How Would You Balance The Jobs?

Even if you aren't using the Forum-goers/BG players that know how Vex/Attunement work, basically anyone should know that Fury+Frailty is absolutely broken. It's not a hard concept.

Indi-Haste/Fury + Geo-Frailty is a massive boost on your DPS.

Vex/attunement is amazing in there for all the debuffs. They can also sub blm and stun with decent stun sets, to stop the Velkk Pygmachia and Saurian Slide which are the worst WS.

Pet never die when I go with ryu drg, but we do stun every tp move.


If the sam has hate, then it is easy for the thf to SATA.

I dont play geo but isnt it kinda mp heavy to use indi spells then dismissing and recasting it whenever you move? Like when you're roaming to NMs?

The Geo spells cost around 300MP to cast, you should only really cast them once or maybe twice per room. Bosses you only need to cast them 1-3 times in my experience, the mega boss can kill bubbles fast but the normal NMs really can't. It really isn't an issue, I still have enough MP to do the nukings. Also you get back a decent chunk of the mana cost when you full circle.

Edit: I actually go /sch to Incursion now, so if it really ever did become an issue I could go /rdm for Convert and it would be fine.

How small that box has to be to think inside of. How does the luopan die if all the AoE is stunned?

Man so much crying about samurai. SAM is balanced very well against MNK and RNG. Samurai is also crippled in fights where you get amnesia; the job does almost no white damage. We struggled against Hyoscya because we had too many samurai. It's generally a balanced job but other DD's aren't useless in comparison, except jobs that are solo-focused. OP talking about BLU being bad? Wha... BLU is good for group content (Delve, Skirmish, Incursion, old VW stuff, etc.), has a ton of utility, and you can even farm Dyna/Salvage very well on it.

I think balance is overall decent. THF/DNC/PUP/BST are better solo/farm jobs than SAM/WAR/DRK/DRG, but offer less for group content. RDM got a buff a couple months that makes it nice for some alliance content. SCH and GEO have good utility, GEO especially is strong right now.

The balance that XI needs right now? Well, ninja is terrible, worst job in the game from where I'm sitting. Summoner is a job with a couple of neat tricks but S-E is still lost on what its role should be. It's good for certain alliance content for its unique buffs/debuffs but still feels lost in the shuffle.

These threads always suck because they are always full of DD's complaining that their (niche/solo) job doesn't outdo SAM/WAR/DRK/MNK/etc. Who cares? It misses the real tragedy of FFXI- healing and tanking are not interesting or balanced. White mage is pretty much the default healer, paladin the only tank for the dwindling amount of content that needs a tank. WoW has a much better grasp on making several different tank or healer classes be necessary for clearing content.

PLD/NIN/RUN* should all excel in different situations, but each should be able to tank a wide range of fights. And same with WHM/SCH/RDM. Each one of these jobs should be able to heal a party, while offering strengths for one or the other.

*I know that some players tank on rune fencer. I have yet to see this, I'd love to see some Youtube videos of RUN tanking high-tier content.


Fudo is not stronger on a per-WS basis than DRK's Resolution.

Follow me pretty much anywhere.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

We see this whenever SE breaks one job or another. The die hard supporters of that job refuse to see how broken it is, or more importantly how much it's hurting the overall game. Back when RNG's used to blow everything up and deal ridiculous damage to everything, they absolutely believed their job was "balanced" because it was expensive and so deserved to be better then everyone else. Then the same was thought by the NINs and MNKs back before the 2H buff when everything was pretty much dominate by those two and Axe WAR/NIN's. Or more recently when you brought MNK to everything, and MNKs refused to see how that could be disrupting.

FFXI overall is more balanced then ever before. The only real problem is they overbuffed SAM during the last round and now there is little to no reason to bring anything else.

Sorry, I don't subscribe to all of the whining that samurai is overpowered. It's a strong job, along with monk and ranger, but the goal should be for S-E to tweak other DD jobs like they just did with DRG to do a little more damage.

The real big problem right now is that there is no balance between these 4 hardcore DDs that usually are pretty balanced. Sam is just better at current content than Drk, Mnk, or War, period. The job gains TP faster, WSes harder, SCs better, has better gear options, etc. Even during the time of "bandwagon" Sams at 75, Sam wasn't strictly better than War/Drk/Mnk, just easier.

I agree that sam is OP atm, but beside fudo, nerfing anything else would just make us change job.

lol

I would argue FFXI is even less balanced then before, it was getting closer between offensive casting mages and melee for awhile after the magic adjustments, but the weaponskill/skillchain/tp update changed that, good look nuking for more damage then the samurai does with just his skillchains, let alone any melee.

If your looking at just the interaction between the heavy DD jobs, Sam, War, Drk, and Mnk, FFXI was actually really well balanced for a long time. Drk had troubles without Apoc, but with it would be a monster. Until abyssea those 4 jobs tended to hover near each other in output, obviously abyssea *** everything with Crit being so important though. After abyssea it kind of returned to status quo though, Sam, War, Drk, and Mnk were all good in Voidwatch and Legion (maybe not mnk in legion because of crit defense). Sure we had times when Ragnarok Drk was a small bit stronger in Voidwatch, or Yoichi Sam was a little better in Legion, but never just one job dominating the other 3. I would even argue that when Mnk was the most popular DD after SOA came out, it wasn't offensively imbalanced by much. The current iteration of Sam is absolutely the most imbalanced we've ever seen these primary DDs.

I think when they look at fixing jobs, they usually tend to look at "what is a problem with the way this job operates?", rather than "how can we make it more popular compared to these others?", though I do think nuking could use an overhaul to some extent. Nukes just either don't come quick enough for the amount of damage they do, or MP becomes an issue. I think it's worth remembering that a lot of content in the old days included full MP restores pretty regularly (green-eyed Dynamis statues, Limbus restoral boxes, etc).

What do you use RUN for? I think it's a fascinating job. And with Epeolatry there's not really much to the argument that it's not intended to be a tank. S-E actually did a solid thing in adding GEO and RUN in Adoulin. These are two jobs with a lot of potential.

I'll tank anything. RUN can tank anything PLD can, it's just a matter of knowing what subjob to use for each event. RUN has a very powerful (60%) Fast Cast effect added to it's full-time buffs, one of which is aoe (up to 3min and 25 seconds, with a 5 min recast), making RUN/NIN better at casting Utsusemi than a NIN, and makes it a lot easier for melees to jump in with /NIN as well. I have 8 second recast on Utsusemi: Ni and Flash, and my Ichi's are borderline instant. On top of that, we have a crazy powerful parry buff that we can fall back on. They also made a lot of our buffs undispellable.

Epeolatry is amazing, but any RUN who understands the job and the enemy they're tanking should be able to get by just fine without it.

Mages do deal more damage then melee right now, it's the power of buffs that changes this, specifically haste. March's and the haste spell will nearly triple the damage output of a melee while nothing comparable exists for nukers. Nukes are also held back by the fixed global casting lock, no matter how fast you cast you need to wait until you can cast again.

RUN can tank pretty much anything right now. It's about knowing which subs to use and how to gear for it. Anyone who used to tank HNM as a RDM, before the enmity nerf, will find it very familiar. You build up massive amounts of CE via enmity tools while making yourself incredibly hard to kill. The only real danger is if your caught with a physical attack that crits after you've had your defense buffs dispelled.

A note about physical defense down, since some people want to dismiss how severe a penalty to survivability it can be. Myself and Sparth noted earlier how effective stacking defense down was on NM's because it's a additive percentage reduction on the bottom of a fraction, the more you stack the more effective each increment becomes. This also applies to monsters hitting the player, having 50% defense down will double the monsters effective attack.

EX:

Monster: 1200 attack
Player: 850 defense (pulled out of my arse).
1200/850 = 1.411 Ratio.

Your getting hit hard but nothing that's too ridiculous.

Berserk, -25% defense, 850 * .75 = 637
1200/637 = 1.883, a 33.5% increase in monster damage, now your taking a beating but nothing a competent WHM can't handle. You may get instant gibbed by a random DA crit + TP move though.

Berserk and LR with boots, -40% defense, 850 * .6 = 510
1200/510 = 2.343, a 24.4% increase from -25% defense down and a whopping 66% increase from no defense down. Your now gonna get your a$$ handed to you by physical attacks and TP moves.

Now lets assume the monster also has either a TP move, or an additional effect on their attacks that applies a modest 15% defense down.

Going from 40 to 55% defense down has the following effects.
850 * .45 = 382
1200/382 = 3.141, that 15% increase in defense down just increased the NM's damage by 34%. The scaling is similiar to haste.

And 1200 is regular mobs, the kinds we farm for CP. NMs will have 1500 or more attack which make stacking defense down on yourself near suicide. No healer in the game can protect you from a instant or near instant KO. During voidwatch we used fanatics drinks to protect against it, and then the monsters ratio cap was 2.0 now it's 4.0.

Run sucks end of story, can tank most stuff does mean it can do it effectively. anything Run can tank the sam/war/mnk can do it better, if those can't tank it then pld(a/o) will do it many time better than Run. I really don't know SE's thinking creating a useless job like Run, I guess SE run out of idea and just slap together a useless job to persuade people to buy the new addon.

I like Ccl's suggestion on drk, give it absorb-all(attack included) with a stat increase of 25-30 range maybe and a low recast timer.

as for war, I think the best way to boost it by increasing DA trait to somewhere 20-25%. I always thought DA should be war's specialty but every damn job /war get the same amount which is stupid.

Define "better". Better as in if your backline is very capable, they will shave X amount of time from the fight? Or better as in they actually have better survivability? Because the latter is absolutely not true.


As far as DRK goes- Removing the stat decay is such an insultingly obvious adjustment that I can't believe hasn't been done yet.

He obviously means the former, but as far as the latter is concerned, there's very little difference.

I love RUN, have it geared, tried to play it as often as possible when we were using tanks again- it's still not exceptional in any respect.

Honestly I'd like to hear a proper breakdown of why RUN is a bad tank because honestly I don't know enough about it. Is it an issue of survivability? difficulty curve? lack of interest? familiarity with PLD being 'the' premier tank? I see a few here or there but the job is largely forgotten amidst the sea of PLD or bust.

I want to know if RUN is just suffering from the same issue GEO is: People don't know ***so they write it off wholesale.

Everyone writes off the job as a tank but few scarcely say why. It doesn't help in this era of XI only a small cluster of people really contribute to the declining base.

RDM tank became popular because of videos that inspired people to pick up the class. RUN is just.... there.

If you're WAR main and don't have DA merits, you're doing it wrong. There's no situation where /WAR should give the same DA as WAR main gets.

It's only a bad tank because it brings very little to the table. It's just as unreasonable as any other tank outside of Decoy Shot situations, fails to mitigate physical damage better than a sturdy DD, and is only on par with PLD for magical damage. It's suitable for most things but excels at nothing, and it's lackluster performance requires three times the attention compared to PLD

And while it's not terribly relevant at the moment, its ability to tank drops off as you add targets, where as PLD's greatest woe in terms of holding multiple enemies is being able to Atonement faster

1) Give Refreshga/Hastega I and II to Rdm with same power as Bards.

2) Adjust Bst, Smn and Pup pet accuracy and damage to match Sam and Mnk dmg output.

3) whatever