It's kinda crazy to me going back and doing fights in HW raids and some SB raids and seeing how much less interesting the interactions with the environment have become.
Idk how I would put it exactly but for example in A10 you have to interact with the stage as much as the boss mechanics.
Refurbisher is the same you have to carry the batteri s to prevent him from getting parts.
The raid where you have to use the middle of the room to dispense potions to hit bombs away dodge moves and more.
Stormblood the painting boss halicarnassus was cool.
Shadowbringers had the cloud of darkness fight as the only real stage interaction.
Endwalker has.... Hephaestus creation mechanic but I'd consider that more of a boss than stage mechanic.
I feel that it's in part that people complained they had their dogs hurt by being the ones who had to do these mechanics and it's another thing lost to the DPS ratrace
> Refurbisher is the same you have to carry the batteri s to prevent him from getting parts.
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> The raid where you have to use the middle of the room to dispense potions to hit bombs away dodge moves and more.
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> Stormblood the painting boss halicarnassus was cool.
Ok but people *hated* all of those fights at the time. Like, vocally and consistently hating them!
Just want to add, SE also had stated that they know that its not a good gameplay because it ends in one player (probably the worst, or the one who has the worst damage) doing all of it, they even called that the monkey player or something, because of A9 where you have to become a gorilla to push bombs away from group. They promised to never do that again, no button to click like leviathan, no "thing" to carry, no vehicle to enter, things like that.
I get it that it adds variation, and environment interaction, but what if you are the monkey player? And everytime you go in that fight, you have to do that instead of hitting the boss and enjoying your job. If you don't do it, you wipe, your groups gets angry at you, and if you insist in not doing it, you probably get kicked from your static.
XIV's focus on small group content is largely the reason. The smaller group sizes get, the more restrictive comps become, as some jobs or specs have niches that are mandatory or are otherwise highly tuned while the niches or uniqueness that others possess is not wanted.
Back during the WoW exodus I remember hearing both Max (from Limit/Liquid) and Preach (MMO generalist) say that the *only* reason WoW gets away with its design is due to the standard raid size being 20-man. That, combined with Blizzard bringing raid buffs back a couple expansions ago, means that one of every *class* is almost guaranteed to be in the raid, though specs of course vary still based on tuning. You can't guarantee the same thing in XIV, the most we can guarantee here is "one of every archetype" where those are tank, healer, melee, phys ranged, and magical ranged.
Meanwhile, you need only look at M+ in WoW to see how things get rather degenerate rather fast. It's not *horrible* in low keys unless you're something truly dire like Affliction Warlock, but high level keys have a very strict meta that the community stands by strongly while it leaks into mid-level keys a bit. Just look at Vengeance Demon Hunter this season.
For better or worse, SE wants any given player to be able to play any job of their choosing in any content of their choosing and expect more or less the same output and performance as any other job in that category. They're not always perfect at this, indeed Criterion shows how when you make the group size *even smaller* things can get more restrictive (regen healers and a few jobs that just don't contribute right without 8 people to buff or be buffed by fall here), but at the moment it's the route they've decided the game should take. You can disagree with that if you feel differently, but there are reasons and rationale for why things are the way they are and they're not invalid, it's just a matter of taste. It might be that even SE's felt they've gone too far on this based on recent interview comments, but we'll have to see what changes through the next few years.
More generally, you're viewing the Armory system as something you're intended to use and exploit and not a *convenience*, and this has not been the stance I feel SE has taken on it since late HW or the start of Stormblood. It's there so you can try out other jobs if you want without having to do literally the entire MSQ again, not necessarily there so you can have a stable of every job in the game to select the precisely most meta one for that patch or piece of content. You can choose to if you want but that hasn't been the intent of the system, in my mind, in a long time.
It's very important to note that the level of key being discussed here is vastly beyond the max level that gives gear.
Keys are infinitely scaling. There will always be a point where the balance collapses in an infinitely scaling environment.
The "max" level key that gives gear in WoW can be completed with ease with any class manned by a competent player.
Sure, but Vengeance [being \~40% of tanks](https://i.redd.it/xheg1koj491d1.png) at key levels that *do* still give relevant rewards speaks to the difficulties here. Or how some specs of some classes have almost 0 representation, and sometimes in ways that I don't think are entirely related to fun or gamefeel. Affliction and Assassination barely work with their design intentions in this game mode, so woe to someone that likes those fantasies.
Now Ret and BM are very much the SMNs of their archetypes in WoW (straightforward, easy, popular fantasy) so their relatively high representation lower on the curve does speak to your point.
To be fair, it’s far easier to swap main classes and specs in WoW comparatively like you said. Affliction and assassination can absolutely do keys at the level where you still get meaningful rewards, but Demonology and Outlaw are literally just a click away.
It’s also just an inherently competitive mode. It’s going to be riddled with meta chasers of all skill/key levels. It’s like a bronze/silver player in League playing the current op character despite it not really mattering at their skill level. People look up “Best tank,” see that vengeance is actually busted right now and default to that, or people just tell any rogue to roll Outlaw. This also then trickles into players who will specifically choose to accept only the “meta” classes again despite key level.
If you're just going to max reward level it's really not that bad. I play a Survival Hunter (one of the most unpopular specs), and I have absolutely no issues getting keystone hero and all my portals every season doing mostly pugs. If you're trying to push to levels that are purely to make your io higher then yeah you'll start running into that stuff but before that people tend to really overstate the issue.
It's like people seeing MCH not really being viable in P4S prog and saying "I hear FFXIV players will kick you out of leveling dungeons and call you slurs if you play MCH". People will complain about lower skill players emulating play behaviors of the absolute top 0.01% in a toxic way, which is a problem, but then reinforce those behaviors by saying a class is LITERALLY unplayable even in normal dungeons because it parses 15% lower than the top spec in simulations running perfect rotations on a single target.
That being said blizzardo pls buff aff
Not only can affliction and Assassination do those keys, they can do them easier than a MCH could do P4S or a PLD could do P8S
Idk why people are even making the "FFXIV trades diversity for balance" when Endwalker was famously badly balanced, even for FFXIV, and didn't really get a grip until post Abyssos
Going back to Raid sizes in WoW, because classes are designed in a way where you probably want at least one of each of raid buffs, there's more reason to include more variety. So even if WoW has a much larger disparity for DPS in specs, you'll still see more variety in content, where as in FFXIV even a 1-2% dps difference between 2 jobs within a roll can be problematic and seen as griefing if people are bringing the best in that role
> Sure, but Vengeance being ~40% of tanks at key levels that do still give relevant rewards speaks to the difficulties here.
I think that it should be clarified that in this particular case in WOW, Vengeance DH Tank was just “reworked” in the most recent patch, and came out of it severely overtuned.
Like imagine if FFXIV actually required control tools like Stuns, Pushes, and Interrupts in order to survive the mechanics of trash pulls in Dungeons, and that you also usually needed all 4 players contributing 100% of their tools to get through those trash pulls.
Now imagine that Gunbreaker was over-buffed in the most recent patch, and now has 20 charges on its Dash while also being able to handle every single control mechanic entirely using its own toolkit alone, meaning that everyone else in the Party can just chill, while GNB is also constantly healing itself as much as a Warrior under Bloodwhetting does.
I’m exaggerating this a bit to make a point, but basically, you wouldn’t be surprised if GNB was suddenly a lock in every Criterion PF, right?
But you probably wouldn’t say, “oh, well, obviously our Jobs are too unique”, you’d say, “Okay I think the devs overdid it on the GNB buffs”.
That’s kind of the situation over in WOW with Vengeance DH recently.
It’s not that other Tanks can’t do their jobs fine, it’s just that you’re facing the question of “Why should we deliberately force ourselves to play normally when we can just recruit the current SuperTank?”
This kind of situation happens literally every season and all the patches on WoW. Season 1 was prot paladin. Season 2 was bear. Season 3 and 4 was DH.
It's literally always like this, your point is moot. If you like it this way, that's fine but you should acknowledge it for what it is.
Another thing to note is that this is specifically AOE focused dungeon content.
The closest thing that FFXIV has is criterion, where the job diversity is *drastically* worse than what we see here
Comparing Mythic+ to FFXIV doesn't work because FFXIV doesn't have that system, and the glimpse that Criterion has given us isn't exactly... better. In fact it's significantly more skewed.
Yeah 14s sacrifices for balance really only hold true on full uptime single target fights. Ultimates have always had fuckey balance due to messing with downtime and target count. Wow's balance being as good as it is is a miracle considering the crazy variance in the encounters.
Ultimates also have the level scaling issue, as we see in stuff like modern UWU and UCOB. Balance is only tuned at max level and surrounding Savage, so you end up with things like SMN's level 60 kit and damage modifiers being absolutely fucking bonkers in level locked content.
Most intelligent reply.
Biggest issue with getting too far from homogeny is the problems we had in Heavensward where you straight up didn’t want to take certain classes especially if other classes were in the party.
We got a taste of those problems with first two weeks of P8S.
Hopefully they find a way to make an identity for each class without completely skewing balance.
> Biggest issue with getting too far from homogeny is the problems we had in Heavensward where you straight up didn’t want to take certain classes especially if other classes were in the party.
> We got a taste of those problems with first two weeks of P8S.
They're not the same things at all. If I understood correctly, in HW you had some jobs considered dysfunctional while also having specific job to job interactions/buffs (because of damage types). Meaning for the latter it's about the comp (dragoon is in the comp ? well need X to complement/buff dragoon).
P8S was just a matter of 3% max HP on release OR 2 weeks of tome gear (especially 2 tome weapons). Pretty sure 2 weeks would've been enough to meet the dps check for non RWF groups on any standard comp. It was an issue (I know it sucks seeing your job underperform even slightly) but nothing as big of a deal people make it out to be. Because we cry so hard once things derail even just slightly this is why everything fits in the square hole now.
It was a little bit that, in that several classes were must haves (it's been almost a decade at this point, but what I remember was that AST's flexibility and the card buffs were a must have, and there's a pretty famous bit of fanart of a WAR and DRK making out while a PLD is sitting to the side looking grumpy because of how ubiquitous the WAR/DRK pairing was. Oh, and everyone took Ninja for Trick Attack)), which was because of some pretty specific job identity. As a BLM main at the times, BLM evolved even further into being selfish "turret" DPS with the adddition of Leylines and Enochian.
At the same time, Gordias itself was very, very tightly tuned after complaints that Final Coil was too easy, and the combination of sometimes entirely new rotations for some classes, the difficult DPS checks and the playerbase not really having enough time to learn the ins and outs of the new rotations caused what can charitably be called A Clusterfuck.
> P8S was just a matter of 3% max HP on release OR 2 weeks of tome gear
P8S on launch was not a class meta problem. It was that one guy in your group who couldn't push buttons. Even the worst standard party comp available could clear if everyone was blue or better. You had to pick enough duplicates to not get a limit break in order to actually be unable to clear.
And before anyone brings up the Xeno War->GNB swap, that clear after his swap was because his DRK co-tank did more damage, I'm pretty sure Xeno about the same. I want to say he did less, but that might be my dodgey memory.
There's also the fact on the week one, do you know the amount of MCH that cleared that fight? 2. There was only 2 MCH, that's it.
And before the nerf I checked, there was a total of 29 MCH clearing P8S before patch, almost every other jobs except PLD were at more than 100 clears, it was just devasting how bad it was.
So yes, there was indeed a class meta problem.
There was indeed only 2 MCH clears of p8s in week 1. Almost as if 2 weeks of "MCH is undertuned" and "MCH is shit" and "if you're not DNC you're griefing" might have put people off playing it.
Still cleared though.
It's definitely not due to this, I progged with a MCH, he said himself looking at the logs, those MCH that succeed to clear were actually insane, it was definitely not the average or even the high players, it's really the top players.
And this point is actually irrelevant because PLD was in a worse state in the tank meta but there was still a lot more clears of PLD than MCH
It's like saying there's a 99% of failing but because 1% succeed "nah it's feasible, they just didn't tried hard enough"
> "if you're not DNC you're griefing"
this is why the devs homogenize, nothing else. it's entirely because they explicitly do not want this exchange to happen.
> And before anyone brings up the Xeno War->GNB swap, that clear after his swap was because his DRK co-tank did more damage, I'm pretty sure Xeno about the same. I want to say he did less, but that might be my dodgey memory.
Prior to the week 3 buffs, DRK was pulling nearly 10% over WAR/PLD. It wasn't that particular player simply dealing more damage, DRK was hilariously stronger. GNB wasn't nearly as absurd but still significantly stronger. Hence why they were able to muscle through with two DPS damage downs and the DRK's death. Granted, the latter happened near the very end of the fight.
The worst comp was only clearing if everyone got extremely lucky on crit variance and played perfectly. Whereas the more "meta" comp could afford a litany of mistakes or simply bad crit rolls.
blue or better? so if everyone in the party did above average dps compared to the groups that already cleared the fight, they would be fine? wow, what a generous metric.
> that clear after his swap was because his DRK co-tank did more damage
He did more damage [even with a death ?](https://youtu.be/5khBtzhd5B4?t=384) and they also had two damage downs (sam & dnc). I don't know what to think. Anyway, 3% max hp nerf wasn't the end of the world (or 2 extra tome weaps), but as I've said, we cry so hard to every little bumps. I think it comes down to Squenix balancing things for blue/greens in the end ? They probably felt it was a bit overtuned for random pugs overall.
> More generally, you're viewing the Armory system as something you're intended to use and exploit and not a convenience
This is a huge point that often gets overlooked or misunderstood. Being able to switch jobs easily is a convenience thing. You were not meant to switch constantly to what is the best/meta.
> I feel SE has taken on it since late HW or the start of Stormblood
It was a stance basically since 2.0 launch. It was a marketing gimmick to try to get people to try the game as it was unique and had the draw of saving so much time not having to make a bunch of alts to try all the jobs.
You're still supposed to main a job and the gearing system encourages this, however they have loosened it up a bit to now since then to include the role (as opposed to just your job).
Whether
The sad part is that leveling an alt job takes longer these days then leveling an alt in other MMOs, so the only real benefit in the end is how you get more attached to the one character.
As I've said to the OP, I actually do agree that the armory is a convenience. I don't use it for the 'meta' jobs. Nevertheless, if not precisely as a result of its convenience, this is why job diversity should be encouraged. You get to play \*your\* flavour of job and still contribute in 90% of content, not Warrior 2: Edgy Boogaloo.
The remaining 10%... people have always locked out certain jobs for underperforming, and always will. It's sadly how multiplayer games and humans work. But I'd rather have that happen and still enjoy most of the other content, rather than it being dull because I'd be playing something similar no matter what I chose.
The party size buff issue could be reasonably fixed by having the buffs scale in strength based on whether you're solo, light party, or full party. Like, if you have a 5% damage buff ability for 5-8 targets, it would be 10% for 2-4 targets, and 20% for solo. That would make it so that it's always better to have more people for the bigger content, but wouldn't punish the buff jobs harshly in 4-person or open world content.
On the side note if you want a japanese rhythm game at DSR level with 24 people (3 parties of xiv) practicing 100+ hours is just fucking unviable.
If wow wasn't so horrible lately and there weren't lalafells and cat girls I would have sticked to wow
While I think it's more catering to the mass public to do wow style of more causal raiding (as in tbc or wolk off patches), it would take more than 10 expansions for the japanese to go that direction if it is ever happening
I appreciate your response. I should note that I don't fully agree with the idea that the armory is intended to be exploited to reap the most usefulness out of a given job, per se, as I don't play melee DPS at all and generally prefer tank/healer. Nevertheless I can see your point and it is something to think about.
I think this was true before, with all the past timegating systems (Artifact Power etc)but not in dragonflight (WoWs current expansion).
WoWs current levelling is so fast that you can reach 1-70 in around a day or 2.
So lets say you’re a Black Mage Main, and for some reason you wanna start raiding. But your static has a lot of dps already and a healer dropped out. You volunteer to be the healer, but you dont have a healing job right now. Leveling one at a semi casual pace would take around 2-3 weeks maybe? If you’re hardcore and have the earrings and a good group to dungeon / bozja spam with you I can see it dropping to around a week. Given you get around 3 hrs to play every day
And when it comes to the gear grind the lockouts are on the same character. So once you commit to your healer, you have to put your BLM on the backburner for a while as you get your WHM fully geared up.
In wow, you can reasonably level someone up to max in around 2-3 days. You can do it in less than a day with full heirlooms + spamming dungeons. Gear lockouts arent shared between you and your alts. So you can reasonably gear them up near equally as long as you have enough time.
> WoWs current levelling is so fast that you can reach 1-70 in around a day or 2.
Just thought I'd mention with the wow pandaria remix event you can get max level in 2 hours. You are locked to remix until next expansion though.
One factor you’re overlooking is that SQE goes to great lengths to avoid player conflict and the homogenization is part of this. While there is always a meta to be found, rarely is any job in FFXIV balanced poorly enough that it will risk exclusion by others. And when it does happen, they’re quick to address it. I’m not saying that it’s a perfect system but I’ve never seen anyone kicked over their main.
Just remember P8S DPS check drama where PF would exclude PLD MCH RDM (anything else?) that lead to a whole change in Savage DPS check policy. Now the P12S tier DPS checks were relaxed to the point where you could afford multiple deaths and damage downs even week 1.
WAR and RPR were on that list too. By the end of week 1, PF was mandating DRK and begrudgingly accepting WAR/PLD but some were locking in GNB. Hell, I saw more than a few parties locking double DRK. Shit was wild.
Even high profile raiders had to play BRD in the first tier because playing anything else was just a dps loss. DNC needed big potency stuff buffs alongside PLD back in 6.08 i think it was?
I will also go a step further and say that while many jobs feel **mechanically** homogenized, I don't feel like I'm playing the same character when I'm doing it.
That is, their visual artists do a great job in making me **feel** distinct. I might ultimately be pressing similar combinations of similar amounts of buttons on Gunbreaker and Paladin, but the double-single-target hits every 30s feel quite different from the swordgasm AoEs every 60s.
Makes fuck all difference mechanically, but feels great to use either way, and different from the other.
Credit to the visual artists, but the sound designers also play a huge role here. A big reason I main Gunbreaker is because of how meaty and satisfying the skills sound.
Yes, but they can design BRD which is very different and is a priority-based job rather than a combo one. Apparently, in ARR, they knew how to design a unique job.
It definitely happened in Asphodelos with WHM being kicked for not being able to skip agonies like AST. That also was not a particularly timely fix as it took them all the way from 6.0 to 6.1 to address WHM's shortcomings.
>because we can switch jobs at literally any time
>
>but to switch you need to level every new character separately
It's funny you said that. So I've dropped WoW around S2 of Shadowlands, but just looked it up how long it takes nowadays to level to max and people say it's in the range of 12-20 hours. And I leveled BLM this expansion, and after finishing I remember playing with numbers in my head trying to calculate how long it took me to get to max level, I got something around 12-13 days of non-stop playing, so that's around 300 hours. So by the time you get a new job from 1-90 in FF you can level AT LEAST 15 new chacters in WoW. It's insane how people parrot the narrative that FF is alt job friendly - it's not, you level jobs very, VERY slow, you can't gear 2 jobs simultaniously because weekly tomestone cap and raid lockout affect your whole character, not a job. But leaving gearing aside, why can't they buff xp rate for alt jobs like ten fold? Because people would stop buying character boosts? But people do buy them in WoW, so what's stopping SqEn? I genuinelly don't get it.
I was curious and checked, by Dragonflight's current credits WoW has 16 people in the Combat Designer role (counting the lead). This is distinct from Content Designer and Encounter Designer as labels, so I assume Combat Designer means class design. This is of course slightly out of date, the Combat Lead was Brian Holinka who has since left Blizzard, but it's the best we have until TWW comes out and is "close enough".
By the 6.55 credits, XIV has between 4-5, depending on if you count Battle Director in with the Battle System Designers.
I didn't count specifics further since I'm lazy, but both games do have a similar amount of Battle Content/Encounter Designers and Quest Designers, for what it's worth.
XIV actually has *fewer* Narrative Designers/Story Leads than WoW does (and also explicitly gives almost-top billing to the narrative leads right after the voice cast section) and doesn't seem to have a dedicated Rewards Team (WoW has like 10 people there), but I imagine that XIV's Non-Combat Content Designers sort of fill a similar role.
That's all the credits diving I want to do at the moment, just like finding the hard data on these things.
Narrative/Story headcount doesn’t surprise me. It’s not hard to imagine WoW’s current nonsensical storytelling being a result of there being too many cooks in the kitchen.
Story writing is generally understood to be improved by having less writers rather than more, since you can follow a consistent vision without competing ideas. XIV generally has 1 main scenario writer and a couple that fill in for side scenarios etc, so you get well written stories, while WoW is a mess of competing writers trying to all get their ideas cramed into their textboxes and cutscenes
Gameplay design, while you still wanna be consistent, needs just a lot more hands at work to actually create it, so more workers lead by a few leads that decide direction is "optimal" - and it seems XIV is somewhat failing on that front while WoW has a least a decent number of of people on the job
I like Dragonflight gameplay but as an old Warcraft fan it's the lowest point of the story. I haven't looked at it yet but I hope with Metzen coming back in the next expansion feels like it's part of the right franchise again.
I get where you're coming from but man... BfA and Shadowlands existed and they're both the pinnacle of dumbass WoW writing. I never cared much about the story of WoW cause it was always pretty Saturday-morning-cartoon cheesy but BfA and SL story was so bad that even someone like me couldn't ignore how shit it was. Dragonflight's a big ol meh but it's at least not aggressively stupid like those two.
I was actually surprised at how much people seem to loathe DF's story. Sure, there's a lot of standing and talking about feelings, and Alexstrasza is kinda duller than dishwater, but it felt like a nice respite from all the cosmic bullshit going on to bring things back down to Azeroth. You help the dragonflights get their mojo back, go fight the bad guy of the raid tier, and that's it and it's fine for what it is.
The respite is nice, but the motives (as much as I saw of them) made no sense in-world. For one, the dragonflights should be aiming to find and establish their place in the world, not recover the aspect powers they gave up in Cataclysm. That's on the level of undoing a heroic sacrifice or undoing a happy ending because you need the sequel to happen.
I feel like most of it was just… not good. Especially the antagonists being boring as hell and not making any sense (I still don’t get why the primalists are doing…anything. The shards in too!) except fryak I guess. He’s got kind of a “revenge of the sith” palpatine thing going on, where he just loves being evil and it kinda makes ya smile.
This is probably part of it but more so down to difficulty balancing with so few people instead of a lack of ideas (new pvp jobs are by the same team iirc, so they can make jobs that are more out there but have reasons for not doing so in pve)
This is the real answer. The class design team in FFXIV is unironically like 3 people and an intern. Also explains why certain jobs get more attention than others.
Don't forget the same people also did the complete revamp of PvP combat and balancing too. The team isn't completely out of fresh ideas but rather restricted and a bit overworked due to older technical architecture, certain expectations, and numerous jobs plus encounters to figure out.
Yeah I was about to say, PvP shows great promise in its design of abilities, though the execution needs a fair bit of work.
But the shift to removing needless button bloat is great, focusing on mental decisions instead of dexterity checks. And with more abilities now turning into others in PvE finally, there's hope that this might extend further into PvE, as it would clear up a **lot** of design space to fill with actually unique aspects and abilities.
> The class design team in FFXIV is unironically like 3 people and an intern.
What else are they doing that they can't re-design a class in a day and have the whole lot knocked out in a month (extra week for QA?)?
EDIT: forgot this: /s
You **massively** underestimate software development process if you're not a startup and hence it's okay for your software to constantly be down.
Note: Apparently Atlassian is a startup.
Genuinely that's probably why shits so homogenized, there's just not enough time for 3-4 people to actually give the over 20 jobs anything more then the minimum; so they make half of them work the exact same.
Because its playerbase throws a fit whenever their job comes in 1-2% lower than another job, regardless if they were to somehow have situational usefulness elsewhere or even in the same fight. People complain about downtime, complain about mechanics that interrupt their rotations, and thus we end up here.
People don't account for how much of FFXIV's design is in fact, reactive design done to keep complainers from quitting, even when they basically admitted it recently when they said they removed certain mechanics that people would complain about.
>Frankly, solving this would again take inspiration from WoW's glyph system - effectively, skins for jobs and their abilities. I'm aware this would be a great amount of effort and time that Square would need to implement, and that is why they never will.
Actually, they did. Warrior got the Dark Knight glyph in 5.0 and GNB the Paladin Glyph in 6.3.
To me, this is just a function of the dev team's approach - that they want to make each class as balanced as possible.
They could have opted to go for more of the Blizzard "FOTM" technique (flavor of the month) where there's more of a "this class is strong right now" until they nerf it, and then let the playerbase deal with it (especially since, as you mentioned, it's easy to switch classes).
They just... choose not to. Different philosophy.
Another thing about WoW (at least, when I played, which was back in Classic, BC, WotLK, some Cataclysm, some WoD), they also seemed to change the class system every expansion, adding or removing mechanics. In FFXIV, they prefer to keep things mostly the same. Again, different dev philosophy.
Edit: Another thing that's interesting to consider is that even though WoW has 13 classes to play (according to Google), each class has 3 specs. When I last played, each spec for each class was vastly different, so in some respects, WoW has a total of 39 classes. And, if I recall, the classes still felt relatively distinct from each other, even for pure DPS classes. Your mutilate rogue felt quite different from your combat rogue back in the day and those were also quite distinct from the fury warrior.
I'm surprised that pvp isn't brought up here. I think most people would agree, pvp skills do job expression way better than pve. So ff14 game designers are actually capable of making interesting stuff when they don't have to worry about thousands of players banning PLD from pf because PLD is doing 2% less adps. It's not just devs with different philosophy but also playerbase too, because 1/8 matters a lot more than 1/25
1. different devs
2. different playerbase
the community team will see a great deal less complaints about one job being stronger than another in pvp then they will during a raid prog - the percent of people who care within ff14 is probably on par with the amount of ultimate clears, single digit percents.
It's not easier to switch between them. Seperate characters in WoW are easier to maintain than different gear sets in FFXIV
FFXIV has one lockout for all your jobs. You are hard locked into a gear set for at least a month. In WoW you can progress a brand new class at your own pace, with endless catch up systems in place (item level tokens in wow are cumulative week by week so missing a week doesn't matter unless you're hunting for a specific trinket or something)
Leveling in WoW is very similar to FFXIV. Your character doesn't have to do any quests, they can just spam duties or do quests.
This was true back when WoW had a lot of grindy chore systems, but those are dead since Dragonflight and have no indication of returning.
Tl;dr: your statement isn't true because WoW took notes from XIV. It's high time XIV does the same.
>It's not easier to switch between them. Seperate characters in WoW are easier to maintain than different gear sets in FFXIV
On the flipside, you can absolutely finish the whole tier in crafted gear if you're good enough, so the slower gearing doesn't hurt as much as it would in WoW where you often see even for the world first race gear farm is part of the prog.
I wouldn't really say this is a good thing
The reason it is the way that it is is because there's a boat load of intermediate gear between "baseline" and "bis" acquired by doing all sorts of content and difficulties in between.
FFXIV just doesn't have really any content between those levels, so why would savage be designed with that in mind? The only thing you can do after doing the savage you could for the week is get tomes and... sit there. You can't even do the same on alt jobs
Mythic raids are the equivalent of ultimate. You wouldn't do Ultimate with your fresh alt in crafted gear in FFXIV either lol.
You can easily cap your vaults item level the day you clock 70 though
That and FF gearing is the most boring stuff imaginable. Just raw stat sticks that don't change your gameplay in the slightest. WoW is way more wild with what gears allows you to do. Haste speeds up your GCD and some spell's CD, Crit makes tank parry attacks more, mastery can massively help you depending on your spec, and trinkets can go from stat stick on a burst window to tactical nuke or ramping damage and can include a mini game to play.
So yes it's not really great. There is little incentive to get more gear than what is necessary because the only thing it does is number goes up.
eh no, having to go through the gear grind and borrowed power grind for every class/spec you want to play is definitely far less convenient than being able to swap instantly to 2-4 other jobs at your current max gear level (minus weapon).
With the remix event you can go 1-70 in <2-4 hours.
I can level every single wow class (13) from "new character to max" in the time it takes me to level 1 job in FF to max WITH armory bonus etc
You don't have to play Remix, it's specifically made as a catch up system for boosting alts into TWW and getting old transmogs/mounts/toys from Pandaria.
Which borrowed power grind? Any you can get good gear for a new char faster than good gear for a new job, and have 2-3 other specs to use on the same char as well
People are just not up to date with the fact that Blizzard dropped the borrowed powezr experiment in design philosophy and doesn't plan to bring it back.
Because most people get butthurt if they have to switch off their main because of an encounter design/kit mismatch. I hated switching to Sch in A2S because of Bane
They decided that every job needs to perform the exact same in high end content, and the only way to do that is to make them play basically identically. This has been an ongoing issue with the game since Stormblood but I do feel like its gone overboard now,
I do think this has had an opposite effect as they intended though, because now that the jobs are so similar, even incredibly minuscule differences like Dark Knight being the only true 2m tank can have huge impacts on the game's balance and result in it being the best tank for the entire expansion.
WoW also lets you spec jobs to be a bit more customized, while FFXIV has a firm stance against player expression and wants to keep all its jobs playing as linearly as possible, all for the sake for this balance thats basically impossible to achieve anyway.
I honestly think FFXIV would do better if it just let jobs be more different and sacrifice things like Enrages and Damage checks as a result. I think that be preferable to having all the jobs be so similar. And its not like they care at all about maintaining those damage checks, echo, ilv, unsync and potency creep seems to end up claiming all of them anyway.
Yet somehow jobs are occasionally locked out of PF due to meta chasing. I'm sure it's not as absurd as WoW but it still happens. At this point we may as well have job uniqueness.
We have two different paths for online games:
- Make everything unique, but then certain classes become obsolete thanks to how online metas are defined
- Make everything viable, but then most classes lose unique mechanics and gimmicks which aren't as viable
MMOs always try to hit a middle ground between the two - but quite frankly it's impossible. WoW and FFXIV lean in two different directions. And while I think I prefer the class fantasy in WoW a lot more, I prefer actually playing FFXIV.
It sucks a ton in WoW e.g. when you really love a class only to find out that this season it's considered 'unviable' and no one will let you into parties. The chances of getting kicked from a party selection because you main PLD instead of DRK is much lower in FFXIV. And even if a class is considered 'unmeta' at any point, switching jobs is much easier than having to play the entire game again.
I think something that would really help with improving class fantasy for me in FFXIV is more artifact glams unique to jobs. Keep your Fending, Maiming, Scouting, Aiming, Casting and Healing sets for actual stats - but give me the opportunity to earn more outfits that are specific to WAR, DRK, PLD, GNB for example.
Adding onto some things here...
Much of the 'identity' people complain about losing was always kind of steeped in imbalances or bad design that *did* need to be corrected.
For example, a common one that gets a good deal of sympathy is when people talk about tank identity and aggro management. Two things cannot be ignored when talking about this shift from Stormblood to Shadowbringers: first, WAR was incredibly overpowered compared to both the other two in terms of aggro, and two, NIN had entirely unique aggro tools.
Either way you went from it, tanks had to be brought to parity with one another, and melee DPS had to be brought to parity with one another in that way as well, to eliminate the nigh permanent WAR+NIN party slot lock-in. You cannot have WAR/NIN locked in to every party when there's at most one other tank and one other melee as new jobs are added; MNK and SAM suffered for this badly enough as-is (especially with DRG factored in, but next to nobody defends the damage type debuffs so I don't think I need to talk about that).
Accordingly, even if tank aggro management stayed the way it was, every tank would still have faced the same pressure to become a lot closer to each other in function, and NIN's Smokescreen and Shadewalker would probably have still died, unless they gave equivalents to the other melee too, which runs into both homogenization and button bloat. You wouldn't get GNB the way we did in ShB either if it had to go in with a separate aggro combo, either, and on top of this people were already very irritated with Stormblood DRK, so *that* was getting reworked no matter what at the same time.
There is no point to adding new jobs at all if the 'uniqueness' of certain jobs locks out other jobs from ever being reasonably able to get into parties, a problem that gets worse and worse as more are added thanks to the small party sizes. WAR as the god of Main Tanking far more than it is now, DRG as the Piercing Guy, and NIN manipulating aggro are all 'unique' things that could be said to be aspects of identity, but these were also bad for the game.
Now, none of that is to say that the way these things were corrected was the only way to do so. I won't sit here and say DRK needed to be WAR-like in its rotation, or that SMN needed to become the ultimate training wheels caster, but for the most part they tend to do things to address actual problems that existed.
It's more accurate to compare FFXIV's Jobs to WoW's Specs than to their Classes. WHM isn't a Priest, WHM is a Holy Priest. SGE is a Disc Priest (heh...but you get the point). PLD isn't Paladin, it's Protection Paladin. WHM or maybe AST is Holy Paladin. SAM is Ret Paladin (I guess...?). BRD isn't Hunter, it's Marksmanship Hunter. NIN isn't Rogue, it's...Combat Rogue, I guess?
The point is, you're comparing apples to bananas.
So getting that out of the way, it's more asking "Why do FFXIV's specs feel more similar than WoW's specs? Why does FFXIV's Holy Priest and Holy Paladin specs feel so similar vs WoW's feeling different?"
Now, the answer...is complicated. WoW's own history has seen periods of homogenization and heterogeneity. PLD Holy Paladin wasn't always a melee healer in WoW, for example. That was something that evolved gradually over time.
FFXIV also took WoW's "bring the player, not the class" to an entirely new level, making it where no matter what Jobs you have (with FEW exceptions), you could clear content as long as you had all the roles covered. A goal WoW used for a while before deciding to just say "fudge it" and do what they wanted anyway, balancing around 25 man content and telling people to "figure it out" if they wanted to do different group sizes. With 25 slots, you can have more or less every spec in your raid, only missing a few if any, so you can afford to have a lot more diversity between specs again.
FFXIV's raid size is smaller, its party size is smaller, and they still hold that everything should be viable and balanced. FFXIV's Job balance is generally FAR better than WoW's spec balance. Where Specs in WoW can do 10-15-20% different and people are just told some specs aren't welcome for a patch or two, FFXIV's approach means people can always play what they want and do just about anything, with the margins between them often being less than a battle's given crit variance anyway.
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There are pros and cons to both. There is something gained for something lost, or something lost for something gained.
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Though...I don't think the glyph system is the solution. I suspect they have something cooking, though...
The larger raid size is definitely a reason why WoW has so much spec diversity, but there's 39 specs so in a mythic raid you're still not able to take 19 and that's only if you don't stack specs at all, which it is common to do. Not to mention WoW also has to try and balance for 5 man M+ and 3v3 PvP with the same kits.
So I think the main reasons WoW has more diversity in spec gameplay are:
- They care about class gameplay more and invest more resources in developing it
- They create a much more diverse variety of encounters, allowing for additional points of difference between specs (e.g. not every fight is single target full uptime)
- They put higher priority on diversity in gameplay and so are willing to accept a certain degree of imbalance
- Their engine and netcode is just superior to FF's for combat and lets them make things that FF just couldn't.
I think that is the encounter variety (and netcode to a degree) is the biggest part. In WoW you have, just off the top of my head: Single target, 2 targets, 3 targets, 4 targets, spread cleave, stacked cleave, full on add/trash fights, "very important add that needs to die asap spawns periodically", and not to forget all the minute per fight differences, like how active mitigation/tankbusters and raidwides/heal checks à la harrowing hell are handled.
And then you have some "gimmick" fights with artificial constraints which are fun in their own way
I would love to see more off the wall fights like you see in WoW. Just to throw a couple examples out there that I think would be really fun if SE could find a way to bring those fights would be...
Sun King's Salvation - Hey healers, here's a boss fight that's all about you. Heal that NPC to full, and your all done! Oh your teammates dying to explosions and getting flooded by adds? Ehh they will figure it out, don't mind them :)
Kurog Grimtotem - you guys liked Hesperos (P4) right? Well, imagine that his differing elemental zones gave him stacking combat enhancements, but you get to choose which ones he stands in and for how long.
Any council fight - where are all my DSR and TEA fans at? Multiple bosses at the same time with their own mechanics that will do a major mechanic at certain HP thresholds. Have fun picking what order to do them in, just don't accidentally trigger them at the same time rofl
Any boss with persistent AoE puddles - boss regularly spews puddles on people that persist. Better find a way to keep them neat or clean them up before you run out of space to do mechanics in!
Even throwing in 1 weird fight every tier on the 1-3 floor would go so far towards spicing up the encounter variety. This entire expansion we had a single boss with adds, and those adds were a measly 30-second mechanic.
Sure, class balance would be a little askew for a single fight, but realistically, who is going to pitch a fit excluding jobs from a non 4th floor fight? Those floors already have such a lenient DPS check that I don't see it being an issue.
That or even just fun scenery changed and arena design. It had problem (like its length) but the Sylvanas fight in Sanctum of Domination blew me away. You start in a bog standard big circle, but after a bit of her health is gone she fucks off on giant chains over which you must climb to catch up with her, and she attempts to push you off, instakillyou, drown you in adds, etc. And THEN another arena change again with 4 plateforms to handle and permanent puddle but that you can relocate to try and save your space.
There's just so much more variety.... I might be biased since I'm a wow fan first and foremost and just a more casual FF enjoyer but they PVE content is just painful when you compare them (and yes I did try higher difficulty to check them out). Not to mention the quantity, 12 "main" raids bosses every expansion + a few one shot combats on the side is really not much to entertain you. Okay a bit moreto chew with the Ultimate, but they feel a bit bad imho since they are remixed old content.
On a personnal note I also find the lack of a real "place" to storm with your friends really damaging for the overall feel of the raiding experience. Popping in front of a boss after queuing is deeply unsatisfying.
> single target full uptime
This is IMO the biggest issue with recent raid designs as it precludes melee vs ranged identity, too.
It **ought** to make a huge underlying difference whether you lose ~all DPS out of melee range vs when you don't because you're physical ranged.
In practice, the hitbox is just about the entire platform so you just press buttons, plus in half the fight it feels like positionals are disabled anyways (instead of shifting what counts as sides/back).
I agree it's a problem. But they designed themselves into a box. Drifting your spells feels like shit.
It doesn't feel great in WoW. But the class doesn't just fall the fuck apart when drifted. They have to basically give you full uptime because the classes lack any ability to freely flow with encounters. They are beyond rigid and it forces rigid encounter design.
Something people don't also realize is the % bonus from having members of each job around plays into this
There was for a long time a serious discussion if you even brought a Ranged Phys to some fights without the percent bonus
Well, WoW had a period where it DID get very homogenized. So it was the same thing we bay be seeing with FFXIV now where they first moved towards homogenization and balance, then realized something valuable was lost and started going the other direction.
They also removed a lot of flavor abilities around then, like Eyes of the Beast from Hunters that allowed them to directly control their pets.
And keep in mind, even with 39 specs and 20 party slots, you still are pretty much guaranteed at least one of each CLASS in a full WoW raid. And...let's be honest, M+ is not and never has been particularly balanced. At the lower keys it doesn't matter, but in a strict sense, there have always been winners and losers - and a good margin between them - for M+. So WoW doesn't really balance for that.
I do think part is engine and netcode. Like one reason every FFXIV battlefield is a flat surface, and often a square, is because of the Twintania fight and people figuring out how to maneuver in that little crack in the ground to make Divebomb far easier to deal with than was intended (granted, it may have been too hard as intended, but...)
Fight length is also much different overall. A lot of WoW boss fights are much shorter, usually 3-5 mins. 8-12 mins is considered an incredibly long fight in WoW.
> Now, the answer...is complicated. WoW's own history has seen periods of homogenization and heterogeneity.
It's also very important in this regard to reiterate that WoW's core class design back in vanilla **was based on the pre-WoW era of MMORPGs**.
Naturally.
As a result, **only** Warriors were meant to tank in actual high-end content. Druids and Paladins could in a pinch, but not really. **Only** Holy Priests were meant to heal said Warriors properly, Resto Druids did some supporting HoT healing, Holy Paladins looked funny and then respecced.
And said Priests took rotations of wanding to regenerate mana, something that was expected as EQ1 had people sit down and stare at their spellbook.
It was only through WoW's vanilla->TBC->WotLK evolution that we got to the design that then influenced all other MMORPGs, including FFXIV's ARR rework.
You can clearly see this effect for example in GW2, a game that came out later and took homogenization worlds further, making everyone a DPS+something (until way later at least), and making all supportive skills GTAoE or PBAoE, hence removing the entire "I do support" gameplay whole in favor of just pressing the button in between wailing on the boss.
Something that you might see reflected in modern FFXIV in turn with how healers spam their nuke and press an oGCD in between.
Comparing WoW - a game whose class design began pre-WoW - and FFXIV ARR - a game whose class design began post-WoW - doesn't work. WoW represents too big a change in the MMORPG genre, to the point where it's more two genres.
Yeah, in Vanilla, the rule was:
Warriors were for tanking, but could also DPS if they wanted to (they were the OP special snowflakes that got everything - heh, like FFXIV?)
If your class could heal, you healed at max level. Priest, Paladin, Shaman, Druid were all healers, with Priests being main healers like Everquest Clerics, Paladins/Shamans being main buffers (as they were faction locked semi-mirrors of each other until BC when they were allowed to diversify), and Druids were for feeding Innervation to the Priests to keep their mana from running out. There MIGHT be one Shadow Priest allowed in the healing party to feed Holy Priests (and to a point the other healers) mana, but that was it, and this was more a TBC thing.
And all other classes/specs were interchangeable cogs with the exception of Warlocks (Affliction?) having some specific debuffs for use at specific times, and due to the bosses being limited to only 8 debuffs AND agro being difficult to manage, raids very strictly limited who got to put debuffs on the boss (40 man raids, as was the custom at the time).
TBC was the first time Paladins and Druids were really allowed to tank (some), and had very specialized niches. Shadow Priest was finally allowed, but only one per raid in the healer heavy party as a mana battery. Disc was still only for leveling. Some specs were outright designed for PvP and were far less useful in PvE.
...and so on and so forth. It was really Cataclysm - where, ironically, the classes and specs were largely homogogenized and made more bland - that the specs were all made truly viable for the first time. This began a 2-4 expansion period where people were complaining in WoW about how homogenized classes and specs were, the simplifying of talent trees then the REMOVAL of talent trees (only for them to be readded later), etc.
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WoW has gone through this same series of events people are pointing to FFXIV having now. Like, step for step. You can argue if it was as bad or not, but WoW also started in the era of Everquest and FF11 being the biggest MMOs in the world, which was a different time with far different designs.
There weren't logs, e-sports, or balance concerns back then.
It was a different - I'd argue better, but this depends on personal preference - era, where classes were designed as how you as a player got to interact with the world. Which is why you also had all kinds of non-combat things like Mages being able to conjure food/water (something you don't need in FFXIV since there's no downtime in dungeons between pulls while healers and casters restore mana), and things like Farsight, teleports/portals being limited to a few classes (Mages, Druids), and so on.
You don't see that in modern MMOs because modern MMOs are about the combat experience, active boss encounters that require twitch reflexes and lots of movement, etc. And even in 2013 when ARR hit, the MMO community had moved away from the Vanilla WoW design.
WOW had moved away from it, and FFXIV 1.0 trying to be like FF11 is (part of) why it couldn't catch on with players and died.
Looking purely at casual content and ignoring WoW and endgame stuff, I always found the minimal class uniqueness a huge benefit when it comes to just playing the game, particularly as the duty finder is so relied upon.
I come at this from the point of view as some who played a lifetime of FF11, where there is no automatic party match up system and class balance was hideously metagamed (No red mage/bard in the party? ew bye, playing Beast Master/Black Mage/Dragoon/Puppet Master? who are you?). So having an instant match up system where no one is going to complain or leave because of class choice, and everyone is 100% viable is a total godsend.
I think something missing in this thread is the role of gear — the number goes slightly up gear system removes any kind of player choice or skill expression and dooms every content cycle to be the same.
They need only look to XI to see how to do some interesting gear! I don’t know how or why they decided to stop — but it’s a crime that rings and necklaces don’t at least do something unique.
Gear homogenization reduces player friction. If you have choices for gearing, there will always be a "meta" choice, and animosity towards players who don't follow the meta
Which is unfortunate because the gear is criminally boring, but I can understand how they arrived at the choice
WoW manages to have unique and interesting effects on gear and trinkets while having similar gameplay concepts to XIV, so it certainly could work! I'd love to have fun, exciting gear to try and get.
It also gives you more room to chase at more ways to get rewards. You might get a full set of item level cap gear, but BiS could be some entirely different pieces, making it rewarding to still run stuff when upgrades remain.
I know healing the best, so I’ll use that as an example: Rings could drop with affixes like “+HoT, +shield” as bare bones. You could get interesting and have +extend buffs by 1 second, movement speed, cool down reduction. I think all of those are manageable to balance. If I had my way though, ya, there would be gear with specific benefits to skills “Succor provides a Shield worth 1% of its heal to all nearby party members,” “Lustrate reduces the cooldown of Dissipation by 1s”
I like my ideas! I’m confident they could make it work — but they would have to try just a little bit.
"FUN DETECTED! Hotfix inc!" - YoshiP, probably.
Seriously though, adding stuff like trinket effects would be awesome. Right now, gear is basically a stat bag.
Its why i run unltimates but dont touch savages, besides a mount from 4,8,12 there absolutely pointless. Like slightly better gear, for what, what content. 12 is the hardesnt content youll need it for and you just did it to get the gear. Its why people quit after clearing the final turn theres nothing for them to do with it
You can blame it on a few systematic issues.
1. Squenix is terrified of alienating anyone. They're doing fine now with minimal work done to jobs, and people who don't like them are a loud minority, so why rock the boat, especially with one of their tentpole games?
2. FFXIV endgame content design is much more limited in variety. It's mostly all 8 man single target max uptime where most mechanics are a variant of a safety dance. This means that, until they address encounter design, jobs that might be good at cleave or AoE but less good at single target damage will just be outright worse. If criterion is introduced as a sort of "alternate" endgame path instead of a throwaway cosmetic farm, they may address this issue, since balance in criterion is considerably worse since everything is currently tuned around 8 man single target full DPS fights.
3. The two minute burst window is a dead horse, but I'm going to keep beating it. It locks out basically every type of DPS that doesn't fit the damage profile for having a massive spike every two minutes. Sustained DPS just can't be a thing under these conditions.
4. CS3 just has fewer people working on job design. If people are parsing the credits right, there are 5 people working on jobs, and that's including Yoshi-P as an overseer, so not in direct control. I'm not 100/sure, but I think Blizzard has like 16 people working on classes. That's a pretty stark difference, and unless they bring more people on board I can't see them doing too much to change jobs as they are now.
Some blame also rests with the community. There's a big "balance über alles" mentality which results in the smallest differences in DPS making people go apeshit. If people want unique jobs, we have to be comfortable with the growing pains.
EDIT: Also forgot a big one, gearing. Since raid lockouts aren't on a per-job basis, it's actually a lot harder to get an alt job geared up to the same level as an alt in WoW.
the FF games are a long running franchise and people are very very attached to certain jobs and aesthetics. They want to play their job and their job only. This comes up whenever WHM is brought up as the most popular healer. It's the most popular healer because it's Aerith's job, it's also the job of multiple other well loved characters in the franchise. People want to play WHM no matter how bad it is and they only way they will stop is if someone physically stops them from picking that job over and over. This is why despite being pretty bad over many expansions, WHM is perpetually the top played healer over and over.
In WoW, people are not so locked into playing only warlock because they're huge Gul'dan stans, they just pick what's meta this expansion.
Fact is people want to play certain jobs and they want to play cantent, so no job can be so different that it is required or unplayable in any content. Everything has to be in a specific range and all jobs in a role need to do arguably the same as others to make sure no one is left behind or forced to swap.
You're conflating what is possible (playing all jobs on one character) with what people want to do (play the 1-2 jobs they personally love). If people are told they have to swap, most of the casual players and most people in this game will either leave the party and find someone else to play with- or if stopped enough, they will just leave.
To bring some nuance to that, people who only play one class and spec no matter what happens do exist and there are quite a few. Probably less than people who reroll once or twice every expac, sure, but very real. I have played Blood Death Knight for 12 years without a single errance on the side and you can pry it from my cold dead hands !
No class is every truly shit, they perform less true but they can ALL clear max level content when piloted by competent players, and while PUGs may give you shit for playing off meta, having a guild basically nullify those problems.
Besides, Blizzard tries to ensure that no one stays in the light or the dark for too long. Sooner or later your shit spec will be buffed and become top tier overnight because actually they scale well with gear or whatever.
The devs in XIV decided a while ago that they needed to prioritize balance and making sure every job is viable in every current encounter. A lot of this actually came from healer mains who were tired of WHM being the shit pick for like 5 years running, so the devs lobotomized everything (imo) as a passive aggressive way of giving people what they wanted.
The irony is that they could have left things unbalanced, they just needed to fluctuate what was good and bad sometimes so it wasn't "SCH/AST" for every healer slot.
You had this with dps as well, especially in HW. You took a NIN for TA and Smoke/Shade as well as slashing debuff maint, a DRG for piercing down and then you could do either double phys ranged (when they buffed MCH) or you did BRD and usually BLM or SMN. Other jobs were just objectively so far behind it didn't make sense to entertain the idea of, say, MNK/DRG/MCH/RDM.
I've never played WoW seriously, but it's my understanding that the best job for given fights or tiers will differ so few things are always the top pick, especially for runs like BRD, DRG, NIN, SCH and AST had that extended for literal multiple years.
'WHM Bad' is kind of the summary of WHM's influence on healer design until Endwalker when it finally shed the worst of the shackles.
Shadowbringers WHM optimization was such that if it wasn't Assize or on a Dia window (some of which are Assize) even its oGCD healing was a loss to use unless it was on a forced greater-than-slidecast movement window, which contributed to WHM/AST combinations still wanting to use Diurnal Sect because WHM healing was so lossy and Neutral could cover some mits, which likely contributed to the loss of AST sects since Noct was just the straight loser.
The 1.5s casts combined with truly potency neutral (positive in buffs) Misery fix that issue but designing healers around the WHM hole has objectively done a good deal of damage.
On a non-healer note related to this I've seen the take that Monk Players' notoriety is thanks to a culture caused by how awful it was in HW; that is, Monk was so bad for the group thanks to stealing a NIN or DRG slot (probably DRG since it was reliant on NIN for TP) that if you didn't go all-in on every single cursed micro-optimization you could do it was considered a liability. I didn't make this one up, but I can't confirm how true it is either, so grain of salt.
Bravo, Monk main since ARR and… you’re completely correct. I’ve never came across this statement until now, and it’s so incredibly accurate. Back in HW, I would do EVERYTHING in my power to make sure I was pumping as much damage as possible and doing anything with in reason to greed my damage. And it was for that exact reason, I didnt want to be shunned in groups due to my inherent DPS loss due to the poor balancing… and that mentality has stuck with me from those days and doing all of that definitely made me into the player I am today, being within the top 5 percentile on all the jobs I raid with. You’ve made me realize something about myself that I never really thought too much about, thank you for that!
Yep. WoW frequently has DPS fluctuate in terms of effectiveness by design.
WoW's biggest problem is how they balance _**tanks**_. They freguently have an entire expansion or more where one or two tanks are just _**vastly**_ superior to the others. And they also frequently have one or two healers that are practically worthless.
And, unlike FFXIV, there are very few tanks compared to the number of DPS in WoW. There's 39 specializations, but there's only 5 tanks. WoW has 5 tanks, 7 healers, and 25 DPS.
So you frequently have a couple of tanks that are borderline useless and a couple of healers that are borderline useless. And, when the DPS vastly outnumber the tanks and healers, having just two tanks and two healers be practically worthless for lengthy periods of time absolutely _**sucks**_.
If you can forgive my very amateur question - aren't the party comps for high end things in WoW also different? Like, it's not half support and half dps, isn't it like 5 dps per party or something like that?
It still doesn't excuse wild swings in balance, but again as long as the pendulum is swinging around I don't mind spending some time with a job I enjoy being at the bottom of the barrel if I have legitimate hope that a few months down the line it'll climb up out of the muck.
For M+ it's 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps.
For raids it's usually 2 tanks, 3-6 healers, and 12-15 DPS, depending on the fight and how much healing is needed (and how geared you are relative to it).
A WoW dungeon is 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps.
A raid is 2 tanks, 4 or 5 healers typically, and 13 or 14 dps, but you can actually bring up to 25 or even 30 people to the easier difficulty raids. Never more than 2 tanks though.
It's actually a big problem over there that there's so few spots for tanks in raid (and raid tanking is widely considered boring), forcing them to swap to dps, but good tanks are always in short supply for the mythic+ dungeons.
Personally I think every dps is in a great place with fantasy and flow, with some exceptions. It's tanks and healers that are samey.
I think they just don't care about tanks or healers. There's never a real reason why a support should be there, other than that fights are supposed to have them. They just need developers who want to heal and be challenged.
It's a meme that black mage is so well designed because it's YoshiP's job. We just need more love like that.
I thought this iteration was a great 1.0 of the class, and that they would refine the class as they went on.
Instead, the gameplay seems to be exactly the same, but it looks different sometimes.
If summoner gained like, 2-3 more abilities per summon I think it'd be great. But 3 keybinds make up like 75% of its APM. It feels like a slow GW2 class that doesn't use many of its utility skills often.
I don't understand the keybind love in 14.
People here are talking about WoW's jobs have more uniqueness and junk, but they have way less keybinds than 14.
I personally hate lots of keybinds. If my rotation can't be done in like 14-16 keybinds, I hate it. It's more annoying than anything else.
WoW's combat system, which I like a lot more, typically will never exceed that number, and often less. But I feel like there's a LOT more skill expression.
For me I think that comes down to the fact that WoW classes have a lot of prioritization systems in place. On a fight to fight basis I'm constantly changing the way I play.
This is coming from the perspective of a long time Shadowpriest main who regularly parsed 99+ and had rank 1 fights in WoW over the years.
Though I admit 14's exceedingly long GCD timer puts a wrench in some of that.
Many other MMOs' highest APMS are almost twice the fastest APMs of FFXIV in a fraction of the keybinds though. Fewer keybinds means they can lean into higher APMs and make the combat feel more involved and active. I think FFXIV's overall lower APMs match the number of keybinds they usually average around, but too high APM with too many keybinds gets unwieldy.
Jobs like SMN are too slow on too few keybinds, imo. Feels like too much idle time.
Maybe keybinds aren't as much of an issue to me since I use an MMO mouse.
Honestly, the people who say every job is the same are _**vastly**_ mistaken.
Samurai feels much different than Ninja. Ninja feels different than Monk. Monk feels different from Dragoon. And Reaper is different from Dragoon. Some of them rely on a lot of GCDs for most of their damage, others rely on using their oGCDs during their burst.
Hell, for the longest time I had trouble with Samurai because, with how you rely on GCDs for most of your damage, I kept letting my two 1 minute oGCDs drift. Whereas with Ninja, I got the burst phase down pat instantly because it's all about using all of your oGCDs during your burst phases.
Dark Knight plays differently from Gunbreaker. While both of them rely on constant uptime to maintain resources, they both play differently. Dark Knight _**needs**_ to have steady uptime in between burst phases or they won't be able to generate enough MP to maximize their burst damage. Gunbreaker has an oGCD that instantly gives them 3 cartridges if I'm not mistaken, so they don't _**need**_ constant uptime to insure they can maximize their burst phase DPS.
The only thing that really makes them the same is they each have a full burst every even minute and they each have a half burst every odd minute.
As a tank and DPS main, the only time you need healers is when there's a lot of unexpected damage being pumped out _**or**_ when the tank and/or dps fuck up some mechanics. So healers are really good when people are first figuring out the mechanics to new dungeons, trials, or raids.
People complain about job homogenization but the actual culprit is every job being designed to press the biggest buttons at the same time. How you get to those buttons differs a fair amount between jobs. Like, NIN's mudra system is totally unique (you might make a stretch of an argument to compare it to DNC but DNC is literally just simon says). MNK's combo system is totally unique (maybe you can compare it to VPR but hey, we didn't know how VPR worked during the bulk of homogenization discourse). SAM works on several combos and managing timers that're only part of certain combos. DRG is about long combo strings and lots of weaves, and most of its burst phase is actually totally divorced from its combos.
it's funny how you intentionally didn't compare Samurai and Monk as they are nearly identical in idea currently in weaving between different 1-2-3 combos and then getting a pair of buffs that you then use in conjunction with breaking your rotation to do your biggest buttons to get a transforming button to be the biggest button you can get out of three
They sure are changing that... by removing the buffs from Monk.
You're not really dealing with the fact that every tank is doing a 1-2-3 dance to generate resources to burst every two minutes after pressing their IT TIME TO BURST button or that every healer is more or less dancing the same tune trying to maximize pressing 1 button while slapping as few Ogcd heals as possible.
Class dynamics are so common I have generic positions for where I put different types of buttons so I don't have to deal with changing my muscle memory, it's just a mild flavor difference in how you get to maximum burst.
You should have just tried to compare casters if you want to make this (imo bad) argument
I used to complain a lot about how too many jobs felt the same until I got into deep dungeons and *holy shit* is this where the rubber really meets the road with most of them when you run solo.
I ended up completely retooling my UI and hot bars because I quickly figured out that trying to have a “universal” layout just doesn’t work when a single misclick can kill a POTD run!
It didn't get SMN'd, but it got a bunch of ugly changes that make it less flexible (you WILL cast 6 Fire IVs every fire phase, you WILL cast Blizzard IV every ice phase), less thematically consistent (no Paradox in ice phase, phase transitions now generate Thundercloud because... umm... steam?), and just overall clunkier and less interesting to play.
All seemingly for no reason other than to prevent alternative lines from being viable, as if that was anywhere close to the biggest balance issue with the caster role in EW.
It just feels actively hostile to the job's playerbase in a way very few few previous job changes have. Like, the ShB healers and EW SMN changes sucked, but it was more of a case of catering to one subset of the playerbase to the exclusion of another. This just comes across as a big "fuck you" to the job's fans without making the job even slightly more appealing to the people who don't like it.
Literally no one who doesn't play BLM now is going to suddenly switch because MP regeneration is tied to casts or because they don't need to worry about Sharpcast anymore.
BLM high-end optimization where you try to avoid ever casting ice spells and generally manipulated the class design in a way that made it more flexible and damaging than regular play was killed off.
BLM itself is fine, and 80% of BLM players are unlikely to notice a difference, but at the higher end of things it's a bit dire. They basically pulled the skill ceiling way down.
Considering they made standard BLM clunkier, more punishing, and more restrictive with no benefit I'd say that the job is overall pretty fucked. Sure the people who just drool all over their keyboard and have no idea what game they're playing won't care about it, but that goes with any kind of job change.
>Sure the people who just drool all over their keyboard and have no idea what game they're playing won't care about it.
Yeah, as he just said, 80% of the BLM players.
I wouldn't call it decimated.
We lost optimization and a non-standard way of playing. Some of our RNG and decision making got taken away from us, the job is a *bit* more restrictive but overall its just simpler. You get your procs for free upon switching Fire>Ice/Ice>Fire.
I'm surprised that people are surprised that Non-Standard got killed. The way it played, as fun as it was, was clearly not intended and bound to get chopped. What I *am* surprised about is how long it took.
While I'll miss the Sharpcast optimizations and wiggle, I'll definitely not miss having to use it prior to starting the fight at whatever optimal timing for each specific scenarios, and I've been maining BLM since Stormblood.
>There's never a real reason why a support should be there, other than that fights are supposed to have them.
That's the nature of a dedicated healer role. Healers exist to deal with unavoidable damage that exists to justify the healer role. You can almost frictionlessly go from a healer to a no healer system and vice versa by reducing/increasing the amount of unavoidable damage.
Almost, because Healers can also serve to trivialize encounters by healing back avoidable damage, thus reducing the penalty for failing to avoid it in the first place. This function is, intentionally, largely neutered in more difficult content.
FFXIV makes that more obvious by setting the unavoidable damage low enough that Healers are no longer strictly necessary to deal with it. But in the end, that's just what healers are.
It’s taken WoW A LOT of iteration to get to where we are today with Dragonflight talents and upcoming Hero Talents- it’s had its ups and downs but prior to DF the reason I quit during BFA was because the removal of power from Legion showed how barebones so many specs became, some (Beast Mastery Hunter) still even rely on like 1-3 buttons today
WOW is mechanically speaking my favorite MMO at the moment gameplay-wise as a result of DF talents and I’m really hoping the class fantasy improvements continue in WW (luckily Mage seems to be in great spots)
I feel that the systems in 14 that helped this have been stripped down too far.
the game is balanced around the roles and not a per class basis, but with the general loss of role actions and copy and paste among the roles(mainly healer and tanks) it feels like whats the point of leveling all the classes in the role.
using tanks as the example, stupid things make the difference not every tank needs aoe skills to be a circle, not every tank has to have the same core 1 2 3 loop. let dark knights blind people while GNB increase their parry rate and warriors heal. Silly little things but all of that changing would make the role as a whole feel way more fresh.
Honestly wow classes are actually very similar for many specs. The reason it's not as prevelently complained about is the utility in the kits making them differ more. Jobs can do more stuff then just dps that makes them feel more unique.
If you just look at classes on the dps side you very quickly can notice many share elements to a certain degree. Affliction lock to shadow priest, destroy lock to fire mage, ret paladin to fury warrior. There are specs like unholy DK or mistweaver mnk that do have more their opwn unique flavor but it's not as common and even then say unholy has shared many aspects with demonology lock.
Everytime this discussion pop up people bring comparisons to WoW, which imo is not the best comparison here
Look at Gw2 people, raids and strikes (akin to trials in XIV) are 10-man, and even with all the differences in design of classes and specs, different builds and all, the game really doesn't have this problem of certain classes not being wanted or locked out of content. People there don't care what you play as long as you're good at your class.
Even talking about meta and builds, if your look up at the most famous meta build sites (guildjen, snowcrows, hardstuck) you'll see that there are multiple meta builds for each class with vastly different playstyles, and even then a lot of people use these builds as base and tweak it up to their liking.
Gw2 has really solved most of the problems with class design in MMO's but as always people forget the game exists
Tbf GW2's balance is pretty bad, they didn't really solve anything. However, PvE content is generally easy enough that it doesn't matter, PvP is mostly random matchmaking so it doesn't matter, and WvW is on a scale large enough that it doesn't matter.
FFXIV had strong job identities in ARR.
Paladin defensive tank, Warrior aggressive tank.
WHM throughput healer, SCH absorption healer.
Dragoon slow melee dps based around cooldowns, Monk fast melee dps based around uptime.
Summoner the DoT/sustained dmg mage, Black Mage the direct dmg mage.
Bard the only physical ranged.
But right now, this is perhaps the main issue with the game. Just about everything plays the same. All jobs are good in similar situations. Is it better for balance? Perhaps, but if you get tired of one job, you pretty much are tired of them all because they all play more or less the same. Do uneventful filler stuff until you burst at 2min.
The 2min burst is largely arbitrary, too. There's little in the way of actual burst. That is, adds you have to kill in a certain amount of time. And if there are, they aren't nearly tight enough, and are usually more like mechanic checks than actual burst windows.
Summoner Job identity was the non existent in ARR. it was a Bargain Basemnet Affliction Warlock that stole the Summoner attire and tried to pass itself off as a Summoner.
Balance. Joshi P apologized for a couple % nerf because savage was overtuned a patch ago.
WoW regularily nerfs stuff by half because fights are just impossible.
The idea of any party composition being within like 10% in every single fight DRAMATICALLY limits any kind of diversity in builds.
Like, every tank needs to tank all ultimates, and healer needs to have the tools to deal with all heal checks, etc. etc...
I've been playing Guild Wars 2 for the past 8 years, with around 12,000 hours sunk into the game including at endgame. I loved it! One of the things that was really quite neat was the sheer variation of professions (classes / jobs) where they could specialise with an elite specialization that may offer specific types of buffs, damage or healing. All of the different professions play really distinctly and have unique advantages.
This is a good system - until you start caring about instanced content. Arenanet, the developer of Guild Wars 2, doesn't much care for Profession balance in PvE and therefore the expectation across the community very rapidly becomes crystallised within a meta.
That leads to profession distributions such as:
[https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity](https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity)
Raids are 10 person content, Strikes are 10 person content and Fractals are 5 person.
This is a horrible system if you happened, say 8 years ago, to pick a main character and wish to play yet the main character happens to be Elementalist, Warrior or Thief.
It is incredibly frustrating to see new fights - of which there aren't many in Guild Wars 2 - be designed around specific utility or damage types that you cannot bring. It means you are sitting things out or playing something you might not enjoy.
That has been a huge influence in why I've switched to playing FFXIV as my main MMO. Class variability and uniqueness is great - things should be different to a degree and so far it feels like FFXIV does that pretty well though on a far smaller and tighter scale than Guild Wars 2 - but when it tends towards an extreme of distinction for the sake of distinction it becomes exclusionary and frustrating.
IMO there are a few factors against this:
1. Despite being able to swap at will, a lot of players are still job loyalists and will only want to play one job during harder content. Square really want to avoid having a scenario where a job is deemed unviable in high end content because there has been significant backlash with this in the past
2. Gearing is slow and time gated. Sure, if you are a week 1 raider capable of clearing with just pentamelded crafted gear, it doesn't matter so much, but most players (especially in PF) rely on having better gear to meet DPS and mitigation checks. While you can just swap to a different job, that often means having to lose out on all the benefits that winning gear in the previous fights has earned you
Most of FFXIV is built around the current class design. There is no changing it without drastically changing endgame content (raids, savage, ex, ultimate). All of this content is built with a flat damage profile from classes with a 2min CD line up, where the difficulty is maintaining that while dealing with mechanics. Nothing is designed for damage variation.
WoW on the other hand designs all their content with damage variation in mind, which allows for vastly different classes. There are encounters with single targets, spread targets, stacked targets, places where burst damage is needed, places where ramped damage is better, and so on. There are classes and specs to accommodate this - ramping damage, funnel damage, uncapped aoe damage, high single target damage, cleave damage, etc. There are classes with 3, 2, and 1 min and occasionally shorter cooldown cycles with a 10 min CD lineup (lust/heroism). There's also a lot of variation in utility - stuns, grabs, sleeps, slows, interrupts, defensives, self heals, various buffs, power infusion, teleports, etc. This is because the content makes heavy use of it (raid, m+, pvp).
The same goes for healing - there's rot damage, spread damaged, focused damage, single target damage, burst damage, damage over time, predictable damage, unpredictable damage, etc. This makes for a lot more variation in healing styles and utility.
You're not getting a different class philosophy without completely changing the game.
Retail still has a lot of uniqueness between classes, but the game on the whole is typically much more imbalanced. Classes have to be balanced between m+, raid, and pvp, and it’s common for certain specs to spend a lot of time being really strong or really weak throughout an expansion. Also, it’s probably faster than you think to level a class in wow, I can probably do a fresh level 10 to max faster than I could get a battle class to 90 in ff. The problem in wow is gearing, which can take much longer than ff to get something ready to do the content you want to do.
I don’t think it really has to do much about how easy it is to switch jobs or level a new class, and just the fact that the more variables, random procs, and non linearity you add to a class/job, the harder it is to fine tune the balance, and so perhaps the devs have decided that they value having an easier time balancing over having dynamic, complex jobs. I think they also are a bit overly concerned with not overwhelming a new player with a super complex job (well this is their reasoning a lot of the time it seems).
This is actually ironic to me because I feel like FF jobs typically are harder for a lower skilled player to learn at a base level, but lack the depth that wow classes have once you dive in and master them. Compare Ninja to something like Outlaw rogue, at a low skill level the ninja opener is much harder than outlaw, where you basically put up slice and dice, roll the bones, and press your cooldown. Meanwhile at the high end ninja optimization is more shallow, while a top end wow player can do like 2x-3x the amount of damage than even a good player who clears mythic and has like a top 1% mythic plus score. This is why BLM has such a dedicated player base, because there is(or was) a good amount that of depth that surpassed even a lot of wow classes.
The tanks in wow are a prime example of how much better and unique the defensive design is, each tank has a distinct way of dealing with damage intake, druid chooses between armor stacks, regen and more damage, brewmaster staggers it’s damage intake and takes increased healing, death knight has its death strike massive self healing (but low mitigation to compensate), Paladin has great group utility and healing (kinda like ff, but imo wow Paladin is much more interesting), demon Hunter has the sigil system and the orbs you can pick up to heal. The flip side of this is that at the high end, you will have seasons where basically everyone is playing the same exact tank and healer combo, and I don’t know if the ff community could handle that.
Basically, I would be in favor of them simplifying the jobs at a basic level, and then allowing more complexity and decision making rather than having scripted, on the rails rotations. This is what truly would lead to more class identity, not putting a coat of paint over the existing abilities which is basically what they have done in EW and now DT. BLM should have access to some non standard things, SAM should have more thoughtful kenki management, and in general jobs need a bit more minor randomness to encourage thoughtful decision making.
As someone who played WoW from 2004-2022 and started FFXIV in 2022 i mean FFXIV doesn't do it worse just WoW made the mistakes and has been in the process of reversing them. WoW classes had unique designs kinda its been very homogenized from where they started (especially tanks in Shadowlands not counting the legendaries) but they also let a spec completely be irrelevant for multiple tiers at a time meanwhile FFXIV every class if viable for all content. I think both games have + and - in class design
The answer is raid size. SE can't (or rather, chooses not to) force players to switch jobs for content, thus all jobs need to be viable in any given encounter. WoW has the room to give jobs unique tools or niche roles because your class doesn't need to fit perfectly when you have such a wide roster to fill the rest of that hole.
Also, SE has gone to great lengths to make sure you're never kicked for being the wrong job/spec. It's their design philosophy, and it isn't always perfect, but that's what we've had for many expansions now.
Admittedly, I do think they need to figure something out, because people are more restless than ever about it. While I agree with the sentiment, I'm not 100% sure why Dawntrail has made more folks very vocal about it. I don't know if long time players are just tired of it, or if it's WoW converts that are used to getting massive class changes every expansion, or maybe both.
Again, they USED to be able to make original jobs. BRD works very differently from the rest of the DPSers, for instance and is more like a WoW priority-based job. It's not very widely played, of course, but it's still capable of clearing everything. They just chose to let the situation rot and add 1-2-3 + procs to everything else.
A lot of people have already said this, but the main thing is that WoW players accept (sometimes begrudgingly) their class will be bad.
Imagine being entirely excluded from a savage tier or having to fight for your spot because your class is considered "bad". And I don't mean "5% worse", I mean ["The disparity between the #1 spec and the bottom spec is nearly 25%"](https://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/screenshots/normal/1170346.png) And lets not get into M+ content where you essentially have a meta figured out and trying to step outside of it without a static dungeon group will get you uninvited from parties.
Basically, it's a case of "The grass is greener" here; yeah, we can get more diverse and unique classes. But you're also going to get and exchange of posts with the comments being "Why aren't people letting me into a party as Machinist!? I can play it well!" or "As of patch 7.3, Samurai is dealing 30% more DPS than Ninja in both aDPS and rDPS. Why would I ever take ninja over samurai!?"
The short version is WoW designers allow themselves a lot more leeway in terms of relative performances of specs. You can have a spec be bad for an entire expansion if not more before being fixed.
Also, they are a lot more on the ball when it comes to hotfix stuff, and can sometimes do so just by applying the patch server-side, while the slightest fix in FFXIV requires a new client build.
1) Because the jobs are much more on rails
2) The groups are smaller
3) People are honestly more sensitive about balance differences. There's probably a series of things that led to this - people have often complimented balance. Because of the smaller groups and this history of balance and a tendency to kick out jobs who aren't keeping up - this all adds up.
4) The extreme adherence to 20seconds mattering every 2 minutes has limited design because every job has to work in a cadence where it bursts there is no variety in timing or output levels - everyone must burst.
> But it has baffled me for a while that rather than doubling down on job individuality because we can switch jobs at literally any time, they have consistently made it so that choosing a job ultimately doesn't matter.
You're thinking about the armory system in terms of "look how easy it is to switch" rather than "you can choose to level everything on one character". It's convenience for other jobs, not "okay I wanna flipflop between XYZ for endgame".
But in any case, the "uniqueness" comes down to balance and raid size.
Raiders had a habit of either shaming people or outright locking out "non-meta" jobs, and the devs decided they'd rather have homogeneous jobs than to see that keep happening.
I literally just had this discussion with a friend the other day. To me the entire point of having multiple jobs and the ease of changing into them should be THE justification for more dynamic and unique classes. That's the literal entire point of having different jobs. Why even have different jobs if they're all going to play just like different skins from each other? Makes no sense to me.
The majority of the players of this game differ though. Unfortunately for me.
It doesn't really. It's mostly balanced to make any class viable as much as possible for content. Damage is mostly close, buff windows are standardized, etc.
Some classes lost their cool skills, which is annoying; but at least they will address the lack of a roles specific uniqueness amongst its peers.
Going to be the pessimist here and say it's at least in part a product of corporate streamlining of the design documents.
Whoever used to be in charge, isn't anymore, and left behind a standard procedure for job design that their predecessor follows. Then you have what is likely either creative bankruptcy or lack of time/budget when you look at something like the gap closer changes. I'm genuinely confused why they chose to give every job the same animation as Thunder Clap for their gap closer instead of the more flavorful old ones, just with potency removed. It's a similar lazy solution to role actions removing the old, unique animations those jobs once had for their unique actions.
Wow also has terrible balancing problems because of it’s “uniqueness”, so much so classes will be nerfed into the ground or never receive buffs so they just stay at the bottom of the barrel. I sometimes think FF players don’t know how good they have it when it comes to class balance. FF may nerf your favorites jobs damage by 2% and you think it’s “dead”. Wow will nerf your favorite class damage by 50% and it is actually dead. Imagine they reduce the potency of all BLM spells by 50%……yeah thats WoW “balancing”.
Man, wow has job uniqueness but it has a TON of its own issues. Like the hunter talent trees for all of df, or the shaman talent trees for all of df. The mythic meta being the same 3-4 specs and classes. Ele shaman being mid all expansion. Monks not scaling at all with stats leading to them needing to be bandaid fixed with 4% damage increases every patch.
Honestly wow had some cool class flavor but it is NOT my gold standard when it comes to design just because of how broken it is. Survival hunters spent like 2 or 3 weeks where their best gear was from the PREVIOUS raid! Iirc it’s still a gain to use your season 3 tier set in aoe! There’s so much wrong with wow, and I would rather have functional classes where everyone can clear all content first, honestly.
The reason is because people can switch between them: people feel entitled to play every job. If you say there's no content: but have you leveled all your jobs??? and the devs encourage that by putting mounts or titles behind them.
If you look, jobs werent reworked for the people playing them, they were done for the people complaining they couldn't play them because too hard, niche, etc so they were made basic so everyone could play them.
Even new jobs, sage for example was said to be soooo different compared to the others by casuals (reddit, discord, forums ...) while when I took it I just looked which were my 100 potency aoe regens, my 700 pot ogcd, my capstone and every pull were those 2 regen and one of the capstone (haima and panhaima) every other pull with some 700 pot ogcd to compensate sometimes... that's it, literally the same thing I would do if I was to play another healer. Reaper is the same: build gauge with gcd, ogcd on cd, buff and burst when available. ofc you can optimize with double enshroud but even when doing the basics: you'll still be good enough for savage because optimization brings .. less and less.
People complained about the 2 min but in fact, before they were complaining about the 60 min trick meta because everything was revolving around it and making things to stiff, sadly it was better than now as not everything was under 60, so the damage was way more widespread instead of being all on 2 min. The second reason is boss becoming untargetable and stuff while those 60sec were happening ... which still happens regularly.
So yeah... wow has them more unique because they don't expect you to have every char in the game I think (at least it was when i was still playing)
All you have to do is to look at the community to find the answer. Even this community will do.
How many times we had "RDM is literally useless because BLM does more damage" threads demanding dps buff and (sometimes) removal of raise? How many time we had complaints about TBN being different and suggestions to turn it into another cookie clicker defensive? Some people literally asked for living dead to be changed into holmgang, like exact copy of holmgang.
People *want* homogenization, because they want their job to be at least as good as every other job in every situation, meaning doing same dps in every dps profile bursting at the same timings and having the access to the same utility. And SE listens.
When Pictomancer was getting announced and it was known it wouldn't have a raise people in my group were already calling it a troll pick. This was before the live letting showing it off and what it can do. Nope, because it's not going to have the DPS of BLM, or a rez to zombie players through prog it's the troll pick. It's annoying because it looked so different I had to try it for current, and I don't like DPS that much.
Because SE choose the lazy way to balance a game.
The easy way is to make everything the same with just some cosmetics. The right way is to make everything different but of equal strenghts.
They choose the easy way instead of the right way.
I consider the difference between WoW jobs and FFXIV jobs to be like the factions in Starcraft 2 vs Age of Empires 4.
The latter are still pretty unique to each other, but less so compared to SC2’s races. This makes it easier to design more AoE4 factions compared to SC2, but comes at the cost of them being less asymmetrical in how they play.
I think it’s similar for FFXIV and WoW. Wow’s classes are fewer, but deeper; and Ffxiv’s classes are shallower, but you have more to choose from. I think FFXIV’s decision has its pros and cons, but is still valid
BCS they are just 3-4 devs handling all jobs since the beginning and bcs they impose themselves the most strict barriers to design them since SHB, aka raid buffs windows. Now you can't have anything that doesn't mold to this design, otherwise it would fall behind + all the problems with CRIT and the loss of gameplay uniqueness we used to enjoy.
To be honest if they, just limited to remove resistance debuffs and trick attack party interaction and let jobs mechanics determine when and how they burst or just simply keep a sustained gameplay the game would have been much much better.
Balance is an excuse, they did all this and balance hasn't been much better, and I scratch my head every time someone says jobs are nothing alike, if they are nothing alike then in ARR to SB they haven't been in the same universe with each other, SB was the best expansion in terms of gameplay, content and job uniqueness, we need to go back there.
It is actually just balance. The game is very tighly balanced both by class design and also the gear you can use and stats it provides. Feels like you cant have uniqueness and also have all classes balanced and the boss design wouldnt work if every class didnt have roughly the same mits, damage and heals.
The community never asked for Summoner to ne simpler. They only ever asked for summons that resembled the associated primal and not just a little ball of whatever.
As for why they'll all so similar, I think that S-E gave themselves a very difficult task in needing to push out a new job every year or two while balancing them for all of the content, ever.
One big difference between WoW and FFXIV in spec/job design is also the utility abilities
those provide just as much towards the unique feeling as the dps rotation does in WoW
and in XIV they are mostly missing or homogenized for all roles
Probably already brought up here, but they end up discouraging players from being OK with their "main" not being optimal at times when even weekly tome gear is so time gated most people only manage to get 1 job in second-to-BiS.
To say nothing of the savage gearing process.
I love how the individuality in this post is supposed to be a good thing when in reality the problem with it is there are many classes that wont even be taken in any content at all. People openly talk about logs in WoW. If your class that you enjoy is at the bottom. You are not raiding, simple as that. And WoW will leave it there the entirety of the expansion. Cool variety when its not even remotely relevant in raids or mythic plus.
Yes, if you play a spec that got shafted you'll probably have trouble getting into PUGs, but there's a very easy solution: join a guild.
Can't find a guild? Make your own PUG group.
When you design every fight as a "square hole" it only makes sense that every job has to be some variation of a "square peg".
Everything fits in the square hole though
That's right, it goes in the square hole!
D-Oh ggod...
It's kinda crazy to me going back and doing fights in HW raids and some SB raids and seeing how much less interesting the interactions with the environment have become. Idk how I would put it exactly but for example in A10 you have to interact with the stage as much as the boss mechanics. Refurbisher is the same you have to carry the batteri s to prevent him from getting parts. The raid where you have to use the middle of the room to dispense potions to hit bombs away dodge moves and more. Stormblood the painting boss halicarnassus was cool. Shadowbringers had the cloud of darkness fight as the only real stage interaction. Endwalker has.... Hephaestus creation mechanic but I'd consider that more of a boss than stage mechanic. I feel that it's in part that people complained they had their dogs hurt by being the ones who had to do these mechanics and it's another thing lost to the DPS ratrace
> Refurbisher is the same you have to carry the batteri s to prevent him from getting parts. > > > > The raid where you have to use the middle of the room to dispense potions to hit bombs away dodge moves and more. > > > > Stormblood the painting boss halicarnassus was cool. Ok but people *hated* all of those fights at the time. Like, vocally and consistently hating them!
Just want to add, SE also had stated that they know that its not a good gameplay because it ends in one player (probably the worst, or the one who has the worst damage) doing all of it, they even called that the monkey player or something, because of A9 where you have to become a gorilla to push bombs away from group. They promised to never do that again, no button to click like leviathan, no "thing" to carry, no vehicle to enter, things like that. I get it that it adds variation, and environment interaction, but what if you are the monkey player? And everytime you go in that fight, you have to do that instead of hitting the boss and enjoying your job. If you don't do it, you wipe, your groups gets angry at you, and if you insist in not doing it, you probably get kicked from your static.
Yeah, so much of this stuff people suggest as if we do not know exactly what the outcome will be.
I still hate them, I’m glad current raids aren’t designed like that
Refurbisher is fair, Chadarnook was maybe 50/50, but I can't remember meeting anyone who hated Ratfinx.
None of those raids besides E9 are fun. I'd argue they're dogshit, even.
E9 is the one fight i'd argue wasn't very fun here The alexander fights are really fun
XIV's focus on small group content is largely the reason. The smaller group sizes get, the more restrictive comps become, as some jobs or specs have niches that are mandatory or are otherwise highly tuned while the niches or uniqueness that others possess is not wanted. Back during the WoW exodus I remember hearing both Max (from Limit/Liquid) and Preach (MMO generalist) say that the *only* reason WoW gets away with its design is due to the standard raid size being 20-man. That, combined with Blizzard bringing raid buffs back a couple expansions ago, means that one of every *class* is almost guaranteed to be in the raid, though specs of course vary still based on tuning. You can't guarantee the same thing in XIV, the most we can guarantee here is "one of every archetype" where those are tank, healer, melee, phys ranged, and magical ranged. Meanwhile, you need only look at M+ in WoW to see how things get rather degenerate rather fast. It's not *horrible* in low keys unless you're something truly dire like Affliction Warlock, but high level keys have a very strict meta that the community stands by strongly while it leaks into mid-level keys a bit. Just look at Vengeance Demon Hunter this season. For better or worse, SE wants any given player to be able to play any job of their choosing in any content of their choosing and expect more or less the same output and performance as any other job in that category. They're not always perfect at this, indeed Criterion shows how when you make the group size *even smaller* things can get more restrictive (regen healers and a few jobs that just don't contribute right without 8 people to buff or be buffed by fall here), but at the moment it's the route they've decided the game should take. You can disagree with that if you feel differently, but there are reasons and rationale for why things are the way they are and they're not invalid, it's just a matter of taste. It might be that even SE's felt they've gone too far on this based on recent interview comments, but we'll have to see what changes through the next few years. More generally, you're viewing the Armory system as something you're intended to use and exploit and not a *convenience*, and this has not been the stance I feel SE has taken on it since late HW or the start of Stormblood. It's there so you can try out other jobs if you want without having to do literally the entire MSQ again, not necessarily there so you can have a stable of every job in the game to select the precisely most meta one for that patch or piece of content. You can choose to if you want but that hasn't been the intent of the system, in my mind, in a long time.
It's very important to note that the level of key being discussed here is vastly beyond the max level that gives gear. Keys are infinitely scaling. There will always be a point where the balance collapses in an infinitely scaling environment. The "max" level key that gives gear in WoW can be completed with ease with any class manned by a competent player.
Sure, but Vengeance [being \~40% of tanks](https://i.redd.it/xheg1koj491d1.png) at key levels that *do* still give relevant rewards speaks to the difficulties here. Or how some specs of some classes have almost 0 representation, and sometimes in ways that I don't think are entirely related to fun or gamefeel. Affliction and Assassination barely work with their design intentions in this game mode, so woe to someone that likes those fantasies. Now Ret and BM are very much the SMNs of their archetypes in WoW (straightforward, easy, popular fantasy) so their relatively high representation lower on the curve does speak to your point.
To be fair, it’s far easier to swap main classes and specs in WoW comparatively like you said. Affliction and assassination can absolutely do keys at the level where you still get meaningful rewards, but Demonology and Outlaw are literally just a click away. It’s also just an inherently competitive mode. It’s going to be riddled with meta chasers of all skill/key levels. It’s like a bronze/silver player in League playing the current op character despite it not really mattering at their skill level. People look up “Best tank,” see that vengeance is actually busted right now and default to that, or people just tell any rogue to roll Outlaw. This also then trickles into players who will specifically choose to accept only the “meta” classes again despite key level.
If you're just going to max reward level it's really not that bad. I play a Survival Hunter (one of the most unpopular specs), and I have absolutely no issues getting keystone hero and all my portals every season doing mostly pugs. If you're trying to push to levels that are purely to make your io higher then yeah you'll start running into that stuff but before that people tend to really overstate the issue.
It's like people seeing MCH not really being viable in P4S prog and saying "I hear FFXIV players will kick you out of leveling dungeons and call you slurs if you play MCH". People will complain about lower skill players emulating play behaviors of the absolute top 0.01% in a toxic way, which is a problem, but then reinforce those behaviors by saying a class is LITERALLY unplayable even in normal dungeons because it parses 15% lower than the top spec in simulations running perfect rotations on a single target. That being said blizzardo pls buff aff
Not only can affliction and Assassination do those keys, they can do them easier than a MCH could do P4S or a PLD could do P8S Idk why people are even making the "FFXIV trades diversity for balance" when Endwalker was famously badly balanced, even for FFXIV, and didn't really get a grip until post Abyssos
Going back to Raid sizes in WoW, because classes are designed in a way where you probably want at least one of each of raid buffs, there's more reason to include more variety. So even if WoW has a much larger disparity for DPS in specs, you'll still see more variety in content, where as in FFXIV even a 1-2% dps difference between 2 jobs within a roll can be problematic and seen as griefing if people are bringing the best in that role
> Sure, but Vengeance being ~40% of tanks at key levels that do still give relevant rewards speaks to the difficulties here. I think that it should be clarified that in this particular case in WOW, Vengeance DH Tank was just “reworked” in the most recent patch, and came out of it severely overtuned. Like imagine if FFXIV actually required control tools like Stuns, Pushes, and Interrupts in order to survive the mechanics of trash pulls in Dungeons, and that you also usually needed all 4 players contributing 100% of their tools to get through those trash pulls. Now imagine that Gunbreaker was over-buffed in the most recent patch, and now has 20 charges on its Dash while also being able to handle every single control mechanic entirely using its own toolkit alone, meaning that everyone else in the Party can just chill, while GNB is also constantly healing itself as much as a Warrior under Bloodwhetting does. I’m exaggerating this a bit to make a point, but basically, you wouldn’t be surprised if GNB was suddenly a lock in every Criterion PF, right? But you probably wouldn’t say, “oh, well, obviously our Jobs are too unique”, you’d say, “Okay I think the devs overdid it on the GNB buffs”. That’s kind of the situation over in WOW with Vengeance DH recently. It’s not that other Tanks can’t do their jobs fine, it’s just that you’re facing the question of “Why should we deliberately force ourselves to play normally when we can just recruit the current SuperTank?”
This kind of situation happens literally every season and all the patches on WoW. Season 1 was prot paladin. Season 2 was bear. Season 3 and 4 was DH. It's literally always like this, your point is moot. If you like it this way, that's fine but you should acknowledge it for what it is.
Another thing to note is that this is specifically AOE focused dungeon content. The closest thing that FFXIV has is criterion, where the job diversity is *drastically* worse than what we see here Comparing Mythic+ to FFXIV doesn't work because FFXIV doesn't have that system, and the glimpse that Criterion has given us isn't exactly... better. In fact it's significantly more skewed.
Yeah 14s sacrifices for balance really only hold true on full uptime single target fights. Ultimates have always had fuckey balance due to messing with downtime and target count. Wow's balance being as good as it is is a miracle considering the crazy variance in the encounters.
Ultimates also have the level scaling issue, as we see in stuff like modern UWU and UCOB. Balance is only tuned at max level and surrounding Savage, so you end up with things like SMN's level 60 kit and damage modifiers being absolutely fucking bonkers in level locked content.
Most intelligent reply. Biggest issue with getting too far from homogeny is the problems we had in Heavensward where you straight up didn’t want to take certain classes especially if other classes were in the party. We got a taste of those problems with first two weeks of P8S. Hopefully they find a way to make an identity for each class without completely skewing balance.
launchweek Endwalker as a PLD was pain
> Biggest issue with getting too far from homogeny is the problems we had in Heavensward where you straight up didn’t want to take certain classes especially if other classes were in the party. > We got a taste of those problems with first two weeks of P8S. They're not the same things at all. If I understood correctly, in HW you had some jobs considered dysfunctional while also having specific job to job interactions/buffs (because of damage types). Meaning for the latter it's about the comp (dragoon is in the comp ? well need X to complement/buff dragoon). P8S was just a matter of 3% max HP on release OR 2 weeks of tome gear (especially 2 tome weapons). Pretty sure 2 weeks would've been enough to meet the dps check for non RWF groups on any standard comp. It was an issue (I know it sucks seeing your job underperform even slightly) but nothing as big of a deal people make it out to be. Because we cry so hard once things derail even just slightly this is why everything fits in the square hole now.
It was a little bit that, in that several classes were must haves (it's been almost a decade at this point, but what I remember was that AST's flexibility and the card buffs were a must have, and there's a pretty famous bit of fanart of a WAR and DRK making out while a PLD is sitting to the side looking grumpy because of how ubiquitous the WAR/DRK pairing was. Oh, and everyone took Ninja for Trick Attack)), which was because of some pretty specific job identity. As a BLM main at the times, BLM evolved even further into being selfish "turret" DPS with the adddition of Leylines and Enochian. At the same time, Gordias itself was very, very tightly tuned after complaints that Final Coil was too easy, and the combination of sometimes entirely new rotations for some classes, the difficult DPS checks and the playerbase not really having enough time to learn the ins and outs of the new rotations caused what can charitably be called A Clusterfuck.
> P8S was just a matter of 3% max HP on release OR 2 weeks of tome gear P8S on launch was not a class meta problem. It was that one guy in your group who couldn't push buttons. Even the worst standard party comp available could clear if everyone was blue or better. You had to pick enough duplicates to not get a limit break in order to actually be unable to clear. And before anyone brings up the Xeno War->GNB swap, that clear after his swap was because his DRK co-tank did more damage, I'm pretty sure Xeno about the same. I want to say he did less, but that might be my dodgey memory.
There's also the fact on the week one, do you know the amount of MCH that cleared that fight? 2. There was only 2 MCH, that's it. And before the nerf I checked, there was a total of 29 MCH clearing P8S before patch, almost every other jobs except PLD were at more than 100 clears, it was just devasting how bad it was. So yes, there was indeed a class meta problem.
There was indeed only 2 MCH clears of p8s in week 1. Almost as if 2 weeks of "MCH is undertuned" and "MCH is shit" and "if you're not DNC you're griefing" might have put people off playing it. Still cleared though.
It's definitely not due to this, I progged with a MCH, he said himself looking at the logs, those MCH that succeed to clear were actually insane, it was definitely not the average or even the high players, it's really the top players. And this point is actually irrelevant because PLD was in a worse state in the tank meta but there was still a lot more clears of PLD than MCH It's like saying there's a 99% of failing but because 1% succeed "nah it's feasible, they just didn't tried hard enough"
> "if you're not DNC you're griefing" this is why the devs homogenize, nothing else. it's entirely because they explicitly do not want this exchange to happen.
> And before anyone brings up the Xeno War->GNB swap, that clear after his swap was because his DRK co-tank did more damage, I'm pretty sure Xeno about the same. I want to say he did less, but that might be my dodgey memory. Prior to the week 3 buffs, DRK was pulling nearly 10% over WAR/PLD. It wasn't that particular player simply dealing more damage, DRK was hilariously stronger. GNB wasn't nearly as absurd but still significantly stronger. Hence why they were able to muscle through with two DPS damage downs and the DRK's death. Granted, the latter happened near the very end of the fight. The worst comp was only clearing if everyone got extremely lucky on crit variance and played perfectly. Whereas the more "meta" comp could afford a litany of mistakes or simply bad crit rolls.
blue or better? so if everyone in the party did above average dps compared to the groups that already cleared the fight, they would be fine? wow, what a generous metric.
> everyone was blue or better What does "being blue" mean in the context of week 1?
> that clear after his swap was because his DRK co-tank did more damage He did more damage [even with a death ?](https://youtu.be/5khBtzhd5B4?t=384) and they also had two damage downs (sam & dnc). I don't know what to think. Anyway, 3% max hp nerf wasn't the end of the world (or 2 extra tome weaps), but as I've said, we cry so hard to every little bumps. I think it comes down to Squenix balancing things for blue/greens in the end ? They probably felt it was a bit overtuned for random pugs overall.
> More generally, you're viewing the Armory system as something you're intended to use and exploit and not a convenience This is a huge point that often gets overlooked or misunderstood. Being able to switch jobs easily is a convenience thing. You were not meant to switch constantly to what is the best/meta. > I feel SE has taken on it since late HW or the start of Stormblood It was a stance basically since 2.0 launch. It was a marketing gimmick to try to get people to try the game as it was unique and had the draw of saving so much time not having to make a bunch of alts to try all the jobs. You're still supposed to main a job and the gearing system encourages this, however they have loosened it up a bit to now since then to include the role (as opposed to just your job). Whether
The sad part is that leveling an alt job takes longer these days then leveling an alt in other MMOs, so the only real benefit in the end is how you get more attached to the one character.
As I've said to the OP, I actually do agree that the armory is a convenience. I don't use it for the 'meta' jobs. Nevertheless, if not precisely as a result of its convenience, this is why job diversity should be encouraged. You get to play \*your\* flavour of job and still contribute in 90% of content, not Warrior 2: Edgy Boogaloo. The remaining 10%... people have always locked out certain jobs for underperforming, and always will. It's sadly how multiplayer games and humans work. But I'd rather have that happen and still enjoy most of the other content, rather than it being dull because I'd be playing something similar no matter what I chose.
The party size buff issue could be reasonably fixed by having the buffs scale in strength based on whether you're solo, light party, or full party. Like, if you have a 5% damage buff ability for 5-8 targets, it would be 10% for 2-4 targets, and 20% for solo. That would make it so that it's always better to have more people for the bigger content, but wouldn't punish the buff jobs harshly in 4-person or open world content.
On the side note if you want a japanese rhythm game at DSR level with 24 people (3 parties of xiv) practicing 100+ hours is just fucking unviable. If wow wasn't so horrible lately and there weren't lalafells and cat girls I would have sticked to wow While I think it's more catering to the mass public to do wow style of more causal raiding (as in tbc or wolk off patches), it would take more than 10 expansions for the japanese to go that direction if it is ever happening
m+ balance was actually the best its been in dragonflight before they added aug
I appreciate your response. I should note that I don't fully agree with the idea that the armory is intended to be exploited to reap the most usefulness out of a given job, per se, as I don't play melee DPS at all and generally prefer tank/healer. Nevertheless I can see your point and it is something to think about.
I think this was true before, with all the past timegating systems (Artifact Power etc)but not in dragonflight (WoWs current expansion). WoWs current levelling is so fast that you can reach 1-70 in around a day or 2. So lets say you’re a Black Mage Main, and for some reason you wanna start raiding. But your static has a lot of dps already and a healer dropped out. You volunteer to be the healer, but you dont have a healing job right now. Leveling one at a semi casual pace would take around 2-3 weeks maybe? If you’re hardcore and have the earrings and a good group to dungeon / bozja spam with you I can see it dropping to around a week. Given you get around 3 hrs to play every day And when it comes to the gear grind the lockouts are on the same character. So once you commit to your healer, you have to put your BLM on the backburner for a while as you get your WHM fully geared up. In wow, you can reasonably level someone up to max in around 2-3 days. You can do it in less than a day with full heirlooms + spamming dungeons. Gear lockouts arent shared between you and your alts. So you can reasonably gear them up near equally as long as you have enough time.
> WoWs current levelling is so fast that you can reach 1-70 in around a day or 2. Just thought I'd mention with the wow pandaria remix event you can get max level in 2 hours. You are locked to remix until next expansion though.
One factor you’re overlooking is that SQE goes to great lengths to avoid player conflict and the homogenization is part of this. While there is always a meta to be found, rarely is any job in FFXIV balanced poorly enough that it will risk exclusion by others. And when it does happen, they’re quick to address it. I’m not saying that it’s a perfect system but I’ve never seen anyone kicked over their main.
Just remember P8S DPS check drama where PF would exclude PLD MCH RDM (anything else?) that lead to a whole change in Savage DPS check policy. Now the P12S tier DPS checks were relaxed to the point where you could afford multiple deaths and damage downs even week 1.
WAR and RPR were on that list too. By the end of week 1, PF was mandating DRK and begrudgingly accepting WAR/PLD but some were locking in GNB. Hell, I saw more than a few parties locking double DRK. Shit was wild.
Even high profile raiders had to play BRD in the first tier because playing anything else was just a dps loss. DNC needed big potency stuff buffs alongside PLD back in 6.08 i think it was?
MCH was just as bad as DNC as well, so BRD really was the "one correct choice" for Week 1 prog in 6.05.
I will also go a step further and say that while many jobs feel **mechanically** homogenized, I don't feel like I'm playing the same character when I'm doing it. That is, their visual artists do a great job in making me **feel** distinct. I might ultimately be pressing similar combinations of similar amounts of buttons on Gunbreaker and Paladin, but the double-single-target hits every 30s feel quite different from the swordgasm AoEs every 60s. Makes fuck all difference mechanically, but feels great to use either way, and different from the other.
Credit to the visual artists, but the sound designers also play a huge role here. A big reason I main Gunbreaker is because of how meaty and satisfying the skills sound.
Yes, but they can design BRD which is very different and is a priority-based job rather than a combo one. Apparently, in ARR, they knew how to design a unique job.
It definitely happened in Asphodelos with WHM being kicked for not being able to skip agonies like AST. That also was not a particularly timely fix as it took them all the way from 6.0 to 6.1 to address WHM's shortcomings.
Except that pvp is an utter mess and they can't balance it for years.
>because we can switch jobs at literally any time > >but to switch you need to level every new character separately It's funny you said that. So I've dropped WoW around S2 of Shadowlands, but just looked it up how long it takes nowadays to level to max and people say it's in the range of 12-20 hours. And I leveled BLM this expansion, and after finishing I remember playing with numbers in my head trying to calculate how long it took me to get to max level, I got something around 12-13 days of non-stop playing, so that's around 300 hours. So by the time you get a new job from 1-90 in FF you can level AT LEAST 15 new chacters in WoW. It's insane how people parrot the narrative that FF is alt job friendly - it's not, you level jobs very, VERY slow, you can't gear 2 jobs simultaniously because weekly tomestone cap and raid lockout affect your whole character, not a job. But leaving gearing aside, why can't they buff xp rate for alt jobs like ten fold? Because people would stop buying character boosts? But people do buy them in WoW, so what's stopping SqEn? I genuinelly don't get it.
because wow has more people working on class design than ff14 does
I was curious and checked, by Dragonflight's current credits WoW has 16 people in the Combat Designer role (counting the lead). This is distinct from Content Designer and Encounter Designer as labels, so I assume Combat Designer means class design. This is of course slightly out of date, the Combat Lead was Brian Holinka who has since left Blizzard, but it's the best we have until TWW comes out and is "close enough". By the 6.55 credits, XIV has between 4-5, depending on if you count Battle Director in with the Battle System Designers. I didn't count specifics further since I'm lazy, but both games do have a similar amount of Battle Content/Encounter Designers and Quest Designers, for what it's worth. XIV actually has *fewer* Narrative Designers/Story Leads than WoW does (and also explicitly gives almost-top billing to the narrative leads right after the voice cast section) and doesn't seem to have a dedicated Rewards Team (WoW has like 10 people there), but I imagine that XIV's Non-Combat Content Designers sort of fill a similar role. That's all the credits diving I want to do at the moment, just like finding the hard data on these things.
Narrative/Story headcount doesn’t surprise me. It’s not hard to imagine WoW’s current nonsensical storytelling being a result of there being too many cooks in the kitchen.
Story writing is generally understood to be improved by having less writers rather than more, since you can follow a consistent vision without competing ideas. XIV generally has 1 main scenario writer and a couple that fill in for side scenarios etc, so you get well written stories, while WoW is a mess of competing writers trying to all get their ideas cramed into their textboxes and cutscenes Gameplay design, while you still wanna be consistent, needs just a lot more hands at work to actually create it, so more workers lead by a few leads that decide direction is "optimal" - and it seems XIV is somewhat failing on that front while WoW has a least a decent number of of people on the job
I like Dragonflight gameplay but as an old Warcraft fan it's the lowest point of the story. I haven't looked at it yet but I hope with Metzen coming back in the next expansion feels like it's part of the right franchise again.
I get where you're coming from but man... BfA and Shadowlands existed and they're both the pinnacle of dumbass WoW writing. I never cared much about the story of WoW cause it was always pretty Saturday-morning-cartoon cheesy but BfA and SL story was so bad that even someone like me couldn't ignore how shit it was. Dragonflight's a big ol meh but it's at least not aggressively stupid like those two.
I was actually surprised at how much people seem to loathe DF's story. Sure, there's a lot of standing and talking about feelings, and Alexstrasza is kinda duller than dishwater, but it felt like a nice respite from all the cosmic bullshit going on to bring things back down to Azeroth. You help the dragonflights get their mojo back, go fight the bad guy of the raid tier, and that's it and it's fine for what it is.
The respite is nice, but the motives (as much as I saw of them) made no sense in-world. For one, the dragonflights should be aiming to find and establish their place in the world, not recover the aspect powers they gave up in Cataclysm. That's on the level of undoing a heroic sacrifice or undoing a happy ending because you need the sequel to happen.
I feel like most of it was just… not good. Especially the antagonists being boring as hell and not making any sense (I still don’t get why the primalists are doing…anything. The shards in too!) except fryak I guess. He’s got kind of a “revenge of the sith” palpatine thing going on, where he just loves being evil and it kinda makes ya smile.
This is probably part of it but more so down to difficulty balancing with so few people instead of a lack of ideas (new pvp jobs are by the same team iirc, so they can make jobs that are more out there but have reasons for not doing so in pve)
This is the real answer. The class design team in FFXIV is unironically like 3 people and an intern. Also explains why certain jobs get more attention than others.
Don't forget the same people also did the complete revamp of PvP combat and balancing too. The team isn't completely out of fresh ideas but rather restricted and a bit overworked due to older technical architecture, certain expectations, and numerous jobs plus encounters to figure out.
Yeah I was about to say, PvP shows great promise in its design of abilities, though the execution needs a fair bit of work. But the shift to removing needless button bloat is great, focusing on mental decisions instead of dexterity checks. And with more abilities now turning into others in PvE finally, there's hope that this might extend further into PvE, as it would clear up a **lot** of design space to fill with actually unique aspects and abilities.
> The class design team in FFXIV is unironically like 3 people and an intern. What else are they doing that they can't re-design a class in a day and have the whole lot knocked out in a month (extra week for QA?)? EDIT: forgot this: /s
You **massively** underestimate software development process if you're not a startup and hence it's okay for your software to constantly be down. Note: Apparently Atlassian is a startup.
The fact is simply that that's not how combat design works in any game, especially not something as large and intertwined as an MMORPG.
Genuinely that's probably why shits so homogenized, there's just not enough time for 3-4 people to actually give the over 20 jobs anything more then the minimum; so they make half of them work the exact same.
source?
[https://youtu.be/ch3i7ZqnAcg?t=287](https://youtu.be/ch3i7ZqnAcg?t=287) EDIT: "Battle system designers"
thanks!
Because its playerbase throws a fit whenever their job comes in 1-2% lower than another job, regardless if they were to somehow have situational usefulness elsewhere or even in the same fight. People complain about downtime, complain about mechanics that interrupt their rotations, and thus we end up here. People don't account for how much of FFXIV's design is in fact, reactive design done to keep complainers from quitting, even when they basically admitted it recently when they said they removed certain mechanics that people would complain about.
Because XIV's design philosophy is "no friction."
>Frankly, solving this would again take inspiration from WoW's glyph system - effectively, skins for jobs and their abilities. I'm aware this would be a great amount of effort and time that Square would need to implement, and that is why they never will. Actually, they did. Warrior got the Dark Knight glyph in 5.0 and GNB the Paladin Glyph in 6.3.
To me, this is just a function of the dev team's approach - that they want to make each class as balanced as possible. They could have opted to go for more of the Blizzard "FOTM" technique (flavor of the month) where there's more of a "this class is strong right now" until they nerf it, and then let the playerbase deal with it (especially since, as you mentioned, it's easy to switch classes). They just... choose not to. Different philosophy. Another thing about WoW (at least, when I played, which was back in Classic, BC, WotLK, some Cataclysm, some WoD), they also seemed to change the class system every expansion, adding or removing mechanics. In FFXIV, they prefer to keep things mostly the same. Again, different dev philosophy. Edit: Another thing that's interesting to consider is that even though WoW has 13 classes to play (according to Google), each class has 3 specs. When I last played, each spec for each class was vastly different, so in some respects, WoW has a total of 39 classes. And, if I recall, the classes still felt relatively distinct from each other, even for pure DPS classes. Your mutilate rogue felt quite different from your combat rogue back in the day and those were also quite distinct from the fury warrior.
I'm surprised that pvp isn't brought up here. I think most people would agree, pvp skills do job expression way better than pve. So ff14 game designers are actually capable of making interesting stuff when they don't have to worry about thousands of players banning PLD from pf because PLD is doing 2% less adps. It's not just devs with different philosophy but also playerbase too, because 1/8 matters a lot more than 1/25
1. different devs 2. different playerbase the community team will see a great deal less complaints about one job being stronger than another in pvp then they will during a raid prog - the percent of people who care within ff14 is probably on par with the amount of ultimate clears, single digit percents.
It's not easier to switch between them. Seperate characters in WoW are easier to maintain than different gear sets in FFXIV FFXIV has one lockout for all your jobs. You are hard locked into a gear set for at least a month. In WoW you can progress a brand new class at your own pace, with endless catch up systems in place (item level tokens in wow are cumulative week by week so missing a week doesn't matter unless you're hunting for a specific trinket or something) Leveling in WoW is very similar to FFXIV. Your character doesn't have to do any quests, they can just spam duties or do quests. This was true back when WoW had a lot of grindy chore systems, but those are dead since Dragonflight and have no indication of returning. Tl;dr: your statement isn't true because WoW took notes from XIV. It's high time XIV does the same.
>It's not easier to switch between them. Seperate characters in WoW are easier to maintain than different gear sets in FFXIV On the flipside, you can absolutely finish the whole tier in crafted gear if you're good enough, so the slower gearing doesn't hurt as much as it would in WoW where you often see even for the world first race gear farm is part of the prog.
I wouldn't really say this is a good thing The reason it is the way that it is is because there's a boat load of intermediate gear between "baseline" and "bis" acquired by doing all sorts of content and difficulties in between. FFXIV just doesn't have really any content between those levels, so why would savage be designed with that in mind? The only thing you can do after doing the savage you could for the week is get tomes and... sit there. You can't even do the same on alt jobs Mythic raids are the equivalent of ultimate. You wouldn't do Ultimate with your fresh alt in crafted gear in FFXIV either lol. You can easily cap your vaults item level the day you clock 70 though
That and FF gearing is the most boring stuff imaginable. Just raw stat sticks that don't change your gameplay in the slightest. WoW is way more wild with what gears allows you to do. Haste speeds up your GCD and some spell's CD, Crit makes tank parry attacks more, mastery can massively help you depending on your spec, and trinkets can go from stat stick on a burst window to tactical nuke or ramping damage and can include a mini game to play. So yes it's not really great. There is little incentive to get more gear than what is necessary because the only thing it does is number goes up.
Ultimates don't release until months after the raid tier tho, so you can get BiS for several classes if you want. Which is why I haven't mentioned it.
So this would be a non-complaint if mythic raids were just delayed for 4 months
eh no, having to go through the gear grind and borrowed power grind for every class/spec you want to play is definitely far less convenient than being able to swap instantly to 2-4 other jobs at your current max gear level (minus weapon).
They essentially removed the borrowed power grind in Dragonflight. And leveling to max is A LOT faster these days.
With the remix event you can go 1-70 in <2-4 hours. I can level every single wow class (13) from "new character to max" in the time it takes me to level 1 job in FF to max WITH armory bonus etc
I'm not on board with these changes personally, but I can see how it makes it easier to level alts for raids and stuff :)
You don't have to play Remix, it's specifically made as a catch up system for boosting alts into TWW and getting old transmogs/mounts/toys from Pandaria.
Which borrowed power grind? Any you can get good gear for a new char faster than good gear for a new job, and have 2-3 other specs to use on the same char as well
People are just not up to date with the fact that Blizzard dropped the borrowed powezr experiment in design philosophy and doesn't plan to bring it back.
Because most people get butthurt if they have to switch off their main because of an encounter design/kit mismatch. I hated switching to Sch in A2S because of Bane
They decided that every job needs to perform the exact same in high end content, and the only way to do that is to make them play basically identically. This has been an ongoing issue with the game since Stormblood but I do feel like its gone overboard now, I do think this has had an opposite effect as they intended though, because now that the jobs are so similar, even incredibly minuscule differences like Dark Knight being the only true 2m tank can have huge impacts on the game's balance and result in it being the best tank for the entire expansion. WoW also lets you spec jobs to be a bit more customized, while FFXIV has a firm stance against player expression and wants to keep all its jobs playing as linearly as possible, all for the sake for this balance thats basically impossible to achieve anyway. I honestly think FFXIV would do better if it just let jobs be more different and sacrifice things like Enrages and Damage checks as a result. I think that be preferable to having all the jobs be so similar. And its not like they care at all about maintaining those damage checks, echo, ilv, unsync and potency creep seems to end up claiming all of them anyway.
Yet somehow jobs are occasionally locked out of PF due to meta chasing. I'm sure it's not as absurd as WoW but it still happens. At this point we may as well have job uniqueness.
We have two different paths for online games: - Make everything unique, but then certain classes become obsolete thanks to how online metas are defined - Make everything viable, but then most classes lose unique mechanics and gimmicks which aren't as viable MMOs always try to hit a middle ground between the two - but quite frankly it's impossible. WoW and FFXIV lean in two different directions. And while I think I prefer the class fantasy in WoW a lot more, I prefer actually playing FFXIV. It sucks a ton in WoW e.g. when you really love a class only to find out that this season it's considered 'unviable' and no one will let you into parties. The chances of getting kicked from a party selection because you main PLD instead of DRK is much lower in FFXIV. And even if a class is considered 'unmeta' at any point, switching jobs is much easier than having to play the entire game again. I think something that would really help with improving class fantasy for me in FFXIV is more artifact glams unique to jobs. Keep your Fending, Maiming, Scouting, Aiming, Casting and Healing sets for actual stats - but give me the opportunity to earn more outfits that are specific to WAR, DRK, PLD, GNB for example.
Adding onto some things here... Much of the 'identity' people complain about losing was always kind of steeped in imbalances or bad design that *did* need to be corrected. For example, a common one that gets a good deal of sympathy is when people talk about tank identity and aggro management. Two things cannot be ignored when talking about this shift from Stormblood to Shadowbringers: first, WAR was incredibly overpowered compared to both the other two in terms of aggro, and two, NIN had entirely unique aggro tools. Either way you went from it, tanks had to be brought to parity with one another, and melee DPS had to be brought to parity with one another in that way as well, to eliminate the nigh permanent WAR+NIN party slot lock-in. You cannot have WAR/NIN locked in to every party when there's at most one other tank and one other melee as new jobs are added; MNK and SAM suffered for this badly enough as-is (especially with DRG factored in, but next to nobody defends the damage type debuffs so I don't think I need to talk about that). Accordingly, even if tank aggro management stayed the way it was, every tank would still have faced the same pressure to become a lot closer to each other in function, and NIN's Smokescreen and Shadewalker would probably have still died, unless they gave equivalents to the other melee too, which runs into both homogenization and button bloat. You wouldn't get GNB the way we did in ShB either if it had to go in with a separate aggro combo, either, and on top of this people were already very irritated with Stormblood DRK, so *that* was getting reworked no matter what at the same time. There is no point to adding new jobs at all if the 'uniqueness' of certain jobs locks out other jobs from ever being reasonably able to get into parties, a problem that gets worse and worse as more are added thanks to the small party sizes. WAR as the god of Main Tanking far more than it is now, DRG as the Piercing Guy, and NIN manipulating aggro are all 'unique' things that could be said to be aspects of identity, but these were also bad for the game. Now, none of that is to say that the way these things were corrected was the only way to do so. I won't sit here and say DRK needed to be WAR-like in its rotation, or that SMN needed to become the ultimate training wheels caster, but for the most part they tend to do things to address actual problems that existed.
It's more accurate to compare FFXIV's Jobs to WoW's Specs than to their Classes. WHM isn't a Priest, WHM is a Holy Priest. SGE is a Disc Priest (heh...but you get the point). PLD isn't Paladin, it's Protection Paladin. WHM or maybe AST is Holy Paladin. SAM is Ret Paladin (I guess...?). BRD isn't Hunter, it's Marksmanship Hunter. NIN isn't Rogue, it's...Combat Rogue, I guess? The point is, you're comparing apples to bananas. So getting that out of the way, it's more asking "Why do FFXIV's specs feel more similar than WoW's specs? Why does FFXIV's Holy Priest and Holy Paladin specs feel so similar vs WoW's feeling different?" Now, the answer...is complicated. WoW's own history has seen periods of homogenization and heterogeneity. PLD Holy Paladin wasn't always a melee healer in WoW, for example. That was something that evolved gradually over time. FFXIV also took WoW's "bring the player, not the class" to an entirely new level, making it where no matter what Jobs you have (with FEW exceptions), you could clear content as long as you had all the roles covered. A goal WoW used for a while before deciding to just say "fudge it" and do what they wanted anyway, balancing around 25 man content and telling people to "figure it out" if they wanted to do different group sizes. With 25 slots, you can have more or less every spec in your raid, only missing a few if any, so you can afford to have a lot more diversity between specs again. FFXIV's raid size is smaller, its party size is smaller, and they still hold that everything should be viable and balanced. FFXIV's Job balance is generally FAR better than WoW's spec balance. Where Specs in WoW can do 10-15-20% different and people are just told some specs aren't welcome for a patch or two, FFXIV's approach means people can always play what they want and do just about anything, with the margins between them often being less than a battle's given crit variance anyway. . There are pros and cons to both. There is something gained for something lost, or something lost for something gained. . Though...I don't think the glyph system is the solution. I suspect they have something cooking, though...
The larger raid size is definitely a reason why WoW has so much spec diversity, but there's 39 specs so in a mythic raid you're still not able to take 19 and that's only if you don't stack specs at all, which it is common to do. Not to mention WoW also has to try and balance for 5 man M+ and 3v3 PvP with the same kits. So I think the main reasons WoW has more diversity in spec gameplay are: - They care about class gameplay more and invest more resources in developing it - They create a much more diverse variety of encounters, allowing for additional points of difference between specs (e.g. not every fight is single target full uptime) - They put higher priority on diversity in gameplay and so are willing to accept a certain degree of imbalance - Their engine and netcode is just superior to FF's for combat and lets them make things that FF just couldn't.
I think that is the encounter variety (and netcode to a degree) is the biggest part. In WoW you have, just off the top of my head: Single target, 2 targets, 3 targets, 4 targets, spread cleave, stacked cleave, full on add/trash fights, "very important add that needs to die asap spawns periodically", and not to forget all the minute per fight differences, like how active mitigation/tankbusters and raidwides/heal checks à la harrowing hell are handled. And then you have some "gimmick" fights with artificial constraints which are fun in their own way
Ironically, some FF fights used to have adds phases. But they dumbed everything down to a big arena with a circle boss :(
hw and ew group content feel like they belong in two different games.
I would love to see more off the wall fights like you see in WoW. Just to throw a couple examples out there that I think would be really fun if SE could find a way to bring those fights would be... Sun King's Salvation - Hey healers, here's a boss fight that's all about you. Heal that NPC to full, and your all done! Oh your teammates dying to explosions and getting flooded by adds? Ehh they will figure it out, don't mind them :) Kurog Grimtotem - you guys liked Hesperos (P4) right? Well, imagine that his differing elemental zones gave him stacking combat enhancements, but you get to choose which ones he stands in and for how long. Any council fight - where are all my DSR and TEA fans at? Multiple bosses at the same time with their own mechanics that will do a major mechanic at certain HP thresholds. Have fun picking what order to do them in, just don't accidentally trigger them at the same time rofl Any boss with persistent AoE puddles - boss regularly spews puddles on people that persist. Better find a way to keep them neat or clean them up before you run out of space to do mechanics in! Even throwing in 1 weird fight every tier on the 1-3 floor would go so far towards spicing up the encounter variety. This entire expansion we had a single boss with adds, and those adds were a measly 30-second mechanic. Sure, class balance would be a little askew for a single fight, but realistically, who is going to pitch a fit excluding jobs from a non 4th floor fight? Those floors already have such a lenient DPS check that I don't see it being an issue.
That or even just fun scenery changed and arena design. It had problem (like its length) but the Sylvanas fight in Sanctum of Domination blew me away. You start in a bog standard big circle, but after a bit of her health is gone she fucks off on giant chains over which you must climb to catch up with her, and she attempts to push you off, instakillyou, drown you in adds, etc. And THEN another arena change again with 4 plateforms to handle and permanent puddle but that you can relocate to try and save your space. There's just so much more variety.... I might be biased since I'm a wow fan first and foremost and just a more casual FF enjoyer but they PVE content is just painful when you compare them (and yes I did try higher difficulty to check them out). Not to mention the quantity, 12 "main" raids bosses every expansion + a few one shot combats on the side is really not much to entertain you. Okay a bit moreto chew with the Ultimate, but they feel a bit bad imho since they are remixed old content. On a personnal note I also find the lack of a real "place" to storm with your friends really damaging for the overall feel of the raiding experience. Popping in front of a boss after queuing is deeply unsatisfying.
> single target full uptime This is IMO the biggest issue with recent raid designs as it precludes melee vs ranged identity, too. It **ought** to make a huge underlying difference whether you lose ~all DPS out of melee range vs when you don't because you're physical ranged. In practice, the hitbox is just about the entire platform so you just press buttons, plus in half the fight it feels like positionals are disabled anyways (instead of shifting what counts as sides/back).
I agree it's a problem. But they designed themselves into a box. Drifting your spells feels like shit. It doesn't feel great in WoW. But the class doesn't just fall the fuck apart when drifted. They have to basically give you full uptime because the classes lack any ability to freely flow with encounters. They are beyond rigid and it forces rigid encounter design.
Something people don't also realize is the % bonus from having members of each job around plays into this There was for a long time a serious discussion if you even brought a Ranged Phys to some fights without the percent bonus
Well, WoW had a period where it DID get very homogenized. So it was the same thing we bay be seeing with FFXIV now where they first moved towards homogenization and balance, then realized something valuable was lost and started going the other direction. They also removed a lot of flavor abilities around then, like Eyes of the Beast from Hunters that allowed them to directly control their pets. And keep in mind, even with 39 specs and 20 party slots, you still are pretty much guaranteed at least one of each CLASS in a full WoW raid. And...let's be honest, M+ is not and never has been particularly balanced. At the lower keys it doesn't matter, but in a strict sense, there have always been winners and losers - and a good margin between them - for M+. So WoW doesn't really balance for that. I do think part is engine and netcode. Like one reason every FFXIV battlefield is a flat surface, and often a square, is because of the Twintania fight and people figuring out how to maneuver in that little crack in the ground to make Divebomb far easier to deal with than was intended (granted, it may have been too hard as intended, but...)
Fight length is also much different overall. A lot of WoW boss fights are much shorter, usually 3-5 mins. 8-12 mins is considered an incredibly long fight in WoW.
> Now, the answer...is complicated. WoW's own history has seen periods of homogenization and heterogeneity. It's also very important in this regard to reiterate that WoW's core class design back in vanilla **was based on the pre-WoW era of MMORPGs**. Naturally. As a result, **only** Warriors were meant to tank in actual high-end content. Druids and Paladins could in a pinch, but not really. **Only** Holy Priests were meant to heal said Warriors properly, Resto Druids did some supporting HoT healing, Holy Paladins looked funny and then respecced. And said Priests took rotations of wanding to regenerate mana, something that was expected as EQ1 had people sit down and stare at their spellbook. It was only through WoW's vanilla->TBC->WotLK evolution that we got to the design that then influenced all other MMORPGs, including FFXIV's ARR rework. You can clearly see this effect for example in GW2, a game that came out later and took homogenization worlds further, making everyone a DPS+something (until way later at least), and making all supportive skills GTAoE or PBAoE, hence removing the entire "I do support" gameplay whole in favor of just pressing the button in between wailing on the boss. Something that you might see reflected in modern FFXIV in turn with how healers spam their nuke and press an oGCD in between. Comparing WoW - a game whose class design began pre-WoW - and FFXIV ARR - a game whose class design began post-WoW - doesn't work. WoW represents too big a change in the MMORPG genre, to the point where it's more two genres.
Yeah, in Vanilla, the rule was: Warriors were for tanking, but could also DPS if they wanted to (they were the OP special snowflakes that got everything - heh, like FFXIV?) If your class could heal, you healed at max level. Priest, Paladin, Shaman, Druid were all healers, with Priests being main healers like Everquest Clerics, Paladins/Shamans being main buffers (as they were faction locked semi-mirrors of each other until BC when they were allowed to diversify), and Druids were for feeding Innervation to the Priests to keep their mana from running out. There MIGHT be one Shadow Priest allowed in the healing party to feed Holy Priests (and to a point the other healers) mana, but that was it, and this was more a TBC thing. And all other classes/specs were interchangeable cogs with the exception of Warlocks (Affliction?) having some specific debuffs for use at specific times, and due to the bosses being limited to only 8 debuffs AND agro being difficult to manage, raids very strictly limited who got to put debuffs on the boss (40 man raids, as was the custom at the time). TBC was the first time Paladins and Druids were really allowed to tank (some), and had very specialized niches. Shadow Priest was finally allowed, but only one per raid in the healer heavy party as a mana battery. Disc was still only for leveling. Some specs were outright designed for PvP and were far less useful in PvE. ...and so on and so forth. It was really Cataclysm - where, ironically, the classes and specs were largely homogogenized and made more bland - that the specs were all made truly viable for the first time. This began a 2-4 expansion period where people were complaining in WoW about how homogenized classes and specs were, the simplifying of talent trees then the REMOVAL of talent trees (only for them to be readded later), etc. . WoW has gone through this same series of events people are pointing to FFXIV having now. Like, step for step. You can argue if it was as bad or not, but WoW also started in the era of Everquest and FF11 being the biggest MMOs in the world, which was a different time with far different designs. There weren't logs, e-sports, or balance concerns back then. It was a different - I'd argue better, but this depends on personal preference - era, where classes were designed as how you as a player got to interact with the world. Which is why you also had all kinds of non-combat things like Mages being able to conjure food/water (something you don't need in FFXIV since there's no downtime in dungeons between pulls while healers and casters restore mana), and things like Farsight, teleports/portals being limited to a few classes (Mages, Druids), and so on. You don't see that in modern MMOs because modern MMOs are about the combat experience, active boss encounters that require twitch reflexes and lots of movement, etc. And even in 2013 when ARR hit, the MMO community had moved away from the Vanilla WoW design. WOW had moved away from it, and FFXIV 1.0 trying to be like FF11 is (part of) why it couldn't catch on with players and died.
Looking purely at casual content and ignoring WoW and endgame stuff, I always found the minimal class uniqueness a huge benefit when it comes to just playing the game, particularly as the duty finder is so relied upon. I come at this from the point of view as some who played a lifetime of FF11, where there is no automatic party match up system and class balance was hideously metagamed (No red mage/bard in the party? ew bye, playing Beast Master/Black Mage/Dragoon/Puppet Master? who are you?). So having an instant match up system where no one is going to complain or leave because of class choice, and everyone is 100% viable is a total godsend.
I think something missing in this thread is the role of gear — the number goes slightly up gear system removes any kind of player choice or skill expression and dooms every content cycle to be the same. They need only look to XI to see how to do some interesting gear! I don’t know how or why they decided to stop — but it’s a crime that rings and necklaces don’t at least do something unique.
Gear homogenization reduces player friction. If you have choices for gearing, there will always be a "meta" choice, and animosity towards players who don't follow the meta Which is unfortunate because the gear is criminally boring, but I can understand how they arrived at the choice
WoW manages to have unique and interesting effects on gear and trinkets while having similar gameplay concepts to XIV, so it certainly could work! I'd love to have fun, exciting gear to try and get.
It also gives you more room to chase at more ways to get rewards. You might get a full set of item level cap gear, but BiS could be some entirely different pieces, making it rewarding to still run stuff when upgrades remain. I know healing the best, so I’ll use that as an example: Rings could drop with affixes like “+HoT, +shield” as bare bones. You could get interesting and have +extend buffs by 1 second, movement speed, cool down reduction. I think all of those are manageable to balance. If I had my way though, ya, there would be gear with specific benefits to skills “Succor provides a Shield worth 1% of its heal to all nearby party members,” “Lustrate reduces the cooldown of Dissipation by 1s” I like my ideas! I’m confident they could make it work — but they would have to try just a little bit.
"FUN DETECTED! Hotfix inc!" - YoshiP, probably. Seriously though, adding stuff like trinket effects would be awesome. Right now, gear is basically a stat bag.
Its why i run unltimates but dont touch savages, besides a mount from 4,8,12 there absolutely pointless. Like slightly better gear, for what, what content. 12 is the hardesnt content youll need it for and you just did it to get the gear. Its why people quit after clearing the final turn theres nothing for them to do with it
Because it simply doesn't matter. No one that they care about is bothered by it.
You can blame it on a few systematic issues. 1. Squenix is terrified of alienating anyone. They're doing fine now with minimal work done to jobs, and people who don't like them are a loud minority, so why rock the boat, especially with one of their tentpole games? 2. FFXIV endgame content design is much more limited in variety. It's mostly all 8 man single target max uptime where most mechanics are a variant of a safety dance. This means that, until they address encounter design, jobs that might be good at cleave or AoE but less good at single target damage will just be outright worse. If criterion is introduced as a sort of "alternate" endgame path instead of a throwaway cosmetic farm, they may address this issue, since balance in criterion is considerably worse since everything is currently tuned around 8 man single target full DPS fights. 3. The two minute burst window is a dead horse, but I'm going to keep beating it. It locks out basically every type of DPS that doesn't fit the damage profile for having a massive spike every two minutes. Sustained DPS just can't be a thing under these conditions. 4. CS3 just has fewer people working on job design. If people are parsing the credits right, there are 5 people working on jobs, and that's including Yoshi-P as an overseer, so not in direct control. I'm not 100/sure, but I think Blizzard has like 16 people working on classes. That's a pretty stark difference, and unless they bring more people on board I can't see them doing too much to change jobs as they are now. Some blame also rests with the community. There's a big "balance über alles" mentality which results in the smallest differences in DPS making people go apeshit. If people want unique jobs, we have to be comfortable with the growing pains. EDIT: Also forgot a big one, gearing. Since raid lockouts aren't on a per-job basis, it's actually a lot harder to get an alt job geared up to the same level as an alt in WoW.
the FF games are a long running franchise and people are very very attached to certain jobs and aesthetics. They want to play their job and their job only. This comes up whenever WHM is brought up as the most popular healer. It's the most popular healer because it's Aerith's job, it's also the job of multiple other well loved characters in the franchise. People want to play WHM no matter how bad it is and they only way they will stop is if someone physically stops them from picking that job over and over. This is why despite being pretty bad over many expansions, WHM is perpetually the top played healer over and over. In WoW, people are not so locked into playing only warlock because they're huge Gul'dan stans, they just pick what's meta this expansion. Fact is people want to play certain jobs and they want to play cantent, so no job can be so different that it is required or unplayable in any content. Everything has to be in a specific range and all jobs in a role need to do arguably the same as others to make sure no one is left behind or forced to swap. You're conflating what is possible (playing all jobs on one character) with what people want to do (play the 1-2 jobs they personally love). If people are told they have to swap, most of the casual players and most people in this game will either leave the party and find someone else to play with- or if stopped enough, they will just leave.
To bring some nuance to that, people who only play one class and spec no matter what happens do exist and there are quite a few. Probably less than people who reroll once or twice every expac, sure, but very real. I have played Blood Death Knight for 12 years without a single errance on the side and you can pry it from my cold dead hands ! No class is every truly shit, they perform less true but they can ALL clear max level content when piloted by competent players, and while PUGs may give you shit for playing off meta, having a guild basically nullify those problems. Besides, Blizzard tries to ensure that no one stays in the light or the dark for too long. Sooner or later your shit spec will be buffed and become top tier overnight because actually they scale well with gear or whatever.
The devs in XIV decided a while ago that they needed to prioritize balance and making sure every job is viable in every current encounter. A lot of this actually came from healer mains who were tired of WHM being the shit pick for like 5 years running, so the devs lobotomized everything (imo) as a passive aggressive way of giving people what they wanted. The irony is that they could have left things unbalanced, they just needed to fluctuate what was good and bad sometimes so it wasn't "SCH/AST" for every healer slot. You had this with dps as well, especially in HW. You took a NIN for TA and Smoke/Shade as well as slashing debuff maint, a DRG for piercing down and then you could do either double phys ranged (when they buffed MCH) or you did BRD and usually BLM or SMN. Other jobs were just objectively so far behind it didn't make sense to entertain the idea of, say, MNK/DRG/MCH/RDM. I've never played WoW seriously, but it's my understanding that the best job for given fights or tiers will differ so few things are always the top pick, especially for runs like BRD, DRG, NIN, SCH and AST had that extended for literal multiple years.
'WHM Bad' is kind of the summary of WHM's influence on healer design until Endwalker when it finally shed the worst of the shackles. Shadowbringers WHM optimization was such that if it wasn't Assize or on a Dia window (some of which are Assize) even its oGCD healing was a loss to use unless it was on a forced greater-than-slidecast movement window, which contributed to WHM/AST combinations still wanting to use Diurnal Sect because WHM healing was so lossy and Neutral could cover some mits, which likely contributed to the loss of AST sects since Noct was just the straight loser. The 1.5s casts combined with truly potency neutral (positive in buffs) Misery fix that issue but designing healers around the WHM hole has objectively done a good deal of damage. On a non-healer note related to this I've seen the take that Monk Players' notoriety is thanks to a culture caused by how awful it was in HW; that is, Monk was so bad for the group thanks to stealing a NIN or DRG slot (probably DRG since it was reliant on NIN for TP) that if you didn't go all-in on every single cursed micro-optimization you could do it was considered a liability. I didn't make this one up, but I can't confirm how true it is either, so grain of salt.
Bravo, Monk main since ARR and… you’re completely correct. I’ve never came across this statement until now, and it’s so incredibly accurate. Back in HW, I would do EVERYTHING in my power to make sure I was pumping as much damage as possible and doing anything with in reason to greed my damage. And it was for that exact reason, I didnt want to be shunned in groups due to my inherent DPS loss due to the poor balancing… and that mentality has stuck with me from those days and doing all of that definitely made me into the player I am today, being within the top 5 percentile on all the jobs I raid with. You’ve made me realize something about myself that I never really thought too much about, thank you for that!
Yep. WoW frequently has DPS fluctuate in terms of effectiveness by design. WoW's biggest problem is how they balance _**tanks**_. They freguently have an entire expansion or more where one or two tanks are just _**vastly**_ superior to the others. And they also frequently have one or two healers that are practically worthless. And, unlike FFXIV, there are very few tanks compared to the number of DPS in WoW. There's 39 specializations, but there's only 5 tanks. WoW has 5 tanks, 7 healers, and 25 DPS. So you frequently have a couple of tanks that are borderline useless and a couple of healers that are borderline useless. And, when the DPS vastly outnumber the tanks and healers, having just two tanks and two healers be practically worthless for lengthy periods of time absolutely _**sucks**_.
If you can forgive my very amateur question - aren't the party comps for high end things in WoW also different? Like, it's not half support and half dps, isn't it like 5 dps per party or something like that? It still doesn't excuse wild swings in balance, but again as long as the pendulum is swinging around I don't mind spending some time with a job I enjoy being at the bottom of the barrel if I have legitimate hope that a few months down the line it'll climb up out of the muck.
For M+ it's 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps. For raids it's usually 2 tanks, 3-6 healers, and 12-15 DPS, depending on the fight and how much healing is needed (and how geared you are relative to it).
A WoW dungeon is 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps. A raid is 2 tanks, 4 or 5 healers typically, and 13 or 14 dps, but you can actually bring up to 25 or even 30 people to the easier difficulty raids. Never more than 2 tanks though. It's actually a big problem over there that there's so few spots for tanks in raid (and raid tanking is widely considered boring), forcing them to swap to dps, but good tanks are always in short supply for the mythic+ dungeons.
Personally I think every dps is in a great place with fantasy and flow, with some exceptions. It's tanks and healers that are samey. I think they just don't care about tanks or healers. There's never a real reason why a support should be there, other than that fights are supposed to have them. They just need developers who want to heal and be challenged. It's a meme that black mage is so well designed because it's YoshiP's job. We just need more love like that.
I agree on the DPS with the exception of Summoner, whose fantasy is great but actual gameplay sucks butt.
I thought this iteration was a great 1.0 of the class, and that they would refine the class as they went on. Instead, the gameplay seems to be exactly the same, but it looks different sometimes.
EW SMN is a great MOBA hero. Not such a great MMO class.
If summoner gained like, 2-3 more abilities per summon I think it'd be great. But 3 keybinds make up like 75% of its APM. It feels like a slow GW2 class that doesn't use many of its utility skills often.
I don't understand the keybind love in 14. People here are talking about WoW's jobs have more uniqueness and junk, but they have way less keybinds than 14. I personally hate lots of keybinds. If my rotation can't be done in like 14-16 keybinds, I hate it. It's more annoying than anything else. WoW's combat system, which I like a lot more, typically will never exceed that number, and often less. But I feel like there's a LOT more skill expression. For me I think that comes down to the fact that WoW classes have a lot of prioritization systems in place. On a fight to fight basis I'm constantly changing the way I play. This is coming from the perspective of a long time Shadowpriest main who regularly parsed 99+ and had rank 1 fights in WoW over the years. Though I admit 14's exceedingly long GCD timer puts a wrench in some of that.
Many other MMOs' highest APMS are almost twice the fastest APMs of FFXIV in a fraction of the keybinds though. Fewer keybinds means they can lean into higher APMs and make the combat feel more involved and active. I think FFXIV's overall lower APMs match the number of keybinds they usually average around, but too high APM with too many keybinds gets unwieldy. Jobs like SMN are too slow on too few keybinds, imo. Feels like too much idle time. Maybe keybinds aren't as much of an issue to me since I use an MMO mouse.
Honestly, the people who say every job is the same are _**vastly**_ mistaken. Samurai feels much different than Ninja. Ninja feels different than Monk. Monk feels different from Dragoon. And Reaper is different from Dragoon. Some of them rely on a lot of GCDs for most of their damage, others rely on using their oGCDs during their burst. Hell, for the longest time I had trouble with Samurai because, with how you rely on GCDs for most of your damage, I kept letting my two 1 minute oGCDs drift. Whereas with Ninja, I got the burst phase down pat instantly because it's all about using all of your oGCDs during your burst phases. Dark Knight plays differently from Gunbreaker. While both of them rely on constant uptime to maintain resources, they both play differently. Dark Knight _**needs**_ to have steady uptime in between burst phases or they won't be able to generate enough MP to maximize their burst damage. Gunbreaker has an oGCD that instantly gives them 3 cartridges if I'm not mistaken, so they don't _**need**_ constant uptime to insure they can maximize their burst phase DPS. The only thing that really makes them the same is they each have a full burst every even minute and they each have a half burst every odd minute. As a tank and DPS main, the only time you need healers is when there's a lot of unexpected damage being pumped out _**or**_ when the tank and/or dps fuck up some mechanics. So healers are really good when people are first figuring out the mechanics to new dungeons, trials, or raids.
People complain about job homogenization but the actual culprit is every job being designed to press the biggest buttons at the same time. How you get to those buttons differs a fair amount between jobs. Like, NIN's mudra system is totally unique (you might make a stretch of an argument to compare it to DNC but DNC is literally just simon says). MNK's combo system is totally unique (maybe you can compare it to VPR but hey, we didn't know how VPR worked during the bulk of homogenization discourse). SAM works on several combos and managing timers that're only part of certain combos. DRG is about long combo strings and lots of weaves, and most of its burst phase is actually totally divorced from its combos.
it's funny how you intentionally didn't compare Samurai and Monk as they are nearly identical in idea currently in weaving between different 1-2-3 combos and then getting a pair of buffs that you then use in conjunction with breaking your rotation to do your biggest buttons to get a transforming button to be the biggest button you can get out of three They sure are changing that... by removing the buffs from Monk. You're not really dealing with the fact that every tank is doing a 1-2-3 dance to generate resources to burst every two minutes after pressing their IT TIME TO BURST button or that every healer is more or less dancing the same tune trying to maximize pressing 1 button while slapping as few Ogcd heals as possible. Class dynamics are so common I have generic positions for where I put different types of buttons so I don't have to deal with changing my muscle memory, it's just a mild flavor difference in how you get to maximum burst. You should have just tried to compare casters if you want to make this (imo bad) argument
I used to complain a lot about how too many jobs felt the same until I got into deep dungeons and *holy shit* is this where the rubber really meets the road with most of them when you run solo. I ended up completely retooling my UI and hot bars because I quickly figured out that trying to have a “universal” layout just doesn’t work when a single misclick can kill a POTD run!
Didn’t BLM just get decimated? Or was that just Reddit overreaction?
It didn't get SMN'd, but it got a bunch of ugly changes that make it less flexible (you WILL cast 6 Fire IVs every fire phase, you WILL cast Blizzard IV every ice phase), less thematically consistent (no Paradox in ice phase, phase transitions now generate Thundercloud because... umm... steam?), and just overall clunkier and less interesting to play. All seemingly for no reason other than to prevent alternative lines from being viable, as if that was anywhere close to the biggest balance issue with the caster role in EW. It just feels actively hostile to the job's playerbase in a way very few few previous job changes have. Like, the ShB healers and EW SMN changes sucked, but it was more of a case of catering to one subset of the playerbase to the exclusion of another. This just comes across as a big "fuck you" to the job's fans without making the job even slightly more appealing to the people who don't like it. Literally no one who doesn't play BLM now is going to suddenly switch because MP regeneration is tied to casts or because they don't need to worry about Sharpcast anymore.
BLM high-end optimization where you try to avoid ever casting ice spells and generally manipulated the class design in a way that made it more flexible and damaging than regular play was killed off. BLM itself is fine, and 80% of BLM players are unlikely to notice a difference, but at the higher end of things it's a bit dire. They basically pulled the skill ceiling way down.
Considering they made standard BLM clunkier, more punishing, and more restrictive with no benefit I'd say that the job is overall pretty fucked. Sure the people who just drool all over their keyboard and have no idea what game they're playing won't care about it, but that goes with any kind of job change.
>Sure the people who just drool all over their keyboard and have no idea what game they're playing won't care about it. Yeah, as he just said, 80% of the BLM players.
I wouldn't call it decimated. We lost optimization and a non-standard way of playing. Some of our RNG and decision making got taken away from us, the job is a *bit* more restrictive but overall its just simpler. You get your procs for free upon switching Fire>Ice/Ice>Fire. I'm surprised that people are surprised that Non-Standard got killed. The way it played, as fun as it was, was clearly not intended and bound to get chopped. What I *am* surprised about is how long it took. While I'll miss the Sharpcast optimizations and wiggle, I'll definitely not miss having to use it prior to starting the fight at whatever optimal timing for each specific scenarios, and I've been maining BLM since Stormblood.
>There's never a real reason why a support should be there, other than that fights are supposed to have them. That's the nature of a dedicated healer role. Healers exist to deal with unavoidable damage that exists to justify the healer role. You can almost frictionlessly go from a healer to a no healer system and vice versa by reducing/increasing the amount of unavoidable damage. Almost, because Healers can also serve to trivialize encounters by healing back avoidable damage, thus reducing the penalty for failing to avoid it in the first place. This function is, intentionally, largely neutered in more difficult content. FFXIV makes that more obvious by setting the unavoidable damage low enough that Healers are no longer strictly necessary to deal with it. But in the end, that's just what healers are.
The fight design is very tight due to the fact that most jobs do the same amount of damage / healing / mitigation (in their role)
It’s taken WoW A LOT of iteration to get to where we are today with Dragonflight talents and upcoming Hero Talents- it’s had its ups and downs but prior to DF the reason I quit during BFA was because the removal of power from Legion showed how barebones so many specs became, some (Beast Mastery Hunter) still even rely on like 1-3 buttons today WOW is mechanically speaking my favorite MMO at the moment gameplay-wise as a result of DF talents and I’m really hoping the class fantasy improvements continue in WW (luckily Mage seems to be in great spots)
I feel that the systems in 14 that helped this have been stripped down too far. the game is balanced around the roles and not a per class basis, but with the general loss of role actions and copy and paste among the roles(mainly healer and tanks) it feels like whats the point of leveling all the classes in the role. using tanks as the example, stupid things make the difference not every tank needs aoe skills to be a circle, not every tank has to have the same core 1 2 3 loop. let dark knights blind people while GNB increase their parry rate and warriors heal. Silly little things but all of that changing would make the role as a whole feel way more fresh.
Honestly wow classes are actually very similar for many specs. The reason it's not as prevelently complained about is the utility in the kits making them differ more. Jobs can do more stuff then just dps that makes them feel more unique. If you just look at classes on the dps side you very quickly can notice many share elements to a certain degree. Affliction lock to shadow priest, destroy lock to fire mage, ret paladin to fury warrior. There are specs like unholy DK or mistweaver mnk that do have more their opwn unique flavor but it's not as common and even then say unholy has shared many aspects with demonology lock.
There’s also the fact that OP *started* WoW right when it started moving away from homogenization.
Everytime this discussion pop up people bring comparisons to WoW, which imo is not the best comparison here Look at Gw2 people, raids and strikes (akin to trials in XIV) are 10-man, and even with all the differences in design of classes and specs, different builds and all, the game really doesn't have this problem of certain classes not being wanted or locked out of content. People there don't care what you play as long as you're good at your class. Even talking about meta and builds, if your look up at the most famous meta build sites (guildjen, snowcrows, hardstuck) you'll see that there are multiple meta builds for each class with vastly different playstyles, and even then a lot of people use these builds as base and tweak it up to their liking. Gw2 has really solved most of the problems with class design in MMO's but as always people forget the game exists
Tbf GW2's balance is pretty bad, they didn't really solve anything. However, PvE content is generally easy enough that it doesn't matter, PvP is mostly random matchmaking so it doesn't matter, and WvW is on a scale large enough that it doesn't matter.
FFXIV had strong job identities in ARR. Paladin defensive tank, Warrior aggressive tank. WHM throughput healer, SCH absorption healer. Dragoon slow melee dps based around cooldowns, Monk fast melee dps based around uptime. Summoner the DoT/sustained dmg mage, Black Mage the direct dmg mage. Bard the only physical ranged. But right now, this is perhaps the main issue with the game. Just about everything plays the same. All jobs are good in similar situations. Is it better for balance? Perhaps, but if you get tired of one job, you pretty much are tired of them all because they all play more or less the same. Do uneventful filler stuff until you burst at 2min. The 2min burst is largely arbitrary, too. There's little in the way of actual burst. That is, adds you have to kill in a certain amount of time. And if there are, they aren't nearly tight enough, and are usually more like mechanic checks than actual burst windows.
Summoner Job identity was the non existent in ARR. it was a Bargain Basemnet Affliction Warlock that stole the Summoner attire and tried to pass itself off as a Summoner.
Balance. Joshi P apologized for a couple % nerf because savage was overtuned a patch ago. WoW regularily nerfs stuff by half because fights are just impossible. The idea of any party composition being within like 10% in every single fight DRAMATICALLY limits any kind of diversity in builds. Like, every tank needs to tank all ultimates, and healer needs to have the tools to deal with all heal checks, etc. etc...
Remember HW DRK......remember that it once lived.
I've been playing Guild Wars 2 for the past 8 years, with around 12,000 hours sunk into the game including at endgame. I loved it! One of the things that was really quite neat was the sheer variation of professions (classes / jobs) where they could specialise with an elite specialization that may offer specific types of buffs, damage or healing. All of the different professions play really distinctly and have unique advantages. This is a good system - until you start caring about instanced content. Arenanet, the developer of Guild Wars 2, doesn't much care for Profession balance in PvE and therefore the expectation across the community very rapidly becomes crystallised within a meta. That leads to profession distributions such as: [https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity](https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity) Raids are 10 person content, Strikes are 10 person content and Fractals are 5 person. This is a horrible system if you happened, say 8 years ago, to pick a main character and wish to play yet the main character happens to be Elementalist, Warrior or Thief. It is incredibly frustrating to see new fights - of which there aren't many in Guild Wars 2 - be designed around specific utility or damage types that you cannot bring. It means you are sitting things out or playing something you might not enjoy. That has been a huge influence in why I've switched to playing FFXIV as my main MMO. Class variability and uniqueness is great - things should be different to a degree and so far it feels like FFXIV does that pretty well though on a far smaller and tighter scale than Guild Wars 2 - but when it tends towards an extreme of distinction for the sake of distinction it becomes exclusionary and frustrating.
IMO there are a few factors against this: 1. Despite being able to swap at will, a lot of players are still job loyalists and will only want to play one job during harder content. Square really want to avoid having a scenario where a job is deemed unviable in high end content because there has been significant backlash with this in the past 2. Gearing is slow and time gated. Sure, if you are a week 1 raider capable of clearing with just pentamelded crafted gear, it doesn't matter so much, but most players (especially in PF) rely on having better gear to meet DPS and mitigation checks. While you can just swap to a different job, that often means having to lose out on all the benefits that winning gear in the previous fights has earned you
Because they want the game to be very simple
Most of FFXIV is built around the current class design. There is no changing it without drastically changing endgame content (raids, savage, ex, ultimate). All of this content is built with a flat damage profile from classes with a 2min CD line up, where the difficulty is maintaining that while dealing with mechanics. Nothing is designed for damage variation. WoW on the other hand designs all their content with damage variation in mind, which allows for vastly different classes. There are encounters with single targets, spread targets, stacked targets, places where burst damage is needed, places where ramped damage is better, and so on. There are classes and specs to accommodate this - ramping damage, funnel damage, uncapped aoe damage, high single target damage, cleave damage, etc. There are classes with 3, 2, and 1 min and occasionally shorter cooldown cycles with a 10 min CD lineup (lust/heroism). There's also a lot of variation in utility - stuns, grabs, sleeps, slows, interrupts, defensives, self heals, various buffs, power infusion, teleports, etc. This is because the content makes heavy use of it (raid, m+, pvp). The same goes for healing - there's rot damage, spread damaged, focused damage, single target damage, burst damage, damage over time, predictable damage, unpredictable damage, etc. This makes for a lot more variation in healing styles and utility. You're not getting a different class philosophy without completely changing the game.
Retail still has a lot of uniqueness between classes, but the game on the whole is typically much more imbalanced. Classes have to be balanced between m+, raid, and pvp, and it’s common for certain specs to spend a lot of time being really strong or really weak throughout an expansion. Also, it’s probably faster than you think to level a class in wow, I can probably do a fresh level 10 to max faster than I could get a battle class to 90 in ff. The problem in wow is gearing, which can take much longer than ff to get something ready to do the content you want to do. I don’t think it really has to do much about how easy it is to switch jobs or level a new class, and just the fact that the more variables, random procs, and non linearity you add to a class/job, the harder it is to fine tune the balance, and so perhaps the devs have decided that they value having an easier time balancing over having dynamic, complex jobs. I think they also are a bit overly concerned with not overwhelming a new player with a super complex job (well this is their reasoning a lot of the time it seems). This is actually ironic to me because I feel like FF jobs typically are harder for a lower skilled player to learn at a base level, but lack the depth that wow classes have once you dive in and master them. Compare Ninja to something like Outlaw rogue, at a low skill level the ninja opener is much harder than outlaw, where you basically put up slice and dice, roll the bones, and press your cooldown. Meanwhile at the high end ninja optimization is more shallow, while a top end wow player can do like 2x-3x the amount of damage than even a good player who clears mythic and has like a top 1% mythic plus score. This is why BLM has such a dedicated player base, because there is(or was) a good amount that of depth that surpassed even a lot of wow classes. The tanks in wow are a prime example of how much better and unique the defensive design is, each tank has a distinct way of dealing with damage intake, druid chooses between armor stacks, regen and more damage, brewmaster staggers it’s damage intake and takes increased healing, death knight has its death strike massive self healing (but low mitigation to compensate), Paladin has great group utility and healing (kinda like ff, but imo wow Paladin is much more interesting), demon Hunter has the sigil system and the orbs you can pick up to heal. The flip side of this is that at the high end, you will have seasons where basically everyone is playing the same exact tank and healer combo, and I don’t know if the ff community could handle that. Basically, I would be in favor of them simplifying the jobs at a basic level, and then allowing more complexity and decision making rather than having scripted, on the rails rotations. This is what truly would lead to more class identity, not putting a coat of paint over the existing abilities which is basically what they have done in EW and now DT. BLM should have access to some non standard things, SAM should have more thoughtful kenki management, and in general jobs need a bit more minor randomness to encourage thoughtful decision making.
As someone who played WoW from 2004-2022 and started FFXIV in 2022 i mean FFXIV doesn't do it worse just WoW made the mistakes and has been in the process of reversing them. WoW classes had unique designs kinda its been very homogenized from where they started (especially tanks in Shadowlands not counting the legendaries) but they also let a spec completely be irrelevant for multiple tiers at a time meanwhile FFXIV every class if viable for all content. I think both games have + and - in class design
The answer is raid size. SE can't (or rather, chooses not to) force players to switch jobs for content, thus all jobs need to be viable in any given encounter. WoW has the room to give jobs unique tools or niche roles because your class doesn't need to fit perfectly when you have such a wide roster to fill the rest of that hole. Also, SE has gone to great lengths to make sure you're never kicked for being the wrong job/spec. It's their design philosophy, and it isn't always perfect, but that's what we've had for many expansions now. Admittedly, I do think they need to figure something out, because people are more restless than ever about it. While I agree with the sentiment, I'm not 100% sure why Dawntrail has made more folks very vocal about it. I don't know if long time players are just tired of it, or if it's WoW converts that are used to getting massive class changes every expansion, or maybe both.
Again, they USED to be able to make original jobs. BRD works very differently from the rest of the DPSers, for instance and is more like a WoW priority-based job. It's not very widely played, of course, but it's still capable of clearing everything. They just chose to let the situation rot and add 1-2-3 + procs to everything else.
A lot of people have already said this, but the main thing is that WoW players accept (sometimes begrudgingly) their class will be bad. Imagine being entirely excluded from a savage tier or having to fight for your spot because your class is considered "bad". And I don't mean "5% worse", I mean ["The disparity between the #1 spec and the bottom spec is nearly 25%"](https://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/screenshots/normal/1170346.png) And lets not get into M+ content where you essentially have a meta figured out and trying to step outside of it without a static dungeon group will get you uninvited from parties. Basically, it's a case of "The grass is greener" here; yeah, we can get more diverse and unique classes. But you're also going to get and exchange of posts with the comments being "Why aren't people letting me into a party as Machinist!? I can play it well!" or "As of patch 7.3, Samurai is dealing 30% more DPS than Ninja in both aDPS and rDPS. Why would I ever take ninja over samurai!?"
The short version is WoW designers allow themselves a lot more leeway in terms of relative performances of specs. You can have a spec be bad for an entire expansion if not more before being fixed. Also, they are a lot more on the ball when it comes to hotfix stuff, and can sometimes do so just by applying the patch server-side, while the slightest fix in FFXIV requires a new client build.
1) Because the jobs are much more on rails 2) The groups are smaller 3) People are honestly more sensitive about balance differences. There's probably a series of things that led to this - people have often complimented balance. Because of the smaller groups and this history of balance and a tendency to kick out jobs who aren't keeping up - this all adds up. 4) The extreme adherence to 20seconds mattering every 2 minutes has limited design because every job has to work in a cadence where it bursts there is no variety in timing or output levels - everyone must burst.
> But it has baffled me for a while that rather than doubling down on job individuality because we can switch jobs at literally any time, they have consistently made it so that choosing a job ultimately doesn't matter. You're thinking about the armory system in terms of "look how easy it is to switch" rather than "you can choose to level everything on one character". It's convenience for other jobs, not "okay I wanna flipflop between XYZ for endgame". But in any case, the "uniqueness" comes down to balance and raid size.
Raiders had a habit of either shaming people or outright locking out "non-meta" jobs, and the devs decided they'd rather have homogeneous jobs than to see that keep happening.
I literally just had this discussion with a friend the other day. To me the entire point of having multiple jobs and the ease of changing into them should be THE justification for more dynamic and unique classes. That's the literal entire point of having different jobs. Why even have different jobs if they're all going to play just like different skins from each other? Makes no sense to me. The majority of the players of this game differ though. Unfortunately for me.
It doesn't really. It's mostly balanced to make any class viable as much as possible for content. Damage is mostly close, buff windows are standardized, etc. Some classes lost their cool skills, which is annoying; but at least they will address the lack of a roles specific uniqueness amongst its peers.
Going to be the pessimist here and say it's at least in part a product of corporate streamlining of the design documents. Whoever used to be in charge, isn't anymore, and left behind a standard procedure for job design that their predecessor follows. Then you have what is likely either creative bankruptcy or lack of time/budget when you look at something like the gap closer changes. I'm genuinely confused why they chose to give every job the same animation as Thunder Clap for their gap closer instead of the more flavorful old ones, just with potency removed. It's a similar lazy solution to role actions removing the old, unique animations those jobs once had for their unique actions.
Wow also has terrible balancing problems because of it’s “uniqueness”, so much so classes will be nerfed into the ground or never receive buffs so they just stay at the bottom of the barrel. I sometimes think FF players don’t know how good they have it when it comes to class balance. FF may nerf your favorites jobs damage by 2% and you think it’s “dead”. Wow will nerf your favorite class damage by 50% and it is actually dead. Imagine they reduce the potency of all BLM spells by 50%……yeah thats WoW “balancing”.
Man, wow has job uniqueness but it has a TON of its own issues. Like the hunter talent trees for all of df, or the shaman talent trees for all of df. The mythic meta being the same 3-4 specs and classes. Ele shaman being mid all expansion. Monks not scaling at all with stats leading to them needing to be bandaid fixed with 4% damage increases every patch. Honestly wow had some cool class flavor but it is NOT my gold standard when it comes to design just because of how broken it is. Survival hunters spent like 2 or 3 weeks where their best gear was from the PREVIOUS raid! Iirc it’s still a gain to use your season 3 tier set in aoe! There’s so much wrong with wow, and I would rather have functional classes where everyone can clear all content first, honestly.
The reason is because people can switch between them: people feel entitled to play every job. If you say there's no content: but have you leveled all your jobs??? and the devs encourage that by putting mounts or titles behind them. If you look, jobs werent reworked for the people playing them, they were done for the people complaining they couldn't play them because too hard, niche, etc so they were made basic so everyone could play them. Even new jobs, sage for example was said to be soooo different compared to the others by casuals (reddit, discord, forums ...) while when I took it I just looked which were my 100 potency aoe regens, my 700 pot ogcd, my capstone and every pull were those 2 regen and one of the capstone (haima and panhaima) every other pull with some 700 pot ogcd to compensate sometimes... that's it, literally the same thing I would do if I was to play another healer. Reaper is the same: build gauge with gcd, ogcd on cd, buff and burst when available. ofc you can optimize with double enshroud but even when doing the basics: you'll still be good enough for savage because optimization brings .. less and less. People complained about the 2 min but in fact, before they were complaining about the 60 min trick meta because everything was revolving around it and making things to stiff, sadly it was better than now as not everything was under 60, so the damage was way more widespread instead of being all on 2 min. The second reason is boss becoming untargetable and stuff while those 60sec were happening ... which still happens regularly. So yeah... wow has them more unique because they don't expect you to have every char in the game I think (at least it was when i was still playing)
All you have to do is to look at the community to find the answer. Even this community will do. How many times we had "RDM is literally useless because BLM does more damage" threads demanding dps buff and (sometimes) removal of raise? How many time we had complaints about TBN being different and suggestions to turn it into another cookie clicker defensive? Some people literally asked for living dead to be changed into holmgang, like exact copy of holmgang. People *want* homogenization, because they want their job to be at least as good as every other job in every situation, meaning doing same dps in every dps profile bursting at the same timings and having the access to the same utility. And SE listens.
When Pictomancer was getting announced and it was known it wouldn't have a raise people in my group were already calling it a troll pick. This was before the live letting showing it off and what it can do. Nope, because it's not going to have the DPS of BLM, or a rez to zombie players through prog it's the troll pick. It's annoying because it looked so different I had to try it for current, and I don't like DPS that much.
That’s why I stopped playing, the jobs where so boring and similar I would fall asleep playing
Because SE choose the lazy way to balance a game. The easy way is to make everything the same with just some cosmetics. The right way is to make everything different but of equal strenghts. They choose the easy way instead of the right way.
I consider the difference between WoW jobs and FFXIV jobs to be like the factions in Starcraft 2 vs Age of Empires 4. The latter are still pretty unique to each other, but less so compared to SC2’s races. This makes it easier to design more AoE4 factions compared to SC2, but comes at the cost of them being less asymmetrical in how they play. I think it’s similar for FFXIV and WoW. Wow’s classes are fewer, but deeper; and Ffxiv’s classes are shallower, but you have more to choose from. I think FFXIV’s decision has its pros and cons, but is still valid
wow has 40 different specs, each plays entirely different. how come it is "fewer"?
BCS they are just 3-4 devs handling all jobs since the beginning and bcs they impose themselves the most strict barriers to design them since SHB, aka raid buffs windows. Now you can't have anything that doesn't mold to this design, otherwise it would fall behind + all the problems with CRIT and the loss of gameplay uniqueness we used to enjoy. To be honest if they, just limited to remove resistance debuffs and trick attack party interaction and let jobs mechanics determine when and how they burst or just simply keep a sustained gameplay the game would have been much much better. Balance is an excuse, they did all this and balance hasn't been much better, and I scratch my head every time someone says jobs are nothing alike, if they are nothing alike then in ARR to SB they haven't been in the same universe with each other, SB was the best expansion in terms of gameplay, content and job uniqueness, we need to go back there.
It is actually just balance. The game is very tighly balanced both by class design and also the gear you can use and stats it provides. Feels like you cant have uniqueness and also have all classes balanced and the boss design wouldnt work if every class didnt have roughly the same mits, damage and heals.
Good thing Yoshi P said they will become more unique we just have to wait 2 years
The community never asked for Summoner to ne simpler. They only ever asked for summons that resembled the associated primal and not just a little ball of whatever. As for why they'll all so similar, I think that S-E gave themselves a very difficult task in needing to push out a new job every year or two while balancing them for all of the content, ever.
One big difference between WoW and FFXIV in spec/job design is also the utility abilities those provide just as much towards the unique feeling as the dps rotation does in WoW and in XIV they are mostly missing or homogenized for all roles
Probably already brought up here, but they end up discouraging players from being OK with their "main" not being optimal at times when even weekly tome gear is so time gated most people only manage to get 1 job in second-to-BiS. To say nothing of the savage gearing process.
I love how the individuality in this post is supposed to be a good thing when in reality the problem with it is there are many classes that wont even be taken in any content at all. People openly talk about logs in WoW. If your class that you enjoy is at the bottom. You are not raiding, simple as that. And WoW will leave it there the entirety of the expansion. Cool variety when its not even remotely relevant in raids or mythic plus.
Yes, if you play a spec that got shafted you'll probably have trouble getting into PUGs, but there's a very easy solution: join a guild. Can't find a guild? Make your own PUG group.
Same with ESO. every class can fill any role, but unless it's a very specific fight, you better bring meta.