Selfish dps need their own role

[Reginald_Cain]

Machinist, black mage and to a lesser degree samurai are severely hindered by having their damage output kept to close to other jobs in their role. Machinisit is a pure dps forced to do comparable damage to bard and dancer which is insane. The buff provided by bard and dancer generate so much value that machinist is usually dropped for them after progging. Machinist's personal damage isn't enough to take advantage of these buffs in a double physical ranged comp and as a result we haven't seen double phys be viable since Stormblood when dragoon lowered piercing resistance. All selfish dps should always be a viable pick for the last flex spot if the rest of the slots have jobs with raid buffs. Pictomancer is almost as cracked as Stormblood Summoner. Back in stormblood summoner was one of if not the highest dps job in the game while having a res and a raid buff. Both jobs were allowed to be overpowered by virtue of their kits being clunky to use but pictomancer is a lot easier than Stormblood summoner. finding time to paint motifs during intense movement phases is tough but holding hammers, holys and comets helps a lot. Downtime is insanely good for Pictomancer compared to any other job and i believe all dps should be able to stock burst during downtime like it. I know picto can't afford to be nerfed too much or it will not be used over a caster that can res. I think picto should be to black mage, what monk is to samurai. close but slightly lower without good crits.

[Carighan]

Yeah, although it's not something you can push in modern MMORPGs. Players get too used to a relatively tight numerical balance, and "being able to play whatever you want".

But if you had older types of balance, where pure jobs could easily deal 50%-100% more damage than others, while certain support jobs like CCers were flat out a requirement to handle many dungeons, that'd be too annoying. Even if it makes for far better and more interesting class and fight design.

Look at bolt casters in DAoC flat out killing people before they even knew they were being attacked. Was that fair for the person being killed? No of course not. Was it actually quite balanced overall and led to a specific niche? Yes, quite so.

[CalvinDescoles]

That kinda a "good" solution you have here that can... "solve" some problem. having 4 types of dps, forcing comp to require those 4 types would actually permit devs to... re-balance the dps into their own role.

[Wayfinder3]

Selfish DPS don’t need their own role, Support need their own role, jobs that shouldn’t be DPS by virtue of the utility they could theoretically bring or in ninja’s case has brought that we’re all removed in service of making it fall in line with everything else.

Ninja has lost so much utility, the ability to apply slashing, the loss of aggro management tools, the loss of trick attack for minute to minute cool down alignment.

The physical ranged would benefit greatly from the addition of a support role and so would Red Mage, a class that aptly considered to be the support of the casters.

Selfish DPS just don’t need to exist, it’s silly to have jobs thats only contribution is that they’re better than everyone else or they’re worthless. It leads to extremely 0 sum balancing where if the vpr/blm/sam and mch aren’t the best class at any given moment. They’re are immediately the worst option. There isn’t in reason we should try and salvage this design principle. It’s blantanly archaic and applies a restrictive noose around class design for no reason than to satisfy people who think hitting hard is something remotely unique.

[Wayfinder3]

Selfish DPS don’t need their own role, Support need their own role, jobs that shouldn’t be DPS by virtue of the utility they could theoretically bring or in ninja’s case has brought that we’re all removed in service of making it fall in line with everything else.

Ninja has lost so much utility, the ability to apply slashing, the loss of aggro management tools, the loss of trick attack for minute to minute cool down alignment.

The physical ranged would benefit greatly from the addition of a support role and so would Red Mage, a class that aptly considered to be the support of the casters.

Selfish DPS just don’t need to exist, it’s silly to have jobs thats only contribution is that they’re better than everyone else or they’re worthless. It leads to extremely 0 sum balancing where if the vpr/blm/sam and mch aren’t the best class at any given moment. They’re are immediately the worst option. There isn’t in reason we should try and salvage this design principle. It’s blantanly archaic and applies a restrictive noose around class design for no reason than to satisfy people who think hitting hard is something remotely unique.

And I’m not advocating the return of the games more primitive systems like slashing debuff, just explaining that ninja had a lot to offer jobs that was taken from it in the name of not making too supportive. So I see no reason in giving pure DPS their own role for something that ultimately far less interesting. A support role can fundamentally change the way those classes play and add something unique to the game. A pure DPS role is just putting a ceiling on everything by making it so the best classes are always the one with the least utility.

[Azurarok]

I'd love to have a support role but fights are also designed to have 2 melee and 2 ranged right now, so if we do split to something like offensive dps and support dps roles I think the latter'd need to be able to flex melee/ranged spots effectively. The ranged jobs obviously can do that, but if any current melees should be in that role they'd need better disengagement tools and probably also lose positionals. NIN's just about the only Melee that I can imagine being able to transition to that well, like add more stacks of mudras and maybe some ranged shuriken skills. Otherwise maybe RPR with ranged avatar skills and easier access to harvest moon.

[Connor]

I think a support role could work, and it absolutely should’ve been considered at the start considering it’s an entire ‘mmo playstyle’ that straight up doesn’t exist in FFXIV.

But then, it’d ofc require way too much reworking of the whole system to work. Maybe the ‘free’ slot in an 8man party could become a ‘support’ slot instead. Make it part of the role bonus and nerf lb generation if more than 1 support is present to stop stacking maybe? But then, that’s just further limiting party compositions.
Plus there would be a lot of questions without easy answers, like whether jobs such as Machinist or Ninja belong in the ‘support’ category or the ‘damage dealer’ category. They’ve been much more ‘support-y’ in the past, but by this point they’re much closer to the ’damage dealer’ category, so it’s not quite as clear where the belong as with like Black Mage or Bard/Dancer.

There’s also the issue of how the ‘supports’ would be split. Assuming we had like Red Mage, Summoner, Bard and Dancer in that category, we have two raisers and two without. They could standardise Raise as a role action, but then some would argue that’s ’too many dps doing healers’ jobs for them’. The role would also be split between ‘casters’ and ‘non-casters’; giving phys ranged cast times to standardise them with RDM/SMN would be extremely controversial to put it mildly lol. Then again, RDM/SMN don’t cast that frequently anyway I think, so maybe like Bard songs with casts and Dancer steps that halt weaponskill usage could balance that out?

I think it’d be awesome if there was a ‘support role’ that had more freedom with jobs focusing on party support, everything in the ‘normal dps’ role would continue focusing more on direct damage dealing. But it’d take such a massive amount of retooling that the two guys in Yoshi-P’s basement developing the entire game wouldn’t be able to make any more expansions

[BabyYoda]

Well, Having HP / Damage as 2 attributes in the game screams no more supports pls,

but let's say that tomorrow we have support jobs, what kind of mechanic they have to trigger? DPS jobs will do damage and tanks will do tanking and healer will heal both.

You can say it will give damage to dps jobs but now you are trying to create a problem by reducing DPS damage to make support role valuable, I think you see the issue here.

While I see that we could have this kind of role but it require to a huge change to:
1- Part composition: from 4 to 5 and from 8 to 10, 2 supports in full party and 1 support for small party.
2- Other important attribute that supports can handle, it will have less damage than DPS and less tanky than tanks and less healing than healers, no you have to create another attribute that this job can solve.
3- this means we need a full rework and I don't think SE will do a full rework for something that maybe could work, and they are interested in classic FFXIV mobile than doing anything huge in the base game.

well if you ask me what Supports could do with current setup? I would say it can speed-up limit break. I don't see other attribute that can be manipulated than this.

Thank you

[Kabooa]

Yeah, although it's not something you can push in modern MMORPGs. Players get too used to a relatively tight numerical balance, and "being able to play whatever you want".

But if you had older types of balance, where pure jobs could easily deal 50%-100% more damage than others, while certain support jobs like CCers were flat out a requirement to handle many dungeons, that'd be too annoying. Even if it makes for far better and more interesting class and fight design.

Look at bolt casters in DAoC flat out killing people before they even knew they were being attacked. Was that fair for the person being killed? No of course not. Was it actually quite balanced overall and led to a specific niche? Yes, quite so.

They do not need to be outrageously ahead.

They simply need something that allows them to make better use of buffs than bringing another buff. Maybe all those Direct Critical guarantees should only ever be on the "Selfish" DPS.

All dps jobs could theoretically do the same solo RDPS so long as the way their contribution interacts with each other is greater than bringing another duplicate job.

As an example, using some arbitrary numbers and FF13's paradigm names:

A "Synergist" (Buffing role) increases the party's RDPS by 5%. Any additional Synergist increases this additively by 5%. Taking 4 is +20%.

A "Saboteur" (Debuffing role) increases the party's RDPS by 5%. Any additional Saboteur increases this additively by 5%.

A "Commando" (Set Up role) etc etc.

A "Ravager" (Capitalizer role) --------------.

If you take all 4 roles, you increase the party's total DPS by ~22%. If you don't, you get less. The attribute bonus is a tuning lever that can also be used here and you have a "Full set" bonus greater than the sum of the parts, so instead of +6% for all 6 roles present (tank, healer, 4 dps), it's +8%.

This is ultimately one of the paradoxes with selfish vs buffing jobs in this game, in that all bonuses provided by the "buffers" are so minute that they are also ultimately selfish jobs, just tuned a little lower. As a game, the path forward is simply embracing this. Everyone does on average the same solo DPS, but you compete by your actual combat role, not your combat position ("Melee vs ranged" evolves into "Buffer, Debuffer, Alley, Oop").

As a nice knock off effect, you can also give Tanks and Healers a sub-role that diversifies them as well. "Sentinel / Sabotuer" for the Dark Knight, "Medicus / Synergist" for the Astrologian as an example.

As for how to handle additive stacking, the inspiration I would look at is Guild Wars 2 and Boons.

Boons are unique status buffs that multiple classes have access to but have stack limits. For example, "Alacrity" increases action cooldown recovery by 25% (20s cooldown -> 16s), but this cannot stack. "Might" increases damage dealt and has a stack limit of 30. Boons effectively create incentive to cover all of them without stacking any particular class because the most important part is coverage.

Applying this to Final Fantasy would have something like Red Mage, Dancer, Monk, Paladin, and Astrologian all provide the same named buff (We'll call it "Heroism") and it can stack between them, but each can only apply one, providing +3% damage per stack. This is something they would apply rotationally (Perhaps even have alternative skills to create some maintenance), and then give them cooldowns that strengthen the effect. The duration / cooldown of those enhancer bonuses could then differ among the jobs and you effectively create different spike windows for different damage profiles. "Enhanced Heroism" might be +8% per stack, but the Paladin provides it for 5 / 45, the Red Mage for 8 / 80, the Dancer for 6 / 60, etc etc, and the Enhancement is unique and cannot itself stack.

[Altera]

I am a BLM main since 1.0 and at this point, if Selfish is so poorly done, and cannot be balanced. Make ALL Jobs give some kinda support.

BLM
Blizzard4/Freeze - Applies Brittle status on Enemy, takes increased damage for X amount of seconds
BloodRite - BLM spills their own blood in a ritual to boost party damage/Speed
Stygian Spikes - Applies a barrier on party members, if an enemy strikes a player, enemy takes X amount of Thunder damage
Apocastatis- The old 1 player shield
Manashift - Gives X amount of MP to targeted party member