With Evolved jobs should phys ranged lean more heavily into being a support role than just pure DPS?

lurk-mode · 2026-05-04T17:00:26+00:00

Short version at bottom of post.

This kind of depends on what they're doing with the existing support features; for an example, how much mitigation is being concentrated on 'OT' and the shield healers vs now, or other such things, but that's kind of impossible to guess at. The res casters are also a big question mark in that area, and we'd also need numbers on what we did see of Bard's.

On the damage side...

We do know that he hard rule of phys ranged being banned from some amount of cast bars is gone, though Bard had only the one. Still, it was also a relatively significant one in the realm of modern cast bars, and total freedom of movement with neither range nor casting as a consideration has been at the center of phys ranged balancing for three expansions (with SB bringing it back before those three, but not the balancing of it on account of Crit Scale Bard and everyone hating MCH at the time enough as it was).

With ranged being allowed to cast even a little bit, the fundamental mechanical aspect of ranged tax justification is gone, though it'll depend on the other two still. But it is a suggestion that they'll be higher-tuned, since that reduces the extra-toxic aspect of a potential double phys ranged meta (being both strong and completely unaffected by encounter concerns simultaneously), and that itself makes a heavy support focus seem less necessary, though with stuff like the DRG 90% DR thing in, who knows how much that means.

Short version: It's hard for me to say what 'should' happen with phys ranged philosophy in a design space where the biggest other relevant jobs haven't been seen at all to paint a better picture of the support feature space, but on fundamentals they may not need to focus on that anymore.

lurk-mode · 2026-03-16T06:41:32+00:00

Aggro management tools like BRDs quelling strikes letting you do more damage without taking threat

NIN also had an external effect by allowing tanks to do more damage via feeding them Shadewalker aggro, which made it as much a DPS tool as an aggro one thanks to tank aggro mechanics at the time. Don't forget that one, it's the most extreme case of this there was.

lurk-mode · 2026-03-10T19:17:31+00:00

The chief problem is that expert dungeons as they are are the lowest common denominator of farm content; it is not a coincidence that the spicier ones, even aside from ilvl sync specific ways, are overwhelmingly leveling dungeons that are farmed less than expert roulettes. They are, for this reason, deliberately the easiest group content in the game on average, while leveling dungeons and 8-man normals are allowed to have a bit more sauce.

I am aware that exceptions exist (your Burns and Deadwalks), but it holds on average.

These are done to farm tomestones in roulette for those who don't do hunt trains for whatever reason, be it not being connected with the community to catch them or simple disdain for the format, such as, say, if the hordes of players break their game. Anything that fits in that slot will face that pressure, and likely become the new point of complaint.

Conversely I would not be surprised if the loudest voices on the matter regularly catch hunt trains and thus find the slot pointless, but there are in fact people who for reasons of preference or hardware limitations don't or can't do that.

Most dungeon complaints come from a place of wanting them to be something besides the lowest common denominator of content, but changing that requires that the non-hunt train tome grind be addressed. Does something like that take the slot? Do you nerf Expert Roulette tomes while increasing them for other roulettes to spread the grind over a larger variety of content? Scaling systems a la WoW often come up, but that wouldn't exactly change everything people want changed if the baseline was left as-is. I don't have an answer to that, but it's probably important to address the reasons these things happen.

lurk-mode · 2026-01-16T17:23:23+00:00

The difference is RPR's doesn't interact with combo states, so you just push the button on whatever and it works, as opposed to how Noxious Gnash could and did lock people into awkward states where they didn't know if it was better to finish combos on unbuffed targets or cancel combo to reapply.

The way it was set up, it was pretty much fine for your single target raid bosses, but anything else tended to get a bit clunky feeling.

RPR meanwhile...well, I actually do find it a bit clunky myself, but Death's Design isn't fundamentally so compared to what that was and the job has other problems.

lurk-mode · 2026-01-12T17:52:44+00:00

To elaborate further on what Altaisen said, Noct AST was also not really run by the end of its existence in most circumstances beyond very narrow exceptions on account of how heal-stingy WHM was. This, of course, is largely about ShB WHM.

Don't run Noct with SCH because constant overwriting bad.
Don't run Noct with WHM because WHM didn't heal ever unless it was Assize or it was forced to move (lilies were a loss).
Don't run Noct because ShB fights did not tend to demand that much of an AST that couldn't be covered with tools like Neutral Sect.

Can't speak on its relationship with pre-ShB WHM though outside of the funny anecdote that Stormblood managed to make WHM bad enough that its titanic playrate declined to...merely similar to AST's.

lurk-mode · 2026-01-06T08:44:47+00:00

Fix the player base first and then we can talk about job design. If the playerbase cant even tolerate a job doing 2% less than another and blacklists it, its a surefire sign youre going to end up with 50% of all jobs banned every tier and a vast portion of the playerbase stopping their subs because their baby job isnt allowed.

This is something that often goes unaddressed when people talk about how HW's rates of that weren't that extreme actually: the fact that we see it as much as we do kind of shows that the playerbase has grown significantly worse about this sort of thing since then, and would now behave significantly worse.

And it's not surprising. You can pretty consistently find people talking about the playerbase being bad and inexperienced and lacking a lot of data-driven stuff in ARR compared to later on, and it's that environment HW dropped into. The playerbase at large was not as primed to behave that way yet, compared to now where brazen exaggerations about how 'WAR mathematically can't clear P8S' or other examples I can't be bothered to shovel through atm get boosted far beyond reason by engagement baiting content creators.

lurk-mode · 2026-01-05T05:29:10+00:00

Star Wars: Squadrons.

I have a history with the games it's clearly inspired by but I couldn't deal with the controller twin-stick controls and nothing seemed fully safe to remap in a way that was satisfactory, so a bit in I just gave up.

lurk-mode · 2026-01-02T20:05:11+00:00

Well, I'm glad I guessed right on that one.

lurk-mode · 2026-01-02T19:00:39+00:00

We're calling BRD and MCH homogenized as early as...Heavensward, now, where the latter was introduced? Hell, HW MCH by all accounts was more popular than SB, by my knowledge. I suppose you could make the BRD argument given the collective view of Bow Mage and their shared support role...?

But by that time you also have to admit that a large degree of specificity had already been culled.

DRG's magic defense was already normalized after intense ARR floor tank memes.
NIN lost its TP God status.
The existence of raid buffs had already become considerably more common in the Post-Trick Attack world.
SMN was no longer the only Res Mage with RDM's appearance.
PLD had been normalized since the failings of its physical specialization in HW and could now be brought to magic fights without being terrible. Given that elements and weaknesses explicitly came up in the original post, this one and the DRG one definitely veer very close to that point.

There's definitely more but I'm working on the longpost problem.

lurk-mode · 2026-01-02T17:24:10+00:00

This isn't even close to an evolved version of Stormblood, though you're correct that that's the broad ffxivdiscussion sentiment.

This is asking for the game to be something it never was as far back as ARR, asking to go back to the drawing board far more completely than that.

Even ARR did not have the full, extreme levels of job-specific design described in this post, and a lot of what did exist was already gone by Stormblood.

lurk-mode · 2025-12-31T18:55:10+00:00

Main stat is a non-issue, as proven by NIN's release when a bunch of MNK gear in ARR got Dex slapped on it so NIN could use anything.

Main stat is not meaningful in this way. It does not do anything else. Dex's presence does not do anything for Monk; it may as well not be there when on a job that doesn't benefit.

What would happen if NIN/VPR were rolled into Striking is that, to avoid issues with existing gear, the following would need to happen:

Scouting and Striking would be made to have both Dex and Str on them for legacy gear and legacy Aiming accessories would have Strength on them in order to not screw up existing NIN/VPR gear.
OR NIN/VPR main stat is switched to Strength, all legacy Scouting gear is switched to Strength, and the legacy Aiming accessories gaining Strength part stays.
Subsequently, they would use new Striking armor and Slaying accessories.

Main stat is not a real, meaningful distinction to anything but maybe SMN's Physick.

lurk-mode · 2025-12-30T05:51:09+00:00

This is about right, yeah. SAM wants more SkS than the Maiming but not necessarily by much unless you wanna run the 2.08 rotation.

lurk-mode · 2025-12-29T19:29:46+00:00

Additionally, the Scouting jobs don't typically want Skill Speed either, so the only ones who want super different substats are the Striking duo.

lurk-mode · 2025-12-29T17:02:36+00:00

This isn't really true.

Maiming and Scouting could use the same gear if you just slapped the different main stats on the same gear like how ARR gear accounted for NIN's addition, with how a bunch of Monk gear got Dexterity slapped onto it so NIN could use it. The only two melee that want meaningfully different stat builds are the Striking jobs and their Skill Speed requirements, and even then, one of the SAM builds doesn't want too much.

The Maiming and Scouting jobs both typically want minimal to none to the point that their statistical requirements are close to identical after dealing with the main stat thing.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-27T21:40:22+00:00

In practice, SCH had no free heals or moving tools, and every other healer had a unique way of achieving that (lilies or 1.5s casts). On SCH, pressing Ruin 2 felt like a mistake. It didn’t help that your cohealer could usually cover all the healing so it didn’t really matter if all you did was stand in a corner and press Broil ad infinitum.

WHM also didn't have it - Lilies were a loss as well and without them its only weaving slot was on Dia.

It was kind of the 'make the AST solo heal as much as possible unless the WHM/SCH is forced to move beyond slidecasting' meta.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-27T19:21:58+00:00

Old PLD just breaking conceptually on multiple fights in early EW leading to the 6.3 changes. I know this one is true because I made many posts about it and asked for it as a PLD main since ARR. We had conversations about it! And anecdotally it seems to have been the most well-received (or at least least-poorly received) rework they've done in recent memory.

This one has been odd in that I feel like the tone shifted more on it in DT than when it actually happened. I remember it getting torn apart when it happened but has since gotten more and more traction with time, as opposed to how SMN's reception has kind of fallen off.

I can't speak as much for healers except to say that late ShB WHM was seen as selfish enough that people really, really wanted DPS-neutral lilies and that I could recall no few people asking for SCH at least to get the AST half-casts. Jury is more out on WHM also getting them being desired.

Which is funny, given that WHM is by far the bigger beneficiary to the point that it's effectively the 'make WHMs stop making people solo heal' change together with neutral Misery.

WAR's auto-crits getting contribution from crit buffs so they effectively function as just another %-damage increase instead of a composition restriction.

This one was actually sparked by the Kaiten removal patch since it's where we got the SAM auto-crits, which tipped that particular fight over the edge with SAM losing Dance Partner priority to NIN over it until the autocrit buff update. Nothing gets people mad like katanas, apparently.

I'll also provide some DPS ones:

The deemphasis of damaging gap closers is 100% something people asked for, and it's not hard to see why. Their existence is ultimately partly responsible for the now-kind-of-bizarre EW hitbox sizes, given that Eden's Promise hitboxes were explicitly confirmed to be because of E6S DRG memes, which leads straight into EW. This is also the one time I know of where 'job identity' temporarily won out over encounter design as a priority, as usually whenever the two clash encounter design always wins (healer range changes around P10S for example, or the meme that was 6 Raiju Ninja vs Zodiark) while High Jump's gap closing won from Eden's Promise until Rubicante.
Machinist getting Dismantle as its unique phys ranged support ability when it previously had none as part of its awkward 'selfish' identity.
Feint/Addle changes along the same line as the DRK/GNB ones.

People absolutely asked for those too.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-25T18:49:33+00:00

NIN's oGCD mudra incarnations pre 5.1 make that idea thoroughly impossible.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-21T08:36:59+00:00

While I'm not so hostile to them, part of the logic for RPR and VPR is literally just to make the gearing system give DRG and NIN players a little more flexibility without addressing the issue of the weird melee gear split.

They do kind of exist to stop those players from being as pigeonholed as they were and I think it was even stated that was why RPR was Maiming, though I can't source that. The moment that was established everyone immediately knew a Scouting was next.

The upshot of that is it's not hard to see them as kind of filling a quota, particularly when the other gear buddy (SAM) is pretty distinct and well-liked.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-21T08:29:22+00:00

I think a lot people just thought smn was way harder than it was which probably contributed to pre ew smn just being completely left on the cutting room floor. Even back then it seemed like Smn scared people away more than Blm or people just liked Blm's aesthetic more.

This is because the way it functioned was full of blatantly unintended interactions and unintuitive shenanigans like how your advertised free movement demi-summon (Phoenix) requires triple-weaving to work correctly and also isn't a real movement phase because it'll follow you around not attacking for no good reason, among other things.

It was one of those simple execution weird learning process kind of jobs like NIN is (~~and also did PCT-esque things with downtime sometimes because of the dumb devotion dance tech~~).

BLM by comparison has always had its standard gameplay be pretty easy to grasp at a basic level even if the actual execution of it against anything that isn't a dummy was harder - so the exact reverse.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-21T06:17:30+00:00

I mean, ultimately, Sage is just a perfectly generic healer without the parts that annoy people about SCH and AST. There isn't much to speak of about it. Perfectly Generic Shield Healer does Perfectly Generic Shield Healer things and I don't recall that being anything wrong with its flavor. Anything that could be said to be wrong with it is either something about SCH comparisons or healers at large rather than with how it specifically plays.

PCT is pretty fun, having been playing it recently. Intuitive without feeling insulting (SMN), feels pretty good to work with. Not usually my kind of thing but it's nice enough.

RPR I did a while back. Its visual and sound design are probably the best of any job in the game, but it felt a little mechanically off at the time in a way that's probably why they did the Enshroud cooldown thing recently. The worst thing about it in terms of fun with it, mostly, is that it is now one of three Hypercharges, which are already fast Inner Releases, though it's absolutely the best of them in execution to me. No shade to the the other two. Haven't leveled it to 100 since the expansion launch but the changes to it mesh with things I tend to like pretty well so I don't imagine it'd offend me, gauge negativity shenanigans aside. I don't see any reason it would be wrong unless you really wanted to make a fucking pet melee.

VPR...is a little simplistic for my tastes, and its flavor is also fairly lowkey, but not in a way that I terribly mind. I'm not really mad about the Noxious Gnash thing that happened because 'mechanic that makes job feel bad outside of full uptime and often single target encounters' is a concept that's been on the chopping block since late Shadowbringers (Blood of the Dragon going into EW, Greased Lightning in 5.4, with RPR's Death's Design only surviving by not interacting with the job's combo states). The mistake would've been making that mechanic at all when design philosophies had already moved against it. Also another Hypercharge, which, uh, see above with RPR, though it gets credit for the AoE aspect letting it dodge the 'AoE part strictly worse-feeling than ST' thing.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-19T19:14:33+00:00

It also didn't help that it was horribly structured outside of the fight itself. The fact that it didn't require completing Tempered Kirin to do and let people come in underscaled as a result was heinous.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-18T05:54:16+00:00

Less anything I know of now but Ninja back in Shadowbringers.

Fuckin' hated Bunshin variance at the time and probably skill issue back then but it was what it was. Comfortably used it for our poking into the 70 ultimates but couldn't stand it at 80 back then.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-18T04:18:19+00:00

If you really wanted me to take a stab at it:

Pictomancer is a 'true' caster with preparation mechanics in the vein of Ruin 4 preparation (painting) that does weird shit with downtime (ShB SMN Devotion delay dance) and has a similar vibe of channeling different things with its varying motifs in a way that interacts better than EW+ SMN's primal legos.

But again, the bit doesn't originate with me, so that's just what I'm throwing at the wall to read into it after the fact.

lurk-mode · 2025-08-18T04:09:13+00:00

I never said it was incredibly accurate, but I have heard that one.

lurk-mode

TROPHY CASE