What happened to job inter-play? Was it any good?

[Local_Custard]

In ARR and HW, there used to be these things generally called cross Class skills (officially titled Additional Actions), where every one of the base classes had a few skills that could be used on other classes/jobs as well. Every Job required a secondary class to 15 alongside their own base class, and they also had a third class they could pull from.

Some of the skills are no longer even in the game and some became role skills, but I found this https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Additional_action

taking a glance at the additional actions and some of them are quite interesting! Has anyone used retaliation? Was it useful?

Congrat's your genuine curiosity brought me out of lurking!

Anywho, As other have put it, there used to be a pretty in depth aggro system in the game with lots of moving parts. It was a effectively this whole mini game where the group assisted managing the main tanks agro utilizing their tools so the main tank could spend as little time as possible in tank stance as it was a MASSIVE DPS increase to do so. Everyone popping their diversions and such, the ninja Shifting their aggro to the tank and reducing the healer/BLM's aggro, all of this at no cost to them as everything is a oGCD. All with the goal of letting the tank stay in DPS stance for damage. It was honestly really fun and engaging....

In Organized High end content

Outside of that, it was infuriating. The main issue with the whole system was that basically as a tank, your DPS was ENTIRELY reliant on your DPS's ability to use their buttons, and if you think people would just use them when asked BOY did people take offense to it. The thing is, alot of the enmity reduction skills were VERY powerful, you didn't even really need to time them in most cases, but in PUGs this was often too much to ask. If they weren't hitting their enmity reduction buttons all they really had to do was out DPS a tank to pull aggro, which they SHOULD be doing, even if they were sub par. Weirdly enough it this led to alot of very bad players getting very big egos, because they thought their DPS was too much for the tank to handle, when in reality they were just not hitting their "make the tank do more damage" buttons. You would end up having to constantly nerf your own damage as a tank (and in WAR case lose access to your defining abilities AKA Fell Cleave) Just because people couldn't be bothered to hit some extra buttons. On the flip side of this, as others have mentioned, you would get players who, if tanking, would be in tank stance ALWAYS, and it was NOT a small DPS loss being in tank stance. It varies from class to class but it was like 30-40% DPS loss, and the players who did this usually weren't very good in the first place, leading to some tanks doing ABYSMAL dps. You could hardly blame them for this conclusion since the game basically told you to do this, however in most situations it was entirely unnecessary and just caused things to get drawn out. If you see arguments these days about healer DPS vs just healing (please do not start this up here) it was basically the same thing, but with tanks. Long story short, the issue with enmity management is that it just divided the player base and got players mad at each other. Ideally from a tank perspective, you would do a single enmity combo (or less if a WAR in SB) and then play in DPS stance the rest of the fight. After the changes tanks now all play like they used to play in DPS stance all the time now, but also have the extra mit like they are in tank stance now as well.

Other issue some classes, like the mages also just had bad tools for handling it, mages only got access to lucid dreaming, which cut their enmity by 50%, this issue being that BLM and RDM tended to start off with a bursty opener, meaning if you didn't have a ninja, the tank needed to gain extra aggro. This caused a effect where most groups were basically locked in a specific DPS set up. you had DRG/BRD (or MCH if you were feeling like being different) because that combo was basically mandatory, the DPS was nutty, then you had a ninja because 60 second trick attack was absolutely silly and they came with aggro management tools that you effectively needed so your tank could deal more DPS. Classes like Monk tended to struggle in these days because it brought basically no synergy buffs to party, and that was the name of the game back then. Basically if a class couldn't nicely slot into a meta comp, it was considered bad back then, much worse then classes are these days, as it wasn't just raw DPS the group would be missing.

While I do miss the system I think it's for the best that it was removed, though I would like to peak into a game where they figured out how to make it work without it being frustrating. It was the cause of so much balancing issues, and and was the center ALOT of points of frustration.

Where/how did the game tell tanks to always be in tank stance back then? This is a genuine question. Was it a tooltips or any job quests? I could see how a system like that could cause frustration. Kinda sad to hear some jobs were left behind in comp back then though maybe not entirely surprising (it is a thing in many games- a class/job gets left behind because it is underpowered or many players underestimate it). I do wonder if you have any idea how you might have improved that system?

I remember when all the healers loved having a bard around just for Mage's Ballad, which used to just be refunded mana. Mana management used to be a lot more of a thing, and healer classes each had their own flavored MP return with much longer cooldowns, and they were also a threat drop. WHM had Shroud of Saints and AST had Luminiferous Aether. SCH was the only one that got to keep theirs.

I didn't know scholar had enmity management still- unless the skill still technically exists but does something else (so same skin but different contents)? I don't play scholar which is why I am asking about this

It was effectively a 1:1 mana transferal. If someone was struggling with MP, you could give them the MP, but that MP deficit was effectively pushed onto someone else (as IIRC, in SB, you couldn't be MP positive). The exception to this is BLM, as they have, what is effectively infinite MP, just due to how the job works.

Did it bad for a little bit when a mage ran out of mp after a mp transfer to a healer? Or did mages back then have a way of generating their own mp back in these situations? Maybe elixirs were used more often back then...

TP was used for all weaponskills, which boils down to all physical GCDs. AoE actions and ranged attacks used ~2 times the amount of TP your single target actions used. This is where problems with TP in dungeons come from. You didn't want to go full into AoE, as you would drain your TP very quickly, which meant you swapped to single target, so that you could at least keep attacking. Jobs did have Invigorate to recover TP, but it was on a long cooldown (2 mins IIRC) and even with optimal use, was TP negative, even in single target scenarios. This does mean longer encounters with a single enemy, ie. trials and raids, could see you run out of TP and be prevented from attacking.

Now, whilst there were jobs that could grant TP (and MP), you couldn't guarantee they were in your party, unless it was premade and even if they did show up, it was a coin toss as to whether that actually used the TP/MP refreshes.

Ah so back then most jobs were TP/MP negative. How often did you run out of those resources back then? I can imagine there were sometimes conflicts that happened when there were players that did not use their refreshes.

I don't think anyone knows 100% what the devs intended for tank stances, however it would be a safe bet that you would be in tank stance whilst you were top of the enmity list and in DPS stance when you were supporting. What actually happened was tank stance + enmity combos for a bit, then swap to full DPS.

As for enmity generation, this is how things tended to flow. Tank stance and enmity combos was the most enmity, followed by Tank Stance and DPS combos, then DPS stance and enmity combos then DPS stance with DPS combos. The issue here is the enmity combos provided no resources (MP/Beast Gauge/Blood), which put you behind in other areas.

If they were to re-introduce tank stances as they used to be, it wouldn't really work out. With so much emphasis on damage output, you would still aim to be in DPS stance as much as possible. It then start getting complicated about how to balance an enmity system, especially with so many variables, like ilevel, which can play havoc with balancing.

If you want to read more about tank stances and different perspectives, you could try reading this topic. However, it is long with a lot of different points of view, so I don't blame you if you want to skip reading it.

I might read that thread sometime later! Thank you for summarizing on stances- I'll likely think about that for a while if not shuffle this information into my catalogue of random facts I'll likely remember later at random points. I do wonder if I would enjoy tanking more if stance dancing was a thing.

Esuna has always been there, erase was only for SB but I also believe it was only for caster DPS and a DPS losing out on 1 GCD of their damage rotation is much more costly than a healer using Esuna. The same for Drain. You could argue usefulness for solo content though.

Sometimes I play other jobs and think "man I wish I could use esuna right about now" though that might just be my healer brain.

BLM used to have 2 shields, one for physical damage and one for magical, they have since been combined. I also do not believe you could Apoctastasis yourself either, so it wasn't anything extra you could use on yourself (same with Pallisade).

Ah so these shields were primarily for supporting other's?

it would have been a great system up to the point where....it involved other players.

even now, with how braindead and samey they have made jobs it isnt rare to find someone that doesnt have a clue what they are doing other than spamming their DPS buttons. add anything else on to that, something that another job needs to perform better, is too much to handle for the average player. the reality is, these days, a majority dont care if they are helping another player perform well or not, parse is king... and if something interferes with that, then it wouldnt be used.

do I miss it? yes. but these days most want to be the damage hero, king of the world... support isnt a consideration.

Support buttons are nice to have for those that want to use it. I do get what you mean but I don't think support buttons being axed is the solution to this.

I would disagree that the goal was to make tanks go on dps stance though; it was just one of the choices. With warrior's unchained going on dps stance wasn't even that necessary outside of the edgy "min maxers," and as you stated not that fun in raiding. The goal of enmity reducing skills was so that dps could increase their damage output without pulling off of tank regardless of tank's dps stance or not.

The whole tank dps stance wasn't even that fun for healers, unless healers enjoyed pressing cure 2, or the equivalent of it, all the time. Yes, I know there was bloodbath but that usually didn't cover a tank beyond the initial few seconds.

Most non-raiding healers that I met preferred a tank stance tank because it allowed them to actually dps (and go on cleric stance if they chose to).
Overall, XIV just had more choices; everyone could pick and choose what they excelled at.

Kind of sad to hear I missed out on some systems. I would have liked to experience it to at least have the experience.

I don't think I've read this short response yet so I'll post it.

Because once you get to having more than double the amount of classes than available raid slots it gets to be a headache in a half to balance. Hence the slow but unavoidable homogenization of classes.

I think one of the reasons for homogenization is because we will soon have 21 jobs but the dev team only has 4 job designers. This would mean on average a job designer would have about 5 jobs to work through. I'm not sure if it is evenly distributed given that there are no job designers that specialize in healers. I have tried designing a job and I can say with confidence that 5 is probably too much for one person if they want to go in depth. If the job designer team were to be expanded there may be less homogenization. Though, I think homogenization could be happening for a multitude of problems beyond the job designer team size. Does anyone know if they have expanded the job design team recently? If so my point is probably moot.

It's been so long now, I hardly even remember those times. The inter-play you speak of was more challenging then that is for sure. I remember when a mistimed use of Cleric stance as a healer would either put your tank in a heap of trouble, or even kill them. It actually would make more sense to have Cleric Stance now opposed to back then because most tanks can take care of themselves.

I do wonder what healer stance dancing would have looked like today if it still existed

I leveled my DRK and WAR during those times as well, and a lot of what made those two tanks fun to play for me are now gone. DRK used to have to manage their MP to retain enmity and deal out damage. I really do miss the days of Blood Price, when DRKs were like, "Hurt me more!!" WAR was always a kind of catch-all kind of job, but it used to require more skill to do what it does now. A lot of their gameplay then was doing everything necessary to remain in deliverance, and it was rewarding to do so.

I really didn't get heavy into playing DPS jobs until late SB when I picked up SAM. That job has always been a selfish DPS with the biggest change being their kenki management which is kind of redundant now. All other DPS jobs I play heavily now such as MNK, NIN, and DNC were all picked up during the era we are currently playing in. I won't go too much into healing despite the role being my main because I'll just piss off everybody. To make it short, I have been one of few who have supported most of the changes regarding this role. It's not healing I take issue with so much as all the encroachment from the other two roles, especially tanks that upsets me.

I recently did a dungeon with a WAR and got disappointed when my earthly star went off but I had nothing to heal because the WAR healed themself to full.

Enmity, MP, and TP management are things that have been stripped away little by little. The first two still exist in a limited fashion, but are completely self-reliant and no longer supported by other party members. The fact of the matter is that at any given time I have played this game, what really mattered boiled down to two things: Minimizing incoming damage, and maximizing outgoing damage. Management of resources and support skills were all driven by those two factors. In order to increase accessibility and decrease forced comps the dev team reduced synergy, homogenized job roles, and cut a lot of fat. There have been mixed receptions of these changes ever since.

It look like DT is going to be more of the same, so we'll have to see what changes they make, if any come 8.0. But I know this game will never return to the days of HW/SB, much to the chagrin of many here.

Given that later comments responded to this better than I could I'll just say this: It sucks hearing about jobs that my friends love slowly losing their liveliness as their unique traits are stripped away until they begin to look like a clone of other jobs. Job identity, at least for me, is very important because it can strongly play into character identity of a WoL. As an example- I don't think my character Ailbhe would become an astrologian if didn't play into his insecurity of not knowing the future or the assurance he could prevent the death of his loved ones. Astrologian has been losing this aspect for a time now as cards have became 1 kind of card in EW (damage up).
There is also the gameplay aspect that I feel other people have better expressed than I ever could.

It was mainly that in Heavensward it had physical mitigation when many bosses dealt magic damage, so to solve this problem all the mitigation was homogenized to just reduce all damage by a %. Paladin also never had self-heals except Clemency, which required you to stop dealing damage, which makes it "invalid" to use in the eyes of many MMO players. It wasn't until Endwalker that it got more self-heals, so it was extremely squishy until Endwalker compared to other tanks. It also had Divine Veil, but this had to be triggered by a heal unlike on other tanks, which was seen as unusual.

Ah, well thanks for taking the time to type this

It would be nothing, tbh. They'd only be able to have the MP regen, damage down and damage increase buffs.
Same as it is now, but higher relative potency. It's actually pretty good now, last I checked, because the way it works now you wouldn't want to spam it and this makes the potency at range decent. But back then, if you could spam it, it became better than your combo due to its potency. You normally couldn't spam it, because you only had enough MP to use it 5 times without the help of Bards/Machinists, whereas now MP is sort of unlimited on Paladin.

Kind of remind me of the dragon kick rotation I have heard about and seen memes of. Has anyone in the past ever tried to make a holy spirit rotation work after it was nerfed (and bringing along the perfect team comp for its perpetual use)?

Yes, Astrologian's cards were about buffing different things depending on RNG - MP, TP, Skill Speed, Spell Speed, Mitigation, Damage, Crit. But the only ones seen as valuable by many players were Damage and Crit. So SE changed them all to be damage cards, where 3 means melee and 3 mean ranged, and the goal is to get 3 unique symbols. Which I think is a good alternative.

Would it have looked different if the damage and crit buffs weren't as high but still an acceptable amount?

If we looked at it today, TP would be useless, MP would be useless except for healers, Skill Speed at least wouldn't result in TP depletion like it used to, Spell Speed may be useful, Mitigation is useless in this game mostly because we have so much of it already, Damage and Crit would be the most sought. So that's really why it ended up this way.

this is a bit random but I am thinking of a hypothetical where players could customize some of their skills/spells/abilities. What if you could customize card effects? So like for example, give bole a new effect but for the cost of a resource. Would that work in ffxiv?

Casual players would value the mitigation over damage, and use it all the time, similar to the "tank stance vs DPS stance" thing on tanks. Yet you knew as someone that understands the game that the mitigation just wasn't valuable because the game isn't that damage intense normally.

sounds like some things haven't changed

Mana Shift got used a lot, particularly in 8-person duties. People would request it, especially healers, when they needed more MP. Often casters just volunteered their MP to help the healers resurrect. I remember seeing it used a lot in A12 just because people died a lot there.
They would run out of TP if they took an extraordinarily long time to kill mob packs in dungeons. An amount of time that just wasn't the case when I was a DPS ie. the party was undergeared or not playing properly. This was unfortunately quite common in Stormblood. They would also run out of TP if Astrologians gave them a Skill Speed card, which was essentially trolling. Bards once had a ranged AoE attack called Wide Volley which also would use a lot of TP, so the melee version was used instead (as a result, SE removed Wide Volley).

Had to look up wide volley. Found a video that at first thought "huh, looks like a weapon skill I use on bard already" then noticed the party had 4 bards.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kx17Fi8CIBY
Dunno why but I find it funny when a party has a lot of duplicates. Yeah that is a lot of TP being used. How much potency did wide volley have?

Maybe, but the way it worked, you rarely noticed TP existed (pretty much like now). So on very rare occasions, you noticed it existed because you couldn't attack at all! And this was just an annoyance, especially when it was due to things like low DPS.

me when I cannot heal because I am out of MP and was so stressed out for the entire fight that I realized I never pressed my lucid dreaming
A sadistic part of me wants melee to experience this today. Eh there are already debuffs that take away your ability to hit things we don't need TP to do that.

Yes, and SE has slowly tried to remove this uncertainty over time. I don't necessarily think the uncertainty should be there if it's avoidable. For example, if someone is about to be hit by an attack and is low on HP, there is no uncertainty on whether I should use The Blackest Night on them. So if it can be done in a way where we have the information we need to be more certain, I think that's good. SE making the same jobs overwrite eachother's buff is probably not a good thing or they could just prevent matching duplicate classes in DF.

To a degree we had a lot of information with the enmity because you can see the enmity difference between you and the healer/DPS, so usually your judgement was going to be correct. But if they did generate a lot of enmity, you just had to figure out "is this a good player? will they use Diversion/Lucid?"

We can have a little bit of uncertainty, as a treat.

Depended on the tank, really. Many Warriors just flat out never used their stance, or used it while a buff was up which nullified the effects of tank stance temporarily.

For PLD, the optimal thing was probably just to have people use Diversion, but personally, I needed to: tank stance+enmity combo 1 time in Heavensward, and tank stance+enmity combo 3 times in Stormblood. I also just used tank stance the entire time for mob packs so I could hold them and do damage (instead of using my damageless enmity generator called Flash). PLD suffered from the stance switch being a GCD, unlike the other tanks.

DRK could use both tank and DPS stance at once, and had a lot of strong enmity tools that didn't require their tank stance, but turning on their tank stance was an option if it was needed, and didn't use the GCD. So for DRK it was really just use the damage stance and use tank stance if needed, but also an option was using Dark Arts on certain attacks. Dark Arts was an ability that transformed the effects of most abilities ie. to increase mitigation, add enmity, significantly boost damage, depending on what it was buffing.

In raids, at least in Stormblood, I'd often just have a Warrior pull since they generated enmity better and had a buff to nullify the downsides of tank stance, then they could shirk me so I didn't need to stance on PLD.

Sounds like stance dancing was quite awkward for PLD

My impression is SE just wanted us to stay in tank stance the entire time lol. But MMO players aren't like that. Except the ones that are and that's why SE had to decide for us by removing the decision.
Tank stance now generates a lot more enmity than it used to (and it already generated a lot). Virtually 1 hit secures enmity for the rest of the fight or a long period of time now. So the dancing now might be 1 hit then switch. Then again, I tanked an entire dungeon on GNB in Shadowbringers without tank stance and held aggro the whole time. So it depends on if the party is even good enough to out-DPS the tank...
You can watch videos on youtube. I'd say the stance dancing was fun and made old dungeons fun for me, but I also understand why it had to change. Maybe they could have just reduced the damage penalty of tank stance to 1% and the increase of damage stance to 1%, so that there isn't as large a gap between people who do it right/wrong. You can see this mechanic being used in Thordan Unreal currently, where adds switch between Shield/Sword Oath.

Would stance dancing be compatible with today's ffxiv version?

Esuna was always there for healers. Erase was just an additional (role) action for caster DPS.

Ah. Kind of wonder if erase would be a nice thing to have around as an option for casters.

The game has always been mostly casual/new/returning players that don't really optimize. That's actually the case for all healthy MMORPGs generally. If it only has the hardcore players that know everything, then it's probably a dying MMO that isn't attracting new players.

new players are always a chance to surprise them with gear and gil

To be honest, tanks had a lot of depth in the past, but it was selfish depth (except on PLD due to Cover, Clemency and Divine Veil). Whereas now they, jobs lost a lot of their selfish depth, but tanks were given selfless depth parity with PLD.

I wonder what a combination of both for tanks would look like. Which tanks would have more selfish depth and which would have more selfless depth (especially if you were to bring back some old ability/weapon skills/spells)?

Reading a lot of the replies, all I can say is welcome to how ************* this community can be. They keep raging against the current blandness we're getting, but immediately revert into saying that everything was bad or frustrating back then as well.

Either way, what we had had some kind of balance between collective and individual. It's never been a fully team synergistic game at all, let's not kid ourselves. And the amount of scripted things was still staggering, even if a lot less so since the whole had a lot more moving parts that could go wrong beyond just fight mechanics.

Would be kind of funny if tank busters were random and a tank got 4 tank busters in a row because of how randomness can work out. I would probably get by just fine if fights had random elements to them and weren't as scripted. This would be especially the case if I get to know the mechanics well. A little bit of chaos as a treat.

To me, it is the opposite, the ones that are happy with the current design do not complain, or complain about minor things It is the ones that do not like the current design that say the level of homogenisation is bad.

Seems to be the case, at least from what I have seen and heard. I'm not too surprised since those unhappy with homogenization aren't really given any alternatives. So as a result they are stuck their favorite jobs being stripped away. They might not be as upset if they could potentially customize their main jobs to have the unique parts of their kits return.

I think a lot of people complaining about how it is now don't say it was bad back then actually. So people like myself point out that there were a lot of bad things back then, and that probably what they want isn't how it was, but something resembling the sophistication and action synergy there was then, but cleaner and better.
Indeed, except really on a mechanical level in high-end duties. But when it comes to dungeons it's always been the case that an experienced player can shoulder most of the burden and carry people through.

this reminds me of all those times I'm a dps and the entire party has died yet I somehow manage to survive long enough to shave off the tiny amount of hp left on the boss. Good times... Good times...

probably what they want isn't how it was, but something resembling the sophistication and action synergy there was then, but cleaner and better.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this one. Other players dream big which is fine. I like hearing about how they would change some things- it is fun to thought experiment. Who knows, there is the very rare chance SE takes notes from it and hopefully consider what would make the ideas work (a well oiled machine is greater than the sum of its parts. If you only consider its parts you won't have something functioning).

But what we've kinda lost is the trinity ie. a warrior, paladin or probably any tank can just solo a dungeon at level 90, whereas earlier in the game if a healer wasn't there the tank was gonna struggle to get too far.
I don't know which replies you mean, but to clarify for myself, yes, I am quite happy with ShB and EW (aside from the lack of a Field Operation/social content/relic grind in EW which SE has acknowledged). However, most people on these forums usually aren't happy with ShB and EW, so I try to meet people half way.

For example, I can agree that the trinity in dungeons has lost its balance and tanks can even solo half way through some current extreme trials or that healers could use a few more attack mechanics or cleric stance. I can't complain about this as a tank main, because being powerful is great, but I can acknowledge it's not right when there is meant to be a holy trinity and that the teamplay just felt a little better in the past.

I could agree with there being a lighter form of sophistication from what we once had (ie. if tanks had a damage stance, it could be a 1% damage difference similar to positionals, rather than a 20% difference). But it is important for the implementation not to create a massive gap between veteran players and new players to where veterans are killing a boss in a fraction of the time it takes new players, because that isn't feasible to balance. I was never comfortable with the gap between veteran and new/casual players in the past, and it's so much better now.

Can you give an experience you've had with this when vets could out damage new players vastly? /gen

As for synergy, I would kinda like for "harmless synergy" to return. For example, having both DoTs up on a Bard buffed the potency of Sidewinder. If the job is played the way it should be, then there is no difference at all to how it is now. Or procs coming from DoT crits. All these things make no material difference to how it is right now, it just makes it feel like you're rewarded for playing it correctly that's all.

How did sidewinder work? What would it look like when played improperly vs properly?

Synergy in Role Actions as this post discusses, like Erase, Mana Shift or MP Refresh is also fair, even if most people don't use them. Since they are harmless if not used, but gave you a few toys to play with.

I like that jobs are more approachable, like how I've found Dragoon playable since Shadowbringers, ranged attacks don't interrupt combos and so on, but it is just being honest to say that jobs have slowly lost their uniqueness. I'm not complaining about that, I just don't want to deny the truth because then I'd be unreasonable. They also just acknowledged job uniqueness was an issue in the last live letter.

They have acknowledged it yeah. I'll have to see what they do.

And when you think of playing a different job, it feeling different to play, at least a bit, is kinda important, otherwise what's the point in switching job? Animation differences are good and all, but if the functional differences have eroded, then it reaches a point where you only need to pick one job in each category whose animations you prefer. I at least want to be able to say "that one does shields, that one does heals, that one does regens" or "dragoons jump, the others don't". But if that isn't how it is for a role then it's fine, really, I'll just pick the job I like the animations of in that category.

I have a lot of thoughts on this yet I cannot properly organize or give said thoughts. One thought I can properly express is an idea for players to be able to pick animations for their spells/abilities/skills for the jobs they play if said spell/ability/skill has multiple iterations from leveling up/traits.

If you give me back manasong in the current system what do you even want me to do with it? It would be like popping troubadour in a dungeon where it just feels like you're trying to cheer yourself up like you're being useful except it's totally useless, and here it would also be totally useless, and even in savage/ultimates on top of it.

It's the whole problem with the current system, it's so one dimensional that all those things that have been removed have been removed because they had no utility left anymore. All the teamplay we had has been axed. The only thing remaining that they can somewhat still fiddle with and give depth to is damage rotations and a modicum of job identity at best, but they have decided that no, this would just introduce too many failure states again into the game, and people would complain again about every little thing being too punishing or frustrating to deal with, and we'll be back to the usual buzzwords in liveletters about "reducing stress on the players" and improving "usability".

We can have a little bit of failstate as a tre-

Honestly, I already have dealt with dying as a potential failstate (since I mainly play the healer role). It isn't really that bad tbh. I find this game to be relatively forgiving in that even if you wipe you can always get back up and try again. Though, I play mostly casual content so I cannot say if it is the same for harder content.

That's the thing though: most of the past attempts at inter-role interaction pointed out as such... weren't actually interactive across roles except in terms of capacity (i.e., no more than Shroud of Saints or Second Wind did from the start).

In the vast majority of cases, it was either effectively just an in-role CD for which you could more directly and impactfully shunt loss onto someone else (by starving them of resource or crippling their and thereby wasting party output to support your negligence in a way redundant with and less interesting than, say, your ability to greed mechanics), or they simply meant that you now had a group mitigation skill available as DPS (to use of schedule because it's not single-target and is therefore noncontextual/nonreactive anyways). They were uninteresting forms of "free" resource around which the game was tuned anyways (ultimately meaning that you're simply punished for not using them as near to on CD as can be leveraged, with most having no barrier to such thoughtless use for effective play).

As a whole, what did it look like for you? The interplay on top of what was going on back then?

If I had to pick a single example: Clemency while healers were jailed (A3S, I think it was). ...Or DPS-kiting melee mobs in dungeons while speed-leveling.

More generally, though: Early on, CC, Mana Wall¹, Paladin absorbs/heals (even as small as they were), and tank flat (as compared to %DR) self-sustain if that would ever be considered cross-role. Such allowed DPS to bait, kite, and place enemies without disrupting the tank's gather, to prevent loss of positionals due to unfortunately-timed special attacks moving the tank at just the wrong moment OR to take pressure off the tank in emergencies, emergency recovery tools, etc. Later, Rescue² and maybe Mana Shift³.

¹ BLM's Mana Wall, before its removal, had the hilarious impact of being able either to fully immune a physical AoE or skillshot type boss attack... or to split a split-damage tankbuster with a tank. It was a short-CD, 100%-mitigation-against-a-single-hit personal defensive... with effectively extendable purpose.
² Fun for dungeon speed-running. Would have been more significant in raid-fights, too, had the game not by then already replaced a majority of displacing mechanics with a "Opt out of mechanic" button-press in the forms of Arm's Length and Surecast.
³ Mana Shift was nice in that it didn't produce additional resource out of thin air (except, perhaps, as casted by a BLM when it wouldn't delay their return to Astral Fire) and therefore wasn't tuned around, but could do a lot to alleviate emergencies. As it was single-target, it was also much more responsive.

Brb going as blm to split damage with the tank to surprise the second tank /j
shame that mana shift might not be that useful in today's version of ffxiv. I enjoy supporting other players.

Honorable Mentions:
If Casters had run out of MP only from using specifically cross-role skills (rez, AoE Phoenix heals, Titan tanking, etc.) and Mage's Ballad had been oGCD, I'd also have considered it as belonging in that list. Not Army's Paeon, though Mage's allowing for greater use of expensive burst tools would have been fine so long as non-casters also were to then use MP, though that would have then partly rendered Foe Requiem redundant even if it had affected all damage. Foe Requiem, if it had been oGCD, though, would at least have engaged enough with party output dynamics that, until this excessive fixation on precisely 2-minute cycles, it would have been a tool that actually feels supportive to use where Battle Voice and Radiant Finale, imo, do not (since it's up to everyone else to use their shit when you pop it, with you simply holding maybe once or twice per fight based on boss jumps). Similarly, Palisade could have been decent... if there were actually just the right number of emergencies throughout content that it could be relied on while also requiring it to be reactive; too many, and you find alternate solutions that render it redundant, while too few make it feel pointless.

ah now I understand the joke someone made a while ago about brd's feeling useless in newer expansions (maybe it isn't a joke. I am very bad at knowing)

Finally, enmity skills on non-tanks would have had at least a bit going for them... so long as their having any impact were no longer dependent first on enmity-multiplying tank stances (i.e., those Enmity stances being replaced with passive bonuses and non-tanks' Diversion skill instead giving that modifier briefly to said non-tanks) and tanks now-disgustingly-high passive eHP bonuses (which are mostly just a change to make non-tanks go squish even faster) weren't so high. As it stood, though, their use cases were limited to mechanics that would otherwise require very precise tank swaps on things that nonetheless wouldn't clobber non-tanks any harder than tanks, which would be beyond awkward to shoe-horn into any significant portion of fights. And even if we had all those things, we'd have been better off with just slightly more sophisticated enmity modification through positioning and slightly greater control over our moment-to-moment throughput (and therefore Enmity) dynamics through slightly increased bankability... rather than requiring a whole discrete selection of Enmity-increased skills. Especially so long as Enmity remains solely a way of determining who gets the auto-attacks and certain special attacks.

While the way CC diminishing returns work needed a rehaul and a few (sparing and situational but impactful) extra tools would have been appreciated, those did far more than "Esuna but better because oGCD" or "hit this to save your tank, assuming equal gear and skill, ~30s of damage loss (so long as everyone else with this ability also presses it)" or "use on CD so your casters are allowed a normal resource economy" ever did. Of those auxiliary "inter-role" skills, all but maybe 10% or 20%, depending on how broadly one defines them, were uninteractive, one-dimensional uninteresting tools. In short, bloat. They should have been trimmed down to those few that were capable of more and then started bending design philosophy slightly around those.

Emnity skills on dps sounds like it would have been kind of fun though as other people have stated could result in headaches if players are stubborn. Though, stubborn players will always exist...

this reply is getting unwieldily with its length so I am going to reply to one more post for the time. I'll likely reply to more later/soon

Save for the rare instance or two when a trial or 8-man goes awry, alliance raids are almost always the go-to ones for me if I want to... y'know, actually be a bit more engaged in healing.
These raids have the most potential for chaos, people just running around, sometimes getting hit by X or Y mechanic. Funnest time is to heal through these raids on week one. Oh god so much chaos. The amount of people just eating mechanics is catastrophic or just barely so. It's the latter when I just enjoy healing the most: When you know you and your co-healer can save a run that appears to be heading for a wipe.

This makes me look forward to playing healer in dawntrail because I get to experience week 1 of raids and its chaos. I am no stranger to being in a raid where no one knows the mechanics (MINE CT) and it is fun trying to figure out what to do and communicating with the raid about what to do and planning with the co-healer. Though, sometimes it is just as fun playing in a raid I know and just watching the carnage.

[Remnance]

Game dumbed down to sell more copies.

[CaptainLagbeard]

taking a glance at the additional actions and some of them are quite interesting! Has anyone used retaliation? Was it useful?

The ones at the bottom (like Retaliation) were PvP skills, when those skills were a thing you could pick 2 of those 5 to bring into PvP.

Where/how did the game tell tanks to always be in tank stance back then? This is a genuine question. Was it a tooltips or any job quests? I could see how a system like that could cause frustration. Kinda sad to hear some jobs were left behind in comp back then though maybe not entirely surprising (it is a thing in many games- a class/job gets left behind because it is underpowered or many players underestimate it). I do wonder if you have any idea how you might have improved that system?

It wasn't specifically said anywhere, just generally assumed and threat generation was incredibly hard without tank stance. And tank DPS even without the damage reduction from the stance was nowhere near enough to maintain aggro. So the stance dance was more to build excess threat with it on, then switch it off to do more damage and put it back on when you're getting close to losing aggro.

Did it bad for a little bit when a mage ran out of mp after a mp transfer to a healer? Or did mages back then have a way of generating their own mp back in these situations? Maybe elixirs were used more often back then...



Ah so back then most jobs were TP/MP negative. How often did you run out of those resources back then? I can imagine there were sometimes conflicts that happened when there were players that did not use their refreshes.

Lucid Dreaming was added in Stormblood for casters and healers, and was basically a must have. Before that, the only way to reliably recover MP really was by having a Bard or MCH, as Bard could give MP regen (at the cost of damage) with Mage's Ballad. And MCH worked a bit different back then, they had two turrets, Rook and Bishop, Rook was single target and Bishop was AoE. They also had a secondary mode that cost MP to maintain where they stopped attacking to regen the party's TP or MP. AST had a 1/6 chance to pull cards for MP regen and TP regen, but that's not really reliable.

I do wonder what healer stance dancing would have looked like today if it still existed

If Healer stance dancing existed, it would probably be a DPS loss... As you needed to turn Cleric Stance off to heal and then back on to do damage, and time spent on turning Cleric Stance off and on again instead of spamming glare at max damage would be lost DPS.



Anyways, I'm going to add this to this thread... A list of skills and spells removed from the game over the years https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/C...Removed_Action
A good chunk of them are from pets, crafters and gatherers... But you can find a lot of the old removed skills talked about in there. Some even referencing mechanics removed from jobs.

[AmiableApkallu]

Then how would you explain: tank limit break, the STR/INT down that became Reprisal, Divine Veil, Passage of Arms, etc. The point of taking damage on behalf of the party is to protect them from damage, but this is also achieved in the aforementioned ways.

Ah! What I meant to say is, "this is what I would like tank gameplay to be." (At least today, anyway. )

That is, if I had my way, tank gameplay would primarily be about redirecting the damage to themselves. Reducing incoming damage to arbitrary party members, including the party as a whole, and restoring HP would fall primarily upon the healers.

For example, Passage of Arms would function more like a channeled, AoE Cover than a mostly-bland X% mitigation.

And I say "primarily" so as not to flat-out exclude job X from doing thing Y. For example, Clemency is fine as-is, and even more fine if it costs 3k or 4k MP.

The problem with the current jobs isn't the (shield/barrier) healers encroaching on the tanks. It's the tanks encroaching on the healers.

[Jeeqbit]

Where/how did the game tell tanks to always be in tank stance back then?

It didn't really explain anything until they retroactively added Hall of the Novice. You are just meant to read the tooltips.

Did it bad for a little bit when a mage ran out of mp after a mp transfer to a healer? Or did mages back then have a way of generating their own mp back in these situations? Maybe elixirs were used more often back then...

Elixirs were never used a lot. They had ways of re-generating MP, but sometimes jobs weren't as balanced as others in terms of management (and sometimes received adjustments to MP cost due to it).

Ah so back then most jobs were TP/MP negative. How often did you run out of those resources back then? I can imagine there were sometimes conflicts that happened when there were players that did not use their refreshes.

I would say jobs might have been MP negative in some cases and need to use abilities like Lucid. But usually I didn't notice TP existed, and the rare times I did it was just an annoyance, usually due to AST buffs or low AoE damage that took an eternity.

Kind of remind me of the dragon kick rotation I have heard about and seen memes of. Has anyone in the past ever tried to make a holy spirit rotation work after it was nerfed

Not that I know of. It got repeatedly nerfed so much that it stopped being good to use unless you were at ranged and had a choice between Shield Lob and Holy Spirit, or were in Requiescat. But you're right, at first it was sort of like the Dragon Kick rotation if you had lots of MP buffers.

Would it have looked different if the damage and crit buffs weren't as high but still an acceptable amount?

No. Optimal MMO players typically go for the damage cards over everything else, even if it's 1%.

this is a bit random but I am thinking of a hypothetical where players could customize some of their skills/spells/abilities. What if you could customize card effects? So like for example, give bole a new effect but for the cost of a resource. Would that work in ffxiv?

That's sort of how Dark Arts worked on Dark Knight prior to Shadowbringers. But other games also may have gear or materia with transformative effects on your abilities to give value to different gear.

How much potency did wide volley have?

I think it was the exact same as the melee version, except it used more TP. The ranged idea and animation was preferred by players, but to save TP we used the melee version... so SE kept the melee version.

Sounds like stance dancing was quite awkward for PLD

It was certainly smoother for WAR and to a lesser extent DRK, because their versions were abilities instead of being on the GCD.

Would be kind of funny if tank busters were random and a tank got 4 tank busters in a row because of how randomness can work out.

It's kinda random in ARR and early Heavensward duties, or at least, there is no cast bar on them. So it's difficult for a tank to anticipate a tank buster and time their mitigation. Whereas now you can be half-asleep, see a tank buster cast and press mit. This is tidier though and allows you to be more consistent, which is rather important in raids.

Can you give an experience you've had with this when vets could out damage new players vastly?

This was actually in Shadowbringers. I tanked an entire leveling dungeon (which has a tight sync) as a Gunbreaker, but I forgot tank stance. My damage was high enough to hold all the enemies despite this. At this point in time, the healers and DPS had no enmity control tools anymore and DPS were supposed to be doing more damage, but they weren't. It wasn't even close. I only noticed at the end of the dungeon right before killing the last boss.

How did sidewinder work?

I think it was something like 100 potency normally, 200 if you had 1 DoT up, 300 if you had 2 DoTs up.

One thought I can properly express is an idea for players to be able to pick animations for their spells/abilities/skills

I've thought of "animation glamours" before. Much like egi glamours.

[Shurrikhan]

The turret loss of damage when switched to MP/TP promotion was approximately 15% if I remember correctly.

Right. After 3.3, Bard was a bit less affected so long as its DoTs finished up around the same time and they could drop Ballad/Paeon just before refreshing them.

My point, though, was that rotational impact. Bard would time its exit around higher potency GCDs (via DoTs, Straighter Shot, Empyreal Arrow, oGCDs), while MCH had no such interaction.

Quite easily fixed if SE really had wanted to do anything about it, but I guess it's easier to just nuke the whole thing and throw the baby with the bathwater.

Agreed to the first half. And agreed that the second was unfortunate.

I'll take anything that re-adds some manner of depth to the core system. Most people those days just argue about homogenization, 2min meta, all those things, but they're just going after the tip of the icerberg, which is attached to the actual immersed colossal chunk that is the progressive loss of the rpg battle system after ShB.

Again, agreed to the first half and agreed that the second was unfortunate.

...Heck, now we've got people simultaneously complaining about button-bloat and yet insisting that reducing some of our versatile skills (such as damaging gap-closers) being reduced to a single dimension is the best thing since glamour, simultaneously reducing skill ceilings (any rewards for fight knowledge / forethought) and decreasing the amount of button-press variance we get per actual button required...

________________

Would stance dancing be compatible with today's ffxiv version?

Not as they were, but potentially.

The last thing you'd want are multiplicatively effective Enmity modifiers from discrete enmity tools and enmity stances, since that encourages using enmity skills only under enmity stances, reducing flexibility -- which in turn fetters any systems that would otherwise make one want to commit to a given stance for more than a single GCD or two. You'd want those modifiers to at most be additive. Even then, you have redundancy though, unless you weave them together somehow.

Of the two options, stances are the far, far more button-efficient, especially so long as we keep our current design wherein one may have 10 buttons but only have more than a single real "choice" among them once every 3 to 10 GCDs. With an enmity stance, a single button, to toggle increased Enmity on or off, allows you to intensify or shirk Enmity generation.
On the other hand, if, say, we kept the number of options per GCD consistent and consumed only as many buttons at a time as there were choices at a time, Enmity skills could slot in with likewise only a single button more in cost. Let me explain:

Let's take Samurai, for instance. Outside of Meikyo Shisui, has at most 3 choices in any given GCD made from melee range of its target. To open, it can use Fuga (later Fuko) or Hakaze [2 choices]. Thereafter, if it uses Fuga, it can viably use only Oka and Mangetsu [2 choices]; restarting the combo is an utter waste. If it uses Hakaze, it can use use Shifu, Jinpu, or Yukikaze [3 choices]. If it uses Oka, Mangetsu, or Yukikaze, it returns to its null state, from which it again has just 2 choices. If it uses Shifu, its only competitive option is Kasha [1 choice]. If it uses Jinpu, then it must next use Gekko [1 choice]. The only complicator is under Meikyo Shisui, especially now that a thus-buffed Kasha and Gekko each provide their combo chain's buffs, where you can arguably use Gekko, Kasha, Yukikaze, Oka, or Mangetsu. By just using range conditionals for Enpi and a cleave conditional for Meikyo-Kasha and Meikyo-Gekko, you can do all that via 3 keys with no loss of control.

Granted, that's just haphazard consolidation. We can do better. For that, we can either (A) make each skill fit freeformly into far more variable rotations, raising the skill floor and ceiling but finally getting value out of such a large button count... or we could (B) make the number of choices per GCD consistent.

Option A:

This isn't quite worth doing a full mock-up for, but just imagine that rigid combos have been, in most important ways, removed, in favor of more general "flows" and MP consumption. In place of those rigid combos you instead have [1] a larger variety of additional effects by which skills may benefit more than a single other skill without necessarily providing a universal buff (+Haste, +Damage, etc.) either, and [2] broader "flows" akin to combos, whereby a skill may reduce the MP cost of others of like type and/or part of the prior skill's potency can be duplicated onto that higher-order skill of like type.

In this way, you still have "finishers" of a sort, but at more variable length, and with far more variable pathing, and every job has significant access to bursting vs. conserving resource even without oGCD banking. In the above case of Samurai, let's say that Gekko, Kasha, Yukikaze, Oka, and Mangetsu always deal their full power, but at very high (unsustainable) cost without prior actions. In this way, MP itself can offer everything Meikyo Shisui did, but far, far more flexibly.

Other logical compliments to such a revamp include skills having Stagger effects (with a more sophisticated CC or displacement system backing it), interactions with enemy Armor, all skills doing as much AoE as they appear to (if your skill cleaves from left to right, even if previously categorized as "single-target", it now cleaves anything that its animation would go through), etc.

Option B:

You simply give a third opening attack, a third skill post-Fuga/Fuko, and allow Shifu and Jinpu each three possible outcomes (e.g., can funnel into Oka, Kasha, or some new skill, or Mangetsu, Gekko, or some new skill, respectively). In this way, 3 buttons covers every viable rotational melee option at every GCD. Iaijutsu, chaining into Tsubame Gaeshi (whose CD surrounds the current Iaijutsu and remains usable until your next Sen generated) would be your fourth and final GCD key. (Enpi would be a passive extending the range of your ST line at %damage cost and chargeable over time and by Yaten to reduce that potency loss, thereby retaining control, timing anchors, and optimization (for ultimately more skill expression)... without costing a single button.

If we so desired, and were willing to make Enmity a fulfilling mechanic (e.g., a means of mob manipulation to change the timing, aim, and/or selection of their special attacks), then Enmity skills would have a place. Without that... it'd likely be mere bloat as before, providing only a Price is Right minigame for how much Enmity one's lead DPS will generate over the whole fight as to just barely meet that margin before dropping stance and use of any enmity skills, both (especially, once debuffs were no longer attached to them). [/HB]

______________

That all being said, there's certainly a place for stances as a form of active mitigation. See Protection Warrior in WoW: Dragonflight, for instance. While the stances are painfully imbalanced right now, sacrificing 20% mitigation for just 8.4% extra damage (and would likely be better off with something like +15% mit vs. +10% dmg), there's still been quite a bit of room to leverage stance-dancing even in high-level combat, in no small part because that tank heals for a percentage of damage dealt (20%, atm, on mine, due to getting lucky with Leech items atop the 10% baseline value).

Of course, there's no reason for every tank to have access to that, though, and off the top of my head, it doesn't seem a great fit for any of the tanks we have now, barring maaayybe Dark Knight, with some small alterations. All others have historically had something close enough and more thematically fitting (like Paladin, say, being able to just hard turtle behind its shield, with the cost being refunded through Shield Oath generation when absorbing significant damage, Warrior using its Deliverance vs. Defiance skills, and Gunbreaker focusing on suppression and evasion).

_______________

this is a bit random but I am thinking of a hypothetical where players could customize some of their skills/spells/abilities. What if you could customize card effects? So like for example, give bole a new effect but for the cost of a resource. Would that work in ffxiv?

Customize? Not really. But like Dark Arts or Royal Road before, you could design Cards to be augmentable in certain ways. Your options then are that each Card has only one augmented form (a la Dark Arts via MP expenditure, or some manner of resource charges), or each Card can be sacrificed to augment any other in a way unique to that sacrificed card (or, as before, each of three pairs of suits -- Celestial/Time, Solar/Damage, and Lunar/Resource).

[RiotSiren]

Where/how did the game tell tanks to always be in tank stance back then? This is a genuine question. Was it a tooltips or any job quests? I could see how a system like that could cause frustration. Kinda sad to hear some jobs were left behind in comp back then though maybe not entirely surprising (it is a thing in many games- a class/job gets left behind because it is underpowered or many players underestimate it). I do wonder if you have any idea how you might have improved that system?

Apologies if I mislead I don't think it was directly said in game to be that way, but it's more the implication the skill makes. A skill that heavily increases survivability, and gives you the capacity to maintain aggro implies to the player that it should be used when tanking. I think the old hall of novice used to mention it but my memory is fuzzy, but even if that's not the case that was the idea it gave many players, and you could hardly blame them for coming to that conclusion. On top of this all the tank stances worked differently and some like PLD, took a GCD to activate and deactivate, causing them to be rather costly and further encouraging players to stay in a stance. From what I recall the devs even talked about it like that was the intent, though I can't remember the quotes from the time. It was similar to the "Free Cure" issue where have today, where the game design implies that since cure has this proc, you should fish for it, which is a extremely sub par way to play healer.

[Post]

There's some good informed opinions and information in this thread, but some errors here and there. On the whole, it doesn't really shift or detract from anyone's points.

I have little to contribute, but I did want to clear up that PLD's tank stance, Shield Oath, only took a GCD to put on, not to remove. It was like DRK's Grit in this way. What was different is that PLD had an additional DPS stance known as Sword Oath which did not grant it access to more actions or increase all their damage, but merely gave them additional 50 potency on all auto attacks (75 potency from 3.4 until its removal).

This meant that certain swords could punch slightly above their weight in the hands of a knowledgeable player (Ramuh's has a relatively fast swing timer) and that they normalized that sort of thing.

More importantly, this meant that PLD could simply swap out of Shield Oath to deal more damage in a brief period or if swapping with the other tank briefly; it wasn't as crippling as at a glance. Also, it was the only tank that got to keep some of its enmity combo in its basic damage combo (fast blade -> SAVAGE BLADE-> Royal Authority) when all tanks were given more control over that in HW (originally PLD only had its enmity combo and thus had no trouble at all holding aggro in DPS stance if a player wasn't horribly under geared). This combo was changed in StB to what it is now (pure damage) as parties had much more control over aggro with the advent of everyone having access to Diversion instead of only casters and ranged with Quelling Strikes, and tanks getting Shirk.

It didn't even get its tank stance until 40 (WAR at 30) and as far as aggro goes this was no problem; usually people complained because it meant PLD took more damage til then. WAR had no DPS stance, just 'not using tank stance' (easier to swap as Defiance was always oGCD, you'd just be stuck in it for its 10 sec cooldown at least), until HW. PLD was commonly seen as the simple to play, simple to hold aggro, simple to mitigate tank until StB where it gets muddled a bit, especially when WAR was drastically streamlined in 4.2.

Likewise, DRK Grit took a GCD to put on but not remove, and DARKSIDE (now the name of the damage buff you get for using any Edge/Flood oGCD attack) was an oGCD that increased all damage dealt at the cost of all MP over time and all MP regeneration, even from external sources such as Mage's Ballad or Ewer cards. Darkside could be used while in OR out of Grit, but was not strictly necessary to hold aggro; but it did grant access to Dark Arts (now the name of the buff granting a free Edge/Flood after fully breaking a TBN shield), which empowered not only certain damaging actions but certain mitigations. So, DRK's DPS stance was always on if well managed and there was something to hit (you turned it off to get MP back during downtime), and Grit was on if you needed aggro or the extra mitigation or off when you were pushing damage.

[Local_Custard]

This is what I am getting from this thread on job interplay:
-tank interplay was different back then and was a bit of a mixed bag but fun for some players (or many)
-tanks still have a good bit of interplay but it is a different flavor
-There was and always will be friction amongst players when it comes to asking them to play some things properly (an example being some dps being stubborn about not pressing things that'll make the tank do more damage)
-a lot of interplay wasn't that well integrated
-a lot of interplay was bloat and needed fine tuning and a bit of pruning
-most of it should have been iterated upon instead of scrapped outright
-interplay was likely seen as a layer of uncertainty which is probably one reason why the devs scrapped it

is this correct?

[Jeeqbit]

Yes, I think that's all pretty spot on.