/r/ffxivdiscussion: If you want WoW-style design, you're going to have to accept-

[KisaiTenshi]

The fallacy is to think that because something bad happens in another game (here, WoW), then that bad thing is automatically going to crop up in XIV were it to attempt introducing variations, and that every attempt to do anything else than homogenization is doomed to fall into the exact same horrifying pitfalls.

Nah. Any time something "bad" happens in another game, all the other games in the genre go "oh, we can't have that", and usually just proactively try to prevent the bad thing.

While SE doesn't have anti-cheat programs in 14, they also seem to go about dealing with bots and players botting in a way that is ineffective, sweeping under the rug at best. If they really cared about enforcing the no third-party tools rule, they would use those sites that the programs report to to ban players that show up on it. And no "but I might get caught in someone elses data" is not an excuse. We all know exactly what is going on. Players chasing the highest DPS on said sites are clearly, shamelessly, using it, and SE is within their right to suspend those characters. These sites only exist because of the toxicity in WoW and players bringing that toxicity to XIV.

The problem will always come back to players mistakenly or brazenly lying about what they do with such data. Like if you have the common mod launcher for one of the trendy 4-player games you know what that launcher does when it sees 14 installed? It tries to sell you on modding 14 through it. Every time it launches. The problem here is that while modding might be acceptable behavior in these P2P 4-player games, it's not acceptable in 14, but they're not going to tell you that. You're just supposed to be smart enough to not get caught.

And as we've seen on the forum, time and time again, people will namedrop not only the websites, but the tools, and the moderators will come by and delete the threads. There is a section of the player base that don't know the "do not brag about your crimes in front of the courthouse" social cue.

By using things that players clearly identified as "coming from WoW"'s design, that was bait for WoW players to come here. And as I recall from the 2.x Novice Network, players were constantly asking how to do (WoW) thing and using the NN as a global chat channel. Many Mentors kept accidently inviting spam bots into it. Anyone who played ANY other game that had a global chat feature knew this was going to happen and SE just naively implemented it anyway. Maybe it's different now? I don't know, mentors are if anything worse players because they feel like they've been made customer service employees without their knowledge so they are excited to help until they get a party of ungrateful players that don't actually want the help. I've also done the Mentor thing in a different MMO, and it's the same problem there. Players don't really want "help" so much as a carry through a piece of content that is too hard without grinding for the gear needed to clear it.

[Valence]

... How did we even move from job balanced to cheats, bots and parsing again?

[Keldion]

The fallacy is to think that because something bad happens in another game (here, WoW), then that bad thing is automatically going to crop up in XIV were it to attempt introducing variations, and that every attempt to do anything else than homogenization is doomed to fall into the exact same horrifying pitfalls.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it can rhyme.

Bringing up similar situations isn't meant to be framed as an ultimatum or definitive proof of Bad Thing™ assuredly occuring, but examples of what happens when we ask for things without careful consideration.

To once again mention up Wow, it wasn't very long ago in Dragonflight (Season 1/2) that some challenging Mythic+ dungeons were cleared without healers. The culprits ranged from inconsistent dungeon tuning to very strong DPS profiles and a potent package of offhealing and utility. This is what caused a shakeup in the mana pools for hybrid DPS classes, and got an additional mana cost attached to Word of Glory where none was present.

FF14 is NOT unique in its healer players feeling marginalized, yet I don't think most of the supporters of #HealerStrike are balancing out those feels with pointed questions. E.g. Why is it happening? Why is there nothing to heal?

It's easy to tip the scales very far in either direction. I'm willing to grant that healers in 14 could use an extra button or two for DPS abilities, but that will not increase their share of overall damage. Therefore, Square must rob Peter to pay Paul.

[Y2K21]

To once again mention up Wow, it wasn't very long ago in Dragonflight (Season 1/2) that some challenging Mythic+ dungeons were cleared without healers. The culprits ranged from inconsistent dungeon tuning to very strong DPS profiles and a potent package of offhealing and utility. This is what caused a shakeup in the mana pools for hybrid DPS classes, and got an additional mana cost attached to Word of Glory where none was present.

It also played into how good a tank Protection Paladin actually was compared to the rest of the field as well.

[Zaniel]

Why is it that people always go from one extreme to another when we're comparing WoW to FF?
We don't NEED a 20% dps difference or anything. We just want jobs to play differently, and have minor advantages and disadvantages over others.
So you have a reason to actually level more than 1 job.

Because it is a PLAYER problem not a dev problem, players are assholes who weld their butts to the tiniest meta advantage and then create a toxic environment where they refuse to accept anyone who isn't 110% on meta. People will exclude others on a 1% differential in performance,and when you go down the WoW path of builds and equipment multipliers you make it impossible to "just have minor variation". The balancing equation snowballs and becomes impossible to manage and 2 expansions later we have people sitting at +200% DPS variation because the devs can't account for every multiplying factor or they spend 95% of their dev time on balancing classes instead of designing content.

[Eudyptes]

FFXI had a lot of cool ideas that were close to being great. The jobs were well designed but often hindered by the sub job system and how it was so limited..

I'm 100% with you on this. It was originally my hope that FFXIV was going to be the more natural progression of FFXI, bringing what made that game great into a new era, but it didn't happen. Don't get me wrong, I love FFXIV, but it never held the same place in my heart FFXIV (and even pre-cata WoW) did. There are a few reasons this is the case, but the main two are job design/identity and the other is that the world in FFXIV feels small and honestly kind of empty even though there are a lot of zones. I'm not sure the latter can be changed or is even worth doing so, but I'm still holding out hope that going forward in 8.0 and beyond they start making strides to overhaul the class design philosophy. Assuming FFXXII or XVIII isn't going to be an MMO and on the horizon that is.

I think they honestly should not even add any new classes next xpac, and overhaul the current ones in major ways. Like letting SMN summon primals on demand in any order with their own separate abilities and CDs (and adding the missing big 3 of course). Give tanks and healers their own identities in bigger and unique ways, like leaning into GNB being the "dps tank", adding a future evasion tank, revisiting the old cards system for AST and expanding on it to be much more impactful, making SGE actually heal primarily through damage, SCH through pets, etc. Also use this opportunity to figure out how to actually make BLU and BST real jobs. Heck, those could be the "new jobs". Sure, this leads to imbalance, but I honestly believe that as long as every class remains viable and/or excels at certain fights doesn't on others this won't really be a problem. It can be a problem in WoW, but FFXIV has already resolved that issue by allowing all classes on the same character and homogenized gear sets.

I know it's a big ask, but honestly this should have been the original progression track for these jobs from the beginning.

[Kira619]

Wait people are wanting Wow-style design? Naw I'm good lol. I use to play WoW and the only thing I prefer in WoW is how classes has multiple specs and I feel the story does a better job of reflecting what you are as a character (example, if you play the dragon like race in the recent expansion, many dragons would reference you as that lineage and give you extra dialogue, versus in FFXIV you can play a Viera, head to a Fanow and they give you dialogue about living long as if you won't live as long as them O_O?) Other than that, I love the way FFXIV is. The community is way better (in regards to playing, forums is a bit different but forums are usually places folks go to speak criticism or when servers are down lol.) You can pick any race and play as any class/job. You can enjoy watching the cutscenes and not get booted, it's just so many things about FFXIV that I prefer. If FFXIV started to head down the WoW direction, I'd bounce.