Why not having "Difficult" jobs?

[Boblawblah]

I'm pretty sure a lot of people would say "yes" without a second though. I think most of us agree that's fine to have easy and hard jobs coexisting that appeal to different people as long as everybody is having fun.

EDIT : imo it's more a matter of identity and playstyle variety than difficulty that matters anyway. We all have different fantasies and that's what matter.

I have to wonder if people, in particular raiders, would complain that <insert_easy_job> can do 'y' as good as <insert_hard_job>, why bother playing <hard_job>, or worse, we need to nerf the easy job. Summoner comes to mind.

[gllt]

Coming from a decade of fighting games, "homogeny balance" being "good for balancing competitive gameplay" is a giant myth. It's great at creating over designed slop nobody wants though and patches made up of dial tweaking changes and looking at the audience for approval while fundamentally being unable to escape from boring design ever out of fear it'll upset the balance that they never achieved to begin with.

It's good at creating the need for gimmicks and illusions that replace all the player agency that slowly gets chipped away to try and convince your players that the game is still good, actually, just try these changes. Look at the cool new animations! It's good at creating a dev cycle of having to give players a fake amount of depth to explore every patch and recreating that once they find out how shallow the changes are.

Also definitely a lot of reading player metrics. Basically divination, trying to act like the way most devs collect player numbers and use them means anything is hilarious. They might as well read from a magical 8 ball.

At the end of the day, if you can't convince the most casual players that they don't, in fact, need to play a top tier or do the most optimal rotation/combo, you will forever suffer their whining. And the top players are the same! It's the intermediate wall of skill understanding. Good Jobs/Characters do the Good Rotation/Combo for the Good Damage and Bad Ones are Bad. They simply need Patches. When my favorite job gets The Good Patch then I will be Good too. I'm simply being held back from my potential, you see. When it comes down to numbers for people trying to squeeze out max theoretical damage and stuff that's different but that's not the actual gameplay and neither is speedrunning high end content, those are edge cases. They will figure out answers though, they don't need patches to hand it to them. The fun is supposed to be in making it work in those scenarios.

Game design is doomed because it tries to appeal not to casuals or hard core players, but because it tries to appeal to no one except ease of development and creating a community that will defend bad design or be too busy with infighting.

It caters to protecting the ego of players who feel the need to look good for doing their job at all times.

I also stand by the fact that they just want to try to squash any differences between levels of gameplay to create an illusion that the skill difference is so minute, anyone can do it! You can be top player too, Timmy! But then Timmy can't double weave consistently, whatever will he do? His GCD drifted in Aurum Vale.. he cleared without a single hitch BUT LOOK AT HIS POOR GCD THE HUMANITY, THE DPS LOSS..

Like yeah whiners exist at all levels, it's just modern gamer star quarterback syndrome. It's a terminal fear of perceived failure.

[Aravell]

I have to wonder if people, in particular raiders, would complain that <insert_easy_job> can do 'y' as good as <insert_hard_job>, why bother playing <hard_job>, or worse, we need to nerf the easy job. Summoner comes to mind.

SMN wasn't a problem purely because it's easier than the other casters.

SMN was a problem because it has a lot of completely free movement, it can res, it can heal, it's extremely easy to master and it also did more damage than RDM. SMN was basically a direct upgrade over RDM in every way and it was breaking the role balance by existing, the problem was not as simple as SMN being a bit too easy.

[gllt]

I think if a job is clearly better than a truly similar job and you can prove it's harmful to meaningful amounts of content, it's good to change them.

If they're just easier or harder to master though, while that does hold weight on a tier list of strength, it's an abysmal thing to attempt to balance to please people or make a fun game while trying to do.

Role balance should care about if everyone can clear but it should not try to make it equally easy for all jobs to clear. It just make jobs that suck. Just let them be different. Let one of the jobs be the harder one.

"But then no one will let them into party finder for the content because a tier list said they are bad" yeah gamers are clowns we know. I'm tired of my game design being subjected to this. Making everything homogeneous so people will play nice with each other doesn't work. They'll just find a new metric for what defines bad job and exclude someone else. You can't make a game that makes people stop caring about what is on someone else's plate.

More time should be spent telling players to cope

[Ozmandis]

I have to wonder if people, in particular raiders, would complain that <insert_easy_job> can do 'y' as good as <insert_hard_job>, why bother playing <hard_job>, or worse, we need to nerf the easy job. Summoner comes to mind.

I am doing high end raiding all the time so I can answer you with 100% certainty that people actually prefer difficult jobs. And there's an easy answer as to why : most of us are bored to death. We play this content solely for the challenge so "handicaping" ourselves by playing harder jobs is actually something we look for. You can see that in a lot of games, one the best example being the souls series where magic is generally the most easy and op playstyle but there's actually very little people playing it because they don't find that engaging.

If people complain about some jobs being too hard, the devs should just say "we have easy jobs, play them" because I think everybody deserves to have fun in its own way.

[Connor]

They also justify this by claiming that we have two options.
- Difficult / challenging encounter
- Difficult / challenging jobs / mechanics

For some inexplicable reason, the developers believe these two things are entirely mutually exclusive . So they hide behind their bullshit excuse of ‘if we make classes/job more complex we have to nuke the difficult of every single raid in existence and every raid in future’

Basically, the devs threaten anyone who wants job complexity with ‘well fine but you’ll have to be happy with significantly less challenging/demanding encounters.

Which ultimately leads to the shitty situation we’re in now where there are literally no raids for ‘encounter complexity’ yet, yet job complexity is largely non-existent on almost every job. FFXIV: Where Nobody Wins!

[Aravell]

They also justify this by claiming that we have two options.
- Difficult / challenging encounter
- Difficult / challenging jobs / mechanics

For some inexplicable reason, the developers believe these two things are entirely mutually exclusive . So they hide behind their bullshit excuse of ‘if we make classes/job more complex we have to nuke the difficult of every single raid in existence and every raid in future’

Basically, the devs threaten anyone who wants job complexity with ‘well fine but you’ll have to be happy with significantly less challenging/demanding encounters.

Which ultimately leads to the shitty situation we’re in now where there are literally no raids for ‘encounter complexity’ yet, yet job complexity is largely non-existent on almost every job. FFXIV: Where Nobody Wins!

It doesn't help that a lot of the playerbase just accepts it all without any question.

Also, to everyone that believes this system is good, I invite you to look at P7S, the biggest flop of Endwalker. Nobody can have any engagement from the fight for the first 7 or so minutes, and that fight is meant to be an engaging high-end fight.

[Payadopa]

The fact is, job design in XIV is inherently raider oriented, and that's the reason classes are "simple". They're easier to balance and design content for them.

That's exactly it. Casual players don't care about numbers whereas Parsers of Light pop a coronary of a job has a lower potency or a "unique" buff. Look at the AST "if you're not fishing for Balance you're doing it wrong" situation and how that turned out. Or melee uptime and big circle bosses. 2 minute raid buffs. Enmity and boss positioning. Etc etc.

On one side it's so easy you can literally press 1 button and win and on the other side of the spectrum everything must be as homogeneous as possible. The end result is bland, boring and uninspired gameplay for the majority of the content.

Personally, as a 1.0 player I'm doing what YP is saying. I do the bare minimum with the MSQ and then I leave for a couple of months. Not worth my money, honestly. Jobs are just sad at this point and the "gameplay" outside of savage and PvP bores me to tears.