Please let summoner keep raise

[Lyth]

...

This discussion is about homogenisation, yes. There's another term that we use to describe 'homogenising' the total DPS output of jobs (read: equalizing) across a given role. It's called job balance. Having some jobs that are only valuable in progression is a terrible design decision. Every job should provide value in progression. Every job should provide value in optimised clears. The current design promotes a different type of homogeneity, in which every group locks in PCT into the caster slot.

Healers aren't individually taxed for having access to raise. That's because it's a property of the role. Nobody looks at a healer raise and sees this as unique job flavour, either. If raise was standardised, then there is no longer any need for a raise tax. You can instead look to other forms of utility as a means of job diversity. We currently have job with a personal barrier, a raidwide barrier, a raidwide heal, and burst mobility, without any form of utility tax whatsoever. It's clear that the DPS discrepancy within Casters specifically is about raise and nothing else. So standardising raise as a role action frees up jobs to diversify their utility in other ways. By your own admission, we see variation in utility between melee jobs with a much tighter DPS balance than you see on ranged. Why else would there be such a large DPS discrepancy amongst ranged jobs?

I just still don’t see the point in ‘remove raise and make it a cool down’. I mean, there’s barely anything left in the game that isn’t a cool-down anymore lol. Do we really want more ? Plus there’s the whole debate of whether it’s really fair to put all that pressure on newer healers.

If Raise becomes essentially a healer exclusive outside of a 120s cool-down, doesn’t that just make it extremely punishing if the healer dies more than once?

There are a couple of ways to implement Raise as a role action without tying in a MP cost. If I were designing a 'Phoenix Down' action, I would give the action a set number of charges that scale based off of fight difficulty (i.e. less charges on harder difficulty fights). Perhaps you could tie in a short mandatory cast that can't be made instant. You create the option of replenishing charges either on a fixed timer, or relative to pre-determined fight transitions that refresh uses, or relative to LB gauge generation. There's a lot of flexibility around how you could influence access to this.

My impression was that the whole point of experimenting with Raise design in Criterion/Criterion Savage was to try to develop novel solutions to the problem of non-healer raises. There are a lot of different directions they could go with this.

[Galvuu]

Healers aren't individually taxed for having access to raise. That's because it's a property of the role. Nobody looks at a healer raise and sees this as unique job flavour, either. If raise was standardised, then there is no longer any need for a raise tax. You can instead look to other forms of utility as a means of job diversity. We currently have job with a personal barrier, a raidwide barrier, a raidwide heal, and burst mobility, without any form of utility tax whatsoever. It's clear that the DPS discrepancy within Casters specifically is about raise and nothing else. So standardising raise as a role action frees up jobs to diversify their utility in other ways. By your own admission, we see variation in utility between melee jobs with a much tighter DPS balance than you see on ranged. Why else would there be such a large DPS discrepancy amongst ranged jobs?

Let's not compare healer balance to dps balance- healer balance has its own problems and challenges and I don't want to go off-topic more than we have already. Although, again, you touch on the problem yourself. Rezzing is a property of healers. Not of casters. That's why a caster having access to rez lends it a unique niche and identity. It's a reason to pick that caster, it's a consideration you need to have when deciding what comp you want to run with. Hypothetically, if Paladin still had its raise and it could be used in combat but dealt less damage, I could see a world where it would be very desirable for prog (imagine PLD using Hallowed Ground and rezzing a healer for a lb3 save). These decisions lead to different prog/raid dynamics and niche- but valuable- use cases. The game needs more of this, not less. Much like SMN having a heal that it can somewhat time (unlike PCT's worthless one, which you need to fire on your 2 mins and is minuscule), RDM having mitigation and PCT having a shield are all different pros with different use cases that might make one more desirable than the other in terms of utility. On an aside, I wish people stop bringing up the Starry heal up. It's a worthless 25k aoe heal that you have no control at all when you're going to use and really has no meaningful use in this raid tier. Tempera Coat, on the other hand, is actually very useful and decently powerful. It's very disingenuous to keep bringing up the PCT heal when its existence is irrelevant.

This discussion is about homogenisation, yes. There's another term that we use to describe 'homogenising' the total DPS output of jobs (read: equalizing) across a given role. It's called job balance. Having some jobs that are only valuable in progression is a terrible design decision. Every job should provide value in progression. Every job should provide value in optimised clears. The current design promotes a different type of homogeneity, in which every group locks in PCT into the caster slot.

My original comment was addressing your suggestion of giving ranged jobs raises left and right. I made a counterpoint that this is not the case in melee dps. MNK has by far the best utility suit of the melee (and, imho, of the whole dps role), and we don't seem to be wishing every melee dps job would copy/paste its tools (adding VPR as an example). Again, I already stated numerous times that the ranged balance is off and that SMN/BRD/DNC and especially RDM/MCH need a damage buff. I still don't know how big that buff should be, but they should be buffed. There's a difference between raising their numbers while keeping their superior utility at the cost of some (but not as much) damage and just copy-pasting their unique niches across the role.

I don't know why having some jobs be more valuable in a prog or pf setting when compared to farm or speedkilling is a problem, either. Every job obviously brings some value- more damage isn't useless (well... this tier it was, but that's an issue with the tier, not the jobs). The tradeoff between bringing a BLM for raw damage or a SMN for easy of use and a rez has been a thing for a while. Again, it's a meaningful decision with pros and cons. This will depend on your comp, on how good your players are, etc. I've progged with rez casters before for safety/comfort (my first dragonsong clear was on RDM), and I've done it with BLM for damage. It's a very different dynamic. This is, again, in my eyes, a good thing. I don't want 15 builder/spenders with different coats of paint.

There isn't any game of any genre with substantially differentiation between its classes/champions/etc that has achieved perfect balance without making every of those classes the same. It's impossible. This is also true for XIV. The point is to make the gap small- but noticeable- so there's a tradeoff. As a final aside, this is a funny discussion because I do think it's suspect MNK has the best support suite of any dps and leads the melee pack in rdps on the 70 thru 90 percentiles (or it did a few days ago), but obviously the gap is small enough it doesn't bother people. So, clearly, all we need to do is narrow the gap we have right now and each job should be able to preserve its utility niche. Again, we can just use the melee role as guide. The gap might need to be slightly bigger because a raise is definitely more powerful than even the mighty Mantra, but I doubt we'd be seeing this uproar if the difference between BLM/PCT and SMN/RDM was 7 or 8% rdps.

[Lyth]

There is no 'job-specific flavour' associated with raises, unless you're counting the different job icons. Let's take a look:

• Raise: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.
• Resurrection: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.
• Ascend: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.
• Egeiro: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.
• Verraise: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.

Job-specific flavour occurs when you actually have significant variation in the implementation of an action. An example of this is tank invulns, which I would argue are even more powerful utility than raises. Every tank has access to invuln, but every invuln is implemented in significantly different ways. As a result, none of the tanks are taxed for having access to them. There are definitely balance issues that exist around this as well, as having a 3 minute variation in recasts across the role has a huge impact on how you tank fights. But it goes to show you that powerful actions can provide job-specific flavour without a DPS tax.

There's a false equivalence in comparing access raise on PLD with a raise on SMN/RDM because tanks also have access to invulns. That being said, if every tank had access to raise (and I'm definitely not recommending this), then there would be no DPS tax within the subrole around the effect. The only reason why the tax exists is to discourage teams from preferentially designing their comp to maximise their access to raises. But that creates the current scenario, where people have a progression comp which brings the raise casters, and a clearing comp which discards them.

If a raise action was available across a role, then it would incur no raise tax, because every comp would have access to the same amount of raises. SMN and RDM would benefit, because they would gain DPS parity. BRD/DNC/MCH would definitely benefit, if you included them, from both DPS parity and a raise. Even BLM/PCT would benefit. The only reason why anyone would ever want to argue against spreading this across the role is because they want to preserve the existing 10% DPS discrepancy that splits ranged jobs into an upper and lower tier of damage dealers. And that's what this conversation really about. Preserving the status quo. Preserving PCT's role dominance.

All forms of utility are worthless until they're not. Players will happily say that these raidwide benefits are 'useless', but the moment that someone recommends that those benefits be removed from them, they'll instantly switch gears to protest with 'that's homogenisation!!' If the dev team was willing to directly nerf Arcane Crest at the start of last expansion in response to player backlash around RPR, then I think it's very reasonable for the team to scrutinise the impact of Tempera Coat/Grassa, Smudge, and Star Prism's raidwide heal as well. That doesn't necessarily mean DPS nerfs, but at the very least it does mean that the rest of the ranged jobs deserve to not be penalised for potentially bringing a variety of support and utility effects of their own. There should not be an upper and lower tier of ranged jobs.

DPS parity is essential. This is the starting point. Having a job do significantly more DPS than another is not 'job flavour'. I want to see a level DPS playing field. Any utility actions that are considered to be 'too unbalanced' to be incorporated on a job-specific basis without a DPS penalty, like invulns and raises, should be shared across the role. You could theoretically have job-specific flavour in how those raise effects are implemented, similar to what we see with invulns, so long as they are shared across an entire role. Once you have established DPS parity, then you are free to be as creative as you like with the rest of your utility effects.

[Connor]

Not really sure why anyone would suggest that raise casters are 'protected'. If you look at the fastest clears, there are two fights where RDM and SMN have 0% representation. That's even worse than MCH. BLM isn't much better off, but at least there are a few dedicated fans that optimise on it purely for the sake of challenging themselves. Meanwhile PCT has a lock on the caster slot, with up to 98% representation in some cases. That's not a caster slot, it's a PCT slot. The caster role is a mess right now. And I say that as someone who remembers Stormblood tanking.

And this outcome is predictable. Because you're effectively trading off 10% of your damage output for that raise. RDM/SMN have a role to play in initial progression when you're trying to understand how a mechanic works, but outside of that you're going to prefer to replace them.

Now if you buffed SMN and RDM to PCT levels, something interesting happens. You wouldn't replace a melee slot, you would replace the Physical Ranged slot. Because the DPS difference that PCT provides makes up for the 1% inclusion bonus. All of these scenarios are bad.

Standardize access to raise on ranged jobs. Give them all DPS parity. Let players bring the ranged jobs that they like. Bring the player, not the job.

I mean, short of doing as mentioned above and splitting the ranged into ‘pure damage’ and ‘support’ as actual sub roles (which wouldn’t be possible because game design etc lol), wouldn't this also go back to the thing of having the ranged role merged? Then some kind of role skill Raise could go in there and suddenly the amount of jobs with that utility triples, meaning there’d be more flexibility in party comp since you’re not having to consider reserving a spot specifically for RDM/SMN. Also if more jobs can assist with recovery it gives developers more license to have involved / challenging healing mechanics.

Only issue there would be how role skills work; would phys ranged get Swiftcast and Lucid? Casters with Head Graze? I still kinda love the image of a Summoner whacking someone with their book so hard they’re stunned into silence lol. I don’t think we’ve had two groups of jobs with different role skills within the same category, so idk how that would work.

Still, in a world where dreams come true I do think it’d make more sense to just split ranged into ‘support’ and ‘damage’. I mean, wouldn’t it be much better for MCH if it was being balanced against Black Mage and Pictomancer over Bard and Dancer? Or Bard and Dancer actually being balanced against what Red Mage/Summoner have instead of just being ‘automatic raid buff machine with less damage’ lol.

[Lyth]

You could preserve the existing role designations if you felt it was really important. As an example, Arm's Length is shared by Tanks, Melee, and Physical Ranged. You can easily do the same thing with a Phoenix Down action shared across Physical Ranged and Magical Ranged.

On the role actions front, I think all of the roles could benefit from a system-wide review. Even within Magical Ranged jobs, there's significant variation in terms of how individual jobs consume and generate MP, as well as their approaches to instant casts. That's one of the reasons why a Raise 'spell' likely wouldn't work as a role action, given BLM's MP generation system and access to Triplecast. You'd almost certainly need to find another means to limit its use, be it either a charge system, recasts, or both, which is why I suggested going the Phoenix Down action route. Healers can naturally continue with their existing Raises for more on-demand access.

You probably could come up with a common set of role actions for Ranged jobs, and find ways to give them more consistent value. Actions that are more specific like Lucid or Swiftcast could be incorporated into individual job toolkits as required, or alternatively, you could find ways to repurpose them with dual functionality.

The problem with creating 'support' and 'damage' subdivisions is because the primary function of any DPS is to deal damage, and it's difficult to trade-off utility vs. damage. Ideally, you should have relatively balanced DPS numbers across the category, and instead give jobs unique utility actions that don't have a clear comparison point. For example, instead of having a Petolon role action that can only be used outside of combat, could either DNC or BRD have a job specific action to speed up their teammates movements? Could SMN or RDM create a Warp portal between two points in the map for teammates to use? Could BLM share their Leylines for once (I know, I know, but I'm only asking). Balance mainly becomes an issue when one job's action is a clear upgrade of the other.

[Tunda]

You could preserve the existing role designations if you felt it was really important. As an example, Arm's Length is shared by Tanks, Melee, and Physical Ranged. You can easily do the same thing with a Phoenix Down action shared across Physical Ranged and Magical Ranged.

On the role actions front, I think all of the roles could benefit from a system-wide review. Even within Magical Ranged jobs, there's significant variation in terms of how individual jobs consume and generate MP, as well as their approaches to instant casts. That's one of the reasons why a Raise 'spell' likely wouldn't work as a role action, given BLM's MP generation system and access to Triplecast. You'd almost certainly need to find another means to limit its use, be it either a charge system, recasts, or both, which is why I suggested going the Phoenix Down action route. Healers can naturally continue with their existing Raises for more on-demand access.

You probably could come up with a common set of role actions for Ranged jobs, and find ways to give them more consistent value. Actions that are more specific like Lucid or Swiftcast could be incorporated into individual job toolkits as required, or alternatively, you could find ways to repurpose them with dual functionality.

The problem with creating 'support' and 'damage' subdivisions is because the primary function of any DPS is to deal damage, and it's difficult to trade-off utility vs. damage. Ideally, you should have relatively balanced DPS numbers across the category, and instead give jobs unique utility actions that don't have a clear comparison point. For example, instead of having a Petolon role action that can only be used outside of combat, could either DNC or BRD have a job specific action to speed up their teammates movements? Could SMN or RDM create a Warp portal between two points in the map for teammates to use? Could BLM share their Leylines for once (I know, I know, but I'm only asking). Balance mainly becomes an issue when one job's action is a clear upgrade of the other.

Let's forget the balance for a second and understand the fantasy behind the jobs.

Summoner who can summon phenix
Redmage a mix between WHM and BLM having raise is part of the identity.

but what about BRD and DNC?
BRD a singer who support party providing utility and having raise will not ruin the fantasy
DNC have raise that is attached with the person that they dance with is so fit to the job identity.

but imagine if we have samurai raise people, systematically it will work but the game is RPG after all.. it is like forcing BLM to have raid buffs because of balance.

and again.. raise should be restricted in specific period of time like summoner can raise people while in phenix state.


it will work but fantasy wise I don't see that fitting

[Raikai]

DNC have raise that is attached with the person that they dance with is so fit to the job identity.

I think that's a great case of good implementation of a raise for Dancer.

Something like Phoenix Step - 2 step action that shares a recast time with Standard Step, but at a slight reduced potency. It raises your Dancer Partner and removes the Brink of death debuff, or just the latter if the person is already rezzed by somebody else. I'd say 5 minute "no Dancer raise" debuff to the Dancer to prevent it to be applied multiple times, so it's something like once a fight, so it's not taxed like the other's rezzes due to how niche it would be.

Unless the DP is another rezzer, which is very unlikely, this turns out being more personal utility, because it's the best interest of the Dancer to have their partner back on their feet (and no brink of death debuff) ASAP.

[Connor]

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On the role actions front, I think all of the roles could benefit from a system-wide review. Even within Magical Ranged jobs, there's significant variation in terms of how individual jobs consume and generate MP, as well as their approaches to instant casts. That's one of the reasons why a Raise 'spell' likely wouldn't work as a role action, given BLM's MP generation system and access to Triplecast

Role/role actions definitely do need some kind of review at some point. That said, even if it was exactly the same as it is now, would it really be that easy for them though? I mean, assuming a Black Mage had Raise in current design (not that I’d want to them to that’s too weird lol), if they were going to use Triplecast to Raise the party they’d need to use 3 GCDs to raise the first three party members, hit Triplecast again, cast one Raise, then they’d have to go into Ice Phase and cast a Blizzard IV to finish the final two raises (since ice phase doesn’t restore mp automatically I think?).

Which, if you were in ‘dps check content’ you’d probably be dangerously close to failing if your Black Mage spent 16s with doing 0 dps while they raised the entire party. Plus there’s things like whether they need to do a body check within that timeframe, avoiding mechanics, potential slaps from the boss if tanks are dead. If you weren’t in ‘dps check’ content then does it really matter if the Black Mage could accidentally do some weird super Raise when it would take so much time and effort?

I just still don’t see the point in ‘remove raise and make it a cool down’. I mean, there’s barely anything left in the game that isn’t a cool-down anymore lol. Do we really want more ? Plus there’s the whole debate of whether it’s really fair to put all that pressure on newer healers.

If Raise becomes essentially a healer exclusive outside of a 120s cool-down, doesn’t that just make it extremely punishing if the healer dies more than once? After their first death they’d essentially be locked out of continuing the fight and have to sit there eating dirt for however long the Raise cool-down is, which doesn’t seem very fair when DPS will always have a healer ready to insta-raise them thanks to Swiftcast’s cool-down. Though, actually getting a healer who will actually use Raise is it’s own issue lol; I’ve genuinely seen healers wipe the party because they wouldn’t hard cast a Raise (usually because other healer goes down lol). I’m all for giving healers more responsibility, especially in terms of healing, but I feel like dps being able to assist with Resurrection is something that should stay, preferably in the form it’s in now.


As for ‘damage and support’ subdivisions, I don’t mean ‘literal support’ as in ‘does essentially no damage’. That ofc wouldn’t work in any capacity in ffxiv. I just mean essentially what we have now but with a clearer line down the middle for ‘what a supportive dps is’ and ‘what a selfish dps is’.
Like why in the world does Monk have an aoe heal? Who goes to a job known for punching people and dealing damage and says ‘wow I want to heal my party’ lol. The line between which jobs are ‘supportive’ and which are ‘selfish’ is razor thin at this point.

[Supersnow845]

Is it really fair to mention healer balance when it’s literally the worst balanced of the 5 subroles. AST is 12% higher than SGE and 13% higher than WHM (2% above SCH). SCH is 10% above SGE and 11% than WHM in the middle of the first tier of an expansion when the buff healers always scale more strongly as the expansion goes on and healers can’t even hide behind rezz as utility or the bubble of the phys ranged 1%

They are just out and out the most unbalanced role in the game, they have DPS differences comparable to the casters but they don’t actually offer large utility differences like the casters do AND the higher damage dealers also give better utility when you get into the weeds. using them as a representation of what happens if you standardise powerful utility like raise is basically just an argument in opposition of said standardisation

[Carighan]

Yeah the healers have marginal variations in their raises, but not directly tied to the rezzes:

* White Mages will often cast theirs at 0 mana cost.
* Scholars due to their nature can have a not insignificant amount of healing continue to go out (in particular when Seraph is around).
* Astrologians can cast multiple rezzes 2,5s faster once out of Swiftcast due to Lightspeed.
* Sages can look very sad.

DPS parity is essential. This is the starting point. Having a job do significantly more DPS than another is not 'job flavour'. I want to see a level DPS playing field.

Though, keep in mind that the push for tighter and tighter balance is what steadily removes job flavour as more and more elements get judged not balance-able "enough" and removed whole (like actual pets, or variable buff timers other than 120s).