Job design mindset need to change

[Alice_Rivers]

I would argue that the equality is in the abilities built around these principles and having each tank capable of reducing a given amount of damage (give or take 5-10%) to zero in a given timeframe.

On the WAR problem, I understand that it's a difficult balancing act but I think it would be easier to achieve if mits and heals were exclusive (though not necessarilly mutually so) and then rather than healing per se, the heals WAR would get should be seen as effective mitigation. I would balance them principly internally such that while an effect of "heals for 20% of outgoing damage" might interact with party buffs the WAR itself wouldn't have the ability to make that scale out of control.

Couldn't the magic parry be 'fixed' with a flag change though? Not saying these alone would fix what I put forth but I do consider them steps toward a solution.

[Mikey_R]

I would argue that the equality is in the abilities built around these principles and having each tank capable of reducing a given amount of damage (give or take 5-10%) to zero in a given timeframe.

On the WAR problem, I understand that it's a difficult balancing act but I think it would be easier to achieve if mits and heals were exclusive (though not necessarilly mutually so) and then rather than healing per se, the heals WAR would get should be seen as effective mitigation. I would balance them principly internally such that while an effect of "heals for 20% of outgoing damage" might interact with party buffs the WAR itself wouldn't have the ability to make that scale out of control.

Assuming I am understanding this right, and you want a separate button for Mitigation and another for HP restoration, you have doubled WAR's button presses to mitigate something that other jobs only need 1 button for. This might or might not be something that appeals to people, but to also note, it restricts the available buttons for rotational needs.

However, WAR would sill be in a weird spot. You have more HP, but you still need to survive the initial hit, so you need to have that minimum mitigation, of which you can then heal after. The question is, how much do you heal? Too little and you make healers work harder, too much and you negate healers. We also have to consider that increasing max HP means it takes more to heal, so, unless you give them a healing increase, you also have to take that into account, which makes the calculations even harder and much more volatile. Now, HOW that HP is healed is then another factor, do you tie it to damage, or, do you make it all like equilibrium, where it is a fixed potency. Even more variance.

We have to remember that original WAR from 2.0 was a high HP tank with very few mitigations, intended to be a take a hit and then heal it after. It didn't work.

Couldn't the magic parry be 'fixed' with a flag change though? Not saying these alone would fix what I put forth but I do consider them steps toward a solution.

Yes, still have the same considerations that blocking has, which I also neglected to mention won't reduce damage from DoTs, just the initial hit (another reason why Holy Sheltron was changed). Just to point out, block went through the exact same thing, never used to be able to block magic, now it does (as of SB). But it is these changes that initially had all these flaws, which, over time, was adjusted, which is how we ended up where we are now and the 'homogenisation' of tanks. If we were to start changing things too drastically, you will find flaws, scenarios where something doesn't work, the community will ask for it to be changed, and we will end up back here. It is an inevitability.

Dark Knight I will always think it'd be cool if it expended its HP as a resource to deal more damage, and as such it has the best healing from its damage

Gunbreaker should probably do more parry / evasion stuff, and probably the highest damage after dark knight

Though I don't know anything about balancing

I'm not going to go through everything, but expending HP to do your job won't work, evasion is broken and parry isn't reliable (and making it 100% just makes it a pseudo % mitigation).

As for balance, it is clear you haven't put any thought into how it would affect the jobs and the balance to go along with it. Which is an issue a a lot of people have. Sure, you could throw HP expending things on DRK and hope it works, wait for the playerbase to complain about it and then do a soft rework in the next major patch, but you can avoid all of that by just thinking, how would this actually affect gameplay and balance. Unfortunately, most people would rather skip the critical thinking and would rather throw things at a wall and see what sticks.

i think a warrior with lower defense but higher hitpoints and even more selfheal would work.

Again, healing balance, and again, you do still need to survive that initial hit.

[Alice_Rivers]

<Post-Quote 1>

My thanks again for engaging and pointing out the flaws in my ideas. I'm coming to appreciate it's a bit more difficult to execute a heal-tank than I think when I look back on when I turned a healer kit into a tank back in STO. If I were to commit to the idea I'd suggest leaning towards the low side on healing so that all those job starved healers (myself included) have more to do - I'll not complain openly. Personally I liked where 6.5/7.0 DRK was generally in terms of survivability I've not had a chance to play with a 7.1 DRK yet but I've been told the added healing is significant. I've wandered from the topic though...

Back to the point - I would suggest, in line with PLD being the only job I envisioned having mass direct mitigation, that the other three should get theirs from role skills. Considering PLD opener (off the top of my head) is 18 skills on 11 buttons if we reserve 6 buttons for non-combat stuff, that leaves 19 buttons to play with, minus 7 for role skills and 2 more for an aoe combo leaves 10 buttons for job abilities, one of which kinda has to be an invuln of some sort. My instinct would be to have 3/4 max HP boosts and 5/6 heals or maybe 3 HP boosts, 5 heals and two heal augmentors. I do appreciate, now, getting into the weeds of it how difficult this process can be.

<Post-Quote 2>

My original image had DRK overcome the problem of mandatory damage through shields, of course, as you've reminded me, that isn't exactly practical and while the WAR section allows for mits as role skills which would augment those shields you're also right to point out that the game's damage profile is unforgiving to such a job paradigm. I also want very much not to invoke the same feelings with dodging that invuln bypass mechanics have because that sucks.

My ideas were, by my own admission at the time, not exactly thought through but that has been made all the more apparent. Your patience is appreciated.

[CVXIV]

I'm not going to go through everything, but expending HP to do your job won't work, evasion is broken and parry isn't reliable (and making it 100% just makes it a pseudo % mitigation).

As for balance, it is clear you haven't put any thought into how it would affect the jobs and the balance to go along with it. Which is an issue a a lot of people have. Sure, you could throw HP expending things on DRK and hope it works, wait for the playerbase to complain about it and then do a soft rework in the next major patch, but you can avoid all of that by just thinking, how would this actually affect gameplay and balance. Unfortunately, most people would rather skip the critical thinking and would rather throw things at a wall and see what sticks.

Wouldn't that be for the developers to decide and think about how it might affect things? 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'm not expecting or even demanding for any of these changes to be made.
I like the game, and the franchise, and I enjoy discussing with people and seeing their thoughts and sharing my own.

It's not that deep and I don't understand the point of being hostile about someone sharing their ideas in a respectful manner.

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.

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.

It's not very constructive to come in here and dismiss anything I've said on the basis that you assume I haven't put much thought into the idea while simultaneously misrepresenting what I say. It comes across as being pretentious.

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

[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?

[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.

[BabyYoda]

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.

So you think people who are saying that jobs are homonigized are overreacting?
but if that is true why Yoshi P raise the point that jobs require an identity agreeing on what people are asking same as this post?
Maybe Yoshi P is seeing things that you didn't.

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).

They are functionally the same and SCH circle is big enough to cover 85% of any encounter and both of them block% of damage and give regen, but let give you that there is an innovation on this part that it is SGE come from self not as a circle.
What about tanks kit? how much are they homonigized? DRK and WAR? how they are different in gameplay perspective? if there is a difference how much? 10%? 90%? how much % is not homonigized?

What about healers homonigization? is that a thing?

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.

so how you think Yoshi P and his team can make them unique?

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.

While I agree 2MIN meta is worst idea when it comes to job design but your suggestion will kill an entire job identity,
so you are asking clearly to kill buff jobs like DNC and BRD, which has already a playerbase that they enjoys this type of gameplay.
This is already bad and not only that you are missing a core concept in any MMORPG which is support class, and removing this kit will make these jobs have less identity.

[Aravell]

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.

Hi, I'm the one that made the comparison between MNK and NIN, except you're misrepresenting my entire argument as "MNK and NIN are the exact same", what did you say about broad strokes again?

Anyway, my actual argument is that the damage profile is the same. Both jobs have a 60s and 120s which they dump all their resources into and they both have a 90s to juggle. DT only made them even more similar by making them both have build/drain gauges instead of MNK being timer management. This leads to both jobs feeling very similar to play, and the gameplay feel is what I consider to be homogenised.