Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[Themarvin]

Not really as you as one job can get weapons for all jobs, which makes it useless in so many ways,

[AvoSturmfaust]

Tbh you dont balance around Dungeons or anything else, you Balance around Savage/Ultimates and maybe ex Trials, where your Endgamerotation and everything else really matters so i would say yes

[Carighan]

Tbh you dont balance around Dungeons or anything else, you Balance around Savage/Ultimates and maybe ex Trials, where your Endgamerotation and everything else really matters so i would say yes

This is good (to a degree) general advise for say, Overwatch 2 or so. Games where the gameplay and the context are fundamentally the same between all tiers of play.

But that's not so much true in MMORPGs, in particular in a design such as these. Dungeon gameplay and Savage gameplay has very little in common, even before you get into the differences between the types of players that have each as their highest level of gameplay they engage with. You don't get matchmade into an Ultimate by the DF because you do too well in Dungeon runs is what I'm saying, basically. The contents aren't part of one broad spectrum.

The following all, ideally, need seperate class design consideration:

* Dungeons
* Normal Trials+Raids
* Extreme+Savage
* Criterion Savage
* Ultimates
* Solo combat (to a very minor degree, that should be trivially fulfilled by the type of class design FFXIV uses)

I excluded PvP since that has classes which are fully distinct from the PvE ones.

The thing is, you can't just look at ultimates. If you balance for that, you cannot also balance for say, Extreme Trials. The fights are just too distinct in their basic design. But you will have plenty players who will never ever ever look into Ultimates, and don't they deserve a balanced class setup, too?

[Valence]

I'm not sure considering that PCT's design right now is literally destroying Ultimates and they haven't adjusted anything in fear of destroying the job for other types of content. DSR also had crippling issues with some tanks (WAR/PLD and MCH to a lesser extent) and had no adjustments made either until 6.2, where it showed up again for P8S and... you know the rest.

The real problem is that savage and ultimates lead the whole battle design and dictate it to the rest of the game, and they follow metrics so little and narrow that even going barely outside of the beaten path is a surefire way to break the whole package... Thanks DDR, the 120s meta and the holy damage metric.

[Avoidy]

Pretty sure the devs have said this quite openly, but good luck finding these exact snippets; everything gets said in offhanded interview comments or gets buried in 8 hour live letters. I distinctly remember the balance team mentioning that the two minute standardization fetish was born out of a desire to make high-end raiding encounters easier for the team to design. They also take player feedback into account. For example, AST used to have lots of different cards that you drew randomly, and a whole system for building an optimal party buff with some chance mixed in, but a lot of people who treat this game like a spreadsheet didn't like that and complained, so now AST is a boring shitjob where you draw the same cards over and over again.

[Kaurhz]

I think they should balance around the hardest content.

But I don't think that means that everything else should play like utter slop as a result. I think there's a middle-ground with being able to balance around high-end content, without turning your standard content into a soulless husk.. Just a shame that the development team don't really seem capable of doing such.

Either way, they have a self-inhibiting design philosophy, it shows, and the game suffers for it.

[Nero-Voidstails]

I think they should balance around the hardest content.

But I don't think that means that everything else should play like utter slop as a result. I think there's a middle-ground with being able to balance around high-end content, without turning your standard content into a soulless husk.. Just a shame that the development team don't really seem capable of doing such.

Either way, they have a self-inhibiting design philosophy, it shows, and the game suffers for it.

I will sadly say they should balance on casual and extreme content then make fight from above around the job because I sadly think that the 2 minute burst meta hurt the game more then anything

[Jeeqbit]

The 2-minute burst and making jobs bursty (like how Paladin was changed) was because of high-end duties generally, yes.

Since it's considered the highest end content in the game the playerbase tends to demand more parity there

I don't think it's just based on requests. I think SE wants it to be balanced regardless of requests.

In terms of having the same abilities, parity in that area is also demanded in casual content - for example "why doesn't PLD have a gap closer", "why doesn't DRK have as many heals", "why doesn't DRK have the same invuln as everyone else". There is absolutely no way they changed WAR's conal AoE into a circle for raiders. That parity was for dungeons.

they've been simplifying jobs as attempts to get more players into high-end raids

Yes and no. Yoshi-P said something like this long ago, and it's true: raids are sort of dangled at you like a carrot. You see others do them and get the rewards, and want to do them yourself because of peer pressure and to fit in. They are meant to be sort of a "goal" even if many players don't arrive at that goal.

So the aim is to make it more realistic to arrive at that goal. To that end, many changes were made:

• Savage was seen as too punishing so they made it easier in the final Heavensward tier and decided that was the difficulty level they wanted to copy to increase participation enough.
• Cross-world Party Finder was added late in Heavensward to make it easier to find people to PUG with on dead worlds.
• There were too many status effects to track, so they were replaced with Job Gauges in Stormblood and they began really making more indicators and telegraphs as the years went on.
• PFs were changed to have [Duty Complete] and [Practice] so that the toxic-looking messages were not needed ("2 chests, no bonus").
• Rotations were not intuitive enough, too punishing and some players did a fraction of their damage potential, so from Shadowbringers there was a much bigger drive to make rotations intuitive and easy to figure out - such as by removing enmity combos and stance dancing on tanks.

What could they do to help reverse course? Or should they, even?

I do not think they should "reverse" making rotations intuitive. I think this is a good thing. In the past, I saw tanks that would never navigate beyond spamming an enmity combo in tank stance, summon the wrong thing on SMN, or press a button wrong and lose half their damage for the next few minutes. It's hard to get a rotation so drastically wrong now, and they are just easier for new players to "figure out".

However, I do think a rotation can be "intuitive" and "dynamic" at the same time (such as by having skill trees, or ways to modify the playstyle via materia), as long as the defaults work just as well because most people stick to defaults.

I think jobs should be unique, to a certain extent. They achieved this in the past and it was fine. For example, all tanks achieved the same thing, but in different ways:

• PLD had raw mitigation/blocks.
• WAR increased HP and took damage, so they could heal it all back up or leech it back up with attacks.
• DRK was once a leech HP tank but became a magic shield absorb tank.
• GNB was a jack of all trades, master of none, with a notable regen idea.

Now they just gave all 4 of them all these things more or less, destroying the uniqueness.

You also had little things to contend with such as WARs having to aim their AoE, which not everyone was good at, and that little nuance was ripped from them.

Barely 10% of players do savage

30% of players clear the savage tier; probably even more prog it.

Ask yourself which type of content the Director enjoys and which is most useful to streamers who have his ear.

From their perspective, when they tried making non-raid content, they got attacked for it (Island Sanctuary etc), and concluded that they can't win whatever they do.

[Daralii]

From their perspective, when they tried making non-raid content, they got attacked for it (Island Sanctuary etc), and concluded that they can't win whatever they do.

If the mammet sweatshop is the best non-raid content they can come up with, and they genuinely think they deserve to be lauded for it, they're delusional.

[Kaurhz]

From their perspective, when they tried making non-raid content, they got attacked for it (Island Sanctuary etc), and concluded that they can't win whatever they do.

From a player perspective the problem isn't that it was non-raid content... The problem is that they just didn't bother at all with developing something flush. They gave people more weekly cookie cutter content. You fill in your workshop, then you ignore it for the week or 2 weeks. Then you have the problem that we lost substantive replay content for weekly cookie cutter... That is how the players see it (whether or not this is true in actuality).

They can win, they just didn't even bother with actually trying to win, and if that'll all it takes for them to conclude 'we can't win' - Then as far as I am concerned that's just a disappointment.

I mean just look at how much gameplay value something like Ishgard Restoration had, versus something like Island Sanctuary... Neither of which are combat oriented.