Thread: 8.0 DPS Job Rework Workshop/Megathread. Goals, Design Principles, and Mock-Ups.

Yes, the difference between a 30s DoT and a 30s cooldown DD attack in gameplay are essentially just:

* The former gives you extra movement/mechanics resistance (as the DoT continues to tick while you move, this is important for casters).
* The former can be re-cast early, but this produces no extra damage. But might sometimes be useful depending on the upcoming few seocnds.
* The latter can burst more, sometimes important depending on the fight.

I kinda feel there'd be room for at least 1 DoT-centric job though, 4-5 stackable DoTs of various lengths, then the filler spam attack is one that drains X seconds off the DoTs current on the target, dealing their damage instantly.

I’d like to see changes in the encounter design that force more randomness and reactivity in the general play style of pve jobs. As opposed to each encounter following an exact script along with job rotations.

I’d also like to see job individuality and expressiveness even if that allows some jobs to outperform others in specific encounters. Ideally, the devs would build encounters that help balance those performances.

Finally, I’d like to see less focus on pure damage maximization being the primary goal of every job role. Perhaps this means some jobs have buff/debuff roles. Healers have to balance healing vs dps (more so than today). Tanks have to balance enmity generation, defense, and dps. Etc…

Some examples:
1. Utilizing the stun/interrupt system that exists and giving more tradeoffs/decision making to usage.
2. Well timed binds, paralysis may impact enemy’s ability to use certain movesets.
3. Other status effects temporarily buffing teammates or debuffing enemies. Like slow/haste, blind, etc…

Another thing I’d like to see is more interactivity between jobs. For example, perhaps bard or dancer can give a partner mp regen. This might help a black mage deal more damage in their fire phase or a dark knight deal more damage via edge of shadow or help a rdm raise multiple party members in a short time. Etc…

Originally Posted by Hanzzo_Kai

I’d like to see changes in the encounter design that force more randomness and reactivity in the general play style of pve jobs. As opposed to each encounter following an exact script along with job rotations.

I’d also like to see job individuality and expressiveness even if that allows some jobs to outperform others in specific encounters. Ideally, the devs would build encounters that help balance those performances.

Finally, I’d like to see less focus on pure damage maximization being the primary goal of every job role. Perhaps this means some jobs have buff/debuff roles. Healers have to balance healing vs dps (more so than today). Tanks have to balance enmity generation, defense, and dps. Etc…

Some examples:
1. Utilizing the stun/interrupt system that exists and giving more tradeoffs/decision making to usage.
2. Well timed binds, paralysis may impact enemy’s ability to use certain movesets.
3. Other status effects temporarily buffing teammates or debuffing enemies. Like slow/haste, blind, etc…

One thing that really bothers me are the "bland oGCDs" like Dream within a Dream just to name one of some examples... Stuff that just do plain damage and won't interact with anything else on the kit. They're only there to challenge you to press the button as it comes off cooldown, ideally between GCDS. To me that's kind of ability that I'd consider bloat and candidate for improvement, or even removal with the damage loss being compensated somewhere else.

Balance Druids in WoW worked similar for a while, though between two aspects of DPS instead of DPS/Healing. But yeah this'd be sensible. It still requires healing expectations across all content to massively increase while also greatly curbing the support/ability pool of all healers (and even non-healers) so that GCD healing is far more required as an activity, but this in turn would then allow this "Heal a lot with GCDs -> Unlock a supernuke // Nuke a lot with GCDs -> Unlock a superheal"-setup.

On that note, I am easily accepting of 3-5 extra damage buttons on healers but only if 3-5 or more healing/support buttons get axed in turn to not further cramp the already laughably overloaded hotbars all jobs have in FFXIV. This would be easy in so far that healers have an absolutely bonkers amount of oGCDs, which in a lot of ways all do the same thing.

Example:
* On Scholar, the only truly outstanding oGCD is Expedient. Eat-Fairy nearly qualifies but since the whole mechanic with the charges vs fairy vs gauge is super-pointless and undercooked right now, it serves no purpose. All other oGCDs are just fancy variants of heal more or heal faster. These could trivially be removed in turn for improving the main healing GCDs if even wanted, and make space for more damage skills. Not nearly all need to be removed of course, but everything would qualify.
* On Astrologian, the only interesting oGCDs to keep are either Draws and Plays or the "prediction" skills Star / Horoscope / Macrocosmos. Which set depends on your outlook on what defines Astro conceptually of these two things. But again, of course both can be kept (and everything else like Sect / tankbuff / CO removed), but in extreme cases all but 4-5 buttons can be folded into base skills.

It's not better on White Mage or Sage either. Sage already does this smarter anyways, since it has just one truly important oGCD button, Eukrasia, and can dual-use all of its other buttons. All of these healers could easily lose half a dozen oGCDs and make room for 3-4 more damage skills, ideally GCDs, and turn another 1-2 oGCDs into healing GCDs to more evenly balance the scales, the implement such a back-and-forth system, though conceptually maybe only White Mage should have this particular one.

I want the 2 minute meta to go away. Reduce group buffs across all jobs and return them to just a couple (Nin, Order, Including probably) to make personal dps matter more than making the 2 minute group burst all important. It also just feels incredibly limiting because every job basically has a 2 minute set rotation they do not want to deviate from. And outside that burst windows a lot of jobs are just mashing a simple 123 combo until it's burst time again. It just feels like the 2 minute thing has been a focus and I'd rather jobs be freed from it. I wouldn't mind if group buffs became more like WoWs Bloodlust CD where it's impactful and big but it's once a fight.

Also would love more procs and such to make rotations more dynamic. Right now a lot of jobs you can memorize and muscle memory through your rotation and that's a snoozefest. I wanna pay attention to what I'm casting and I want it to matter for skill expression.

Some customizability or new specs for jobs would be amazing. I don't care if it means never getting a fully new job again if it means we had some sort of way to customize or change things up. Arcanist became SMN and SCH. What if Pugilist had options of MNK and PUP (Puppetmaster). Talents where we can elect for more buttons for a complex but slightly more powerful rotation or more passives for an easier to play but still effective rotation could also be great. I just want more depth to what we have.

Oh, and also for jobs to get their rotational kit earlier so ARR content doesn't make me regret my life choices.

Some potential ideas:

Stance-changing Healers
Splitting healers into pure and shield was a bit of a mistake, and I feel the solution is to look at Astro from 3.X and its ability to choose whether it'll be a regen or shield healer at the start of a fight (you would activate Diurnal or Nocturnal Sect before combat and it would lock in once fighting starts). Implementing this for the four healers where a stance augments their kit toward pure or shield healing would be really handy as instead of having to search out one pure & one shield (or two shield) for PF you can instead take any healer and just have them adopt the relevant stance. Would be an opportunity as well to add some aesthetic to each job; a White Mage could have an Earth theme on its spells when being a shield healer, and the current Water theme when it's doing pure healing.


DPS Swappable Skills
Some old playstyles were lost to job reworks that have left some players without the job playstyle they enjoyed; Summoners are probably the biggest example, going from a DoT management style to the current system that's been criticised as being overly simple and a bit rigid to play around different timings in phase changes. However, there will be players who came into those jobs not knowing the previous playstyle so just reverting them would be a bad idea.

A way of restoring old playstyles could be through swappable skills on the role-action system. In the past, this system was used in a way where you'd pick a number of skills from the ones available to equip and you would take whichever ones best fit the fight(s) you were planning to do; for this system, it'd be picking one of two conflicting skills that change the playstyle of the job.

As an example, let's say you could either equip DRK's Living Shadow (does damage independently of you) or Dark Arts (buffs potencies of certain abilities while its active); the damage from Living Shadow should be comparable to what you get from using Dark Arts appropriately so that the playstyle can be changed without overly changing the job's potential damage too much; one style would be better in certain situations vs. the other, but a player could change it between pulls to better fit what they're dealing with if an issue comes up. It'd be a way of potentially getting some old styles back that sections of players weren't happy about losing, like SAM's Kaiten.