How would you tackle job identity?

[Hycinthus]

Accept that jobs won't be perfectly balanced and some may be more effective paired with others, and some may be more effective in specific fights.

In wow dungeons certain classes are significantly better than the alternatives and creates scenarios where people just do not accept certain healers, or certain tanks or certain dps. In ffxiv this would translate to "sorry we don't bring white mages. only astrologians. sorry we don't bring warriors ever. pick another tank if you want to come. This probably even bleeds into casual play when you look for groups with random people. But the class design is largely aimed at raiding. So increasing from 8 to 10 people doesn't fix the problem. Wow found that even with 10 people they still had to homogenize classes in order for fight mechanics designed for 20 people to be even be possible for 10 player raids.

And I think we're just gonna have to be able to accept that.

Increasing Job Identity will come with some form of certain jobs being more effective and popular than others. I think you cannot have both, because that's the nature of having "unique identity". Having both actually is a contradiction, but of course, you can minimize this with continuous tweakings. At certain expansions, some jobs will become more effective, and at other expansions, other jobs.

In the early days FFXI, wasn't it that certain jobs truly paired well with some? Especially jobs that can produce Skillchains together, and of course BLM was preferred for Magic Burst, and you wouldn't go to a party without a BLM. And for support, RDM was preferred for Refresh MP tick, compared to Bard's MP tick song? And definitely you couldn't go to a party without a WHM's Raise 3 in case you died and lost XP, and you didn't feel SMN heals were enough, but occassionally you will meet that amazing one of a kind SMN who could do that, and you write down that person's name. And at some point of the next expansion, certain jobs shine more, then there was a trend of Ninja tanking, etc?

So some jobs rise and fall, and maybe that's fine.

Personally, I love to play an under-picked and underdog job in other MMOs. I would often search which job is least played, and then try to be that, because I enjoy being unique and rare.

And I think that's what the essence of the argument of wanting Job Identity.

Job Identity is actually just Identity. Everyone wants to feel unique in a way, and not homogenized.

[Zolvolt]

In the early days FFXI, wasn't it that certain jobs truly paired well with some? Especially jobs that can produce Skillchains together, and of course BLM was preferred for Magic Burst, and you wouldn't go to a party without a BLM. And for support, RDM was preferred for Refresh MP tick, compared to Bard's MP tick song? And definitely you couldn't go to a party without a WHM's Raise 3 in case you died and lost XP, and you didn't feel SMN heals were enough, but occassionally you will meet that amazing one of a kind SMN who could do that, and you write down that person's name. And at some point of the next expansion, certain jobs shine more, then there was a trend of Ninja tanking, etc?

Correct, thats why they changed it. everybody wants to be unique but nobody wants to be left out. Being left out is the worst state a game can get to. FFXIV plays it safe (too safe) but we also don't get jobs left out. That is absolutely worth it. But we do need to not be so safe and bring some more fun back. I also can't imagine how badly this community would take inbalance. I mean this expansion raiders absolutely lost their mind of one job having one GCD's worth of damage less than other jobs in their role.

[Dyvid]

First you need to tackle Role Identity first. What type of tank are there? What is a caster? What should a healer do during a fight? What should P.Range DPS do for a party?

Jobs should be unique within their respective roles. That way people who enjoying playing Healers or Tanks or DPS have unique designs to pick from within their chosen playstyle.

[Shurrikhan]

In wow dungeons certain classes are significantly better than the alternatives and creates scenarios where people just do not accept certain healers, or certain tanks or certain dps.

This no more less true in WoW's Mythic+ even past reward caps than it is in XIV's Savage raids even now, despite the greater homogeneity in the latter.

Yes, if something is flagrantly undertuned due to a terrible tier set or a new bug, people in the know will want more ilvl and/or achievement score from that spec than most (as they may from specs that are rarely well understood except until very high level content, specs that tend to attract "auto-pilot" players, etc.), but until you're deep into "purely for the ego points" territory, everything gets picked so long as the overall comp still covers the basics (a battle res, sufficient displacement for the particular dungeon, a spare dispel for Afflicted weeks, enough CC for incorp weeks, etc.), which is not particularly limiting at all.

Though there are some FotMs in most patches (Vengeance Demon Hunter being a longstanding one this expansion), the reason a given player is declined short of a particular fight of Mythic raiding or the highest tiers of Mythic+ dungeoning... is more often equivalent to "We already have enough of A, B, and C capacities you bring, not enough of E and F, and already have a Physical Ranged for your particular raidbuff" rather than "We don't take your kind."

[KageTokage]

I'd honestly rather have the jobs be less balanced but more fun to play. Just tune the DPS checks to be less strict to compensate.

[Shurrikhan]

Just tune the DPS checks to be less strict to compensate.

The less strictly you tune DPS checks, the less value there is in playing making good use of one's kit or fitting party utility, which then devolves/degrades much of the enjoyment you garnered from having less homogenous classes.

[SeverianLyonesse]

I would remove party-wide damage and de facto damage buffs across all classes.

Then, the two minute meta having been eliminated, retool jobs to focus on buffing themselves or single partners (kind of how a lot of skills work already) and otherwise create more reactive/improvisational gameplay loops instead of a railroaded rotation.

If any party-wide buffers did exist, I would make them expressly be able to keep up their buffs for most of the fight instead of a brief window, with one of their primary mini games being the maintenance of the buffs.

Conservatively though I would err on the side of no party buffs. GW2 went that direction and now every support class feels the same, expected to proceed all the buffs all the time with no flavorful differentiation. I suppose in theory you could balance say, a haste-support to be roughly as effective as a power-support with number tweaking and a limitation on how many supports per party, but players will somehow ruin it with optimization anyway. MMOs are a wonderful demonstration of how individual ambition en masse--in this case, most players prioritizing grind efficiency over actually enjoying the feel of the game--just destroys all things good and beautiful in the world.

[KisaiTenshi]

In wow dungeons certain classes are significantly better than the alternatives and creates scenarios where people just do not accept certain healers, or certain tanks or certain dps. In ffxiv this would translate to "sorry we don't bring white mages. only astrologians. sorry we don't bring warriors ever. pick another tank if you want to come.

What Final Fantasy does right, out of the box, is not pigeon-holing characters into only being able to play one class. You can do every class on every character, just change the weapon. In WoW and many other MMO's, you can't even customize the character because they designed gear to only fit that one character model. So everyone in that class looks exactly the same except for maybe their hair and eyes colorings.

FFXIV, you almost never see a pile of people wearing the same gear for very long, because every race in the game can wear every piece of gear (well, almost every piece) and there's only a small amount of gender-locked gear.

When it comes to job identity in the game, what we really have are only 5 jobs. "Tank", "Healer", "DPS Melee", "DPS Ranged", and "DPS Caster". They can't make each of those too different, otherwise we get exactly what you said, where people will only play with a perfect party composition meta.

How we fix that has to come from the MSQ design first. What did ARR require to do a dungeon? 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 DPS (any). There is nothing unique for DPS to do, in ANY dungeon. They just hit/shoot things. What does EW dungeons require? the exact same thing. You're never required to use your entire kit, because they can only design around the "common" kit. As a healer, fighting that final solo Zeno's fight, once as Scholar and once as White Mage, it takes forever, but that's the ONLY time in the game MSQ where using more than just the basic kit was even considered. The rest of the time you can dodge the punishing hits.

What if, the dungeons actually changed based on job composition, so you are required to use more of your kit, even when you select the NPC party? Like there used to be ARR monsters/hostile-NPC's that matched the classes of players, and we haven't see much of that in dungeons. This is probably asking too much from dungeon design, but is it really too much to ask to run into monsters where you are required to "sleep" something in the encounter ( we saw this exactly once in Brayflox Longstop) otherwise it will heal the boss, or call more adds. Could a machinist "disable" the doors to keep adds from coming from one direction. You could cut half the adds in theory when you take support DPS, where as that option is not available when taking pure damage DPS. Cut the adds in half, the dungeon is done faster. Instead of "Wall-to-wall" tanking that's been the norm since HW.

The old ARR dungeons used to have unique mechanics, but they've been erased (Toto-rak, Dzemael Darkhold have completely lost mechanics, but they weren't class-specific mechanics, just "extra run around" ones.) Other games, which focus on exploration, would usually need a "thief"(Rogue) character to deal with traps, nothing like that exists in 14. Other games would need the Cleric (white mage) to deal with undead, that doesn't exist in 14. There are things that could dynamically change the difficulty of a dungeon just from the role composition. Let's say you "need" a white mage to dispel a room of undead, or you could just fight them. That's an option, one that doesn't "require" always bringing the white mage. Maybe in this specific room if you use holy, it instant-kills the mobs. Maybe another room "Gravity" breaks a wall instantly and you can bypass it. You could either always brute-force your way through the dungeon, or you could take shorter paths if you have certain healer jobs in your party, or certain tanks.

But 14 doesn't really do exploration, fights are choreographed dances that have only a small amount of wiggle room for variation, and hence the jobs get samey to prevent having a "best-in-slot DPS"-only situation.

[Freyt]

PLD: Remove gauge cost on Cover. Boost damage reduction on shield wing defensive.
DRK: Give Delirium 5 stacks for 30s, and give it an aura similar to Black Mage during it's limit break in PVP. Delete Carve and Spit. Abyssal Drain gets an MP cost/DA cost and 1s recast (remove MP recovery). Bloodspiller/Quietus restore a set amount of MP.

SCH: Remove Aetherflow. Fairy gauge constantly increases up to 100, 10 per 10s, starts at 100. Aetherflow skills cost 30 fairy gauge. Replace Dissipation with a skill that increases fairy gauge by 50 and restores MP by 20% on a 60s recast (named Fairy Kiss or something).
AST: On the right track. 4 Cards at once is a bit much though probably.

DRG: Delete Battle Litany and Life Surge.
SAM: Give back 3s cast time on Iajutsu.
NIN: If Ten Chi Jin is cancelled via movement, grants a buff that lets you use it again with the remaining ninjutsu uses.

BLM: Sword Magic (single target damage buff). New changes are confusing and will have to wait and see if it sucks or not.
SMN: It uses a rod instead of a book. Not tied to SCH anymore. More primal summons. Dark Phoenix (Endsinger) for 4th demi summon. Delete Searing Light. Combine Energy Drain and Energy Siphon.

BRD: Remove dots.
MCH: Make flamethrower actually useful. Bigger focus on multi-weapon instead of Heat Blast/Gauss Round. Delete Wildfire.

Some of the healing skills probably need to die.

[Shurrikhan]

I would remove party-wide damage and de facto damage buffs across all classes.

So long as they're tuned around, I don't much see any need to avoid them outright, tbh, so long as they continue with the XIV approach and don't push anything like WoW's (nigh-passive, nigh-permanent, fewer than their are classes, overriding each other if multiple).

I just don't think there should be an insistence on all (or all but a handful of "selfish" jobs) having them, let alone at the same timings, and they probably ought to feature some degree of split or square root scaling across affected allies as not to be underpowered in light party content whenever balanced for full party content.

There are currently a few too many 2-minute ones, but I'd be as fine with some of them (and some core CDs in turn, while others become more bankable to fit into a greater variety of larger CDs' structures) going 80s or 90s as outright removing that (imo) excess.

I.e., I just don't see the point of so many going off at once if they're also going to do so every time. By then, it just becomes visual bloat.

Granted, even that would be almost wholly mitigated via greater control of our status effects' display, such that we could organize healing, defensive, offensive, mobility, and other utility effects into whatever and however many collections we prefer, sorted in order of strength, by specific preference, etc., with single-target ones and/or our own effects being weighted higher however we please, etc., etc.