#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[CaptainLagbeard]

They had the problem of a tank that could block physical attacks but the boss had magical ones. Old-style unique/job identity is extremely hard to balance if at all.

With the Job system, it's not really all that hard to be honest... As you can somewhat reasonably expect someone doing Savage to have more than 1 job leveled... If one tank is better at some fights, you just use that tank for those fights.

[Packetdancer]

Old-style unique/job identity is extremely hard to balance if at all.

Really, the only way you can truly "balance" a wide variety of distinct classes/jobs/whatever is to simply stop caring about making them all equally viable and just lean into making them all equally interesting. Which can work, but I'm not going to pretend like I've seen it work well often. Meanwhile, we as a community—at least at the high end—have also demonstrated if something is not "optimal" it may be shunned compared to optimal compositions; witness MCH being locked out of some PF groups back during Abyssos initially, which suggests "prioritizing unique play above balance and equal viability" may not be a strat that would work for this particular game.

I don't entirely like where things are at—leastwise for healers—as a player, but putting on my game dev hat, boy can I agree that this makes actually making things (mostly) equally viable at endgame a much less horrible task to tackle.

[sharknado]

With the Job system, it's not really all that hard to be honest... As you can somewhat reasonably expect someone doing Savage to have more than 1 job leveled... If one tank is better at some fights, you just use that tank for those fights.

Depends on their approach. Right now we say "you can play whatever you want". Whenever PLD had problems with an encounter in like SHB it got a rework. All jobs are similar but also valid for the end game content with small variations. WoW didn't had and disc priest was goto for most mythic world first races while failing as preemptive healer that has to hit something to heal in other content, with less organized groups and so on. Then they cut the outliers.

We can have a fight that needs a BLM to take a pact with a voidsent. Then specific tanks for specific bosses or content to complicate it more. WAR for dungeons, PLD/DRK for phys/magic bosses... And as most players would have the attitude of picking best job, best at endgame most would pick PLD/DRK as their first leveling job. And people that like WAR would be rejected like PLD in Hevensward.

[Shurrikhan]

Really, the only way you can truly "balance" a wide variety of distinct classes/jobs/whatever is to simply stop caring about making them all equally viable and just lean into making them all equally interesting.

That's not the way advantage generally works unless they are countered by opportunities for equal exploitation of a different advantage in each and every instance, including the compositional contexts of those advantages. Which is worthwhile, certainly, but is vastly more involved, chaotic, error-prone, and therefore time-consuming to develop.

Without that extensive care, by the time the features are perform differently enough in a given encounter or content type to make a significant difference, well... they make a significant difference. So why would a typical group sandbag themselves by not taking the job that does 15% better for fights of type X, let alone the job that does 10% worse even than the average? You just end up with your participation across all content being subject to additional grind requirements, needing job leveled and geared A for you to be allowed to tank content type or encounter A, B for B, C for C, etc. It therefore ends up providing mere horizontal progression by way of grind in order to unlock the choices in content you used to have for free, not real or additional choice in how to tank or what tank to play.

[Packetdancer]

That's not the way advantage generally works unless they are countered by opportunities for equal exploitation of a different advantage in each and every instance, including the compositional contexts of those advantages. Which is worthwhile, certainly, but is vastly more involved, chaotic, error-prone, and therefore time-consuming to develop.

I do in fact agree with you; as I said in my post, I have not seen it work well often. There are exceptions; Warframe manages to have quite a few frames play wildly differently, and just at baseline they are not what I would call "equally viable" for various things, because the devs have demonstrably tried to focus more on making them interesting to play. However, the game has an extensive gear modding system and you can slurp an ability off of one frame and put it onto another to replace a normal ability, and things like that allow you to get very creative to a degree that lets you come up with ways to make things viable for whatever content you want.

But—again, as noted—I do not think that approach would work for this game. For a whole variety of reasons.

But "I want a wide variety of unique job/class identities and play styles" and "I want things to be roughly equally viable" is an extremely difficult set of things to combine, and the more jobs/classes/whatevers you add to the mix, the closer it becomes to actively impossible; you largely have to pick one or the other.

[Shurrikhan]

But "I want a wide variety of unique job/class identities and play styles" and "I want things to be roughly equally viable" is an extremely difficult set of things to combine, and the more jobs/classes/whatevers you add to the mix, the closer it becomes to actively impossible; you largely have to pick one or the other.

I worry this is splitting hairs, but I feel like I should elaborate on a couple points.

First, I don't think people tend to assume that the best possible run with a job under best possible play by self and party, best possible composition, and best possible RNG with a given job should need to be within 1% of another job's... so long as that 1% is minute compared to other elements of variance unavoidable between runs.

The more varied the strats, the more that can go differently without blatant error, the wider the margin of acceptance. I'm not sure anything beyond that asymptote (in which the more of A, the larger the lenience for B) is worth worrying about so long as whatever community-noted net advantage is shuffled enough over fights and/or over time (early prog, later), compositions, etc.

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But anywho, that's arguing theoretical bounds and is therefore far, far less practical, so long as there's any desire to make the game more fleshed out regardless. More practical then is HOW kit may interact with content.

For that, I'd be most interested in ensuring that we have a great many (perhaps even overlapping, if need be) categories for capacity and seek to ensure that jobs' efforts required to provide that much and the maximum they can reasonably provide in practice are roughly on par with one another by crafting content in such a way as to pull on each of those capacities at roughly equal volume.

Put more simply, imagine each job as having a irregular decagonal radial graph showing their various powers. You want to slice what content makes use of in such a way that the volumes by the content from each kit used are roughly equal, even if the shape of that content's own "graph" so to speak varied wildly.

Which is far, far, from easy, I understand. But it does start first with those categories and imagining in what ways one can even indirectly but meaningfully near an encounter's goal, be it healing something to X% HP, reducing its HP to 0, moving it from point A to point B, or whatever else.

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Sidenote: One other way to balance jobs is to instead balance their gambits. For instance, when players can only really afford (in terms of time or account-wide time-locked content) to level one job per role, they tend to stick to that one job per role and parties tend to take a more lenient view of acceptable inefficiency (so long as the party can still clear content). However, as it'd stand for XIV this would require massive losses to XIV's unique selling points, to accessibility (in terms of time and allowance for more indecisive/choice-anxious players), and customizability of gameplay at the player and party levels.

A potential compromise, though, is just to have more content where specific utility advantages are decently frequent but in roughly equal portion and are especially valuable (relative to raw output) and the exact encounters are largely randomized. In those cases, without knowing who will come out on top, again a larger variance tends to be acceptable so long as, chances accounted for, each enters with roughly equal risk.

[Aravell]

Really, the only way you can truly "balance" a wide variety of distinct classes/jobs/whatever is to simply stop caring about making them all equally viable and just lean into making them all equally interesting. Which can work, but I'm not going to pretend like I've seen it work well often. Meanwhile, we as a community—at least at the high end—have also demonstrated if something is not "optimal" it may be shunned compared to optimal compositions; witness MCH being locked out of some PF groups back during Abyssos initially, which suggests "prioritizing unique play above balance and equal viability" may not be a strat that would work for this particular game.

MCH wasn't locked out because it wasn't viable, MCH was locked out because it was far enough behind that the 1% stat boost and their personal damage wasn't enough to bridge the gap between them and a melee, something that is happening again this tier btw.

What the dev team should do is to stop trying to break player-created metas, it's not worth the problems that it creates. Make unique and fun jobs, then make sure they're all viable, that's all they need to do.

Also they need to actually nerf jobs, endless buffing will just lead to powercreep and end up with an unbalanced game, which is what the game has been trending towards.

[Ritsugamesh]

MCH wasn't locked out because it wasn't viable, MCH was locked out because it was far enough behind that the 1% stat boost and their personal damage wasn't enough to bridge the gap between them and a melee, something that is happening again this tier btw.

What the dev team should do is to stop trying to break player-created metas, it's not worth the problems that it creates. Make unique and fun jobs, then make sure they're all viable, that's all they need to do.

Also they need to actually nerf jobs, endless buffing will just lead to powercreep and end up with an unbalanced game, which is what the game has been trending towards.

Couldn't agree more. So much of the thought is around the balance at all costs and neglect to see that it is impossible to police the playerbase and the same things will continue to happen ad infinitum. So instead of tightening the clamps even harder, just try and make the jobs actually fun to play.

Reducing the power curve in concert will also help to mitigate wide balance issues. When you're slapping multiple 1,000 potency skills in kits that then get augmented by stacking buffs, 2 min windows, and all that, they're just digging their own grave.

[SeriousPan]

Mind you, the focus on Serious Endgame Raiding to the exclusion of everything else was not the only decision that led to WildStar's downfall, but it was sure a contributing factor. And while it wasn't exactly "balancing for this specific group," it is sure an example of "heeding the requests of the 'top players' to the exclusion of all else can be harmful."

(Despite its flaws, I do miss WildStar, though.)

It didn't help that a lot of countries had wildly high ping when playing, like Australia, and were essentially blocked off from feasibly doing any end game content. I loved Wildstar and I miss it all the time but yeah for all the reasons you said it shot itself in the foot. Hell of a cautionary tale for MMOs.

[Packetdancer]

MCH wasn't locked out because it wasn't viable, MCH was locked out because it was far enough behind that the 1% stat boost and their personal damage wasn't enough to bridge the gap between them and a melee, something that is happening again this tier btw.

Okay, fair enough; instead of saying MCH wasn't viable, we'll say that MCH was technically viable, it just wasn't optimal, hence why it got excluded.

What the dev team should do is to stop trying to break player-created metas, it's not worth the problems that it creates. Make unique and fun jobs, then make sure they're all viable, that's all they need to do.

Except you yourself point out in the quote above that even with MCH being viable, the fact that it wasn't as optimal as other things meant it got excluded. (Granted it was a dramatic lack of optimization, but still.)

I would argue (and have argued) that viability alone is not enough for how this community optimizes fights, and that need to have things not just viable but more or less functionally equivalent in overall damage contribution (within a certain margin of error, anyway) introduces a significant limiting factor on how distinct and different from each other you can make jobs within a role.

A potential compromise, though, is just to have more content where specific utility advantages are decently frequent but in roughly equal portion and are especially valuable (relative to raw output) and the exact encounters are largely randomized. In those cases, without knowing who will come out on top, again a larger variance tends to be acceptable so long as, chances accounted for, each enters with roughly equal risk.

I agree with this; I think the fact that FFXIV's encounters are so rigidly scripted is potentially a significant part of what constrains the dev team design-wise. The fact that we can make a rigid timeline for a fight means we can literally mathematically break down what is optimal to take into a fight. If there was a bit more variance and random chance, that would be a (slightly) more nebulous situation to solve for.