Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[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]

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.

It's not even about them having fun, it's about their magic funny number being bigger because they barely have to play around the fight, just alternate DDR and their static 120s rotation.

[Voryn]

I think there’s a good chance you’re right about ultimates being why jobs are designed the way they are now. If all jobs’s rotations are built around the a similar plan (in this case, doing strong bursts windows), and also they’re generally not especially complicated, they’re going to hopefully be easier to balance in ultimates.

But if they don’t prioritize having every job be similarly balanced in ultimate, then there’s a greater chance that a weaker job would be bad enough to be actually unviable. This could be really frustrating with how the gear system currently works. If you only like one job in your role (or are a melee that doesn’t like the job that shares gear with your main) then you might have to spend weeks getting all the gear for another job. If the devs are ok with the risk of less balance in ultimate then they would have to make it easier to play multiple jobs.

It does seem like jobs are simpler so newer players can get into raiding more easily, as they have less mistakes to make and are hopefully more likely to do enough damage. But I’d prefer the game give newer players better ways to actually learn to play their jobs rather than to make jobs less interesting for all of us. An extreme example is that although some healers complain they only press two buttons to do damage, some new raiders playing healer still won’t do enough damage if they don’t know that healer damage actually matters and that they should try to keep their gcd rolling whenever they can.

[Mawlzy]

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.

Oh I absolutely agree.

[Moqi]

They decided to focus exclusively on fight mechanics instead of making an interesting gameplay loop because it's easier to balance and design around, so when content lacks mechanics we are left with nothing.

I'm not gonna blame Ultimate per se but rather how SE decides to approach difficulty.

If you raise the skill ceiling you can apply that anywhere - even if the fight is easy you can always try to aim as high as you can for fun.

[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.

[CaedemSanguis]

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.

There is very little ressources put in ultimates, if you cancel ultimates you might get one extra trial, and I think it's wrong to put all of the difficulty in encounters and nearly nothing in job efficiency

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?

I really dont think there is a "contributor" to the current job design, it's just that SE wanted to reduce the gap between high skilled/less skilled players, the "2mn meta" only happened because of this, if you have only 1mn/2mn burst it's easier to reduce the gap (compared to having 30s/45s/1mn/1mn30/2mn/3mn/4 or 6mn/etc)

[CaedemSanguis]

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.

well jobs should be balanced around highest difficulty ? why focusing balance on content without dps/hps/mitigation check ?

[CaedemSanguis]

Honestly I dont really understand the thread x)

You dont have 2mn meta because of raiders or savage/ultimate, you have 2mn meta because SE wanted to reduce the gap between high skilled/less skilled players (yoshi said it somewhere around SB or ShB) and also because SE wants every job to perform the EXACT SAME

most of the raiders I know (myself included) wants way harder jobs, savages/ultimates will then be balanced around jobs that have 30s/45s/1mn/1mn30/2mn/3mn/4mn/6mn burst

trust me, the raiders are the ones that are the most annoyed by the current job design