Job design mindset need to change

[Taranok]

While that sounds really nice on paper, it wouldn't work in the current raid environment, unless (taking wAR as example) you buff warrior hitpoints substantially so it can survive various mechanics with only minimal mitigation.
What I'm getting at is that such changes would need to be complimented by major fight design changes and I doubt they'd do either or both.

The first instance of major homogenization in the game happened because of this exact reason. When WAR literally couldn't do Twintania because it would just get deleted by death sentence. The dev's solution was to turn WAR into PLD, and off to the races on homogenization. Second instance of homogenization being to turn all healers into white mage. Third instance is to turn all casters into phys ranged and otherwise destroying cast bars. Things like 2m burst or equal damage with similar damage buffs don't even factor into homogenization compared to completely destroying entire playstyles.

That said, you can fix the issue (for tanks) without giving WAR something like 400% the HP of paladin. But it first begins by recognizing that 20% mit is already ridiculously strong, and things like tank passive + 40% mit + 20% mit + 15% mit + another 20% mit is already insanely overpowered. Toning down the numbers and availability, especially preventing stacking of mits, would do a lot to break the chokehold that the devs have forced themselves into.

Unfortunately, fixing this issue is, as you say, basically impossible in the current fight design environment. But it's either fixing the encounter design or we end up with the fight design we have now, where casting spells is miserable, fights are DDR simulators with no lag tolerance, and every tank and healer does their primary job with basically identical buttons.

I was outright flabbergasted with how absolutely awful the new alliance and dungeon was from a design standpoint. Nevermind EX3 being more of the same nonsense that made trial 3 such an awful fight. I digress.

[sindriiisgaming]

both PvE and PvP successful games reached one day to what we are having now in FFXIV but if we consider 8.0 would be "the job design expansion" that means it took 8 years to reach this point.

I want to share my thoughts of many games that was similar to FFXIV current design and successfully moved on:

1- Each job should be unfair, there is no such a thing called balance, instead of making all jobs fair change the mind set to make all jobs unfair and unbalanced, this will destroy homogenization.

2- Develop a sub category for each role and make them unique on that category, each sub category will have a noticeable different playstyle that others.

3- one job can have 2 things to do, not 4 not 5, like if there is a job who is doing dots + RNG + keeping buffs then this have to change to focus on 2 things only, this will make other jobs which have nothing start to have something more unique.

4- different jobs are better in different encounters, and that's doesn't mean other jobs are bad but they are better in different situations.


What do think?

im not going to talk about 8.0 until the time is closer, but the thing that needs the most help rn is the new ms. i am offended that my character is literally a piece of background in the current msq. he does nothing.

[Nero-Voidstails]

im not going to talk about 8.0 until the time is closer, but the thing that needs the most help rn is the new ms. i am offended that my character is literally a piece of background in the current msq. he does nothing.

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

[CVXIV]

I think they should take a level of inspiration from RTS balance, principly "equal but different", while allowing for a loose balance point so that it never has to be perfect.

To give a couple of examples, strictly in principle:-
PLD: THE mitigation tank, all about using that shield to reduce damage taken and has minimal - if any - heals.
WAR: THE heal tank, basically the reverse of the PLD, it has many heals (though maybe not quite as powerful as now) but minimal mits.
DRK: The parry all the things tank, tapping back into it's roots it seeks to maximise it's parry chance and shields what it has to while turning incoming damage into outgoing damage be that with an HP scalar or through it's gauge.
GNB: Then becomes all about evasion, I'll leave it to more creative minds to flesh it out though - I haven't ideas.

I've always seen paladin as the support tank, given it has the most party wide support of them and can help keep people alive

It's what I really like about it, and the fact you can cover people that are close to death

Warrior I'm not sure, I don't play it enough
I think it having some self healing is fine because I can understand it from an "adrenaline" standpoint

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
It's hard to say who should deal the most damage of the tanks, mostly because I struggle seeing gunbreaker in that role

[Asari5]

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

lower defensiv stats means he gets more dmg so he needs more hp to survive. but more hp means the healers have a harder time to heal him up. so the warrior has to help the healers often to heal himself up. sounds fine to me.

healers would have more work with lazy warriors but overall it would differentiate warrior from all the other tanks without changing too much

[Alice_Rivers]

I don't really care who does the most damage among tanks, or healers for that matter, it's secondary to the role. I care mostly about the relationship between tanks, healers and content - For me tanks should walk to line of having agency without crossing into self-sufficiency, content should demand healers fundamentally and tanks should, eventually, die in the absence of a healer. But it doesn't have to be obvious or instant, nor do I think tank or healer design while we have such small numbers of both jobs, should fit one template each, I aimed to provoke discussion of a variety of templates such that every job in a role might go about it's function in completely different ways.

I feel like I failed in that objective, but then I'm the first to admit I'm more analytical than creative.

[Daralii]

They ultimately just need to stop redesigning jobs to try and appeal to people that don't play them and will continue to not play them.

[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