During ARR you had to level other jobs in order to get all the skills you needed, notable BLM for Swiftcast if you were playing any kind of healer. In other games that have different builds or skill tress it inevitably comes down to one build or skill path being optimal and then enforced by the players, there is no real choice there if you want to participate with others. The jobs as they are now though are very similar across roles, with abilities having been pruned away in favor of a simpler and similar playstyle that is easier to pick up but leaves players wanting to change jobs more often. The instant job change mechanic is really hampering design in this way because it allows the developers to simply tell people to change jobs often if they are getting bored with one, instead of creating jobs that are fulfilling to play for any length of time.

Let me ask you this: Do you think Jobs should be expanded to have different builds (like other MMO's) or do you think Square should focus on making different jobs as uniquely distinct from one another as possible? (or both?).

As a former ESO player, I lean more towards the latter option myself. I think people underestimate just how much players value flavor in their classes, even if its just getting a unique animation or jump (like in old WoW for example).

[undull1]

Summoner between levels 51-85 is painfully stale, they need a mechanic to make use of their aetherflow gauge or something.

Likewise alot of jobs barely change throughout heavenward and Stormblood due to rebalancing of skills. Rather than shiny lvl 100 skills in next expansion we need more to fill out the mid levels

[Eraden]

Mao thinkings is not the jobs that has become problematic in some cases, but is the way fights has evolved in EW. EW promotings fights with more runnings around and Mao finding it harder to play as BLMs. Mao sad.

[Coatl]

The balance is still bad despite the efforts made to homogenize the classes. Every class is just playing into the two minute windows, and every fight is playing around it.

EW is just buns.

[Jeeqbit]

Hey there everyone, I'm pretty new to the game (the forums too) and I've been hearing a lot of talk about FFXIV's Jobs like Summoner getting reworked, tanks getting nerfed, skills getting removed, healers getting homogenized and all that stuff.

1. Summoner used to be really difficult to play, to the point SE had to make temporary changes due to complaints, then reworked it entirely to be more like a traditional Final Fantasy summoner. Jobs used to be full of useless, annoying and janky abilities and harder to play in Heavensward, but since Shadowbringers SE has been trying to making them simple and intuitive to play, so that even a new player can't mess them up. Players that like complexity and difficulty haven't liked that.
2. Tanks haven't got nerfed (although some people are saying their self-healing is too great, particularly healer mains). Tanks, like other jobs, have been made easier and more intuitive to play. Holding the attention of enemies used to be a lot more work to explain than it is now, and many of their damage-reductions used to be unique (but also relatively light or pointless).
3. Healers have always been pretty homogenized except Astrologian, because their card system is unique. In fact even White Mage and Scholar used to be the same when the game released because White Mage's version of Adlo/Succor was Stoneskin. Most of Scholar's uniqueness came from what it inherited from Arcanist, a class shared with Summoner. What unique thing did White Mage have? Fluid Aura, an enemy knockback that annoyed melee jobs and the stun on Holy.

For a better idea of how jobs used to be and how they have changed, you can watch through a youtube series at https://youtu.be/Pve2swkUMUI&list=PL...7W0DUWz3ZAoyf7

Or just look at videos of people doing content from years ago.

However, everything I've heard on that front is a year+ old and a lot has happened since then, including some buffs; but I've heard nobody talk about it, so I figured I'd ask you.

If you want to keep up-to-date on this you can read the patch notes (not recommended unless you are through the entire MSQ) https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...patchnote_log/

What's your opinion on job identity right now? how's your main job doing? do you think Square is going in the right direction or do you still miss how your class(s) were in a past iteration of FFXIV? let me know

Contrary to what a lot of people say, tanks have always been pretty homogenized (always had the same ways to create enmity, a ranged attack, a 20% mit, a 30-40% mit, a flavor mit or more, a stun, a tank stance. However there were subtle differences, such as Warrior having a cone aoe which required a target that is now a circle.

Most of the changes to jobs were widely regarded as for the better. They got rid of useless, barely-used or clunky abilities up until Shadowbringers. In Shadowbringers that was done, so all that was left was to make the jobs more intuitive and simpler to play, and chip away at their identities, and that's where it began to alarm people.

I still really enjoy tanking, but I do think tanks should have something or other unique about them. Even if it's as subtle as "this job self-heals" and "this job shields" and "this job mitigates". Otherwise what's the point in even switching between them? These exact differences have been blurred in Endwalker.

I preferred how Paladin used to play. The changes are good, but the old version had a fun and lengthy rotation with a unique flow to it. Dragoon has something like that as well and they are planning to adjust it in 7.0.

[Coatl]

Summoner plays like a lv30 class would in ARR..

Bosses use to crit their autos and not spend half the fight casting mechanics, giving healers something to do in downtime. MP management existed. Solo tanking was something you could do in some fights, and playing around less mitigation was interesting and fun.

I'm not going to say it was a perfect system by any means. No one would expect that from an MMO that was essentially brought back from the dead. But I do miss it, especially compared to what we have now.

[Dzian]

If PvE kits were reduced to "10 really impactful abilities" rather than "24 not impactful abilities" I'd be more interested in PvE gameplay.
Lots of buttons just aren't interesting. 3-part combos that are just increasing potencies of damage. Big GCD damage. Big oGCD damage. Big AoE oGCD damage and so on.

I've said this for years. There's no weight or impact to any of the skills in xivs combat just follow a rotation over and over boring..

Buffs and cool downs are the same they don't do anything they just make numbers slightly higher or slightly lower again dull and boring.

I'd much rather have less buttons but they all actually do something or impact a battle in someway. Be it blinding a boss so an attack misses or a tanks cooldown that does more than just x%less damage. 1.23 had a paladin skill called aegis boon which was fun to use. It'd block the next hit and heal hp equivalent to the damage you would have taken or something such. Took an element of skill to use.

The problem is that when things are dull and boring like this. Players are lazy and when content is so easy they can still win then there's no reason to do a rotation. And the devs mistake that laziness for difficulty and then nerf jobs and make them even simpler and more boring but content is still so easy that players can basically auto attack and win so they still don't play jobs properly. And the devs think oh this jobs still too hard to play let's make it even simpler....

Downward spiral of doom.

[fulminating]

There’s one and a half jobs worth of tank split across four, nearly a coherent job between the healers, bard is just sad with the three fixes for a problem it no longer has, every big ability being hit at 2minute intervals makes things feel more similar than they really are, summoner is a complete abomination and should be taken back to the drawing board wholesale, fight philosophy is inferior to arr/hw, something unreal seems to have inadvertently emphasised- compare tank damage in mb:ub and p4s for example. The number of flat body checks is just not engaging; someone dying means you can’t even attempt to scrape a recovery because the debuff soup can’t be rectified with 7, blue mage is the sole light in this fetid mire and that’s mainly because it can’t enter current content where the problems are at their most noticeable.

2/10 could be better.

[Shurrikhan]

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.