Effort to reward ratio for job point categories

[Ramzi]

Dev team,
Please consider looking into some of the modifications we are currently seeing in the job points system. I bring to your attention THF. You have a category for steal cooldown time. Steal is a 5 min ability = 300 seconds. Your JP category reduces this by 2 seconds. 2/300 is nothing. It's insignificant. Even if you grinded many many many hours your total reduction is 20 seconds assuming each level is 2 seconds.

To put things in perspective, increasing this category once only makes your steal ability recharge .066% faster. Dumping all 10 levels of JP into it gives you 6% faster recharge on your steal ability- which could be argued is pretty damn useless as it is.

My point is, with the amount of effort it takes to get just one single JP (not to mention the effort to increase categories beyond that with the scaling system) the rewards are a complete joke. No one will even bother. I got a JP on my thf while farming in Marjami, and I didn't even know what to apply it to. They all suck so bad, so I put it in SA effect, so 1% more DEX is taken into consideration. Wow, so what will that do for my SA damage? 1-2 more?

Please please have another look at this system because it's flawed beyond belief. Blue Mage has the only category worth investing in.

[Aeron]

I completely agree with the OP. I know you guys have said that you aren't going to use the job point system to balance out jobs, but why not? All of the jp values need to be increase significantly. Imo the job point system is a perfect opportunity to make much needed balancing adjustments so what if it requires work on the part of the player to fix something that you guys should have fixed in the first place. At this point any system that allows the player more control over the functionality of a job is welcome in my eyes. That being said I know there are some that view job points as something that should not be required to play a certain job. Not having job points a requirement to perform in PUGs in a very valid view point because it puts at the moment a very grindy objective on the shoulders of casual players to be able to perform at a normal level in content. Being as someone that only really focuses on one job that being pld my point of view on the matter is a little biased ill admit, but really ever since they came out with these merit fights every end game even that's worth anything has become a grind.

sorry wall of text
tldr: I agree with op. fix the job point system because the effort to reward ratio sucks.

[Afania]

I completely agree with the OP. I know you guys have said that you aren't going to use the job point system to balance out jobs, but why not? All of the jp values need to be increase significantly. Imo the job point system is a perfect opportunity to make much needed balancing adjustments so what if it requires work on the part of the player to fix something that you guys should have fixed in the first place. At this point any system that allows the player more control over the functionality of a job is welcome in my eyes. That being said I know there are some that view job points as something that should not be required to play a certain job. Not having job points a requirement to perform in PUGs in a very valid view point because it puts at the moment a very grindy objective on the shoulders of casual players to be able to perform at a normal level in content. Being as someone that only really focuses on one job that being pld my point of view on the matter is a little biased ill admit, but really ever since they came out with these merit fights every end game even that's worth anything has become a grind.

sorry wall of text
tldr: I agree with op. fix the job point system because the effort to reward ratio sucks.

The reward:effort issue is the game content balance issue.

If the job point system is fixed to worth 100hr of grind, then the entire game content would need rebalance as well, thus forcing everyone to grind JP to cap.

[Aeron]

The reward:effort issue is the game content balance issue.

If the job point system is fixed to worth 100hr of grind, then the entire game content would need rebalance as well, thus forcing everyone to grind JP to cap.

I get what your saying and I agree with it on one hand while on the other hand to me at least it would be justifiable in the sense that if the rewards actually did end up balancing the jobs they would be worth it to me at least. I know other players wouldn't see it this way. I'd like to see some middle ground on this issue because right now job points being a mechanic that ppl that have everything else done for a job can do to get the little extras is a very short sighted concept and can be vastly expanded upon.

I do however get what you're saying where they would end up being if not a quasi requirement a full fledged one for ppl to play a particular job. Though merits are kind of along the same lines where some are good and some are just horrible and when making a party at least in my experience you never see ppl shout for x job with x merits you know what I mean? So this idea that job points would be implemented to restrict players to join shouts is a little paranoid, though it would really depend on how much the job points in question effected the performance of said job.

[Selindrile]

Blu has 2 categories (1 until they patch Learning Chance into Macc) worth investing into, the only one that actually feels rewarding effort/reward wise is Point Bonus. And guess what, as much as I'm loving the Blu love lately, I still never get to go Blu to any endgame other than Bee and Shark. Technically Bst has the best Job Points IMO, but nobody's seen a Bst play this game in years.

There are a few other Job Points on a few jobs that actually feel at least kinda worthwhile, like the Macc ones, some of the Accuracy ones, etc..... but there are plenty of absolute duds, and plenty of jobs that get absolutely nothing that feels worthy of putting a point into: Thf, Pld, etc.

[Ulth]

What I have been doing to determine good job point abilities and bad ones is instead of thinking about how long it would take to max them out, instead think about how I would feel if I did have them maxed out. If I am remembering correctly they plan on raising the caps to 30, so that's what I base my judgement off of.

Some of them are actually pretty good for thf, like the sneak attack and trick attack ones. 30% of my dex is like +90 extra base damage for weaponskills stacked with sneak attack. That is hardly something to sneeze at. Other ones like the Larceny extension isn't half bad. 75 seconds of one hundred fists sounds great to me.

Mug needs some work, I think if the bonus from the relic head actually increased the amount drained that would be all you needed. Steal at 30 would be a 4 minute cool down and that's pretty much nothing. Would be better if it was 3-4 seconds off per point.

Then there is the worst. +3 magic evasion per point when using perfect dodge. Sure at 30 points that +90 magic evasion, but it's for 45 seconds once an hour. Basically the added effect of the hour ability is about the same as remembering to wear some pants. It would need to be like +3 magic evasion, +3 status resistance, and +3 magic def to warrant using it to protect from magic, so the only use is to still use it to avoid attacks.

[Afania]

Blu has 2 categories (1 until they patch Learning Chance into Macc) worth investing into, the only one that actually feels rewarding effort/reward wise is Point Bonus. And guess what, as much as I'm loving the Blu love lately, I still never get to go Blu to any endgame other than Bee and Shark. Technically Bst has the best Job Points IMO, but nobody's seen a Bst play this game in years.

There are a few other Job Points on a few jobs that actually feel at least kinda worthwhile, like the Macc ones, some of the Accuracy ones, etc..... but there are plenty of absolute duds, and plenty of jobs that get absolutely nothing that feels worthy of putting a point into: Thf, Pld, etc.

What I have been doing to determine good job point abilities and bad ones is instead of thinking about how long it would take to max them out, instead think about how I would feel if I did have them maxed out. If I am remembering correctly they plan on raising the caps to 30, so that's what I base my judgement off of.

Some of them are actually pretty good for thf, like the sneak attack and trick attack ones. 30% of my dex is like +90 extra base damage for weaponskills stacked with sneak attack. That is hardly something to sneeze at. Other ones like the Larceny extension isn't half bad. 75 seconds of one hundred fists sounds great to me.

Mug needs some work, I think if the bonus from the relic head actually increased the amount drained that would be all you needed. Steal at 30 would be a 4 minute cool down and that's pretty much nothing. Would be better if it was 3-4 seconds off per point.

Then there is the worst. +3 magic evasion per point when using perfect dodge. Sure at 30 points that +90 magic evasion, but it's for 45 seconds once an hour. Basically the added effect of the hour ability is about the same as remembering to wear some pants. It would need to be like +3 magic evasion, +3 status resistance, and +3 magic def to warrant using it to protect from magic, so the only use is to still use it to avoid attacks.

Job point is certainly not as useless as ppl made it sound like. Ppl complained about long grind for little increase, but that's due to the fact that ppl are used to finishing 1 119 gear in 1hr of work. I mean, only BLU has 2 useful job point, seriously? I can name a lot more JP category that's BETTER than BLU's(IMO).

The reward/effort ratio isn't worse than 75 era, at that time +1% haste from hands cost millions and millions.

[Grekumah]

We plan on making it easier to earn job points in future version updates. You’ll be able to earn job points via the newest addition to battle content, Incursion, which is scheduled to be released in the next version update. However, as for the request regarding thief’s steal category, we do not have any plans to adjust it at the moment.

Also keep in mind what we have mentioned in the past that currently the maximum amount of points you can place into a category is 10; however, in the future we are planning to make it so you can place up to 30 points, which will enhance jobs even further.

[detlef]

Also keep in mind what we have mentioned in the past that currently the maximum amount of points you can place into a category is 10; however, in the future we are planning to make it so you can place up to 30 points, which will enhance jobs even further.

Are the upgrades going to keep increasing in cost to the point where the final upgrade costs 30 job points? That would be bananas.

[Xsilver]

Probably, which is why we can hold 200. Also "Merit Point"-style mentality parties are not really sticking when it comes to job points. They probably thought people would be excited to go back to a 'grind' in a 6person party, like pre-abyssea days to gain Merits/Job Points again. The thing is you'll party for hours and get maybe 4-5 job points which can upgrade one ability by like 1%, at least merit points gave more potent bonuses. Job points are a lot more subtle and take much, much longer to gain, a little too long. CP should be doubled all around as the CP gained during the 2x CP Campaigns feels much more appropriate, can gain 10-15 Job Points in a few hours and it feels so rewarding compared to maybe 1 job point per hour(especially when upgrades in the future, when the cap is raised, will start to cost 20-30 job points to upgrade to the next level...)