Unsubs vs Resubs over BLM changes

[Carighan]

Yeah in my ideal world it'd be close to that. Also fire-damage keeps escalating as you stay in fire (no limit), but your only source of instant-cast spells are:

* That 1 Swiftcast.
* Paradox (see below)

No Triplecast, no Xenoglossy (casted in Fire, only instant in Ice!), no Despair, no nothing. Need to move? Go Ice again! All ice-spells are fully instant. Of course, you lose the escalating fire damage bonus, but hey, you also regenerate mana, get the procs you need to refresh Thunder etc (I'd only give it on going into Ice). So ice phase would be a dual nature phase of instant-casts + mana-regen, while Fire is a dual-burden of mana-drain and ~slidecasting-only.

In return this would allow fire damage to be massively bumped (the escalating bonus I'd in fact lower per stack, but raise the base damage significantly). And Paradox would act as a "wrong stance" spell, acting like Fire IV in Ice and like Blizzard IV in Fire. Xenoglossy is casted and simply costs no mana, otherwise it acts like Fire IV / Blizzard IV, effectively being a "reverse Paradox". Or rather Paradox is a reverse Xenoglossy, I suppose.

[HikariKurosawa]

I'm just glad square enix is in charge of their game because these ideas are abhorrent.

[Asari5]

20 jobs in this game... 20!!....

imagine having jobs for different kinds of people.

if you like a difficult job but arent that great with it... combine it with easy content.
if you wanna do difficult content but arent that great... combine it with an easy job.

mindblowing

[Carighan]

20 jobs in this game... 20!!....

imagine having jobs for different kinds of people.

if you like a difficult job but arent that great with it... combine it with easy content.
if you wanna do difficult content but arent that great... combine it with an easy job.

mindblowing

It might be counterintuitive, but the vast array of classes is in fact why they all have to be ultimately work quite similar.

Because it means difficulty cannot viably be established through class interaction. It's just not realistic. For any given PvE encounter, any balance the devs achieve would either:

* Exclude a vast portion of classes entirely, if balance is aimed at the few classes performing best in this encounter. You are simply expected to, say, bring Pictomancers for FRU. That's what FRU is balanced for, and intentionally no other DPS can produce the DPS needed for this encounter.
* Or, alternatively, you balance for the average or even minimum performance, in which case every group can trivially beat fights by just bringing whoever "overperforms" here. And this is an effect we already see, despite 5%-6% outliers in both directions. Imagine if it were 20%-50% outliers due to mechanical design differences!

This issue, coupled with the frankly inane need (and community desire) for more and more classes, means difficulty has to lie entirely in the encounter. It's the only way to centrally control the difficulty. But to establish this, all jobs of a specific role need to be "flattened", to ensure their perform about equal independent of the context. Look at what a huge problem Picto not fitting that mold was and still is, or how Vipers with their weird faceroll-lulz burst overperform in M6S. These things have to all be taken out. So naturally a job not fitting on the other end - too immobile - also has to be changed. All difficulty must come from the PvE encounters if your game has too many classes unless your community embraces and enjoys intentional irrelevance of some jobs in some contents (EQ1 and DAoC are good examples of this design paradigm).

[ovIm]

It might be counterintuitive, but the vast array of classes is in fact why they all have to be ultimately work quite similar.
...
This issue, coupled with the frankly inane need (and community desire) for more and more classes, means difficulty has to lie entirely in the encounter.

Respectfully, thats bollocks. Making things balanced does not mean homogenization and pushing every bit of difficulty into the encounter. It is much more work and definitely harder to balance the classes if they are not homogenized and each bring something unique to the table, yes absolutely, cause that means developing encounters with every class in mind and not just 5 roles.
But that does not absolve Square Enix from their product, since it is their job to figure this out. We are paying them to figure this out. They have a veritable army of game designers at hand, being such a massive studio with years and years of expertise in game design and development. However, from the credits, job design team is still just 4 or 5 people strong.

Homogenization and job simplification/shallowfication/however you want to call it is simply the easiest and laziest way to achieve some resemblance of balance, but balance does not require either of those things.

[Carighan]

Respectfully, thats bollocks. Making things balanced does not mean homogenization

All of MMORPG history disagrees with you there. MMORPGs naturally homogenize as they age. It just seems to be a universal law of MMO gaming, but it makes sense as games age, and naturally rosters both in class amount and class loadout expand. They also naturally either remove of neuter pet classes, though I'm not sure why if I'm honest, but it still happens in every MMO eventually.

More importantly though, that's not what I said. I did not say balance required homogenization, but a large roster eventually does, and with FFXIV having such a large roster comparatively speaking, it naturally does so more than other games, and faster. There is btw one counterexample, but it also provides for one of those weird and whacky worlds of how things could be: Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars 2 has 9 classes, each with tens of thousands of possible setups, effectively a near infinite pool of effective classes you could bring to a fight. The vast vast vast majority of these are not balanced at all, and strictly inferior, and all but one or two are absolutely inferior for any given goal you want to achieve. The other 9998 options are kept in as, well, fluff. They are window dressing. And even then GW2 is heavily homogenized anyways, just to a far lesser degree than most MMORPGs of its age.

And coming from 7 years of playing that before moving to FFXIV, it's different, but not superior at all. I would not call it inferior either, just very different. It has upsides, such as this wild diversity in loadouts, one Mesmer not at all playing like another Mesmer. But it also has lots of downsides, such as the individual irrelevance of each individual effect and the homogenization that comes from each ability applying 4-6 effects total out of a relatively small pool of maybe 20 effects that are the entire game. Its class system is interesting, but not in the "Look how much better things could be!"-way.

But again, to reel that back in: Even Guild Wars 2 heavily homogenized over the years. It is a constant of MMO gaming. You can argue why and whether it should be, but right now, it absolutely is!

[CidHeiral]

This issue, coupled with the frankly inane need (and community desire) for more and more classes, means difficulty has to lie entirely in the encounter.

Not true at all.

[PyurBlue]

Ice for movement is an interesting idea and it ties in to having timers back since it would put a limit on mobility. EW BLM is still my ideal, it kept the original spirit of the job while having more than enough tools to deal with modern content design, but even that iteration could coexist with additional ice mechanics.