What are your unrealistic expectations for the upcoming Combat Live Letter?

[Gemina]

What I want to hear the most that I feel has the least chance to be mentioned is tanks being changed up to no longer be able to heal and instead will focus on damage mitigation.

Melee DPS will focus more on being selfish DPS. Physical/Magical ranged will bring more support. BLM is obviously the exception here.

GCDs will become a healer's primary resource to heal. OGCD heals on a short cooldown will be adjusted to provide support. High potency oGCD heals will have much longer cooldown timers. WHM benediction will not go on cooldown if zero HP is restored and it cannot be used outside combat.

[Valence]

Melee DPS will focus more on being selfish DPS. Physical/Magical ranged will bring more support. BLM is obviously the exception here.

More support, sure, I'm all for it in a vacuum, but what for? What does the party need more support for? Healing? Mitigation? Everybody and their mothers already provide this in endless amounts today already. Why should I care as a ranged if I get a third mitigation tool next to tactician and dismantle? I already don't need half of those and they tax me on DPS for it.

And if by support we mean damage raid buff support, then same? Will it make my personal dps drop lower than tanks? They already burst better than me, hell, even healers manage to burst close already.

[Gemina]

More support, sure, I'm all for it in a vacuum, but what for? What does the party need more support for? Healing? Mitigation? Everybody and their mothers already provide this in endless amounts today already. Why should I care as a ranged if I get a third mitigation tool next to tactician and dismantle? I already don't need half of those and they tax me on DPS for it.

And if by support we mean damage raid buff support, then same? Will it make my personal dps drop lower than tanks? They already burst better than me, hell, even healers manage to burst close already.

In the scenario I described, the only change is raid buffs like Litany and Brotherhood go away. In their place the melee role and the reliance on them focuses more on their personal DPS. Also keep in mind that I mentioned tank healing also goes away. This means they can't heal themselves, or other members of the party, but they can still mitigate damage. My idea of ranged support is boosting the damage of the melee and themselves, limited healing/debuff cleanses, and raise support.

I find that encounter and job design in terms of support has far too much encroachment from all the roles. I feel that tanks should focus on mitigation, DPS should focus on damage boosts, and healing is a support role in itself being able to heal, cleanse, raise, and contribute to damage when not doing any of the former. Some overlap is ok and makes sense, but giving any of these responsibilities to other roles should be vastly limited and/or comes at the cost of their primary duties.

[Mikey_R]

In the scenario I described, the only change is raid buffs like Litany and Brotherhood go away. In their place the melee role and the reliance on them focuses more on their personal DPS.

I've had thoughts in the past in that you don't necessarily need to remove the raid wide buffs, just change them to only affect the damage of the user, and not just by a flat % buff. It is more that, you buff your allies and they provide the resources for the user.

Take Brotherhood and Arcane Circle. Take away the 5/3% damage increase and you are left with buffs that only increase the damage of the user, but rely on the other members of the party to make full use of. In the case of Monk, any GCD has a chance to provide a Chakra and for Reaper, getting a stack of Immortal Sacrifice.

This was all in my thoughts overall that, in order to get away from the 2 minute meta completely and push jobs into different playstyles, you need to have each job be selfish, but the above idea was a way to still allow parties to rely on team mates to help them do more damage, whilst not needing to be reliant on having to fit them into 2 minute buff windows (or any buff windows except the user).

Alternatives are, rather than having full selfish, make it more of a 50/50 split. Say, SAM/DRG/VPR are the selfish melees and MNK/RPR/NIN are more party damage orientated (so they still have party wide damage increases).

[Gemina]

I've had thoughts in the past in that you don't necessarily need to remove the raid wide buffs, just change them to only affect the damage of the user, and not just by a flat % buff. It is more that, you buff your allies and they provide the resources for the user.

Take Brotherhood and Arcane Circle. Take away the 5/3% damage increase and you are left with buffs that only increase the damage of the user, but rely on the other members of the party to make full use of. In the case of Monk, any GCD has a chance to provide a Chakra and for Reaper, getting a stack of Immortal Sacrifice.

This was all in my thoughts overall that, in order to get away from the 2 minute meta completely and push jobs into different playstyles, you need to have each job be selfish, but the above idea was a way to still allow parties to rely on team mates to help them do more damage, whilst not needing to be reliant on having to fit them into 2 minute buff windows (or any buff windows except the user).

Alternatives are, rather than having full selfish, make it more of a 50/50 split. Say, SAM/DRG/VPR are the selfish melees and MNK/RPR/NIN are more party damage orientated (so they still have party wide damage increases).

Because I don't actively participate in savage and ultimate encounters, I can only speak from a preferential standpoint. It's easy for me to say, "Just take the raid buffs away." But I really don't know how this would affect the raid scene. However, I really like the idea that the kind of support any particular job/role brings to the party is heavily based on what is innate to that job/role. That's why I say tanks bring mitigation, ranged/magical DPS bring DPS support, and melee DPS have strong self-buffs, but I know in the back of my head that it is not that simple due to current encounter design.

I also know that I do not like the 2-minute meta and how it forces not only job design, but also how the job plays. It also greatly limits the creativity the dev team can put into any of the game's jobs. But perhaps this is favorable to the dev team, because if they have a basic template to go off of then it makes their jobs easier. Unfortunately, as we have seen, this comes at the cost of unique, enjoyable, and engaging gameplay. As such, this direction needs to be corrected/avoided.

The game as advertised is supposed to function off of the holy trinity infrastructure. This means that players must rely on each other to obtain their clears. The dev team has deviated from this to the point that they either need to abolish roles entirely, or course correct back into allowing players to rely on other players. Current design is absolutely unacceptable in terms of the concept of job roles.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Black mage will get new buttons that do huge damage.

Summoner will get rebuilt from the ground up. Some people will love the new version, some people will hate it and say the job is ruined.

Red mage will get a new hat.

[Esmoire]

Afflatus Solace and Misery for White Mage by level 50.

[Equitable_Remedy]

My most unrealistic expectation is that players on social media (including this forum) won't work themselves into a frothy lather whining about changes that they haven't yet seen.

My second most unrealistic expectation is that, after the combat live letter, players on social media will just go play games that they like more rather than exploding into a new frenzy of whining about this game while still paying a monthly subscription to play it.

Also, replacing Hyoton with a raise ninjustu

[Roda]

SMN finally gets a job mechanic lets go!!!

Some Red mages will get a new hat.

I fixed that for you :'(

[TheMightyMollusk]

I fixed that for you :'(

I mean, we'll still get it. It won't be visible, so it's just a stat piece, but we'll still have it. Taunting us.