Job design mindset need to change

[Taranok]

I think the healer role is in more need of attention then that not gonna lie

Agreed. Though I'd say tanks need just as much attention, it's just easy to ignore because they have the barest semblance of a DPS rotation, but healers and tanks both have the exact same problem. The buster meta forces all tanks to have heavy mits, and all healers to have burst healing and anti-burst mits. Two halves of the exact same coin.

[Shougun]

In a general sense I agree but I would like to remove the rigidity even suggested, I don't mean that meanly either. Just that first we should aim for FUN THEME, or fun gameplay roleplay, and then we should do our best to make other jobs not be hot garbage in comparison. So yes there will be unique things, yes there may be bias in situations, but we're not trying to get you yelled at because you do 1/10 the damage of another job that is also the same role. This done without thinking strictly "I need 2 unique ideas" but just "what would be cool" like how mage in wow can teleport because why not, or druids can transform, use all roles, and travel by forest.

Some less combat based ideas on job identity: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/492928

In other threads I've talked on combat suggestions as well and most recently I can think of the healers. Where healers will have some healing consolidated either in buttons or power, and then new skills added that thematically add combat value. So some healers will buff teammates in a support like role, while others will just straight rip and tear at the enemy. Like Sage has more, and more powerful, kardia offensive skills. Astrologian has many more team buffs, some card related but they don't all need to be. Scholar's fairy returns to Heavensward like styling (quite powerful auto healer) and they get many tactical style skills mixed of offensive and defensive. Y mage gets many ally target or no target skills, so many new buffs, but more damage spells that require no target (so they primarily target allies, their kit remains straight forward and logical digest).

Or when it all about limited jobs, when they were new especially, I suggested advanced jobs, and for all. Like in WoW hunter has a whole beast taming thing, they gave mage a ignore damage skill (that is better than blue mage's even lol), monk can delete monsters less than their total health, etc. so in our case blue mage has a normal kit but also has their world thing, painter can collect new motifs and art sets (ink painting vs watercolor), bard has tavern visiting mechanics using the mini games SE made already made, beast master can do both, etc.

Take the theme and make it king, with fun particularly paired with it, and THEN balance it (and others) where it has to be so other jobs don't feel like crap. Right now it feels like they first balance and then throw an art pass over the skills for them, almost any job could be repainted onto another job (emotionally how it feels).

PvP kits are too small so I'm not saying 'exactly' that, but I feel PvP has much better theme design than our normal kits.

Especially in context of WoW which I would give A to A plus on theme skill and FFXIV started at B and is moving to C-, D- if they continue what they're doing.

[Daralii]

Agreed. Though I'd say tanks need just as much attention, it's just easy to ignore because they have the barest semblance of a DPS rotation, but healers and tanks both have the exact same problem. The buster meta forces all tanks to have heavy mits, and all healers to have burst healing and anti-burst mits. Two halves of the exact same coin.

It's also another instance of incredibly uneven design and balancing. The mitigation's tuned to be just enough in ultimates, which means it's way too strong in everything below that.

[mallleable]

While I agree that job design philosophy does need to change, I disagree with your points in that they are already kinda happening with certain splits within roles, and jobs only being situational will just lead to more player frustration.

Instead, I think jobs just need rules to them, rules that mechanically, and aesthetically make sense for each individual job. I think good recent example is with SAM, and how Tsubame-gaeishi has changed. It used to be that only Iajutsus used at a certain time would proc it, but now almost every cast Iajutsu procs Tsubame. The rule is now every cast weapon skill procs an instant version of itself, it's easy to understand, fun to execute, and affords points of optimization for players to chew on. A theoretical example of how this can change job design is with GNB, and Continuation. It could be made that when you unlock Continuation it unlocks the procs on all cartridge skills. The rule is that cartridge skills proc Continuation. This frees up the leveling slots at level 86, and 96 for other things, it moves gameplay elements to an earlier level, and it means that any future cartridge skills already has its Continuation proc unlocked freeing up design space for things other than Enhanced Continuation traits. A lot of knock on effects just by establishing a simple rule.

I think a problem with jobs now is that they lack these rules, and end up feeling like a mishmash of random mechanics that are in a just good enough, playable state.

[Nero-Voidstails]

the jobs should be balanced toward casual then make the harder fight balanced toward that not how it is today not gonna lie

[Bonoki]

I have been saying for years that Job Identity and Job Balance cannot coexist within the game design philosophy of FFXIV.

[Mikey_R]

First, I want to address one thing, my post wasn't intended to come across as hostile. I just see a lot of the same suggestions being thrown around the tank forums where people just say thing without thinking about the consequences and how it might affect the game. So, sorry if it came off as too hostile.

So, to get onto the rest:

Wouldn't that be for the developers to decide and think about how it might affect things?

First, how do you know that haven't? In the case of a HP draining DRK, it would be the first thing they thought of, could we actually get this to work? The find they cannot do it and so relegated the task to the DRK's MP instead. Second, if you have an idea, just think about how it might affect things, what are the pros and cons you can think of, is there a way you might adapt your idea so that these cons are lesser? By bringing a more realistic idea forward, it has more of a chance of being realised as you envisioned it. It is why, when I put out ideas, I showcase what pros I have come up with, the cons I have come up with and leave it to others to criticise as well.

As an example:

All I can mention is how dark knight has been in previous games and that I think it would be cool if they could make it work like that, similarly to gunbreaker landing a critical hit whenever a cartridge is expended because of how ff8 works

I literally have no qualms about this. It would be a nice call back to FF8 and how the trigger was handled there. We could question whether we make the whole thing crit, the GCDs crit or just the continuation attacks crit. If I were to give my suggestion, just the continuation attacks should auto crit as that is what is closest to having a timed trigger. Opinions here can change, but ultimately, it is just a numbers game.

I don't think expending HP as a resource would work very well, which I've admitted several times in the past because it's easier to implement something like that in a single player game versus a multiplayer one so I believe they would have a hard time with finding the right balance for it.

Which to me seems odd that you even suggested it in the first place, however:

That said, why wouldn't it work?
Is it because the chance of a dark knight using too much health, and thus dying to attacks? It would be the entire point of the risk vs reward playstyle, to encourage calculated risks from players. They would still have mitigation so they could reduce incoming damage, but also be able to heal anything they expend, along with giving healers more to do which seems to be a common complaint in the forums.

(This is fairly lengthy, so I will hide it):

There are 2 ways you can use HP as a resource, damage and mitigation. Starting with damage, damage is king in this game. Any way you can do more damage, you do it. if you had a spammable action that took HP to use, you would spam it. You can have some HP regen on the DRK, but it isn't going to cover all that HP, however, what other source of HP do we have? Healers. Healers would be expected to pick up the slack, the more you can be healed, the more damage you can do. Healers like WHM's benediction then turn into extra resources for DRK to get more damage out of. If the DRK dies, it isn't the DRK's fault, it is the healers fault. It creates this harmful synergy between the DRK and healers that no other tank has and, with the increased risk of dying, you just aren't going to take DRK and it will be excluded.

If you have a non spammable attack, then the frequency of the attack has to be taken into account and if the DRK has self heals, how do you balance it out? It goes back to the WAR problem from earlier. Too much self healing and you give healers less to do, too little and they have to heal you more. There is a balance that needs to be met. We can also talk about mechanics that reduce your HP, preventing you from using the action, which can cause it to drift, reducing your DPS throughout the fight. It is just another barrier.

As for defensive purposes, taking your HP to increase your defences seems, counter intuitive. Take away some defensive tool to give it somewhere else, where, you only really benefit if the mitigation is incredibly strong and/or you get healed after using it but before the damage comes out. I don't think I need to elaborate further on this.

However, one of the bigger hurdles is just, how would you determine the HP cost in the first place? If you make it static based on level, then you run into issues with progression. Level X0 takes Y amount of HP, level up to X1 and it takes more HP, but your HP hasn't really increased, considering most of it comes from gear. Even looking at hitting level X0, it will cost a certain amount of HP, you get better gear, but the cost is the same, so you can use it more and your damage scales faster than every other job. If it were to take a % of your HP, we now need to talk about healers again. If you are a max ilevel tank and you have a group with lower ilevel healers, they will have to heal more to keep you alive than a higher ilevel healer. I know this is the same for all tanks, but it is disproportionately higher for DRK. On the flip side, a higher ilevel healer has an easier time healing a lower ilevel DRK. This leads to the case where it might not be beneficial to gear up a DRK past the minimum required. They will survive the encounter, the HP drain is going to be lower, so they are easier to heal. I guarantee I have not gone over everything here, but there is a lot to consider just balancing how much HP you use at a given time before we even talk about how it would actually be used.

Regarding evasion and parrying, if it's so bad then why shouldn't we encourage it to be fixed? We saw with the changes to Dark Mind, Dark Missionary, and Heart of Light, that they can add conditionals to mitigation, so why couldn't they do something along those same lines? Reduce x amount of damage, and have a chance to dodge / parry / block x amount of damage

If we give the parry/evasion mitigation, some other form of mitigation underneath (think Camouflage), then aren't you undermining the focus on parry/evasion? Now, to give credit where it is due, RNG mitigation works better the more individual hits you get to go into it. This is why they are fairly effective when faced with a group of mobs in a dungeon, or even a multi hitting tank buster, but aren't reliable for the single big hits. Noone is going to use solely Camouflage on a single hit tank buster, as 10% is not much and the parry isn't guaranteed. If we were to make parry/block/evasion all the same, then it is just % based mitigation with all the downsides (cannot use whilst incapacitated and doesn't reduce damage from DoTs). Plus, having them all be the same, just with a different name means, leans towards homogenisation. I don't know where you stand on that front, but that is where you are going with that line of thinking. By trying to be different, you make things the same.

the jobs should be balanced toward casual then make the harder fight balanced toward that not how it is today not gonna lie

I would be interested to know what you mean by 'balance around casual'.

EDIT: There is one thing I forgot to mention and this relates to how Darkside used to work and how it correlates with the whole HP resource thing. Darkside, during HW and SB, did not allow Dark Knight to receive MP restoration from outside sources. What do you think that is? Giving DRK more resources just makes them stronger and stronger. They had to specifically add in the code to prevent MP gain from elsewhere. How do you think this would have translated if it were HP based instead?

[MisterNublet]

Job design and job identity will never improve while the 2-min meta still exists.

[BabyYoda]

...

it seems that you like the current design, I wonder how you see current homonization as an interesting concept

Job design and job identity will never improve while the 2-min meta still exists.

it is 100% a great factor, all jobs have fixed burst phase is leading to what we have now, we are trying to make BLM as a burst job same as PCT which is not working at it best

[Mikey_R]

it seems that you like the current design, I wonder how you see current homonization as an interesting concept

It is a bit of a misleading question as you have assumed I believe everything is already homogenised and therefore interesting. I do not. The problem I see with many people's viewpoints is that they look at things too broadly, and don't look at the nuances that makes things different. To use an extreme example, all jobs use the GCD and oGCD to perform actions, therefore everything is homogenised. Obviously, that is an absurd claim to make, but it is technically true. What we have to do is look at the individual skills and see how they differ, and this is where things tend to split between many people's view and mine. To give a clear example, if you had 2 GCDs, both do 100 potency of damage, but one had a cast time. They are obviously different, but there would be some that claim, well, the result is the same, therefore they are homogenised., whilst ignoring the fact one of them has a cast time.

To give an example of this, before DT, but after we had the media tour info, someone was claiming that Ninja and Monk played the same. I provided quite a long post explaining how the jobs are different, between how the jobs burst, their filler etc. were different. The response was, yes, but they both have a 60 second and a 2 minute buff, therefore, they feel the same. Now, again, this can be seen as an extreme view, but it is something someone said.

Another one that comes up is Scholar's Sacred Soil and Sage's Kerachole. Functionally, they are the same, but they are different in how the resources needed to use them are generated differently and the benefit to the SCH/SGE are different, plus, they radiate from different places (SCH is ground target whilst SGE is from self).

I can keep going with things that seem the same, but are different, but that isn't the main point here. In my eyes, things ARE different, the problem is, those differences do not necessarily shine through and this is down to things that have happened. To provide an example, using the above from SCH/SGE again, when they massively increased the radius of all these effects, it stopped mattering whether it was a ground target or from self, as the range is so big, it doesn't matter. It isn't that they have directly made them the same, they have just made that difference not matter.

We can also talk about what does it actually mean to be different? If Kerachole was a shield rather than a % mitigation, would that make it more unique? You would use it in the same places, nothing has changed there, but would it then stop being classed as the same as Sacred Soil?

Which brings me onto the next point. What would it actually take to make things not homogenous? A tank needs to be able to mitigate damage effectively, regardless of whether it is physical or magical (if you make them useless against one or the other, it prevents them from being taken into fights where that damage type is most used). Remember, every tank has to be able to clear every piece of content, so they need to be able to mitigate both sides well enough. What does this then leave you with? % mitigation and shield mitigation. There is only so many ways you can mix and match those concepts before things start to look 'samey', so how are we changing things to make then unique to the tanks? We have had suggestions of Parry/Block/%Evasion, but those are all just different names for a straight up % mitigation, with downsides.

Now, to prevent any misunderstanding, I do not think the system is perfect. As is a common theme, the 2 minute meta has destroyed a dimension of avenues that jobs can go down, the main one being damage profiles. With the 2 minute meta, every job is a burst job, even tanks and healers. It has necessarily killed off any sort of sustain jobs. My fix for this would be quite extreme, but zero temporary raid buffs. The damage stacking from raid buffs is what has ultimately caused this meta to form, so getting rid of it completely will change this dynamic. I do understand that some people like to be able to buff jobs and help others out, the caveat is that any damage buff has to be able to be upkept for the whole fight and not have periods where you can increase it higher temporarily. The other type I would look at is Brotherhood and Arcane Circle. Taking Brotherhood for a second, removing the damage component means the only thing is the Chakra gain for Monk. As long as your team mates are attacking, you benefit the Monk and help them out, but it also doesn't matter where in the rotation the party members are. Bursting or not, it doesn't affect anything. Similar concept with Arcane Circle and Plentiful Harvest.

Now that raid buffs are either permanent or do not affect the damage of anyone else but the user, we can look at rotations. There is no 2 minute meta to follow, you are free to use whatever timings you want. You can also give more agency as to WHEN you burst, if you have that capability. As an example, Viper. The only reason it used Reawakening every 2 minutes is because of the raid buff window. Get rid of that and you get more freedom as to when you use Reawaken. Now is not a good time, so I will save it for a bit, or, I will use it earlier to help push the phase or kill an add. This doesn't necessarily mean you cannot have a stricter job that is much more rotation focused like Dragoon, they are just different ways jobs can be different.

There is a lot more that goes into this, but I do not agree with the blanket statement that all jobs are homogenised.