We cannot achieve balance while DPS jobs have utilities

[Connor]

I believe Astrologian too fit more into Supportive with card system but maybe no I don't know

When Astrologian first came out it was literally being sold as ‘an FFXIV buffer/support job’. They then immediately made it their mission to simplify, minimise and reduce the impact of Astrologian cards/support in every way possible with each successive expansion. I.E removing buff manipulation skills like Time Dilation or Royal Road, removing varied card effects, removing rng and rng manipulation, etc.

As for Dancer and Bard, personally I think they should be as close to a ‘pure support class’ as FFXIV can get, but again that a pretty wildly unpopular opinion that I don’t see anyone agreeing with (because I tried up until Stormblood, literally even the devs disagreed with me lol)

[Tunda]

When Astrologian first came out it was literally being sold as ‘an FFXIV buffer/support job’. They then immediately made it their mission to simplify, minimise and reduce the impact of Astrologian cards/support in every way possible with each successive expansion. I.E removing buff manipulation skills like Time Dilation or Royal Road, removing varied card effects, removing rng and rng manipulation, etc.

As for Dancer and Bard, personally I think they should be as close to a ‘pure support class’ as FFXIV can get, but again that a pretty wildly unpopular opinion that I don’t see anyone agreeing with (because I tried up until Stormblood, literally even the devs disagreed with me lol)

Moving Astrologian more into healing was a big mistake..
Now we are suffering of nerfing and buffing dps and healers when we can have simple to balance DPS jobs and supports

Astro have 5% of their kit as support when it should be 50%

[Payadopa]

How about no?

[Reimmi]

This is the path that turns the game into a snooze fest
I'd rather have some imbalance to have classes bring unique fun things to gameplay, like scholars expedience.

[koko-on-da-forumz]

The idea that people are counting 'raid damage buff every 2 minutes' as a party utility speaks volumes about how much bad it is that the ONLY party resource is directly damage.

[Mistress_Irika]

Question for the OP:

If tanking and supporting are not the popular roles why would we go and try to force a set up like this?
To top it off if the healer and/or support cannot survive folks are going to be just going to be in a kicking mood just to find someone else that can do the job. You may as well be treating healers and supports like it's a job interview. Why potentially put us in a scenario like that?

[Connor]

To top it off if the healer and/or support cannot survive folks are going to be just going to be in a kicking mood just to find someone else that can do the job.

How is that any different from what we have now though, if healers die and there’s no RDM/SMN present it’s a wipe and that’s that (unless tank decides to solo it). Jobs like Bard and Dancer having actual healing and utility and not just ‘raid buffs’ would help healers by reducing the pressure, not somehow make them harder

[Colt47]

End game problems in FFXIV largely boil down to gut decisions made by the developers ages ago that just ended up making the entire thing worse.

1) Making it so that top end content requires a specific group composition based on category of role rather than the actual role. Thus, shield healers, pure healers, melee dps, ranged dps, magic dps, and tanks are the FFXIV roles rather than healers, tanks, and DPS. This is implicitly enforced by the bonus system so if someone wants to be cheeky, they can say "sure you can go four melee dps", but you'll never see anyone do it.

2) Having lockouts based on group rather than the character. It should be a character lockout and per job so it is possible to run savage on more than just a Tuesday. The fact they had to add an option for "rewards unclaimed" is kind of silly.

3) The change to make the final book convert into other books sort of pushed out mid to late season prog in PF outside of a static. A good analogy to the scenario is printing money and sending it out as aid to give short term relief, but then having inflation occur making things less affordable later. Because it lets people get gear faster in savage, people soon don't want to run those fights anymore since they have no benefit and only do them to get to the last one, and it isn't like those people are going to go help others trying to clear earlier fights if they need to reach m4s with the herd that includes most of the competent healers and tanks.

[Shurrikhan]

DNC and bard is already a support job

Dancer's gameplay is no more that of a Support than is, say, Monk. Unless playing in a composition where it's optimal to swap your Closed Position partner about, you just set your stance pre-combat and the rest is automatic. Heck, if outside of those comps you don't count what can be used precombat anyways, Monk has more support tools (AoE heal, AoE healing taken increase, AoE damage increase, personal damage increased from party attacks) and consideration therearound.

Bard? Same number of support abilities, just trading the direct heal for a dispel. The songs are used simply for their contribution to Soul Voice and their Repertoire bonuses.

Support makes up a small portion of either's numeric performance and a far, far smaller portion of the player's skill's influence on that performance. Neither is a Support. They're just DPS with a few random support skills (far less than a HW NIN, Stormblood Summoner, and no more, arguably, than even an ARR BLM, etc.).

How is that any different from what we have now though, if healers die and there’s no RDM/SMN present it’s a wipe and that’s that (unless tank decides to solo it). Jobs like Bard and Dancer having actual healing and utility and not just ‘raid buffs’ would help healers by reducing the pressure, not somehow make them harder

At most, because --given how much of the healer kit is a waste already-- if the "Support" can then meet healing requirements more precisely (i.e., with less excess) while having higher damage, it will be harder to even find a party as a healer.

Any effective cure potency per minute that you are balanced around but locked into makes you a worse choice when it goes to waste, such that if you offer a category of healing-capable jobs that have a lower hps ceiling but higher damage, you simply go from their being inferior when requirements are too high for them to superior when healers' cp output is too high for the content (under typical player familiarity and gear at that time).

To me, the solution then is to simply make healers more flexible so that their maximum theoretical DPS is quite a bit nearer that of DPS but comes at greater cost to healing potential and heals at greater cost to DPS (to about the same result when using a couple at-cost heals per minute, but higher dps otherwise for having converted the would-be excessive oGCD healing into something of use), but alas, what's a solution without systemic convolution (creating new roles out of what should simply be a spectrum, therefore greatly splitting and thereby constraining thematic options for each job)?

[LilimoLimomo]

Even if we could only achieve balance by further homogenizing the game's classes, it's not worth the cost. The degree of radical balance that some people want will stifle the ability for classes to be distinct and interesting. I would rather have an unbalanced game with a variety of meaningfully different options.