Final Fantasy XIV Discussion on reddit “Where is all the FFXIV Homogenization?” https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/urnw2s/where_is_all_the_homogenization/
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#ffxiv #discussion #homogenization
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I feel like you guys hate blue mage. My evidence is that neither of you have a 90 blue mage.
Great ideas to save space in job actions.
La légende de QUINZAA.Monster snowquen's est mon idole. C'est la personne que j'aspire à êtrez, c'est ma lumière du jour
Yea… the PvE is too dumbed down and homogenized in order to cater to the casuals and make every DPS/healer/tank replaceable with one another
There is little to no job identity in the PvE setting
When you focus purely on job identity at the cost of everything else you get something like Blue Mage, which wildly swings on it's utility. I would prefer jobs to have milder differences in exchange for universal viability.
I think there is plenty of homogenization and people are more than willing to overlook it.
For example, the basic tank rotation always has 1 attack that grants "HP". I put that in quotes because GNB generates a shield. You have a gap closer, a ranged enmity generator, and two circular AoEs. Then, there's an alt cycle for peak damage. WAR uses their Inner Rage or whatever it transforms into. PLD has the magic rotation. GNB has the powder gauge combos. DRK has its Delirium cycle.
Even DRG, MNK, and SAM play similarly with their combo systems that encourage you to alternate between flank and rear. The main differences are how their finishers are done. MNK wants you to do both Nadi and your Masterful Blitz. SAM's Iaijutsu basically follow the same principle. Build up your Sen and use them for the big combo. DRG wants you to get your 2 Firstmind Focus for your Wyrmwind Thrust though this one isn't as reliant on your positioning and right combo combinations as the previous two. It just uses the same cycle.
RPR is left out because it hasn't undergone "consolidation" like the other classes have yet. But, when it gets pruned, I expect it to line up much more.
BLM and SMN also have a lot that line up. BLM's Astral Fire is essentially SMN's Demi-Bahamut and Demi-Phoenix phase. Demi-Garuda and Demi-Titan would be the Umbral Ice. Damage is low while you're waiting for the big stuff to be ready. You could probably fold RDM's Black and White Mana enhanced combos attacks as the enhanced damage phase while the ranged mana build up being the recovery phase into this as well.
BRD and DNC have a lot in common. Though BRD doesn't care about distance as much, DNC is generally up close due to the limitations of some of the attacks if you want to maximize damage. Chance to trigger higher damage attacks, have party wide buff at 30 second intervals, and powerful finisher once a certain gauge is filled. A lot of similarities there. One could even argue that MCN's Automaton could fit in here too though it requires less work on your end for the finisher.
SCH and SGE are a bit of inversions of one another. Both have some kind passive healing. SCH has the fairy. SGE has its healing from attacks. SCH's default mode is to shield while its alternate mode is to heal. SGE's default mode is to heal while its alternate mode is to shield. The difference is that the SGE's unpruned skill tree gives it a lot more offensive power that SCHs used to have as well. If SCH's still had more dots and Shadow Flare, SCH would be even more similar to SGE.
AST still has a bit of uniqueness in its cards, but much like SCH and SGE, AST and WHM have a lot of skills that line up including their instant heals, AoE placement heals, and this thing builds up and go boom.
Being eligible to clear and being homogeneous isn't the same thing. I'm tired of this take. Jobs become more and more boring ever since SB, tank stances and [increase DPS by X%] only. It's mind-numbingly boring for 90% of the content. How people can claim the game hasn't been homogenised to an insane degree is wild to me.
I think jobs should have their own identities. Jobs should be able to have very distinct uses in a party because this creates more opportunities for different synchronizations, and this allows for deeper gameplay. There will always be a meta with this direction, but I think people have forgotten that finding the meta, or even sometimes going against the meta is part of what made older MMOs more fun.
In fact, between this issue and the severe lack of inter-job customization, are the two biggest problems I have with XIV.
The key is to balance job identity with game balance itself. You have to homogenize somewhat to make this possible. I feel 14 does a good job of this. Each job has a unique identity and playstyle without excluding others from content.
You make things too unique and jobs literally get passed over for certain fights or excluded altogether. WoW really suffered from this and still does. Which has been one of its biggest complaints since vanilla.
I think far too many people are scared of “we don’t want to take your job because it’s bad” style scenarios (like a lot of “this is too much like WoW” concerns).
Roulettes aren’t going anywhere and are tuned so low they can be cleared by warm bodies. 90% of the player base will never even have the possibility of seeing this scenario.
Ultimates are more than easy enough that more job imbalance could be introduced and everyone would still be absolutely fine. The first place I could potentially see a “we don’t want that job” scenario is Savage. And at that point I’d say more unique jobs is worth that risk.
Especially because FFXIV’s job change system already mitigates this to a massive degree. You’re never going to be stuck in a situation where your class is bad and you’re stuck without literally re-rolling your character. If you care about raiding Savage to that degree, surely you have the dedication to level more than one job. If my current main MCH somehow becomes so undertuned I can’t bring it to high end raids (like some people are feeling about it in DSR, funny enough), it’s not like I’m left without options. I can play DNC, or GNB, or SGE, or RDM, or any of the myriad other jobs I’ve got at 90 or could get to 90 with comparatively little effort.
There is one part of the game where it truly feels like not every party comp can clear, ands thats the big pull in Holminster Switch right before the first boss with Sage if they have any tank besides Warrior with them.
If anyone out there has any advice for how a Sage should approach that specific pull, i would love to hear it. Because i have every Healer to 90 except Sage (80) and that specific pull has given me more trouble than anything else in the game.
Forgive me but, my first reaction at reading homogenisation was thinking, ‘milk?!’. Sorry. 😂 *ahem* silly nonsense aside. In my personal opinion, all jobs are similar when they belong to a specific group. I feel that’s what it’s supposed to be like. Tank, healer and dps. That’s basically it. They’re all diverse in their skills, but the bottom line is very much the same in my view. In order for a job to be truly distinct and unique, it needs to do something Only it can do. Case in point, Blue Mage.
I think the FFXIV devs have done a great job implementing player agency in the separate enthusiast content. Eureka, Bozja/Zadnor, PotD/HoH, BLU. All have pretty involved systems to modify their gameplay. I kind of agree with how they separate it: core gameplay is static and predictable (casual players can pick up and play) while enthusiast side content gives more freedom (core players can dive in).
Subjectively I feel like people treat cross-over principles as homogenization. Personally, I'm full with this post. As a tank main while there are some shared things they all play drastically different in terms of actually fully executing on their skills and abilities.
The reddit FFXIV community is pretty bad imo, they downvote anything that isn't 100% positive.
The biggest thing on my wish list would be choice and divergence in job builds, so that there is multiple ways to play each jobs. Maybe a drk dps build or a rdm healer build, interchangeable skills or even a sub job. I feel like there is no player choice at all in how you build a character 🤔. Although very easy to balance, it becomes very simple and dull over time.
I think new players don't see the homogenization issue because they weren't around to see how different the jobs used to be and every major patch it seems like the changes bring everything closer and closer together. And since a lot of the changes tend to be small things that add up like WAR getting a circle AoE so now all tanks act the same in dungeon mobs, that on it's own seems minor but it adds up. All the healers have 1 attack and 1 DoT, Sage has a couple extra it can sometimes use but most of it's kit is just SCH with the extra damage and single target drip heal being the difference and in practice, it's not that different. They removed things like refresh on Bard and other types of buffs so now Bard and DNC tend to conflict with each other because there are not enough buffs in the game to make them fill truly seperate roles, even removing crit procs from Bard. It's a lot of little changes that older players feel and make the jobs feel and approach everything basically the same. It's not totally homogenized yet but it's been a worrying trend for a while that is bad enough you can feel how samey some jobs are getting with each other.
I honestly don't think the individual job identity will go away. The developers seem to invested in keeping the job fantasy alive when they talk about changes and in some cases they even move away from the jobs feeling homogenized in ways I wish they wouldn't. Seems like every role has that one outlier that requires different stat priority making it rather annoying when it comes to gearing when you play multiple jobs regularly. It may not be so bad if they took a page from other mmos and have a few choices in gear for each role at the highest item level but they generally don't, requiring people to mix and match in kind of weird ways sometimes cause you can't just collect the most recent gear set and have it always match up with what your job needs.
i just hope they take away positionals… stupidest unneccessary mechanic, they should just make the pve like pvp… less buttons but way more unique, I WOULD LOVE THIS
i think my biggest pet peeve for 14 is when people say all jobs are homogenized to play the same. each job in each role is very different. sure there's some over lap because they're needs to be. every tank has provoke? cause its a role action that isnt just 1 tanks. hell back in 1.0/2.0 provoke was just for plds, and warriors had to level up paladin so they could unlock it in cross class skills. devs decided this was dumb, so just gave it to all tanks.
smn/rdm/blm. free movement most of the time, free movement every other spell, wants to stand still, but can move if they need to. even the gear, look at the tanks for this. all 4 tanks have slightly different gear sets because they all want different skill speed values. no tank BIS is shared between 2 jobs, they can work out most of the time.
when ppl say "all tanks are the same" i just think of my ex girlfriend that felt that all video games were exactly the same. you turn it on, shoot a guy a few times and then play another game" she thought all video games were basically call of duty. this is what these people are to me. someone that looks at all jobs and think, oh ff14 is basically just call of duty.
What I think on the matter is that, job balance is functionally irrelevant in any content below Extremes. And that the devs should focus on making the jobs unique and fun to play rather than worrying about making them "viable".
My reasoning for this is that XIV doesn't have DPS checks in normal mode anymore, and it has functionally infinite combat rez's. The only place where job balance really matters is in the highest levels of content. Even in that content though, the tuning is so low that once players are geared any comp is viable. Even 4 DNC, 2 WAR, and 2 WHM could probably clear P4S if at 600 ilvl(lowest DPS comp I can think of). The last time XIV had a raid tier where meta actually mattered was Gordias or arguably Midas. Content in XIV just simply isn't designed to require such strict balance and homogenization of the jobs.
If the devs aren't going to change focus on job design though, then they need to shift their focus on content design to make more content that's tuned like Midas was. In conjunction with that they also need to rework the reward structure so that high end players don't feel like they need to run expert roulette 5 times a week every week. Once you've done savage and ultimate, you just don't want to take these boring jobs into dungeons that much. They're tuned so low that it is just too boring. Overall though, XIV has a problem where it has simple jobs and simple content. When I started playing it had mildly complex jobs with simple content. You can have a game with simple jobs and complex content, you can have a game with complex jobs and simple content, and you can even have a game where both are complex. However a game where both are simple, is called Cookie Clicker, and that's what XIV is turning into.
Chris’ Black Mage movement idea was so cool i cant even lie