Final Fantasy XIV

Really poor decision to not include a new tank or healer. Queue times for the new jobs are going to be atrocious.

I hadn't considered that aspect. However, I have no particular interest in being a Samurai or Red Mage right away, so maybe it won't affect me too much :P

Their reasoning though, I felt, was rather sensible.

According to them, the majority of their data showed that introducing DRK and AST didn't create a new influx of tanks and healers like they wanted, but just shifted pre-existing tanks and heals to scatter about to them.

It's an ever recurring issue, and one that Wo W's had a lot, you need to incentivize non-DPS roles really hard to get normally DPS players to bother wanting to try something other than that.

Also, unless Stormblood brings in a huge flood of new people,I don't think the DPS queues will be as bad as you think they'll be, they'll just be scattered out between RDM and SAM, a lot like what I mentioned about with DRK and AST, tanks and healers may switch off, but it won't cause a big enough hit to be noticeable, especially not with the new jobs starting at 50 and having less grinding to do, and people still queuing for levelling roulette.

Also, responding to another post on last page. No new race is confirmed, and there will be no new jobs until 5.0, so no Blue Mage and Dancer this time around unless they decide to go back on their word and introduce a job in the middle of the content cycle

edited 18th Feb '17 4:14:45 AM by NaraNumas

That makes sense. I do main DRK now, but it used to be WAR, so yeah, I just switched.

I don't know why people are so reluctant to play tanks and healers. I've mained a tank since I started playing, it's really not that hard. Healing roles I haven't dabbled in so much (my fourth character is a WHM, and my 3rd has AST as a secondary class), but even that wasn't as hard as I expected.

Anyway, Stormblood trailer because it hasn't been posted here yet.

I also think it was a poor decision because it sends a message to the player base: we don't care about giving Tanks and Healers new game play options. So if they get bored that's on them.

DPS players get two new flashy jobs to play and the trailers since Heavensward have all featured poster boy in DPS jobs. I know it's an uphill battle getting players out of DPS in general, but they're really not incentivizing the other roles as they could in any form.

The issue is you can't really force people to heal or tank if they really don't want to do it. Just like how they can put a ton of incentives in PVP and some people will still refuse to play that game mode. Regardless, the battle system is being reworked, so tanks and healers may have a refreshing change of pace and it could cause some people to give the jobs a try again.

man who cares

WE GOIN TO DOMA, BOIS

There are incentives to play PVP? :P Nothing's convinced me so far. That said, the few pieces of the latest PVP gear I've seen have me intrigued, because they don't look fucking ridiculous.

EDIT- Looked them up, they just don't look as ridiculous. Still too OTT for my taste.

edited 18th Feb '17 9:00:59 AM by artfulscruff

They been adding mounts and glamours to PVP. The Garro event just added more and it's a publicity stunt.

Ah, that's the gear I'd been seeing around. The healer gear specifically. The rest, nope, still don't like it :P

I got my horse from winning 30 Feast games and it's a lot of gold armor. And the horses fly so that's cool too. Also, the Garro gear will be added to the Gold Saucer rewards list, but they cannot be dyed.

Honestly, as unhappy as I am about Yoshida's adamant-hard boner for DPS jobs, I can't say I particularly want to see any more healer or tank jobs added until they figure out how to balance the ones that are already in the game, WITHOUT just throwing up their hands and making them all carbon copies of one another or having One Tank/Healer To Rule Them All and the rest are just "what you take if you can't get the GOOD one"

edited 18th Feb '17 1:27:36 PM by Reflextion

The amount of salt being thrown around over Samurai not being a tank (or a healer as some people were hoping for) is enough to make one's blood pressure go up. Making a new job takes a lot of time and planning. They wouldn't be able to do that for a new healer and tank AND do the job/battle rebalance at the same time on top of the new DPS jobs. It's a nightmare.

Honestly I think they've just shot themselves in the foot with the way they strictly balance jobs. Samurai basically sounds like Ninja take 2 as is, Machinists are Bards with guns and pets that do the exact same thing as Bard songs, Dark Knight is a more complex Paladin, etc.

It's balanced, but it's also mad boring. I guess I'm glad they didn't just phone in a new Tank or Healer the way they did Dark Knight, but it's still very frustrating that I'm going to have to wait a year or two to try something new in the two roles I enjoy most.

It's a necessary evil I think. Even if every job was radically different, you'd run the risk of certain jobs being shunned in raids or other content by the community. Heck, this still happens to some degree today; people consider White Mage and Paladin as low tier for raid content, even though those two jobs can perform just fine. Regardless, wasn't the battle system revamp going to give each job a bit more uniqueness?

edited 18th Feb '17 1:53:32 PM by Steven

Don't forget Astro is exactly the same as a White Mage with a few minor cooldown changes, all their basic spells are the same just different names.

There are plenty of ways to make new healers and tanks, they just take a little effort into mechanics and the fact that not every class needs a strong heal / weak heal with the exact same cast time and such. Having a weakness and making the strengths excel make for unique classes, the only real priority is balancing throughput.

edited 18th Feb '17 1:54:20 PM by Memers

Ok, then what would a new healer or tank job bring? What could this new job do that the others can't do? Could it compliment other healers or tanks? Are their abilities just going to be copypastas of other jobs? That's the million gil question.

Its not the 'bring' that is important its how they play.

We'll see if they can pull it off. They've brought it up numerous times but we still know nothing about it and probably won't until late March or April at the earliest.

As someone who doesn't get deep into which job is better and stuff like that, I'm not bothered by them rehashing jobs, since I just stick with one I like, from a semi-RP point of view, and I kinda lost my train of thought again here.

But yeah, what Memers said. You can easily slot in requirements like specific debuffs or party buffs.

The important part is how those classes feel and what enjoyment the player gets out of playing them. It's obviously simplifying the process to assume balancing all that is easy, but when PVP is practically a seperate game with entirely separate commands, it can't be that difficult relatively.

I also think that, to a degree, the playerbase needs to be ignored with regards to balance, sometimes. The more you listen to your players' demands, the more same-y everything is, and the less things have time to grow and become their own thing. Ninjas in XI were actually premier tanks entirely by mistake due to their Utsusemi ability, just as an example. But they're so dedicated to ensuring everything is balanced and viable that theirs no space for identity any more.

edited 18th Feb '17 2:02:57 PM by Hashil

I'm looking at this from a broader perspective. Making a job feel good during play is obviously a goal to meet, but it shouldn't stop there when it comes to making new jobs. Memers, you mentioned jobs with weaknesses and strengths to make up for the weaknesses. Astrologian in the early days was supposed to be that (cards to buff the party while not having strong healing compared to the other healers), but casual and hardcore raiders alike hated AST and didn't want them in their parties purely because the card buffs weren't worth it when their healer's healing is too weak. Stuff like that is something the devs want to avoid, which is why I made my last post.

Does anyone else find it a little amusing that its only now that our DPS icons which where represented by swords finally have sword wielding classes.

I've done emergency tanking before as a ninja, and certainly made it through chunks of lower-level content without a tank.

edited 18th Feb '17 2:11:27 PM by artfulscruff

Stuff out in the world obviously you can solo fine.

I was referring to bonafide group content in XI. Ninjas had an ability that let them dodge a single attack, and coupled with their decent DPS they could tank in a very unorthodox way. If XIV followed suit, you could use a Ninja to kite people and legitimately tank dungeons.

Incidentally, Samurai were intended to be tanks in that same game but were mostly better at DPS anyway, so that's what they did, but jobs weren't so strict in how they were designed or implemented for better (Ninja tanks, Samurai DPS, Blue Mages, Dancers, and a few other jobs in general) or worse (Puppetmasters, Dark Knights).