Job Balance?

After 11 years of FFXI the job balance has pretty much stayed the same. I guess it was intentional that PUP, BLU, DRG, THF, NIN DNC were relegated as subpar DDs and WAR MNK DRK SAM will always reign supreme. At least they closed some of the gap though by enhancing one handed DD(though they upped MNK as well)

Imo, the job tiers as of now from what I observe of the current meta are as follows (end game perspective):

God Tier: BLU
High Tier: PLD, BLM, WHM, SCH, GEO, BST, SMN, COR
Mid Tier: DNC, SAM, MNK, PUP, RUN
Low Tier: RDM, THF, DRK, WAR, RNG, BRD, NIN, DRG

As for solo/low to high level content (with trusts), the tier list is more as such:

God Tier: BLU
High Tier: Pet based jobs (SMN, BST and PUP), Tanks (PLD, RUN, NIN), SCH, DNC, RDM
Low Tier: Other DDs and mage jobs

This is just my opinion from what I see people play. Ultimately, a player's skill is a big factor but margin or error is much higher on lower tier jobs. Also, a lot of the more "useless" jobs have less options to deal with situations which makes them perceived as bad jobs.

I believe any job can be great if the person is willing to put forth the effort. Just some jobs are going to be much rougher than others.

Edited: 09/15/2016 - RDM on High Tier for Solo (my mistake as I didn't even list it there when it should have been)

I won't deny that BLU is pretty strong atm but for endgame stuff it is more like:
God tier: GEO
High tier: SCH, BLM, RUN, PLD, WHM
Mid tier: COR, BLU, BST, SMN, PUP (maybe RDM)
Low tier: everything else except MNK
Trash tier: MNK

for solo stuff i'd say it is:
God tier: BST, SCH
High tier: BLU, PUP, SMN, DNC
Low tier: everything else except MNK
Trash tier: MNK

inb4: another "we need a BLU nerf"-trait

nice necro bump btw :)

mnk op plz nerf

Lol list is lol, not sure if trolling.

Kiyaras list seems like it came from someone who don't do endgame nor attempted soloing on most jobs >.> For example I don't see how tank job is any better than other jobs for solo with trust tank and healers, when other DD job kills faster. If people have attempted solo stuff from 119 to 135 range they'd know in most cases tank job isn't always the best choice.

Obviously this is a very subjective matter. I think your list is as valuable as anyone else, but I strongly disagree with most, if not all your placement.

What is the criteria you are basing your assessment on? Even things you have in your low tier I have seen perform incredibly.

The real question is how many of you who make the solo tier list with trusts have actually attempted soloing, or at least done some research about it?

If soloing without trusts maybe* placing SCH BST on the top is legit, although it's also due to the most hardcore no trust soloer in NA community created more SCH and BST solo vid than other jobs. But if using trusts then it's entirely different and personally I think SCH BST no longer has massive advantage.

For example, you guys placed DRG as "low tier", and yet people have soloed Escha suzaku with roll prebuff before evasion nerf:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP2ONecXIlk

I wouldn't be surprised if it's doable without prebuff post evasion nerf. He also has SR solo video in his channel.

There's also another guy who soloed everything on RDM without trusts:

https://www.youtube.com/user/gajigajiko/videos

Effectively making RDM as strong as popular SCH BST in none trust solos, but ppl view it as "low tier" solo job but SCH BST is god tier?

There are more similar examples. Most ppl don't even attempt FFXI higher lv content solo regularly, nor have youtube video channel full of solo videos. How'd you know a job is in "low tier" or fully understand the pros and cons of each solo jobs until you tried?

This list seems like another nerf BLU fishbait to me.

That was my exact thought when I read it. You must be joking if you think BLU is "god-tier" over GEO or BLM lol... especially for end game. After recent nerfs, DD has been more viable on the hardest content but it doesn't bump BLU over GEO or BLM, where GEO is REQUIRED for any serious fight in the game. The job literally cannot be replaced and is OP as heck. Sadly this parroted bandwagon against BLU is almost 100% because of the bandwagon going on and how people only shout for BLU when other jobs do just as fine without any impact on overall clear time. I've seen idiots shouting for BLU only for ***that can be soloed, its astounding. As much as I hate the current bandwagon, it doesn't mean BLU is overpowered over other jobs.


Sums up my thoughts on current end-game.


From knowing how the jobs function and playing them? SCH with its insane regen and DOT capabilities and BST with its infinite heal spams, not easy to guess how they are god tier for soloing. I'd place RDM on high tier in that list though.

Sorry, totally forgot about RDM for soloing, which should be high tier aswell.

He clearly said it's "solo with trusts", SCH regen and BST heal spam is irrelevant with august tanking, apuru or yoran healing and Selh'teus AoE healing/recovering mp every few sec. Most well geared melee DD kills faster than SCH dot/bst spamming JA every 10 sec with trusts.

When soloing with trusts, things like versatility or surviability is a LOT less relevant than soloing without trusts. Higher output and faster kill speed start to gain more advantage.

Trusts aren't capable of tanking everything, especially certain VD fights. You are getting way too technical just for the sake of arguing.

I highly disagree with the solo list from both of them that is. Not because it's for the sake of arguing, but because I think the list is misleading and discourages ppl try to solo on other jobs. I'm encouraging ppl to give accurate and objective opinion about tiers.

Each job has it's pros and cons when it comes to solo, which also depend on the content and gimmck required. There are no job that's absolutely above every other job when it comes to solo with trusts. placing certain job on "god tier" while other job that's capable of doing the same with trusts and killing faster "low tier" is biased.

op clearly said it's solo with trust situations, thus situations that doesn't favor trust solo isn't relevant to the list.

Again, how many of you actually have tried to trust solo on these jobs and understand the pros and cons before making the list to give objective opinion? Or do you just make the list because you see a few SCH BST solo vid on youtube and all of your friends solo low tier escha NM on BLU?

Well you're wrong then. SCH and BST are above every other job, even with trusts. There isn't any denying it just based on the jobs capabilities alone. We're talking about overall usage, not certain fights that you randomly found a video of a random job soloing. Overall, those jobs are at the top due to how their job functions. Most trusts will die very fast in VD fights, your killspeed situation doesn't seem to account for that.

You are the one who randomly post a situation, such as VD with AoE that doesn't favor trust soloing, then claim other jobs that rely on trusts more are inferior.

If you are just killing an escha T1 repeatly for an item, I fail to see melee DD killing it in 5 WS/30 sec is inferior choice than BST spamming JA every 10 sec.

I also don't understand why tank jobs or smn pup dnc is one tier above other dps when soloing with trusts.

Overall usage argument is not a valid argument because ***is situational. For example if I'm just killing a T1 which dies in 5 melee WS, there's no reason to solo it on tank jobs or SCH dot wait for it to die unless it's proven that dot kills faster.

By placing SCH BST tank jobs 1 or 2 tier above melee DD suggests that these jobs are superior to melee DD when soloing T1, which isn't fact.

tl;dr, the solo tier list can't accurately reflect which job is superior choice to solo certain content. It only takes a job's survibility and versatility into consideration.

Okay and you would still have BST and SCH in the top spots in those situations. They are bother easier to gear and make good than most DD jobs and they are quicker to get going. Other DD would need buffs and if the trusts die they aren't as sturdy as BST or SCH. Trusts are also bad at keeping hate in non-ilevel areas, so for UNMs. A SCH self SC+MB and BST spamming with tiger. Overall, those two jobs are above the rest when you consider all possibilities. I don't get what you mean otherwise. If we're counting easy ***, I'd say BLU would be up there with them too.

"for solo stuff i'd say it is:
God tier: BST, SCH
High tier: BLU, PUP, SMN, DNC
Low tier: everything else except MNK
Trash tier: MNK"

If you referring to that list, there is no tank jobs in there?

I'm referring to both list, as I don't agree with some job placements on both of them. But such is the nature of 'job tier list' discussion.

Okay well if someone asked me, hey what are the best jobs to solo stuff in the game? I'd say SCH, BST and BLU. That covers a large portion of soloable content and they are overall the best choices. Yes you can solo a weak T1 faster as x DD job than SCH or BST, but overall those are the safest and best choices for the majority of content.

Of course if you compare a geared out DD soloing T1 NMs vs a geared out BST or SCH doing the same you'd have fairly equal footing (tho even my ***geared BLU pulls hate off of trust tanks really easily so I'm not really confident that you'd be able to go whole hog on a DD job whereas there is no penalty to spamming Ready moves)

BST can do those same NMs with less gear tho.

for solo stuff i'd say it is:
God tier: PUP
High tier: BLU, SMN, DNC, BST, SCH, RDM


Show me another job that can walk away from the computer for five minutes and still clear content.

What is the goal of soloing though? This isn't the 75 days and content is restricted to being able to solo because of time. I personally love to see what people can solo because I think that is fun, but realistically there isn't really any gain when it comes to progression of your character. You can't do the hardest content solo anymore.

That being said, does solo capabilities justify nerfs when it is an entirely different ball game when you are doing group content (the content that matters)? For example, assuming BLU was the master solo race, but isn't the top DPS in a group setting, yet has it's dps nerfed? Not saying this is what should or shouldn't happen, but really curious on how people feel SE should handle "balance". Things like nerf MG hurt people in group content, so I don't see how that helps anything.

If they nerf BLU, people will just bandwagon over to NIN instead. Solves nothing, will just give people something new to *** incessantly about. All for the silver medal, 'cause I hate to break it to anyone but not a single melee in the game has a chance of wresting gold from the hands of a BLM. This is all also assuming your group isn't just using a SCH to produce nearly entirely safe skillchains from outside of AoE range instead of a melee. For the few melee-centric fights that exist, we've already seen plenty of evidence that different communities and groups prefer different jobs to accomplish the task.

The few melee centric fights that exist? Of cutting edge endgame sure, there's only a few melee ones. Of the whole game that people fight on somewhat regular basis? It's vast majority melee style fights.

Wherein it doesn't matter what job you bring unless the leader of your party is some kind of ridiculous fuccboi. There isn't a single fight in this game below T3 Escha that requires a strict setup of DDs outside of having to trigger some kind of gimmick. I came back to the game less than 3 weeks ago and I am capable of soloing most T1s and bringing any job I want to T2s, so let's not try to pretend that there's some sort of barrier to entry for jobs who aren't BLU to be taken to trash tier content. Any sort of stringent barring of melees who aren't BLU is purely a community driven fabrication based on some mixture of idiocy, ignorance, and ineptitude.

And because bandwagon exists because of what people see from higher up, so the fact that BLU has been top dog for so long is why everyone thinks that's the answer to all their woes.

The NA community is a gigantic case of sheep following the shepherd. The much-touted survivability and damage output of a BLU being demonized for its accessibility as a job for less skilled players on lower tier content comes in center stage while all the other marionettes continue to dance without a spotlight. If there's one theme I've noticed since coming back, it's that the bandwagon on top of the bandwagon is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen.

The first layer would be the BLUs, including the bandwagoners either being a bunch of followers or people who find it less stressful to play compared to other things.

The second layer would be the Metabandwagoners, those who bandwagon in opposition to the bandwagon based on some sort of pretense that the first bandwagon (BLU) is the source of the problem.

In reality, the problem is as it always has been: there's too many followers, not enough leaders. You have people masquerading as a leader when all they're doing is following a battle guide or some text written in a forum post about how X job killed Y NM, thus taking it as the only possible solution without either considering alternatives or continuing to research any further.

This leads to people forming parties asking for only this or only that, then leading on to whining and moaning on forums as a result. This is a self destructive behavior from every angle. Asking for only certain jobs not only continues to perpetuate the closed-minded mentality of the general playerbase, but also leads to building up the ire of those who feel scorned or underappreciated because their jobs are not accepted into these parties. So by locking down the jobs you want in your party due to ignorance, you're simply opening up the possibility of the hivemind masses to whine loud enough for SE to take action in order to appease what playerbase they have left. This has some negative outcomes.

A) The "safety" job is no longer viable or "safe", thus decreasing the average number of players who are capable of clearing content due to less skill or less ability to play "harder" jobs against that content. This outcome is inevitable, or else the argument that BLU requires adjustment due to being easier or safer to play is irrelevant.

B) Your "downtrodden jobs" are in no better position. One or two will be chosen as the next bandwagon, someone will make a post or a battle testimonial about that job, and people will flock to it like the second coming of Christ just like they have with BLU. You've simply shifted the spotlight to another part of the stage. Congratulations.

Instead of bickering and bitching every single day about whether this job or that job should be nerfed, you should be more concerned about finding solutions to the overall problems with the way the community works and how other jobs can be made more fun or more attractive to allow more people to make a vested interest in them.

Normally I'd be all for bringing one job down to benefit the rest (and have argued for it before, i.e. Ukko's Fury during the Abyssea era), however times have changed. Homogenizing all the jobs doesn't work, it never has. Separating them and making them all stupidly effective in their own way (i.e. PUP, BLM, BLU, BST, SCH, etc.) is the correct path to take.

Fair chance B is continually the case and that's just the nature of our beast. But there at least have been times where it was "bring two jobs that can make darkness (or light) and there was variance allowed. Granted this memory of mine is going back to EXP parties in 75 era so...lol

But the reason BLU is such a problem is because it shifts the party configuration. Because they self cap haste that isn't the goal of a setup anymore, which makes it more difficult to toss any other melee in. If BLU's aided in capping haste for everyone (MG perma-AOE without diffusion for example) then they would at least function well with another job in certain setups.

Your 2nd paragraph I have quoted here is quite vague. The issue though is it's BLU or 9 other jobs that need to be made more interesting/viable. It's far easier to bring BLU down and fix general melee issues than try to bring all 9 of those jobs up to BLU's level without just making BLU even better.

I'm not asking for jobs to homogenize. I actually want there to be accepted three types of groups:

Meleeburn:
Tank/DD/DD/GEO/???/WHM

Petburn:
PUP/BST/???/???/COR/GEO

Manaburn:
Tank/BLM/BLM/SCH/GEO/WHM

For a brief period of time this was roughly how SR worked, until the petburn bandwagon took over.

But no amount of words will find more people playing BRD's (which requires aeonic to even compete with GEO) and GEO's to allow non-BLU groups to be easy to setup and make work. Most BLU groups can drop that 2nd GEO and toss in a COR which makes it a lot easier to get setup and going on content. And that convenience is not going to be replaced because I make some posts on the internet.

Sounds to me like your problem lies with support classes, not DD ones. The barrier to entry for support classes has always been way too ridiculously high, especially considering that playing a support is already not fun in general for most people. Reducing the requirements to be a successful support and perhaps finding a way to make playing support feel more rewarding would be far more beneficial than bringing down the one job that manages to circumvent it in some way and making life harder for everyone. Making the game more fun to play in general is better than making it more of a pain in the ***.

Think about it this way, would nerfing Mighty Guard make these woes any less severe? Would making BLU's ability to cap haste less prominent somehow make more people play BRD and GEO and allow other melees to flourish? Nope.

Increasing the power of things like Linos, Gjallarhorn, Terpander, Daurdabla, Dunna, etc. would go a long way to making support more accessible to more people. Those exclusive few who think they're hot ***cause they have an Idris or something can be insulted by the lowly peasants being able to play their job all they want if it means more people get to have fun playing.

You're still asking for far more from the dev team by saying "make it a ton easier (and therefore pointless to continue gearing) for people to play support jobs so it's magically easier to find them and make a party work" instead of "hey could you make BLU not have an answer to everything and far easier to deal with than any other DD in the game?"

Still doesn't change the greater picture though.

Current base party is:

Tank/BLU/BLU/GEO/COR/WHM

It's easier to find a COR than a GEO, so party setup is easier this way.

Standard melee setup is:

Tank/DD/DD/GEO/GEO/WHM

So the GEO's have to handle entrusting, which then kicks out BRD's and RDM's from existing as viable support.

Even if you hand out a free Gjallarhorn to everyone it's not going to fix it being easier to indi/luopan afk and two roll afk then find two GEO's to afk for you.

You're right in that they need to rework support jobs and find a way to get haste out to everyone(which is something I've already made a post about on the Official forums for, btw). But after we fix the haste issues then we get to how BLU's have more defense than anything but a PLD/BLU so they take less AOE damage. And they have (unreliable) 11 shadows. And they have magic barrier. Which still puts them ahead of other DD, even if they can out DD them (and they can, BLU is not the best DD in the game in terms of DPS).

I'm hearing people see a lot more NIN lately, and that's also based on survival, shadows (reliable) and migawari or whatever foil/scherzo type move they have make them more viable on content than other jobs.

But end of the day something needs to break up the bandwagon, which is only getting worse as time goes on. And it's far easier to tap BLU down than bring everything else up.

I just wanted to point out that this isn't a bad thing. Actually it is extremely healthy for gameplay. Take games like league of legends in which balance is constantly shifting and certain champions become FoTM. You will never, ever obtain perfect balance in any game, ever. It is impossible and if it was possible then that probably means all the classes are boring and lackluster with very little identity.

A constant shifting meta will put some jobs in the spotlight and others out but as it keeps shifting every job will feel valuable at one point in time which is a lot better than a single job being better all the time. Changes in meta also have a shift period and during that period, really anything and everything is viable.People don't understand this though, because they don't really understand game balance.


Also you speak as if people just blindly follow others, which I agree to an extent, but Meta isn't just created from one person saying but rather observations of the community. You can go out and observe it yourself and you will most likely reach the same conclusion. BLU is irrevocably the strongest job in the game. In terms of damage output, self-support and over survivability you will have a hard time finding a class that can hold a candle to their light. I definitely think that all melees are viable for any content that BLU can do, heck I've done most of the content with other melees but the thing is when people pug, they will always pick the easier job to roll with. It doesn't matter if you think they are sheep or not - The just want a result and BLU gets them their result easier. This is why nerfs/buffs need to happen.


Reading a bit further:


I agree with this to an extent, but you need to shift the meta in some form or manor and honestly hard nerfs are the best way to force the playerbase to rethink their strategies.

You are correct that homogenizing jobs is a dumb idea, it does work but the game would be boring. At the same time then you can't really homogenizing the encounters that we have. In order for them to shift the meta at all they would have to make a slew of new encounters that make other jobs useful. But how would you do that without stupid mechanics like blinding Maju.

When you invite a DPS, you want damage and you will pick whatever job will provide the most damage while not straining the party. You can't really make a DRG sound like a good option when an AG Almace BLU wants to join.

Also if we were to just buff everything then power creep would come into play and eventually all content would be way to easy and boring.

I think they should nerf Draylo, not BLU, that guy is too hot I tell ya
:3 :3 :3


(lol)