FFXIV and Job Identity

[Laisimo]

Idk, just your tier list really reflects how little you know about the jobs and how they work together when doing harder where you need to rely on raidbuffs and timings in a bossfight. Samurai in Tier 1 shared with summoner while dancer and reaper goes into tier 2? Your arguments about where the different jobs end up in that tier list also shows how little you understand them.

[Zakuyia]

We need to play jeopardy with the devil.

What is job identity for 300,000 gil?

What is job uniqueness? For 1,000,000 gil.

[Carighan]

What is job identity for 300,000 gil?

What is job uniqueness? For 1,000,000 gil.

Not going to happen. And you could argue FFXIV never really had job uniqueness, only lore/animation/style identity but never gameplay identity derived from uniqueness. There were whispers of it, sure. But fundamentally the game doesn't want to engage with jobs that don't have a "fixed solution" (usually a static or quasi-static rotation), especially now that all CDs have been harmonized to 120s or to align with 120s.

Hence why saying "they're eroding job identity" is always a bit weird: Erode what, exactly? Sure, in a vacuum, looking at just this game, naturally having Sword and Shield oath was a stronger gameplay identity than not having them. Or... was it even? It wasn't like the idea was Paladin-unique. It wasn't like while the specifics differed (much like they do now) the overall concept mirrored between tanks, including the weird "dance" it elicited. And that dance was just busywork, there was a fixed solution as to when you wanted to be in what stance, with no player expression beyond "I could have done better". There wasn't "I did well because I did A" vs "I did well because I did B", the second was "I did badly because I did B", which you can still get easily just as well, as evident by all the data we can readily access about how players play (fflogs and such).

Job identity is... a tricky concept however. I don't think it can be lifted from other games and transplanted into FFXIV, given the combination of its age, the extreme button bloat and hence abilities to consider and reconsider and the vast number of classes instead of less classes coupled with specializations. There's just too much. FFXIV launched without any real job identity, and what little there was has been removed since ~late Stormblood. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all if all you have is an infected appendix, you remove it. A healthy one would be better, sure, but between none and infected, none is better.

[Qyoon]

they are going to remove their identity from all jobs gameplay wise so it's easier to balance each jobs.
After 8.0 i bet picking a job will just be all about the VFX and overall style of it nothing more.
Dunno if it's for better or for worse, but it's clearly SQE goal atm.

The good part is the way it's going we might be able to play FF XIV and FF XIV Mobile at the same time.

[Carighan]

The good part is the way it's going we might be able to play FF XIV and FF XIV Mobile at the same time.

As an aside, I'm fully expecting an FFXIV Switch 2 release...

[GreysonMidori]

The only takeaways I can get from most of these overhaul ideas that keep popping up is that people think the current gameplay gets so stale they just want more than to play an entirely different game.
They want to change FFXIV into an whole different beast with new problems and speedbumps to keep them awake during their muscle memory coasting.

And this mostly spurs from people feeling very unsatisfied with job design anywhere BUT raids and trials because that's what our combat system was redesigned to fit around.

The only way to really satisfy this kind of frustrated yearning is probably to just completely divide the gameplay feel outside of raids and trials with different playstyles or something like they did with PVP having entirely different combat rules.

But if there's one thing I know about this community, It's that nobody can agree on anything. So they'll just keep simplifying things for the sake of perfect consistency until the game plays you more than you play it.
Unless you're doing 8 player content.

[Valence]

I don't know I feel very frustrated ESPECIALLY in raids and trials...