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

[Connor]

Wait, if VPR is a variant of RPR, and RPR is a melee variant of MCH, does this mean VPR is a melee variant of MCH? Oshi-

Why does this make the think of that meme with the two spacemen

It was all Machinist?
Always was
lol

I’ve still not seen anyone explain why homogenisation somehow needs to exist as a necessary balancing mechanic when there’s a literal category of skills dedicated to sharing crucial skills between jobs within the same role.

Like why do all the healer DoTs needs to be completely identical when they could just put a shared DoT in the role skills section then use the extra space to give healers unique and interesting abilities instead of copy+pasting from each other (then putting a funny moustache on it to pretend it’s not the same) lol. Or Troubactitionsamba (Troubadour/Tactician/Samba lol) which is literally just a role skill pretending to be a real one. So, why is it not in role skills…?

[Mikey_R]

I wasn't going to comment in here, but now I have to.

Using the above, yes, you could say, look, they are the same. But some commonalities between jobs is required. Just using the graphic, a ranged attack, gap closer and basic AoE is going to be needed for all tanks.

Going onto defensives. It is, again a necessary evil. Make ones that are stronger than another, since the aim is for every job to be able to clear all content, the 'weakest' one still has to be able to mitigate the damage, with the higher mitigation ones only helping if it actually saves on healer resources. I could go more in depth, but having the tanks have similar defensives for similar situations should (in theory) help out fight design. Again, necessary evil. Same is true for raidwide mitigation (how often is PoA actually useful in changing how a healer would have healed if the PLD had not been there?)

So, going back to the graphic (which I suspect is going right back to ShB), Fight or Flight, No Mercy, Inner Release and Delirium. Fight or Flight and No Mercy are the same (even down to procing another GCD), however, Inner Release and Delirium are different to both of those and they are infact different to each other. Yes, they both provide free access to Fell Cleave/Scarlet combo, but Inner Release helps build to Primal Wrath and allows access to Primal Rend/Ruination, the Scarlet combo gives the DRK Blood and MP, with no way to spend Blood during it, meaning you need to be careful before you press it. It also does not give access to a stronger attack like Primal Rend/Ruination or build up to an oGCD like Primal Wrath.

Talking about the spenders (both ST and AoE), first, I find it funny the graphic for Chaotic Cyclone was used, when the equivalent would be Decimate, however, they, again, are used differently and have different considerations. Holy Spirit can only be used with the Divine Might buff once per combo and you have to use it before you complete another combo, otherwise it gets overwritten, Burst Strike, whilst you can use it once per combo, you can also store the charges and the charges are used with other actions, then, Bloodspiller and Fell Cleave, both use gauge, which builds up at different rates dependant on the job (DRK is a constant 20 per combo loop and Warrior is 10/20 for Storm's Eye/Path), DRK also builds gauge in their burst via Delirium, whereas Warrior just straight up gives 50 gauge and upgrades it.

We can continue this thought with the rest of the kit where, you can say you can line up buttons, but do you actually press them in the same way, do you have the same thoughts and considerations when you press them. Each tank has different burst phases with different nuances and things to consider, which does go back down into the filler aspects. To me, making a blanket statement that knowing 1 tank you know them all, undersells the differences in the tanks.

The same can be said for melee. I've already made a long post about how Monk and Ninja are different, but to see people claim Viper and Reaper are the same baffles me. My cross bars are setup differently and they have a different flow to each of them. But then, if all melee are the same, are they the same as Samurai or Dragoon? I suspect if the question was asked, how are the melees the same, I would get the response that normally follows. They all have a 120 second burst and a mini 60 second burst. They also all use combos, therefore they are the same. Of course, this completely misses everything else about the jobs. A simple question would be, if you took a melee and made it a 45/90 second job, would that then make it not homogenised, or would it still be homogenised because it has a mini burst and a big burst?

Healers are the jobs that I can say are the most homogenised, with Sage and Scholar being the closest to each other. But again, healers need a basic suite of healing and damage to perform their job at a basic level, would it then be fair to count these towards homogenisation where it is a necessary evil? As an example, imagine if all healers were in the perfect state, would all of them having a single target heal, AoE heal, ST damage spell, AoE damage spell and a raise work against that ideal? Would changing them to have HoTs and shields added make them less homogenised?

I also don't like the argument saying, you can just map similar things across the jobs. Well yes, that is human nature. Doesn't matter how different you make things, you are going to have a plan as to where you put things. This button is my tank invuln, this is my short defensive cooldown. Doesn't matter how you fancy it up, if the main goal for that action lines up well enough with something from another job in the same role, chances are, they are going to be put together. That is just common sense. Even if you made a job's 123 RNG like old MCH, you are still going to put them in the 123 slots of that other job where it is a guaranteed combo, because that makes sense. All that to say, button placement does not mean job homogenisation.

[Supersnow845]

People seem to looks at a lot of the modern jobs and go “yeah sure they have x y and z similar but that’s a balance consideration/necessary evil” but then don’t consider the fact that they didn’t have this sort of similarity before ShB

Like “people say the melee are similar because they all have a big 2 minute burst and a small 1 minute burst”. Yeah but they didn’t all have that before ShB. NIN had that. MNK did whatever the fuck it wanted to. SAM played more like a sustained DPS that didn’t care about anyone else’s burst window nor did it have a particular area of its rotation that was noticeably bursty and DRG played still mostly the same rotationaly to how it plays now

Or when people compare SCH to SGE, sure they are the most similar jobs but why is SCH 100* more similar to WHM than it was in ARR back when they were literally your only choice. Somehow the two got away with their only similarity being physick=cure 1, adlo=cure 2 and succor=medica but now they have to have 80% of their kit the same or everything apparently falls apart

If the jobs aren’t homogenised why can’t I play a DOT’er when I used to be able to. Why can’t I play a sustained DPS that is actually uncaring of others rather than a weird hybrid “I don’t want to care but I have to or I do terrible damage” like BLM. Why can’t I play a ramper, why can’t I play a debuffer.

I honestly have no idea how people can claim the jobs aren’t homogenised when we went from 2 DOT’ers, 4 sustained, 1 buffer/debuffer, 1 ramper and 2 builder spenders to 21 builder spenders

[Azurarok]

Like why do all the healer DoTs needs to be completely identical when they could just put a shared DoT in the role skills section then use the extra space to give healers unique and interesting abilities instead of copy+pasting from each other (then putting a funny moustache on it to pretend it’s not the same) lol. Or Troubactitionsamba (Troubadour/Tactician/Samba lol) which is literally just a role skill pretending to be a real one. So, why is it not in role skills…?

Difference in visual effects, potencies, and learned level as far as I can tell. MCH gets Tactician in the 50s while the two are learned in their 60s.

AST's Combust is weaker than the others since it relies more on raid buffs for damage, WHM also very slightly frontloads Aero~Dia's damage by having the damage upfront, and SGE's E. Dosis has the Kardion effect.

[Exmo]

The argument that all the jobs are being excessively homogenized somewhat collides with the fact that every fifth thread on these forums is someone either complaining about or celebrating how a change to a job makes the job feel different to play. If ask the jobs felt the same, people wouldn't be so invested in the specificities of certain jobs.

I'm not saying there is not a process of standardisation occurring across all the jobs, but surely it mustn't be so severe and detrimental given the material evidence to the contrary.

[Namir]

Homogenization is a process OP, not a state, yet you are treating it as such. Homogenization doesn’t mean “being the same” it means “making different things similar”.

By treating homogenization as a state, you are saying that unless classes play exactly, 100% the same, just with a different skin, they are not homogenized. Yes, we all know they are not 100% the same. Yet the percentage of similarity has drastically increased overtime. All jobs have been in a constant process of homogenization by removing more and more things that make each FEEL unique to play each expansion.

Maybe you started playing during later expansions and so, never experienced the things that made each job feel more distinct from each other, but anybody that has been playing since ARR has seen the homogenization increase more and more over time. I’m still having fun with the game, but yes, the jobs all play much, much more similar than they used to, and going by the trend, homogenization will continue which is why people talk about it a lot, in hopes that it will change, because they love this game and want to keep playing it and having fun with it for a long time.

[Connor]

Difference in visual effects, potencies, and learned level as far as I can tell. MCH gets Tactician in the 50s while the two are learned in their 60s.

AST's Combust is weaker than the others since it relies more on raid buffs for damage, WHM also very slightly frontloads Aero~Dia's damage by having the damage upfront, and SGE's E. Dosis has the Kardion effect.

Isn’t that like saying Cure II and Benefic II are two totally different abilities because one procs 0 MP cost and the other procs a forced crit? Is that really enough to somehow make them ‘different’ from each other? And I’m talking about in terms of actual gameplay not literal semantics lol.

I mean semantically Cure / Benefic are different from Physick / Diagnosis (50 potency difference) because potency, but nobody in their right mind is going to argue they’re all somehow different abilities, are they?

The visuals argument are moot because we’ve literally seen them add various different role skills to jobs that have completely different animations per job. I.E Peloton. Unless the argument is that the particle effects will be the same, which…I guess? Does that seriously matter? Jobs can’t have the same particle effects from a role skill but it’s totally cool to have two functionally identical spells with a 15% of being different if you cast a spell you literally will get abused for casting (Cure/Benefic).

As for phys ranged and their role-skills-pretending-not-to-be, explain to me what the functional gameplay reason for Machinist learning it at a different level actually is. What job mechanic or balancing purpose does making Machinist learn Tactician at level 50 provide? Or maybe it’s completely arbitrary and likely exists as either an oversight or to create some cynical illusion of variety?

Going to be harsh here but if we’re taking these extremely minor differences between abilities as evidence that they’re each unique and interesting things and not effectively the same thing with a different coat of paint, we really deserve everything we’re getting from the devs right now.

[Azurarok]

Isn’t that like saying Cure II and Benefic II are two totally different abilities because one procs 0 MP cost and the other procs a forced crit? Is that really enough to somehow make them ‘different’ from each other? And I’m talking about in terms of actual gameplay not literal semantics lol.

I mean semantically Cure / Benefic are different from Physick / Diagnosis (50 potency difference) because potency, but nobody in their right mind is going to argue they’re all somehow different abilities, are they?

The visuals argument are moot because we’ve literally seen them add various different role skills to jobs that have completely different animations per job. I.E Peloton. Unless the argument is that the particle effects will be the same, which…I guess? Does that seriously matter? Jobs can’t have the same particle effects from a role skill but it’s totally cool to have two functionally identical spells with a 15% of being different if you cast a spell you literally will get abused for casting (Cure/Benefic).

As for phys ranged and their role-skills-pretending-not-to-be, explain to me what the functional gameplay reason for Machinist learning it at a different level actually is. What job mechanic or balancing purpose does making Machinist learn Tactician at level 50 provide? Or maybe it’s completely arbitrary and likely exists as either an oversight or to create some cynical illusion of variety?

Going to be harsh here but if we’re taking these extremely minor differences between abilities as evidence that they’re each unique and interesting things and not effectively the same thing with a different coat of paint, we really deserve everything we’re getting from the devs right now.

I wasn't saying it to disagree with you, just pointing out that's probably why some of these haven't been merged into a role skill. Also yes, I did mean the particle effects and sound effects.

As for Tactician being earlier I'd say it would matter if there was any content that mattered that has to be played synced to lv60, but there isn't.

[Connor]

I wasn't saying it to disagree with you, just pointing out that's probably why some of these haven't been merged into a role skill. Also yes, I did mean the particle effects and sound effects.

As for Tactician being earlier I'd say it would matter if there was any content that mattered that has to be played synced to lv60, but there isn't.

I mean, the real question from that is, if they can have different animations per job for a role skill, couldn’t they have different particle effects per job to match with visuals anyway? Maybe we could have both. Then skills like Troubawhatever could actually become something interesting that adds to the class itself. I mean it’s not like the role skills need to be super flashy either so I don’t see why they couldn’t do it.

The level difference on it seems weird though because wouldn’t that just cause problems if there was some kind of relevant content at level 50? Wouldn’t Bards and Dancers be like ‘we don’t have a mitigation skill yet save us Yoshi’ and devs would just standardise the learning level anyway? Whether doing so is actually the correct move or not lol. Is it such a bad thing for jobs to have strengths and weaknesses? It is when it’s not something artificial like making one job learn an identical skill to the others at a slightly lower level in my opinion lol.

I just don’t understand their idea of standardising jobs in so many but then completely ignoring the role skill category that was supposed to exist for the purpose of standardising certain crucial skills across a role I.E Swiftcast. Personally I’d rather they did that and actually developed each job with its own identity gameplay etc. Like I’d rather have Swiftcast shared between casters as the same skill if it meant they could get their own unique gameplay stuff lol.
But instead they just keep creating equivalents of so many abilities with extremely minor differences, instead of just putting those in the role skills and using the extra job ability space on reinforcing said job’s actual identity and gameplay.

As an addendum: I should add this as a signature to my post since it never comes across the way I wanted it to but to clarify my frustration is at the devs for putting us in a position where this we’re having to actively campaign just for something as simple as (more) varied gameplay between jobs. As for whether any of it is actually one ‘player groups’ fault in reality - ‘casuals’ or ‘hardcore’ - I find doubtful.It’s not like anyone can force the devs to do something lol. If anything it seems like they’re not actually listening to any players at all lol. Maybe the voices in their head?

[Mikey_R]

People seem to looks at a lot of the modern jobs and go “yeah sure they have x y and z similar but that’s a balance consideration/necessary evil” but then don’t consider the fact that they didn’t have this sort of similarity before ShB

Yes they did. Sentinel, Vengeance and Shadow Wall were functionally the same, with Sentinel being 40% rather than 30%, but they were used in the same situations. I guarantee that applies to the vast majority of the necessary evils.

Like “people say the melee are similar because they all have a big 2 minute burst and a small 1 minute burst”. Yeah but they didn’t all have that before ShB. NIN had that. MNK did whatever the fuck it wanted to. SAM played more like a sustained DPS that didn’t care about anyone else’s burst window nor did it have a particular area of its rotation that was noticeably bursty and DRG played still mostly the same rotationaly to how it plays now

No, they weren't the same, this is why I bought up the hypothetical question of whether just changing burst timings is enough to make a job not homogenised. Also, SAM was absolutely a 60 second job thanks to Meikyo Shisui and had a harder hitting burst every 2 minutes thanks to Ikishoten and Guren, not to mention Kenki shenanigans with Hagakure.

Or when people compare SCH to SGE, sure they are the most similar jobs but why is SCH 100* more similar to WHM than it was in ARR back when they were literally your only choice. Somehow the two got away with their only similarity being physick=cure 1, adlo=cure 2 and succor=medica but now they have to have 80% of their kit the same or everything apparently falls apart

Because fight design now is different to fight design then. There weren't overly complex mechanics, everything was fairly simple. As fight design gets more complex, kits have to change and adapt to better suit the new environment. We also have to consider that most of Scholar's kit was based on Arcanist, where they only had a few slots to bring something unique to Scholar over White Mage. Though it is worth noting that the basis for the 2 jobs DPS rotations were, apply DoTs (Aero1, Aero 2, Bio, Bio 2, Miasma), spam filler (Stone 2, Ruin). Of course, there were other aspects, but that was the core.

If the jobs aren’t homogenised why can’t I play a DOT’er when I used to be able to. Why can’t I play a sustained DPS that is actually uncaring of others rather than a weird hybrid “I don’t want to care but I have to or I do terrible damage” like BLM. Why can’t I play a ramper, why can’t I play a debuffer.

Because they do not fit the 2 minute meta. It is as simple as that. The 2 minute meta is something that is bringing jobs together and is something that needs to go. However, lets not conflate the idea that every job is now fixated on the 2 minute meta with the idea that every job plays the same. Yes, big burst damage every 60/120 seconds, but they achieve it in different ways. COuld we have more ways with different DPS archtypes? Yes, as long as you are willing to get rid of the 2 minute meta.

I honestly have no idea how people can claim the jobs aren’t homogenised when we went from 2 DOT’ers, 4 sustained, 1 buffer/debuffer, 1 ramper and 2 builder spenders to 21 builder spenders

Alot of the jobs in the past also had builder spender mechanics. SMN's Aetherflow, Monk's Meditate, Dragoon's blood of the Dragon, BLM's Enochian, Warrior Wrath etc. and this is just going to Heavensward before we got the gauges for all jobs. Most of the gauges we got in SB was just a way to visualise the information differently as opposed to tracking a buff. As long as a job has a gauge, it will either be a builder spender or a ramper where the gauge doesn't get spent (old GL comes to mind). So really, saying all jobs are builder spenders is true, but it has always been true for the vast majority of jobs, you just might not have noticed it as it was hidden behind something else.

So, the question again becomes, what would it actually take for jobs to feel different? And I want to give an example, as a thought experiment. Lets go back to a time where Fester used to have increased damage based on the number of DoTs applied (by self) to the target. For this example, Bio 3 and Miasma 3. As long as they are ticking, Fester will do max damage. This is a situation that everyone is familiar with. I want to propose a different scenario. This other job has 2 attacks, they do not apply a DoT but instead apply a buff to themselves. These 2 attacks have different buffs so they can stack with each other. We then have a 'power attack' that increases in damage based on the number of buffs you have. For most situations, these 2 things are functionally the same. Keep an eye on your DoT timer or keep an eye on your buff timer. Only use strong attack when you have 2 DoTs/buffs active. But would these be considered the same? Likely not, but why not? If we then compare this to Ninja and Monk, both have a 60 second damage period and a 120 second damage period, just that one is a buff to the user/party and the other is a debuff to the enemies. But people would argue that they feel the same.