FFXIV: Why Jobs Are Homogenized and Not Unique? | MMO Discussion
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It's a mix of balance and consistency. We saw this problem back in the ARR days with Cross Class Skills. It ended up that you needed to basically level up each class anyways because you needed skills from one class to make another work. Wanted to play Warrior? Gotta have Paladin. Want to play Paladin? Gotta have Warrior. Now, those skills are just naturally baked into the tool kits.
Making them unique has strict limitations on what you can do to maintain that balance.
This balance is really delicate matter, especially for XIV that really presistant to maintain balance in game
while I also agree these days balance are getting boring due to homogenized roles
but then again players will always have "Bad" habits on making and even insisting on using "Meta" build only in any game that have unique builds
and this being proven from time to time even on the game as balance as XIV
and I personally don't want to be not allowed and be able to use my personal favs jobs just to enter any specific content
Just like in 1.0 you have to use ARC for moogle and DRG for ifrit lol
I'm really looking forward for a solution in between
They need to apply a portion of the work they've done with the new PvP abilities into the regular game. Every jobs feels amazing and unique to play. They also have their own burst window rather than this boring 2 minutes buff meta. The button bloats is getting out of control, jobs has so many abilities that does the exact same effect on different cooldown timers especially for healers. DPS is just a different ability that does aoe instead of single targetđ
The thing is there is no "solution", just different philosophies. I'm leaning towards the unique sides of things since I always prioritise fun over what's considered optimal if it's boring. XIV has crossed that line hard for me if it's anything below savage, where nuances in job design are noticable and therefore shine.
When I look at old PvP vs the new one I'd say I'm not the only one who feels that way. Personally, I disliked old PvP because it felt so.. numerical, for lack of a better term. The current one is vastly superior in terms of fun. A shield healer that actually only uses shields. Love it. lol AST cards that don't feel the same. RDMs that can swap between two stances. All good stuff.
I hope we see more of that in 7.0 but I'm not holding my breath. There needs to be some balance, yes, but currently XIV is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The short answer is both giving a larger audience of different skill levels an easier time to understand everything as they try the game out and not restricting any (non-limited) job from any duty in harder content by making everything viable. And that's fine to me. Would I like things to be more unique? Yes, but I feel how things are is better for the game's overall health and growth. It was mentioned in the video but players can just play PVP or do something where customizable duty actions are involved if they want a different experience. There's a little bit of something for everyone.
Because Yoshi-P is incapable of thinking.
I agree when you say balance shouldnât be the center of the convo. Or balance should mean more about your contribution to the group opposed to measurable output. In the old WoW days all the people who would cry about balance made me so annoyed and it eventually just ended in the game being dumbed down all around.
Balance to me should include 4 elements: Survival, Damage, Group Support, and Group healing.
Survival = when youâre directly being hit how much can you hold up.
Damage = How much damage can you dish out
Group support = how much can you buff your group or debuff/break the enemy
Healing = how much healing can you put out to the group.
But you shouldnât just be locked to being good at (or only contributing) to one of the four. The better you are at one thing, it should have diminishing returns on the others. A red mage for example should be serviceable at everything but not the best at anything.
A paladin should be heavy on healing and survival, but not really big on damage or group support.
Bonus points if the game actually lets you specialize more in one element of the class than other so when you have two paladins theyâre not expected to do the exact same thing as the other .
I just miss the days where mmos were about synergy.
I just play the game and enjoy it, I have no opinions about the current jobs being "easy" or "bad" when it comes to rotation and identity. But I'm not going to disregard the opinions others have either. I hope the devs do relax a little and add back uniqueness to jobs
If the 2 minute buff window did not exist then all classes would feel different. As someone who is leveling all jobs (all now at least 80) they all feel different enough when I play them. The way I heal on all of the healers is different. The way I attack across all jobs feels different. I notice it more as I don't care about rotations or aligning buffs while just leveling.
The issue I think becomes high end play when you are basically trying to squeeze all of your big damage in a burst window then it makes them all feel the same because EVERYBODY is saving all of their stuff to blow their load during that 2 minute window.
A lot of content creators spent years asking "Why is this buff on 45 seconds? Why isn't it 60 seconds so it lines up?" Now they are complaining about the 2 minutes window. They brought it on themselves?
I say remove all GROUP damage buff cooldowns. This will allow the devs to actually allow different burst windows to exist. Rather than them be build for one minute. Press 60 second press all big damage buttons. Do again another minute and hit 120 sec cd 60 sec cd and all of the big damage. They could instead have classes that go through 10 second windows, 30 second windows, no builders at all instead various CD big damage hits. This would allow a lot more variability than what presently is "allowed."
I look at it the same as the game Furi. You're abilities are relatively tame and the complexity and depth comes from the encounters themselves.
I really don't understand this comment that jobs are "homogenized." Reaper/Dragoon/Monk/Samurai/Ninja all play highly differently… The Casters have nothing in common. Healers and Tanks are probably closes t to homogenization, but even those all feel pretty different to me. I enjoy WHM gameplay, but hate AST gameplay. PLD is not fun for me, but DRK and GNB are.
There is no solution to the problem of the homogenization of jobs only trade off. Job feel unique PvP because they are not designed for group content. They are jobs that do one thing really well and come together a team where other players shore up their weakness. To make jobs unique in PvE without needing a large team SE would have to let every job have single player gameplay. The only game I have seen job uniqueness take front and center is Black Desert because all their jobs are designed for solo play.
This is an age old problem that has existed since MMOs have existed. I do get frustrated with balance being the end all and be all, that is until I'm barred from a group for being the wrong job/class. The reality is there will always be a meta/BIS for certain fights. I think the goal here should be to make sure all classes are balanced enough to be accepted into 99% of the content in the game. Then when an ultimate has people taking BLM over BRD it's totally fine because that sort of thing was always going to happen in the top tier of content no matter how well balanced the jobs are, one will always just be mathematically better than the other. So I say let's embrace that fact and open up the design space a bit and instead bring some more unique flavors to the jobs and let the flavor of the week be what it is.
Chris you need to be more positive and try FF11 someday. I want you to see what we see and then get an understanding of sub jobs or changing weapons in middle of combat.
Favorite blu
To have played stormblood, and with all the flaws: 3.5 was probably one of the most balanced we have seen with more diversity even on core gameplay. Yes there were some black sheep (BLM, DRK, SAM and WHM mostly) but for example: blm was a meta pick for speedkills, whm was still taken it was just not comfy due to movement, sam was in a weird spot, drk was not bad just outclassed and had its strength for some situation because of those differences. But in sam's case as an example: they probably shouldn't have a job with one more a slashing debuff and should have tried to vary better the debuffs across the jobs, to create synergies that werent focused on one job (aha dragoon) or put them on the already best one (war, nin), but instead of playing with it and get regular balance, they just scraped it.
When you know that if your job aint good on release, it will probably not get updates or balances for 4 months if you are lucky, sometimes more than a year, it makes people way more focused on which jobs are good or bad, as they don't know if anything will change after all.
The issue I've been having with the game is they wanted the classes to be isolated into a role a lot of the old school games the players modified a class into the role. The devs essentially Said this is what you are accept that. And I get it because it makes it easier for them when it's all about numbers and that's all they need to focus on hit thing to zero win. I find it almost comical they completely refuse and seem to almost despise the players that enjoy being a full support style. Because of this I've seen a huge trend of identity crisis with a lot of the classes because they seem to be forcing the classes into the roles they made. Ionno got much love for yoshi and do enjoy the game but feels very boring and lack luster over the years losing its charm
I don't want balance to be king of everything. If another job is better than the one I'm using at a certain fight that's cool. I'm sure they can make a fight in the future where my job would be better at the content. If every job can have that then what's the problem? If sage is better at savage fight A but Astrologian is better at Savage fight B that's cool, better does not mean the other jobs can't do the content. Right now healers are really irrelevant in everything except the high end content… how is that fun? It's becoming clear like you guys said that over the last two expansions they have signaled this will be a homogenized game. Sad but on to the next mmmo. I've had a blast and it will remain in my heart but when the fun is gone why stay? They weird part is they could make changes to the healers to make them more dynamic, more involved than spamming one button, but synergy between healing spells, but they refuse. This is not a game for healers, they should eliminate the role and spread teh healing among the tanks (already has happened) and dps. Give the ranged DPS the healer kits for 7.0:
Bard(harp)magical range with astro kit now songs
Dancer physical range with sage kit added to dance moves
Machinist physical range with whm kit added to abilities give him a healing automaton
Beastmaster (Bow) physical range with scholar abilities added to the diff animals he can summon or catch
That way the range gets to keep doing damage and the healing is taken care of and no one is forced to smash one button from level one to ninety. Seriously go level a white mage see how much you spam that one button.
I think a lot of people here are making good points.
2 min window is bad and has made a lot of Jobs feel very samey. Tightly tuned content balance has made "unviable" Jobs (which are entirely VIABLE, just not the top of optimal).
Healers are…complicated. You have the camp that wants to be pure healers, the camp that wants to be support healers (with buffs/debuffs), and the camp that wants to be damage dealing support healers. Think like how Everquest had Clerics (pure), Shaman (buff/debuff focused), and Druid (damage focused), which Pantheon is trying to emulate in its design. You can read the English official FFXIV forum Healer area (it's toxic, be warned – the pro-damage side relentlessly attack anyone who either likes Healers as they are or has a proposed solution that isn't "more damage buttons") and see arguments for the different leanings, as well as FFXIV Discussion on Reddit. The best solution I've seen (imo) is the proposal to make all four of the Healer Jobs have a different focus like that, which it kind of did in ARR with WHM vs SCH (WHM being a more pure and GCD focused Job while SCH was more focused on oGCDs and Cleric, DoT, DPS uptime). The term coined seems to be "The Four Healers Model", which holds that we have 4 Healer Jobs, so there's no reason for them all to play essentially identically (or at least very similar to one another, especially in their damage rotation).
The PvP system would be interesting, but isn't perfect. As a person that likes playing a pure healer in games (Cleric in EQ, Holy Priest in WoW, WHM in FFXIV), I don't like Seraph Strike and not having a spamable or AOE heal. IF those problems were addressed, I might be okay with it, though.
I think there ARE answers, it's just hard. oGCD/free healing from Tanks and DPS needs to be reigned in, and Healer oGCDs are probably too powerful (except for the Healers, if any, we base around oGCD use), and they need to change the tuning on encounters a LOT to make the Job variations not as problematic (MCH in 6.2 was so bad BECAUSE of how tightly tuned P8S was), and reduce the "pass fail" nature of mechanics so taking a little avoidable damage isn't a death sentence.
Honestly, top down the game systems need a redesign. People don't really want that, but that's the answer. The alternative is more homogenization, which probably isn't good for the game long-term. Better to bite the bullet and get it fixed sooner rather than drag on in this state.
Iâve been progging this tier as a healer for the 1st time, doing both AST and SGE. Currently on the final phase of P8S (soft enrage), and these jobs are completely different. I invite other healers to go through P8S and tell me they are âjust spamming broilâ. Thatâs hilarious. I also invite you to heal P5S, and tell me with a straight face you are just spamming one spell. So short answer: if you just do dungeons or easy content, then yes, all jobs are the same in the sense you donât need to be good at them. Just pushing buttons randomly will get you through the finish line. This is true for any videogame in history. Easy mode = no effort.
PS: Healing P8S is absurdly fun.