Class Balancing

[Schwerpunkt]

The timeline on ffwiki places FFT after FF12, but before Vagrant Story (which is about concurrent with Arazlam Orrai, so about 400 years after FFT). Hell, that same wiki actually places FF12 before Ajora, which isn't entirely sensible since the in-game primer mentions him (although it's a "her" in FF12, for whatever reason).

Basically, Ivalice's continuity is a complete mess and we can do whatever we want. I intend to have it look vaguely like that, though.

[Diethe]

Yeah Blizz the continuity is switched. FFT is like FF12's dark ages. Though the layout of the land will probably be the same except of course more destroyed. Geomancers would've probably come from Jahara and took the mantle of geomancy from those bull people in FF12. The Orient will probably around Balfonheim and I plan on making Rabanastre an empty maelstrom.

[kablizzy]

Oh, yes. I was just meaning in terms of landmass, rather than timeline. As in, Ordallia continues to go East into that landmass. We can also do whatever the Hell we want in the middle sections of Ordallia, which is also neat.

[Mordred]

I think it's time to reopen the races on this thread, since Blizz mentioned that he was going to post a quick list of what he sees all the basic classes as being about. For my part, here's what I've got:

POJ
Knight - Takes hits for himself and others like a champ, busts up enemy stats in 1v1.

Archer - Stays out of enemy reach, can't really take a hit or dodge, does big damage at max range.

Monk - Takes hits for himself like an even bigger champ because he can autoheal for free. Also can smack multiple foes around a bit with moves like Spinning Fist.

Thief - Versatile soldiers whose bottomless bags of tricks allow them to change up their equipment loadout on the fly, copy other soldiers' abilities, and even lock enemies' access to their own abilities.

Geomancer - Crazy motherfuckers with axes who wade into the thick of combat hoping to do massive close-quarters damage with self-centered AoE Element attacks or axe blows before getting killed due to low dodge and poor tankeyness.

Lancer - Extremely mobile spear-wielding damage monsters who avoid taking hits with their 2R spears (most counters can't reach them) and can Jump in and out of melee at will.

Ninja - Two knives, high speed, lots of dodge, good mobility: get in, stab a guy in the face, then either get out or stay in to do more face-stabbing.

Samurai - Not sure what this guy does. I kind of stole his bit (self-target AoE) for the Geomancer, since Geos needed love.

Wizard - Instant single-target magic damage at middling range, can charge up his spells to add AoE.

Priest - Can heal the entire party a little all at once or one guy a lot, also delivers buffs, revives the fallen, and can even deal a little damage. The one-stop party support shop.

Oracle - An oddity combining good melee damage at 2R, tanky-for-a-mage HP, and a wide array of mid-range multi-target and single-target status effect spells. A survivable mage for the front line.

Time Mage - All about spacetime related buffs, with Haste, Don't Move, etc. wreaking havoc on the enemy all up ins. Comet and Meteor provide limited DD options, but this class is really all about screwing with time to harm the enemy or help the party. Maybe also can teleport people around the field.

Summoner - AoE, high power, high range magic artillery of all elements. The squishiest of squishies, though.

Mediator - Buffs up all party member stats within a short range using Speeches, can directly give pep talks to one party member to give long-lasting buffs or ruin an enemy's self-esteem with other rhetoric.

Everyone else, plz post your ideas especially if they differ from mine.

[Schwerpunkt]

Stealing from Peter to pay Paul is not a winning strategy when it comes to developing unique identities for each class.




Knight - Tanky and with a few high-damage whacks.

Archer - Consistent damage and utility at range.

Lancer - "Jetpack infantry."

Thief - Dirty fighting.

Ninja - Highly mobile DPS, specializes in chasing down magi.



Samurai - High M-Ev, oriented towards utility and area control.

Monk - Combination of bizarre martial arts, yielding a combination of good dps and utility.

Geomancer - Terrain-based attacks. Something a little more... adventures than chip damage at range.

Mediator - A refined intellectual who tries to convince you of the error of your ways. And, when that fails, he simply shoots you.

Spellsword - Air, Earth, and Water spells plus what is probably a(n extremely limited) auxiliary healing capacity and whatever else we think of. Maybe Imbue Weapon. Probably not.

Performer - The stuff you can successfully salvage from Bard/Dancer, plus new and less derivative stuff.



Wizard - Middle range direct damage.

Priest - Middle range healing, long range direct damage.

Summoner - The "magical artillery" of the sim.,

Time Mage - Manipulation of the spacetime continuum because this dude is high as a goddamn kite.

Oracle - Status effects, a really lethal stick, and maybe a dot or two.


5 MOJs/POJs and 6 HOJs. Totally doable.

[kablizzy]

Okay, so. As I said in the Calculator thread, we can't be 100% mechanical on these, but here's the class themes as I see them -

Squire -

• Squire, to me, is all about the support. There's really no POJ support job, so I think Squire would be a great candidate to fill that role. The other theme is weaponry and arsenal; They were meant to carry the load for the group, and make sure everyone is equipped right.
• Mechanically, it makes sense that Squires were weaker than everyone else - after all, they were just Knights-in-training. But in my eyes, if we extrapolate that concept to its natural high-fantasy conclusion, you're looking at a self-buffing class that can turn into a steamroller over time. Focus on things like Yell and Accumulate, First Aid, and equip change. Also has the potential to be a potion runner, and keep the party standing.
• Primary role: Support.
• Secondary roles: Decent DPS when swinging, and tons of weapons versatility.
• Lower growth than other classes, but able to make up for it in helping the party. He'd be squishier and do less damage, but with a lot more potential.

Knight -

• Honorable, Brave, and Just. More concerned about his party than himself. A martyr out for justice above all else.
• If I had to assign mechanics roles to him, it'd be Tank. I like the concept of Knight getting a ton of Bravery-based stuff as well. He's there to take the damage, so shielding himself and the party, damage mitigation when shielding the party, and a great Physical defense (Not necessarily P-EV).
• Secondary roles would be Single-Target Melee DPS, and possibly Rending.
• Knight should have a difficult time with Range, Multi-target AoE, and Status Effects.

Archer

• I see archers as not necessarily fast, but wily and agile. They can climb and snipe and play keep away in certain environments. They'd be able to use terrain to their advantage to keep their distance.
• Mechanics - wise, It'd be Single-Target Ranged DPS, and to a lesser extent, status effects.
• I'd imagine Archers would have a difficult time with Don't Move, single-target melee (Once they get to him), and stuff like Ninja.

Lancer

• Flavorfully, Lancers are all about jump. I view them fighting like Achilles in Tron, they just saunter around, and do wicked heroic things. They're kinda cavalry without the horses, highly mobile and highly deadly.
• Now here's where I run aground of mechanics issues - Lancers in my mind should be weaker than Knights, HP-wise, less speedy than Ninja, move-wise, and do less damage than some of the caster classes and Archer. But all of these things make sense mechanically. The Lancer seems to want to be Single-Target Short Range DPS.
• Flavor-theme, I'd like to keep them as close to traditional Final Fantasy Lancers / Dragoons as we can muster. Think Kain from FFIV.
• I don't see in my mind anything that they necessarily should be bad at, or have a weakness to. I think a big weakness should be that they can't do as much damage, don't have as many HP, and so on.

Samurai -

• Ancient, skilled warriors from a distant land, extremely skilled swordsmen with a soul for battle. Slow and deadly, they can unleash the souls of long-lost warriors.
• In FFT, these guys played a short-range AoE utility role. This was decent, but very one-dimensional. I liked the short-range AoE, but I feel like Samurai should be a bit more versatile. Jack-of-all-trades. I loved the Magic-Tank idea, and latched onto that quite readily. So, primary role: Magic-Tank.
• Secondary roles: Short-range AoE and some self-and party utility.
• Weaknesses: Well, again, I can't see anything that I could constitute as a weakness.

Monk

• In my opinion, the most versatile original FFT class - Bare-fisted and innately tough, a focus on utility and mediocre damage. This runs into the problem of classes stepping on other classes, as Lancer, Knight, Samurai, and Monk all have different flavor, but can all do pretty much the same thing. Knight can be the tough, full-tank with less damage and some party cover, Samurai, we've been able to turn into a Magic Tank, Lancer, we've turned into more of a DPS, but that doesn't leave much room for Monk. He does the same conceptual stuff that everyone else does. Only differences are flavor, but I definitely want all four in.
• Primary role - My idea is for high-quality damage reduction and self-healing. 
• Secondary roles - Self-healing and a ton of self-survivability.
• A few weaknesses of the class would be that he can't use other equip abilities - no equip hats, no equip swords, like he'd lose his effectiveness.

Thief

• Weak, but quick. Steal, steal, steal. They are a stealing class, and I'm still pondering the viability of thieving in the game, and thusfar, I've had little luck. I'm not concerned with economy imbalance or anything like that. I see him as a Scoundrel and a dirty fighter, and I love the concept of him being able to edit his own Brave down to deal more damage. Basically, the more of a scoundrel and cheap, dirty fighter he is, the better he becomes at it.
• This is yet another breakdown of concept. Thief does nothing that we actually want him to do, he steps on the toes of six other classes, but I want to keep him in. I think your ideas around Thief are decent, but even those step on the toes of other classes. So, honestly, I don't know what to do with this thing. All of the ideas I have, you guys would veto outright.

Geomancer

• Elemental attacker, could be conceptually what Mord was suggesting - A high-damage, charge-into-battle and release some Self-AoE elemental spam. I saw him as a short-range, small AoE Elemental / status hybrid, mostly like FFT. I didn't like how Geomancy worked, and that translated into quite a bit too much work. I'd like to see this as a large DPS class, with some stuff like Aero, Quake, and the like to shore up the short-range DPS role. Stuff like Quake could inflict Don't Move, Aero Don't Act, and so on.
• Yet another class that doesn't fit into an extreme role, Geomancers strike me as decent HP, decent DPS, Decent MA growth, Decent PA growth... Again, kind of a Jack-of-all-trades. One of the reasons why I threw them into the Hybrid tree.
• Some of the spells, like Quake, would be a bit larger AoE, but smaller damage, and the single-target ones would likely be more.
• Weak to long-range attackers, not able to wear heavy armor, and very low P-EV / M-EV.

Ninja

• The original glass cannon. Horrible HP growth, very high damage. Speedy and agile, and capable of dodging a ton, and hitting for a bunch. I see reaction abilities triggering off Dodge% (If you dodge an attack, counterattack), and doling out the harshness with two weapons. I also like the concept of hit-and-run, and a small ability to mitigate his opponent's movement / counterattack for survivability.
• Primary Role: DPS. 
• Secondary Role: Speed and MOJ hurt. I love the Mage Killer idea, as he should be more well-tuned to doing damage to weaker stuff.
• I would say low M-EV, or if he has a higher M-EV, low, low HP. As low as some of the MOJ classes. Ninja traditionally are some of the best characters in the game, and they should have that mitigated in a few ways. I like the thought that Ninja are countered by EV-reducing stuff, but that you have to catch them first.

Chemist / Alchemist

• Master of potions and mixtures, able to Bill Nye up all kinds of neat stuff. We had a neat concept in v1 and v2 for Chemist to start getting into compounds and !mix and all that, but it would need a lot of refinement.
• Primary Role: Support / Short-range single-target damage.
• Secondary Roles would be weird status effects, DoT / stacking of effects, diseases, poison, and some healing.
• Weaknesses: No P-EV / M-EV to speak of, low HP / MP / PA / MA growth. In fact, a true hybrid class if ever I saw one.

Wizard

• Huge, single target ranged elemental damage. Master of damage types and burning faces off.
• Primary role: Single Target ranged DPS. Still pondering on the CT thing, but instant seems decent.
• Secondary roles: a bit of dabbling into status effects, but nothing debilitating, per se. Just poison and maybe a bit of DoT.
• Any type of physical damage. Archers would give Black Magi a serious run for their money. Low, low HP growth and I'd go so far as to say, like, 5% max P-EV. I would like MP to be one of the regulating factors for MOJ classes, but this gives them either a lot of power, or makes them utterly useless.

Priest

• THE pre-eminent healing / caregiver class. This is the class that you want to watch out for
• Primary role: Support. Keeping your team alive. Probably instant-cast heals, as well as some HoT heals.
• Secondary roles: Buffs / conceptual giving your team more hardiness. Ways to mitigate some status effects and beef up your ranks.
• Weaknesses: Almost no P-EV to speak of, and no way to mitigate that. Slow and low damage.

Summoner

• In tune with the Espers and Eidolons, the Summoner can call on Guardian Spirits to assist in battle.
• Primary Role: Ranged AoE damage. Largest AoE in the game.
• Secondary Role: Select buffs and elemental damage types. High, high M-EV
• Weaknesses: Same as Wizard and Priest, they're squishy. These all need to be able to dole out the harshness to POJ classes, and be weak against other MOJ classes, so I'm pondering givng MOJs much, much higher relative M-EV. I think this is probably the biggest balancer in the game.

Oracle

• Mystical spellcasters, mostly focused on the heart and mind and carrying the ability to warp a character's ability to act. 
• Primary Role: Tapping into statuses to debilitate their foes. A lot of Don't Move and Don't Act and Frog and Toad and all of this. Primarily single-target, and chance-to-fail.
• Secondary Role: I would say damage-over-time would fit here pretty well as a secondary capacity.
• Should be weak, not much HP or MP growth to speak of, but the mitigation would come in the form of their debilitating status effects. If they get hit, they get hit hard.

Time Mage

• Master of Time and Speed, able to manipulate CT and time for a panoply of effects.
• Primary Role: Speed, speed, speed. They should have either the highest or second-highest speed, on par with Ninja, if not faster. Either that, or the ability to take a Support ability to raise speed.
• Secondary Role: Ranged Buff / Debuff all related to speed. Haste / Slow. I'd like to see them tag-team with DoT effects like poison to inflict more Poison damage (Speed up ticks for DoT effects). Perhaps a tertiary role of Damage over Time. Actually, the more I think of it, the more I like their damage to be DoT. Meteor is cool, but it never felt right as a Time Mage thing. There's a shitton of overlap in Time Magic and other disciplines, like Don't Act, Don't Move, Invisible, Float, Meteor, Gravity, Reflect, Regen (Regen actually does make sense, but we have to figure out whether we want it here or not), Mute, Berserk, Break, so I'd want to define and narrow this a bit.
• Weaknesses: I'm seeing Time Magi as having a difficult time dealing a lot of damage at once. I think the best (rather, coolest) concept is to give him nothing that can directly kill, but rather focus on DoT and manipulating that DoT stuff. I'd also like to see Time Magi as a bit more hardy, since they won't have as many straight-up debilitating effects like Oracle.

Calculator

• Calculators, as I see them, are a primarily support role. They can analyze the battlefield and affect combat elements - I see them as being able to manipulate numbers, whether that be the range of a spell, the amount of damage dealt, and so on. I'd like to see him with the ability to manipulate strengths / weaknesses (Elemental and otherwise) and study the battlefield to find gaps and weaknesses. Based upon study and Lore, uses knowledge to gain advantages and remove buffs / edit HP / MP maximums in combat.
• Primary Role: Support, damage mitigation, and 
• Secondary Roles: Mid-range DPS and high survivability for an MOJ class. Highest P-EV and M-EV of the MOJ classes.
• Weak against Ninja, and the inability to do large amounts of damage at a time. He'd be extremely susceptible to auto-hit effects and status effects.

Bard

• Short-range self-AoE, kind of akin to old Samurai. The power of song to inflict statuses in a short-range capacity.
• Primary Role: Support / Buffs / Debuffs.
• Secondary Role: Short-ranged DPS / Healing High M-EV?
• Dunno what weaknesses Bard would have. Weak against Long-range (Archer and Mediator)?

Dancer

• I see Dancer very much filling the same role as Mog from FF6. 
• Primary Role: Mid-range utility / DPS.
• Seondary Role: Debuffs? Dunno. This is the only class along with Bard that I have a hard time envisioning, but I haven't worked on either yet. High P-EV?
• Again, not 100% on weaknesses.

Mediator

• A communicator and a conniver, uses his speech to entrance and mystify and convince.
• Primary Role: Medium ranged, single-target Debuffs.
• Secondary Role: Long-range Physical DPS (Via guns)
  
• Weaknesses: Uhhh. No idea. Hybrid classes are hard to quantify as far as weaknesses go.

Red Mage

• The ultimate utility class - a little bit of everything.
• Primary Role: Utility. The Red Mage is ready for anything.
• Support Role: More utility. Can perform a wide array of roles.
• Weaknesses: Not going to be as good at damage or tanking or healing or support or buffs as any other class, but has the ability to fill those unique roles in a secondary capacity when needed.

Blue Mage

• Monster Lore magician; Doesn't need to learn, just mimics. Think Lore from FF6. As opposed to Summoner, the Blue Mage focuses more on mundane critters and their behaviours.
• Primary Role: Mid-range single-target DPS.
• Support / Utility, and some limited heals.
• Weaknesses: Low M-EV? Low P-EV? I dunno.

I was a bit rushed on the last few, but these are my base concepts. I'll expound later when I have a moment.