Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[Azurarok]

Jobs that do sustained damage hate downtime, which Ultimates have quite a lot of, while jobs with much more burst-oriented damage aren't affected nearly as much. DPS checks are tighter and the DDR is more specific, so uptime tools are more valued there too.

Since it's considered the highest end content in the game the playerbase tends to demand more parity there, which then often ends up with requests to make jobs of each role have roughly the same burst-oriented design and mobility/disengagement tools with less timer-based job mechanics like dots and debuffs.

It's also been my theory for a while that they've been simplifying jobs as attempts to get more players into high-end raids since it looks like they've been spending a lot of their resources making these and need to justify the cost.

I won't say it's the only contributor for the current job design issues of course, but I do feel it's a pretty major one. What could they do to help reverse course? Or should they, even?

[Daralii]

Considering DRG had its burst condensed from 3 Nastrond casts to 1 because of FRU, they're definitely part of it.

[VerdeLuck]

It's definitely a heavy factor that SE seems to only balance for Ultimate and Savage and doesn't really pay attention to how things play anywhere else. It's another case where I don't think they really play their own game, at least not in the way or at the level most people do.

[Themarvin]

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

[Mawlzy]

It's definitely a heavy factor that SE seems to only balance for Ultimate and Savage and doesn't really pay attention to how things play anywhere else. It's another case where I don't think they really play their own game, at least not in the way or at the level most people do.

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

[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

[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.

[VerdeLuck]

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

I would counter that with what is the content 90% of the game plays. Barely 10% of players do savage and less than 5% of players do ultimate. We shouldn't sacrifice the entire rest of the balance and game enjoyment just for 5% of players to have fun.

[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.