Random Cards Were The Only Reason AST Felt Good/Different

[Carighan]

So I guess we should just delete cards all together, since it doesn’t matter what they do it’s always going to be the damage card. So why even bother? If we’re gonna optimise literally everything in the game to oblivion we might as well start asking them to delete everything but one single job…that’s the only way you’re ever actually going to achieve ‘balance’; variations will always exist otherwise. Or they could just accept those variations and actively work to mitigate them in times where they become an issue?

Yes.

Actually.

Sadly.

Plenty MMORPGs have shown that before.

Importantly however, in particular long-lived ones like EQ1 or WoW have also shown how flavour and uniqueness works or doesn't work, and the current system (of all jobs, this is not an AST specific problem) has extremely little job-flavour on a mechanical level (visuals and sound are strong, the latter very strong in many cases). But that's not a problem you can solve on the level of a single job. The combat system and in particular the fight design implies the current setup. Again, sadly, but eh, so be it.

They could add a lot of flavor to jobs, but they'd need to make space for it first. For example, healers are inherently reactionary in other MMORPGs. There's actual damage to heal that is not on a fixed timetable (say constant random hits on random partymembers) and you need to react to that. Such a situation can easily have on healer by more easily able to handle this, in return for having a portion of their healing kit (note that I said healing kit, and only that) be locked behind random chance. You take a portion of the reactionary nature away, in return for making the player also react to the random draw.

That's doable. Easily in fact. Only... for that to work, healers would first need to heal in FFXIV. And that's just a single aspect of where the issues in job design are unsolvable before or without the combat encounter design being reworked. And even then, some things just won't work. Other MMOs have tried things, and they've all universally eventually removed it or trivialized it. Pet classes for example are such a thing, pets always get trivialized into external DoTs/HoTs with fancy graphics at some point, or flat out removed. Do I hate that we lost our two actual pet classes? For sure, old Scholar was my main. Did I fully expect it to eventually happen? Of course, evidence suggests this is a natural lifecycle event for an MMORPG.

So basically... don't do random cards as a design point. If there were space for them to fill in a viable way, they'd be cool, but that space would need to be created, and in particular in FFXIV's design I just cannot see such a tectonic change in combat encounter design happen. Sorry.