kohlrak: In a party, the idea is the white mage keeps the tank alive while the mages do the real work and the tank bodies the damage. You see this played out really, really well in MMOs. In Final Fantasy tactics, i usually use tanks and 1 ranger and 1 or 2 mages (both which have white magic as secondary) for this very reason. It's very effective
dtgreene: That's if game balance favors tanking. In other words, it needs to be possible for a character to be a target of most of the attacks, for that character to be significantly harder to damage than the rest of the party, and for healing balance to favor single-target healing.
On the other hand, if the defense difference between builds isn't as big, and the healing balance favors multi-target healig, then you have a different situation. Assuming a high attrition game, the strategy then becomes one where you don't build a single tank, but rather one where it makes sense to rotate your party, so that when a character gets low on health, you move the character to safety and put a healthier character in their place. Then, once you run out of healthy characters, that's when you heal, as it is less taxing on your healing resources to wait until this point. (I'd actually like to see games that are balanced like this a bit more often; it's an interesting idea, and definitely different from the more common (in modern times) approach where one character just tanks all the damage.)
I've yet to see one that both works like this and allows this. Most are turn-based RPGs, and you can't swap party order mid-battle.
kohlrak: Tanking is pretty effective against a ranger and reasonably so. The idea is the tank will progress on the ranger who can't aim, do full pull, and keep distance at the same time. Eventually the tank will catch the ranger and it's game over for the ranger. Ranger is effectively the "tank magic damage instead" or "avoid." This goes back to how dex-class varies per game. Sometimes it's a ranger, sometimes it's a thief, etc. Either way, they focus on targeting one target and hopefully getting a high damage "snipe shot" in. Mages hit a number of targets or a single target while staying just out of range. Tank just progresses on the target like it doesn't even hurt. I think this gets ignored because rangers are becoming rarer encounters in games compared to before (or at least it seems that way).
Again, that depends on the game, and if the game has build variations, may depend on the build.
My Fuzzy Ranger in Ultima 3 could likely deal with a tanking enemy just by casting Mentar; if that doesn't kill the enemy, physical attacks will. Then again, maybe Ultima 3's mechanics are a bit too primitive for this to be a thing.
Around that time, there seemed to be no notion of balance.
kohlrak: A fully balanced character should not be viable. That doesn't mean you can't have balance, but if you're fully balancing all skills, you don't specialize in anything, and you're not taking on a real role: which defeats the whole purpose. But a good "red mage" would have some basic phyiscal armor, use white magic to become the tank that they are, pick one physical weapon to be good with, and some black magic for when hugging the enemy isn't a good idea. In particular, the red mage should have most difficulty with mobs of enemies, while being versatile against any solo boss, but they will still ultimately still employ the mage strategy (oddly enough, this is your Geralt or codevein mages).
I disagree. In developing a game, one should strive to have as many roles as possible be viable, and that includes fully-balanced characters. The strength of a balanced character, in games where such a thing is viable, is that they can fill whichever role is needed in a particular situation.
The problem is in doing so you make any specialized build OP outside of their weaknesses.
Also, white magic in the Final Fantasy series is generally not used for tanking, with FF1's RUSE/Blink spell being the only real exception. Even then, I note that, even though the spell is level 1, red mages can't actually learn that spell until after class change.
Usually it's designed so it's not viable for the white mage to do ll the tanking themselves, but to throw all the tankability onto the the warrior class (in the form of defensive buffs), but it's still the magic tank. You make up for armor with heals. Final Fantasy is one of the great violators since the tank class usually does the most (or near the most in cases of assassins and black belts) damage damage. I vaguely remember us discussing this about a year to a year and a half ago. Final fantasy does not balance the classes well.
kohlrak: You're too focused on variations of classes when we're having issues with companies struggling with basic class forms.
dtgreene: Except that the topic is about classes called "Ranger", not about classes that fill the role that a ranger fills. There's a difference here.
Your statement is correct, but it doesn't address anything you quoted. The fact remains you can make any class off normal that you want, but it seems pointless to do when we cn't even balance the standard mage and ranger classes in these games these days, which is the main complaint of the thread, just not as focused.
kohlrak: It needs to be worth saying that the human player countering their class weakness should be achieved by playing your class like the one that has advantage. For example, i've seen an excelent video where a human solos (well, aside from the mandatory AI guests that go down quickly) a difficult mission (the one that most people first loose in that game to realize how hard it can be) in Final Fantasy Tactics while underleveled using a ranger. His trick was to immediately deal with the Knights by playing his ranger like a mage, the rest he played normally.
Last I checked, Final Fantasy Tactics (the original that was first released for the PlayStation) has no Ranger class.
It did. They called it "archer" in particular. Available after leveling squire job once, along with the knight. And yes, he does specify he's not talking about Might and Magic's archer or Diablo's rogue. In other words, he think Might nd Magic and Diablo are the exceptions, and he's talking about dex classes in general. FFT does actually have this class, but it's an off-shoot of the tank class because of the way the stats work in tactics. Despite it's odd placeent in the tree, it does work as epected in the triangle.
The option to play a character as one of a different class in the right situation is the sort of thing that a balanced character should be able to excel at. Sure, the character might not be as good as a mage as a focused caster, but the character can still act like a mage in situations where other classes would be at a disadvantage, and that should count for something.
Perhaps i should've clarified this a bit better: i do think that's valid, but, as i said, it needs a good support. He should be an augment to the existing character filling the role he's going for, not the leader. Definitely should not be viable outside of the party.
(There's also the notion of synergy between different builds, as you might see in a game like Baldur's Gate 2 (evert multi-class in that game, including Cleric/Thief, has some synergy), or in some SaGa games, where an ability might depend on one stat, but raise another.)
Yes, this is where "team" comes in. Games that allow people to be two classes at once often have at least a team of 2 people, and the classes are fairly strict.
