Can anyone clearly explain "job homogenization" in this game?

[OliviaLugria]

homogenization: the process of making things uniform or similar.

It doesn't have to be exact. Their current way of achieving "balance" is to make abilites and jobs as a whole similar.

To continue to use this dessert example. Tanks shouldn't all be ice cream. They should all be completely different desserts. Still functioning and operating under that "dessert" moniker but otherwise are completly different.

Our current model is closer to everything being vanilla ice cream with different toppings.

The base kit is a 1,2,3 combo. Every tank has 3 long personal defesnives cds and 2 party mits. Every tank is going to have a short personal mit that can also be used on someone else (or has an eqvilant skill that can)

Regardless of the bells and whistles, the tanks play so similary mastering one is akin to being 80% of the way there with others.

You can look at the pvp tanks for a more diverse tank set and how they accomplish the role.

It's funny that you do bring up the physical range role as it's one of the more diverse roles moment to moment along with casters. There is still the issue of the damage profile and the macro scale of the designs like snowball described in their first post.

[Azurarok]

I wish they found ways to keep jobs viable without removing aspects that made their differences stand out more, or taking what we know worked on another job and slapping it onto the others, which was exactly the case with them reducing Glare/Broil's cast times from 2.5s to Malefic's 1.5s in 6.0.

I think more weaves/mobility were needed for sure, but they could've handled it differently, especially since they already had the foundations for it in Shadowbringers with Lilies and RuinII.

[Carighan]

I personally do not believe this game has homogenization

Just like with many things IRL like whether the earth is flat or not, reality could not possibly care any less about what you believe. This is not a believe-based thing, it's an empirical science, you can look at something and check whether it has homogenization (not a single MMORPG currently on the market does not have homogenization) and if yes, which types and to what degree.

You can believe in a lot of things. You can believe in Santa Claus. You can believe you need another coffee. But you can just look to see how much homogenization is in a class design setup. Like, with your eyes and stuff.

[Valence]

I always felt like the "job homogenization" was an exageration. As much as I totally agree for tanks (nearly every skill has it's counterpart in every job), it's not true for DPS and Healers (except maybe WHM and AST sharing some similarities - I didn't play them enough at high lvl).

Even the arguments presented in this thread talk more about job simplification than homogenization. Or resullt of the 2 min meta that was asked by the players for years before everyone realized it was a bad idea. I swear to god, people in this game are really bad at reflecting on and analyzing the problems, and often end pointing a real symptoms under a fake problem. Except for tanks (and maybe WHM and AST), homogenization is not a problem, 2 min meta and simplification are. None of the melee ranged or magic jobs feel the same. Even the barrier Healers don't feel the same.

The same kind of argument can be made about content, where people claim it's predictability problem or the time between patch being too long, when the problem is that the content has no shelf life. Unpreductability would be nice plus, but if the content continue to be one time and never again, not being predictable and being every 3.5 month instead of 4.5 won't change anything, the problem is the nature of the content we get.

And then people complain about the dev team being out of touch (well, that's not totally untrue), when their complaints continue to be out there, pointing at problems that are, at best a result of the core problem.

The main problem is that you're only looking at it under a single lens and examining a single factor. Jobs are indeed not homogenized besides tanks (and potentially healers) if one just considers their mechanical execution and specific button/rotation patterns, although there is some similarities that have started appearing since EW, namely the 2 min raid buffs automatically turning into a 2min related nuke. Jobs are however very much homogenized when you start considering damage profiles, roles in a party, and their interaction with the battle content, which Supersnow exposed already well enough in the first page of this thread.

It is the same problem with content, and that shelf life is the main issue, but predictability also directly introduces a dire factor that is boredom based around repeatability and the lack of fresh, new things, and surprise.

[brinn12]

Job homogenization is another consequence of overcorrection in this game.

1 - Dungeon design is getting out of hand? Nerf hard mode dungeons and stop releasing them, nerf MSQ dungeons. Every dungeon must be two useless packs into easy bosses.

2 - Not enough single player content in MSQ? Introduce Trusts and dampen dungeon design/creativity even more, designing everything around Trust AI.

3 - Physical ranged jobs are OP? Make them irrelevant for 1 expansion. Might as well make it 3 expansions. They still bring the 1% party buff. Make hitboxes and mechanics which allow for melee uptime 99% of the time.

4 - Unpopular jobs at release? Release OP jobs, even if this means no DPS checks in high-end content. Introduce 1% party buff and change LB generation as band-aid fixes for irrelevant jobs.

5 - Relics are too grindy? Nerf the grind of existing relics, release relics which only require 1500 tomestones for each step.

Job design is no different. Developers thought jobs were too complex. We went from quality of life changes, which would be healthy for game balance and improve the overall experience, to complete job homogenization, where everything revolves around predictable bursts and fillers. Most raid buffs feel the same. Most party mitigation feels the same, within a job's role. Every job released or reworked since SHB is made in a way that players can't push the wrong buttons.

[HikariKurosawa]

Just like with many things IRL like whether the earth is flat or not, reality could not possibly care any less about what you believe. This is not a believe-based thing, it's an empirical science, you can look at something and check whether it has homogenization (not a single MMORPG currently on the market does not have homogenization) and if yes, which types and to what degree.

You can believe in a lot of things. You can believe in Santa Claus. You can believe you need another coffee. But you can just look to see how much homogenization is in a class design setup. Like, with your eyes and stuff.

That's funny how you put it like that. I agree, saying there is any meaningful amount of job homogenization in this game is like being a flat earther.

[Canadane]

If you've played the game at it's peak, during SB, you'll know exactly how homogenized ShB made everything.

[Carighan]

I agree, saying there is any meaningful amount of job homogenization in this game is like being a flat earther.

/shrug

I mean, sure. Depending on just how limited your experience with MMORPGs at large or FFXIV over its lifetime is (and I started in ShB, so I missed the worst homogenization-steps), sure, yeah, you'd not see a lot of it.

Alternatively if you never attempted to see the similarities between different jobs or how the vast majority can have equivalent hotbar setups, you might not have ever realized just how homogenized things are, although some structural steps such as the 120s burst focus of course remain.

Matter of perspective I imagine. Compared to DAoC in its early most-PvP-centric days, this game was extremely homogenized at launch, nevermind now which is just luducrious. Compared to the effectively inexistent variety in combat handling in something like say, Diablo IV (not an MMO but just to prove a point), yeah sure there's a lot of diversity here.

You're still going to have a very hard time convincing anybody that this excessive homogenization is not the central flaw in FFXIV's combat design right now, though. More power to you if you flat out cannot see it - makes the design less annoying - but it's still there. Again, it really does not care what you believe or don't believe, it just... is.

[OliviaLugria]

They aren't exactly willing to concede anything at all.

They argued that healers having a filler and a 30 second dot was not homogenization.

They'd probably argue sch indom isn't the same as sage indom because sages restores your mp.

[OliviaLugria]

Like... samba, tactician, and troubadour are reskins of the exact same ability and don't stack, but look different so not homogenization.

Rampart is a tank role action but the job does a slightly different animation so not homogenization