Thread: Please Share Updates on 8.0 Job Design

Originally Posted by Aravell

I've seen a lot of people blame "DDR fights" whenever talk about jobs comes up, but what's the exact definition of it? I don't think anyone has defined what a DDR fight means?

What I personally think ruined job design is 'team jump rope mechanics', some examples:

- Instead of being allowed to stand and cast heals, the healer now must jump rope in tempo with the rest of the party, so now they get more and more instant heals because they're not allowed to stand still.
- Instead of the physical ranged helping the BLM take a mechanic so the BLM can continue casting, the BLM is now forced to jump rope with everyone else, so no more casting, you get more instant casts now.
- If the tank moves to jump rope with the rest of the party, the boss might follow the tank and cause the melee grief, so now the boss is only allowed to stand in the middle and chaincast mechanics and not autoattack.

It's the departure from role mechanics that slowly encroaches upon and eventually ruins job design for me personally, every role does the same thing now, every role jumps the same rope. There's very few remaining unique struggles for each role, so every job basically feels the same when you do a fight.

I think there is a huge amount of overlap between what people call DDR and what you call team jump rope. The relativity mechanics from e12s are imo prime example of DDR mechanics.

Originally Posted by Aravell

I've seen a lot of people blame "DDR fights" whenever talk about jobs comes up, but what's the exact definition of it? I don't think anyone has defined what a DDR fight means?

What I personally think ruined job design is 'team jump rope mechanics', some examples:

- Instead of being allowed to stand and cast heals, the healer now must jump rope in tempo with the rest of the party, so now they get more and more instant heals because they're not allowed to stand still.
- Instead of the physical ranged helping the BLM take a mechanic so the BLM can continue casting, the BLM is now forced to jump rope with everyone else, so no more casting, you get more instant casts now.
- If the tank moves to jump rope with the rest of the party, the boss might follow the tank and cause the melee grief, so now the boss is only allowed to stand in the middle and chaincast mechanics and not autoattack.

It's the departure from role mechanics that slowly encroaches upon and eventually ruins job design for me personally, every role does the same thing now, every role jumps the same rope. There's very few remaining unique struggles for each role, so every job basically feels the same when you do a fight.

That sounds about right.
But it goes further than that. There is also a general surge of mobility and twitchy action mechanics with visual cues to look at everywhere, where time spent moving or running all around is ramping up and up and up dramatically. I do main rphys jobs, and I don't have uptime problems (although the role has one of the poorest mobility those days except DNC), and it still pisses me off to no end.
That's what Mao called I believe "frogs in a blender". I think the image is apt enough, at least for me.

Originally Posted by Raikai

I don't heal anymore, but AST was my favorite back in the day. I mourn the loss of the sects...

Because it was for freakin' nothing!

I actually didn't mind it at first, but on practice the whole Shield healer / Pure healer segregation turned out to be nearly pointless, and let me ask: what happens when the 5th healer gets added? It suddenly steals old AST fantasy and becomes flex? Or they won't mind having unbalanced types of healers?

Not even mentioning... The amount of shielding or direct/regen healing the 'other' healer has is quite a lot for them to even be categorized in a box.

SGE is already the flex healer as it stands

It’s a regen healer that has shields on its GCD

Originally Posted by Raikai

I don't heal anymore, but AST was my favorite back in the day. I mourn the loss of the sects...

Because it was for freakin' nothing!

I actually didn't mind it at first, but on practice the whole Shield healer / Pure healer segregation turned out to be nearly pointless, and let me ask: what happens when the 5th healer gets added? It suddenly steals old AST fantasy and becomes flex? Or they won't mind having unbalanced types of healers?

Not even mentioning... The amount of shielding or direct/regen healing the 'other' healer has is quite a lot for them to even be categorized in a box.

If they add a new healer, they would either have to turn back the AST changes, and so making the years the job fantasy got deleted all for nothing, but annoyance to the players, or ignore the unbalance and make the sacrifice moot. I am just sad they ruined a job fantasy for something like SGE who also failed to deliver in being a more battle focused healer.

You want to play Healers? Why not try:
WHM
WHM but book
WHM but gambling problems
WHM but nerf gun

Originally Posted by Pip_Chick

Man... this made me remember Diurnal/Nocturnal sect Astro. It was so fun choosing which sect to pick based on my co healers.
When the Nocturnal sect got removed for the "split between pure and shield healers" I was so sad.
I would really like if we got the 2 sects back and be left to choose which we prefered. Can we have it back please?

Honestly, diurnal/nocturnal never should have been a thing. It was a bandaid to force the healer to heal like a WHM or SCH at a time when it was inferior to both (literally, the class flat launched in a worthless state and had trouble healing the dungeons of HW.)

But, what I want is really to have uniqueness breathed into healer (and tank) design. The buster meta FFXIV uses is extremely toxic to the game as a whole, but especially tank and healer design. AST happens to be a poster child of this because it flat couldn't heal well enough until it was turned into a copy of both healers that preceded it with the push of a button, with one of those 2 (SCH) also being turned into the other (WHM.)

So long as the concept of tank busters exist as a major and primary mechanic of fight design, both healers and tanks will continue to have terrible, homogenized gameplay full of binary pass-fails and no uniqueness to speak of. Just think, Synnastry could have been a stance, and AST could have been closer to WoW's paladin circa legion era. But alas, the devs don't understand how to make anything unique anymore, and long ago abandoned the concept of uniqueness.