Final Fantasy XIV and MMO Essentials #2: The Challenge of Balance

Hello and welcome to a new edition of "Final Fantasy XIV and MMO Exxentials," a blog series where I try and talk about what I think any good MMO should have and hopefully FFXIV will include in their game. In this section, I'm going to be talking about something I think anyone will agree to be important: Class/Job Balance. Being that WoW has been my most prominent MMO experience I usually refer to them as classes, but those of you who play Final Fantasy can think of them as jobs if you prefer.

Those of us who've been playing MMORPG's long enough and have the mind to pay attention know one thing: class balance is not an easy thing to pull off! In fact, it's damn hard to make sure that the system is fair and impartial across the world, especially in games with lots of PvP like WoW or Warhammer Online. World of Warcraft set it up...or at least they tried to set it up as a "Rock, Paper, Scissors" scheme, where one class might have an advantage against one class but be at a disadvantage against another. For instance, a rogue has the stabbing power and silencing abilities to silence and quickly kill a mage, but when the rogue finds himself against the warrior or a paladin, those really don't count for much. Meanwhile the mage can immobalize a warrior and nuke him from a distance. Rock, Paper, Scissors. A fairly basic concept, yes?

Well, at the basic level this was true but players with skill, who knew how to properly set up talents and ability rotations on their rogue could work their way around these disadvantages and still get wins over the warrior. On top of that, no matter what class you play or how great you are at the game, if you only have half your equipment as blue and green level (superior and uncommon level gear, respectively) you are going to be hard pressed to win against a player who has their toon decked out in all epic purples. So, in the end, the balance of the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" system was kind of thrown off by levels of gear and actual player skill.

And that's fine! That's actually how it's suppose to be. No one wants to play a game where you can always win against one class and never win against the other, right? So, for the past four and a half years, players were able to battle based mostly on skill and gear and go to war and have fun about it. Oh sure, it was a common occurance where some player who thinks too highly of their own abilities would get their face eaten by another player and then cling to this illusion that the problem was with the game, not with them. They would then petition for nerf bats to be swung or for their class to be "fixed". Fixed means different things for different people. In this case it means "I really want my class to be able to steamroll all competition with little effort!"

Deny it all you want, but in the end the truth is the truth.

Well, unfortunately, they got their wish. About the start of Patch 3.0, just before the release of their newest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, the World of Warcraft community at large began to notice that something peculiar was going on. A certain class that had been rather average compared to all the others was all of a sudden doing a lot better on the battlefields. They were doing a lot more DPS, it seemed that it was much harder to kill them, they were basically dancing their way through victory after victory. I'm talking about the paladin class, specifically those who specced their talents towards Retribution.

Thus was born what I consider to be the first real "Face Rolling Class" of WoW. A few idiots in the world might argue that warlocks were a face rolling class in the beginning, and remained so over the years since then. Not true. You had to actually know how to play the warlock effectively in order to make it look like it had edges over everyone else, and people cried for warlock nerfs for the reason I stated above. They couldn't face the fact that they sucked and had to blame the system. Sure, no one likes being feared constantly but ask any warlock player in the world what it feels like to be stunlocked either. Yet there were ways around both.

Ret Pallies, however... Wow. Literally, Wow. It was rather curious for me to see players who previously ranged from average to downright bad at PvP all of a sudden doing well in the battle grounds. It was rather amazing to watch a rogue or a warrior get the drop on a paladin, stun them, apply a hamstring, and then run circles around them beating them mercilessly. That was before, provided the warrior was good enough. Usually the paladin was able to cancel the stun and start hitting back, but he was still slowed and he had half his life. He was usually forced to bubble up and heal or use Lay on Hands on himself.

Not anymore though, right ret pallies? Oh no. Now you can use abilities to cancel out both the stun and the slow, and now you have the DPS to turn around and three shot that warrior into the next age. It must feel good to have all that extra power, right? And that wasn't even using ye ole Bubble n' Heal trick or their Lay on Hands ability either! Players of hunters and mages were all getting beat a lot more as well. In the end, Ret Pallies were topping DPS charts in battle grounds, having far more kills than everyone else, and getting killed a lot less than before.

Something was clearly wrong here.

Did it get fixed? Not really. In an odd way it actually got worse with the introduction of Death Knights. Now let's understand here, I loved my WoW Death Knight. He was a great, fun class to play and I do miss him. I just might go back and play him more before FFXIV is released, but let's all be honest here folks. To say that Death Knights weren't overpowered is like saying that a modern politician isn't corrupt. We're talking about a class that were extremely effective tanks and extremely effective DPS in dungeons and raids no matter what talent tree you chose. Unholy DK's especially with their powerful ghoul pets and insanely high DPS rates. They were tearing up everyone left and right...except for ret pallies. Ret pallies, not surprisingly enough, still had the edge over DK's. In fact, ret pallies had the edge over almost everyone, but that did not stop the flood of people who rolled up a Death Knight hoping to find a new face-rolling class to play, which, in a sense, they got.

By the time I last logged off WoW over a month ago, it was almost impossible to get into a group that did not have a DK in it, and it was also almost impossible to get into a battle ground and not meet a pally or a DK you would soon come to hate. Other classes, like the poor rogue, were pushed out into the cold more and more.

That brings us to one thing I cannot stand in an any MMO that has ever used the type of class or job system in games like WoW or Final Fantasy XI, and that is that class balance becomes so screwed up that one or two classes in the game become virtually obsolete. Rogues were still active in WoW by then but they seemed to be dwindling. No one wanted them in their groups because Death Knight DPS was just as great, if not better. No one wanted to play them because they were having trouble against pallies and DK's in PvP.

Folks, this is one of things I expect the development team for Final Fantasy XIV to strictly avoid as long as they are playing the game. No job or class should become the unwanted because a piss poor job of balancing the system makes them unpractical to play. I don't care if it is a good idea on a business standpoint. Think about the game itself and not how well you can line your pocket books! Towards the end of WoW, I can't help but wonder if Blizzard was actually thinking "Gee, we got a hot thing going here with ret pallies and death knights! People like to be facerollers! Mo' Money!!! Sorry rogues, but we want you to go play DK's more, so we're going to nerf you until you abandon your toons and roll up a death knight! Paladin works too! YEEHAW!"

...Ok, that last bit was a bit of a stretch, but the actions do speak for themselves. The nerfs that were scheduled to happen to the rogue were off the wall in light of how powerful certain other classes got. Whether they actually happened since then I'm not really sure. I know at least one of them has, and it became more pointless for rogue players to keep logging in as such. Thus, class balance in WoW was screwed, perhaps not for all time, but come on. Blizzard is now thinking on a maximum profit standpoint. They know that the young, no talent face rolling players are the primary force in their subsribers today, thus classes like ret pallies and death knights are the hot commodity. They're not about to nerf who should be nerfed and buff who should be buffed, not without threatening their maximized profits.

Right now you might be thinking "What's the point to all this? That can never happen in Final Fantasy XIV! The devs care about the game too much!"

Yet it did happen, though not quite as bad, in FFXI. Ask long time players of that game what happened with the Ranger job. Once upon a time, they were perhaps the best damage dealers in the game, though their damage was expensive because bolts, arrows, and bullets were Expensive. Then the Samurai job gets a little buff with "grips" that could be added to weapons, and all of a sudden their faster TP growth makes them better damage dealers than the ranger. Guess what! It's free damage too! Just the price of one great katana that certainly doesn't require ammo. The result of this was players knowing that they had a free option to do more dps over an expensive option that does less dps. That's pretty much a no brainer, folks! The poor ranger kind of became an endangered species.

They at least still had a few roles left though. They're considered to be one of the best pullers in the game, so they at least have a spot left in groups and raids, but considering how difficult it is to level them...yeah. Rangers are the FFXI victim of poor class/job balancing decisions.

So how will things look in FFXIV? We know that the job system will not quite be the same in this new game, they've stated that experience points are pretty much out the window, but that doesn't mean that jobs will be balanced fairly. The developers did say that that they were taking into account a lot of the feedback the gained from FFXI, so maybe there is hope there. Considering how many fans of the Samurai class that are out there...I don't know. We can hope.

So that brings us to the question to the developers of Final Fantasy XIV: Will you do everything you can for job balance to make sure that one job does not become too powerful over other jobs, and to make sure that none of them fall into a state where very few want to play them?

This question ties in with my next issue which will be coming shortly. Until then, stay cool.