FFxiv could use a big change in game design but what about balance

[Kes13a]

what about balance? its a crock of steaming excrement that leads to.... the boring same garbage we have today. people whine when someone out dps's them... who cares if they know their job and rotation so they can do that.. others want to do teh same damage etc. which means they try to balance that, and you cannot balance for skill.

they need to make the jobs fun.. screw balance. if a job is fun, is a far better metric than the mythical "balance"

no game developer has ever balanced a game.. unless there is only a single class.

[Kandraxx]

You first would have to fix the game system. Fix the microlag/unresponsiveness. Scrap OGCDs, nice idea that doesn't work and hugely contributes to the tedious/braindead pos gameplay.

Then you have to fix the roles. Tank = Tank, not a blue color DPS that happens to be the one to get hit. Healer = Healer, not a DPS that sometimes uses a CD heal. And scrap all shared role actions.

After that you can start to fix the jobs. Throw out all the 123s 124s 125s you get the idea. And then sit down for 30 min and feel bad about creating something that not even the shittiest 80s game had. Remove the resource bloat. Throw out the 2m and 1m damage CDs and meta. Throw out all skills that are in a 'logical sequence'. In fact, just delete every skill on every job and start fresh because that's hella lot easier for you. Create skills that stand alone, do have a direct impact and are fun to press. 123 into resource 1 into resource 2 with always the same no brainer OGCD between them is not fun, it's the definition of bad. One unique resource per job is enough, there's no need to have more. Most skills should be based on that resource and player/situational choice.

[Azurarok]

AST was the buff healer(with time magic to extend them), SCH was the DoT healer, and SGE could have much more to the "damaging healer" idea than Kardia and Pneuma. WHM just getting Aero 3(or a holy equivalent) back would at least be more than it has now. CS3 has already made it abundantly clear that they can't balance for shit even when each role effectively only has two archetypes at most, so I'd rather they just bite the bullet and roll back the homogenization so that the enjoyability of the battle content isn't entirely dependent on savage/ultimate encounter design.

Returning WHM to a 2.5s cast Glare/Holy and rebuilding its skills around that would do wonders for it imo. Being a slow-ish caster with higher raw output and mobility challenges should be its thing, not EW/DT AST but worse.

[brinn12]

I really don’t get how people believe jobs will become more complex in 8.0, when encounter complexity is already going up. If one increases, the other has to decrease — that's always been SE's design philosophy. Just think about it for a second. You’ve been lied to before. They weren't supposed to dumb down more jobs in Dawntrail.

[Inputnamehere]

I had slight trust in a certain somebody's "big change in 8.0" claim. But after what they did to BLM, nah. Now I just play what's left of the game until I can find a replacement game, or run out of patience.

This is a PvE game. You don't need obsessive balancing in a PvE game. Over-balancing makes everything boring down. And honestly, I won't call the current state "balancing" anymore. It's more like giving up job designs entirely so they can have an easier time with all future "adjustment", which would be simply tweaking the same numbers over and over in an Excel sheet.

Either they no longer have any competent team members to work with, or their stale decision-makers thought it a better idea to just put the game on a heart-lung machine and fleece it for as long as they can.

[Basteala]

All this sandpaper and for what? Imbalances are still rampant and exacerbated by a drastic reduction of encounter metrics.

I hate to say I agree with this. Sure the rez casters are close to each other on damage, as are the non rez casters, and the melee close to each other, and the r phys close to each other.

But all the jobs are pretty much stratified by their above role. Literally. With the exception of Ninja.

[Taranok]

So, the big fix to encounter design comes from recognizing 3 things.

1, healers are overpowered as all hell (at healing.)

2, tanks are overpowered as all hell (at tanking, specifically mitigations.)

3, binary pass-fails aren't fun. They're attention checks and they get extremely tedious, especially when it's the only way your role does its job.

In order to fix the encounter design, the devs need to claw back power from all healers and tanks. Even from casters, who have way too much movement right now for good caster design. You just can't make interesting heal checks when a healer can solve charybdis into second aoe for free. You can't make interesting tank mechanics when a paladin just using personal mit can hit 450% EHP. Hell, you can't make any tank other than a mitigation tank if you let mitigation values hit 450% EHP. You can't even do fun things like force healers to make actual decisions when spells like medica 1 exist.

Like, seriously, how do you threaten classes this overpowered? Almost every single design problem of FFXIV, including modern day DDR fights, is a direct consequence of healers and tanks being completely overpowered.

Fixing it can be done somewhat simply with a trait at level, say, 102, and a complete healer and tank swap (and adding cast bars back to casters,) could even be done without messing up older fight design. But the simple fact is all the problems of FFXIV game design stems from making classes too overpowered, and instead of depowering them, they double down and push the design ever more into the extreme. More one shots, more auto-deaths, faster mechanics, faster massive aoes. That's not interesting design, it just eventually hits a breakpoint and people stop playing the game.

[Taranok]

Returning WHM to a 2.5s cast Glare/Holy and rebuilding its skills around that would do wonders for it imo. Being a slow-ish caster with higher raw output and mobility challenges should be its thing, not EW/DT AST but worse.

Honestly, we can draw a straight line from modern DT caster design all the way back to healers having the innocuous request of wanting to be able to cast oGCDs without clipping their GCDs. If I were a dev, as per my above post, I'd rather remove healer oGCDs and force them to GCD heal, than have the current situation that has resulted in no casters existing anymore.

Casting gameplay is at its best when fights don't have a ton of movement, but you still need to make movement and it matters. Kind of like how, in my opinion, healer gameplay is at its best when the healer has limited resources and relatively weak spells, can't instantly solve problems, and if they want it to be instant, it comes at severe cost. Triage gameplay is amazing for healers, no damaging GCDs necessarily required.

[Azurarok]

Honestly, we can draw a straight line from modern DT caster design all the way back to healers having the innocuous request of wanting to be able to cast oGCDs without clipping their GCDs. If I were a dev, as per my above post, I'd rather remove healer oGCDs and force them to GCD heal, than have the current situation that has resulted in no casters existing anymore.

Casting gameplay is at its best when fights don't have a ton of movement, but you still need to make movement and it matters. Kind of like how, in my opinion, healer gameplay is at its best when the healer has limited resources and relatively weak spells, can't instantly solve problems, and if they want it to be instant, it comes at severe cost. Triage gameplay is amazing for healers, no damaging GCDs necessarily required.

I just don't understand why it needed to be spread to the other healers when it was only AST that remotely needed it because of its card stuff.

And the only reason AST even needed it was because they extended all healer dot durations to 30s from 18s in SB, more or less halving their instant cast count.

And I'd guess the only reason the dots even needed the extension was because of Cleric Stance, which was removed in the same patch anyways.

[kajv95]

Mate, they're not even keeping older content balanced now with these shit jobs. What makes you think keeping older content balanced should be a consideration for the future when it isn't at this point in time?