Info from EU Fanfest (Frankfurt 2017)

[Damane]

I dunno about SAM having a unique identity. It does combos with 3 basic moves and the output changes depending on the order of the combo? Sounds exactly like a repurposed Ten-Chi-Jin from Ninja. And then a power-up ability that unlocks moves based on how powered up you are? Sounds exactly like the Monk chakra system. I wouldn't be surprised if SAM is a straight mashup of the two jobs with one or two unique OGCDs. After all, it's not like the HW jobs did anything different besides their specific one or two "job identity moves". MCH is the same template as bard just with ammo and turret instead of songs. DRK and AST play very closely to the template of WAR/PLD and WHM/SCH as well. Yeah they have some unique stuff but "new jobs" since HW have been very obviously just stealing the template from another job and tweaking certain abilities to do something slightly different. If SAM isn't a straight mashup of NIN/MNK I will be fairly surprised.

The problem and the reason they have to do this is their idea of balance is to keep everything as homogenous as possible so "everyone can enjoy the game the same no matter what job they're on!" The restrictions on what they allow themselves to do with the classes are just too great to overcome currently. Maybe that will change with 4.0 but I highly doubt it; SE hasn't proven itself capable of radically different thought when it comes to the basic systems of the game, no matter how many people complain about the lack of actual balance and the lack of an interesting battle system.

They are capable they just dont want to if you think about the changes from 1.0 to 2.0. There is no intention to drasticly change the battle system as stated multiple times by the devs.

[Taint]

The problem and the reason they have to do this is their idea of balance is to keep everything as homogenous as possible so "everyone can enjoy the game the same no matter what job they're on!" .

This is exactly why we have such bland jobs. They want every tank to be able to tank every fight. This is why people just go with DRK/WAR. Since they can both tank everything, you go with the combo that offers the most to the group. Same with every other role. The current meta (DRK,WAR,SCH,AST,DRG,NIN,BRD,MCH) is all about the group offering than anything else.

I bet they really dilute the DPS jobs to the point that literally any 4 jobs can beat anything and then balance them to near identical DPS.

[Destinye]

From the looks of it, Sam seriously looks and sounds like its going to have its own identity.

Kinda how MCH sounded.

[Lucavi]

I never had any real hopes for MCH, but that's merely becuase I was never personally interested in it. Biases gonna bias, I guess.

[Spider-Dan]

I wouldn't be surprised if SAM is a straight mashup of the two jobs with one or two unique OGCDs.

That's exactly what they did with AST. Shamelessly, even.

The problem and the reason they have to do this is their idea of balance is to keep everything as homogenous as possible so "everyone can enjoy the game the same no matter what job they're on!" The restrictions on what they allow themselves to do with the classes are just too great to overcome currently. Maybe that will change with 4.0 but I highly doubt it; SE hasn't proven itself capable of radically different thought when it comes to the basic systems of the game, no matter how many people complain about the lack of actual balance and the lack of an interesting battle system.

this

[Elcura]

What is this, round 4364?

Yes, yes, balance is bad. No balance is bad. What to do? And thinking they can't do it is hilarious, it's just that they know better and actually know what they want for the game. The community for this game is so ridiculously impossible to please.

[Lokus]

The game's flow is not going to change much at all especially as they add more and more jobs that will need to be viable no matter the content. They should just have us play a specific role and we spec into a job based on what content we're doing; they wouldn't have to worry about extreme balance at that point. It'd be akin to 1.0 where a dps player basically had to be proficient in all dps jobs and they'd change depending on what they were doing. Obviously, that's not really casual playstyle friendly with how the game is set up currently with regard to leveling/gear so will never happen.

[Fiye]

The community for this game is so ridiculously impossible to please.

<Insert Yoshida reaction to Alexander is too easy question>

[Lucavi]

I'm all for having having 60/40 balance until you're running into shit like 2.0 War that could barely tank anything in Coil without sphincter clenches from the healer. As long as every job can do their job and do it well, I'm satisfied. If we're determining "balanced jobs" by 3% differences in parsed damage at end-game, I think that can be safely ignored. Balance should be about ensuring that every Job can perform their job up to snuff, without having every single thing they can provide performed better by other jobs.

You know, like Pld right now. Buff em.

[Alisha]

isnt the change of cross clasding system allready a buff to pld dps? I mean unless they exclude all tanks from accessing dps abilitys


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it wouldn't surprise me if part of cutting of skills involved the removal of bfb ir and rs as cross class abilities.

[Alisha]

Really don't want to see War nerfs. I'd rather see jobs buffed than nerfed unless a nerf happens because of an outright broken ability. Warrior has beastly abilities and a truckload of variety (especially for a tank class), but nothing breaks the game wide open. Pld needs more AOE damage, less resource starvation, more active damage through combos and abilities, a bettter unique asset (lowering an attribute stat is alright, but we can do better in 2017) and far less ability bloat. A lot of their defensive abilities could either be rolled into passives, combined into single abilities, or could be worked into buffs on the back end of combos or instant attacks. I agree with most of what was said above about Drk changes.

I really want to see more passives, even if they are passives we have to "choose" or "spec into". So many abilities across the board could simply be passives and allow for more useful or at least, more focused skills to be introduced. The foundation is decent, but SE needs to take the gloves off, shed the last of the XI-UI restrictions and go whole hog on true Job identity. From the looks of it, Sam seriously looks and sounds like its going to have its own identity.

in what fucking world do warriors live in that they think 100% uptime sacred soil isn't OP? really path an eye additional effects are what makes war overpowered. i'd like to see war given more reasons
to use inner beast. attach a tp cost on top of the current stack cost to all war attacks that cost stacks. change fell cleave to a dot so it's less spammable. make inner beast ogcd.

[Rionel]

I swear, any time I come into these new info threads it's always a very exhausting kind of cynical discourse where pretty much the -SAME- people really want to just do anything to suck out any potential enjoyment the game might have.



I'm sure it's all on deaf ears, but perhaps that's just what makes it all the more tiring.

[Lucavi]

in what fucking world do warriors live in that they think 100% uptime sacred soil isn't OP? really path an eye additional effects are what makes war overpowered. i'd like to see war given more reasons
to use inner beast. attach a tp cost on top of the current stack cost to all war attacks that cost stacks. change fell cleave to a dot so it's less spammable. make inner beast ogcd.

In what world did I say that anything wasn't OP? I said War has nothing that breaks the game wide open. They do not.

The game is not functionally busted from anything War offers. Not sure what the issue is, here.

[Alisha]

when jobs basically have guaranteed party slots that is breaking the game wide open.

[Skai]

Out of 3 jobs in a party composition where you need two yeah sure.

[Obsidian]

It doesn't break the game in the sense that WAR makes everything easy mode, but it's an inarguably bad design and needs to be remedied.

[Lucavi]

It doesn't break the game in the sense that WAR makes everything easy mode, but it's an inarguably bad design and needs to be remedied.

This I'll agree with. The minute they made warrior able to actually tank shit without getting gibbed by every damage spike ability (still have PTSD from rotoswipe) is the day they could have realistically cut out War's eye/path buffs. I'd still rather see jobs buffed on the whole, though, than nerfing War and leaving Pld/Drk where it is.

We'll see what happens.

[Silenka]

This is the issue with the battle system and the kind of monotone "balance" the dev team is looking for. The minute one job is preferred over the others or one job is left out for not being as good as others, people gotta bitch about it. It was a huge issue in XI, and this still happens in XIV, even with the monotone cut & paste that the XIV jobs were created to be to avoid being XI mk.II. Yet how can we have more individualistic, differentiated jobs without having issues where some jobs are going to be more or less preferred than others?

I'm not sure there can ever be a battle system for XIV where every job is preferred equally for most content and fulfills the needs of this community. I dunno about you guys, but personally, I'm willing to let a couple jobs be relatively shit or OP if it means that the battle system is overall more fun and engaging. It's too bad that in XI it happened to be my favorite job that was shit for most things (SMN), but oh well, you know? Seeing the alternative - the monotone, the lack of itemization, and still having some balance problems despite taking most of the color out of the battle system - makes me realize that it wasn't so bad in XI. To me, it was more fun that jobs had niches. It gave having different jobs actual purpose, unlike how now the job system is broken up by role only and who cares which one you actually pick in that role because they all do mostly the same thing. And there is a downside to requiring a specific job for specific content, because in XI if you couldn't find someone with that job you were fucked, but that's largely a non-issue in XIV with the introduction of Duty Finder and cross-world PF.

Now, if Yoshi-P and the crew can figure out how to make XIV's battle system a little more fun and engaging AND achieve perfect balance where every job is useful for everything, that would sure be something. I know it's their goal, but I also think it's almost impossible, if not actually impossible, to achieve. Someone's always going to get the short straw, whether it be for a crucial ability or that little bit of difference in dps/mitigation. But as soon as people start complaining about it, the dev team drives for more monotony and more "balance", and so we keep receding from what most of us seem to actually want.

[Obsidian]

This is the issue with the battle system and the kind of monotone "balance" the dev team is looking for. The minute one job is preferred over the others or one job is left out for not being as good as others, people gotta bitch about it. It was a huge issue in XI, and this still happens in XIV, even with the monotone cut & paste that the XIV jobs were created to be to avoid being XI mk.II. Yet how can we have more individualistic, differentiated jobs without having issues where some jobs are going to be more or less preferred than others?

I'm not sure there can ever be a battle system for XIV where every job is preferred equally for most content and fulfills the needs of this community. I dunno about you guys, but personally, I'm willing to let a couple jobs be relatively shit or OP if it means that the battle system is overall more fun and engaging. It's too bad that in XI it happened to be my favorite job that was shit for most things (SMN), but oh well, you know? Seeing the alternative - the monotone, the lack of itemization, and still having some balance problems despite taking most of the color out of the battle system - makes me realize that it wasn't so bad in XI. To me, it was more fun that jobs had niches. It gave having different jobs actual purpose, unlike how now the job system is broken up by role only and who cares which one you actually pick in that role because they all do mostly the same thing. And there is a downside to requiring a specific job for specific content, because in XI if you couldn't find someone with that job you were fucked, but that's largely a non-issue in XIV with the introduction of Duty Finder and cross-world PF.

Now, if Yoshi-P and the crew can figure out how to make XIV's battle system a little more fun and engaging AND achieve perfect balance where every job is useful for everything, that would sure be something. I know it's their goal, but I also think it's almost impossible, if not actually impossible, to achieve. Someone's always going to get the short straw, whether it be for a crucial ability or that little bit of difference in dps/mitigation. But as soon as people start complaining about it, the dev team drives for more monotony and more "balance", and so we keep receding from what most of us seem to actually want.

It has very little to do with one being preferred and a lot more with one being very clearly and objectively better than the other two.

The game is very clearly aiming at the Smash Bros Fox/Falco/Wolf class design where they all do the same thing with different flair. In that regard, they are objectively failing where tank balance is concerned, because all three tanks do the same thing but WAR just does it better than the other two. That's not "wah this combat system sucks," it's "they've completely failed to fulfil their own design philosophy."

XIV is a game where your job is intended to do little more than determine what you look like while you fulfil your role in a party. The WAR > PLD/DRK issue has nothing to do with the battle system and everything to do with the implementation of those three jobs specifically.

[Silenka]

It has very little to do with one being preferred and a lot more with one being very clearly and objectively better than the other two.

The game is very clearly aiming at the Smash Bros Fox/Falco/Wolf class design where they all do the same thing with different flair. In that regard, they are objectively failing where tank balance is concerned, because all three tanks do the same thing but WAR just does it better than the other two. That's not "wah this combat system sucks," it's "they've completely failed to fulfil their own design philosophy."

XIV is a game where your job is intended to do little more than determine what you look like while you fulfil your role in a party. The WAR > PLD/DRK issue has nothing to do with the battle system and everything to do with the implementation of those three jobs specifically.

To address your first point, yes, of course. A job that is objectively better than others will be (and is) preferred by players. That's part of the point I was making. It's going to be almost impossible to have complete balance where no job is preferred over another in the same role, unless the devs actually just give every job in a role the exact same abilities with different names.

As for my overall point (I think you think I'm arguing tanks specifically but I'm not), the discussion of battle changes on this forum has been a big theme, with most people voicing a preference for a battle system that is less monotone and more full of individual choice such as skill trees and additional stat choices. If the battle system were indeed to be changed to the way most of us seem to want, jobs that are objectively better/preferred by the community would absolutely exist, even worse than they are now. Yet, people can't even stop complaining about how WAR and SCH are OP compared to other jobs. There's no way a battle system more complex than the one XIV has right now could be introduced without creating even more of these issues.

Sorry for the confusion. I recognize that WAR has some OP parts and balance is shitty. I was deviating from that specific conversation to make the more broad point above, based on the observation that even these (relatively small) preferences in job choice due to imbalance causes a lot of bitching.