pup maybe you will see how upset we are now

[Ineedmoney]

Understanding Puppetmaster Development
So, I’m confused.

I suppose that is the least I can say. Puppetmaster has not been the most welcomed job to any event, ever, unless it was mistakenly so (automaton did not aggro monsters when deactivated, etc.) It does not proc weakness well enough with any of its weapons compared to other jobs in Abyssea, people often whine about how much TP it feeds monsters when both the player and automaton are attacking, it’s still considered LOL by many people (though mistakenly, but it hardly matters if most people feel that way unless all you spend your time doing is soloing or playing with a tiny group in rare situations), etc.

Doing a search for PUPs on any server will reveal what everyone already knows: generally, less than one percent of the players on at a given time are PUPs. Currently on Asura, 19 of the 2050 people online are playing on their PUP. A few other jobs have similar problems (Scholar and Corsair come to mind), but the fact is clear: people do not play PUP in any great numbers.

Herein lies my confusion. Why did Square-Enix think it was necessary to nerf Burattinaios to the ground such that it is now worthless compared to just about any other weapon given the circumstances above? The ONLY thing it is useful for with 1 TP/tick is equipping when you’ve first entered a zone and are running to where the fighting will take place, and even then, you’ll probably end up with a whopping 50ish TP. You can’t switch into it between fights unless you want to lose the master’s TP and, quite frankly, the master’s WS are better than the automatons, so that would be ill advised.

Was having less than 1% of the population be slightly overpowered (and that is arguable) really that big of a deal? I mean, we’ve seen notes from the developers/forum moderators saying other updates “take too much time” or “we don’t have the resources,” yet they had time, desire and resources to change a value that hardly mattered to anyone. Did they really want to make a job that is already much maligned and/or misunderstood that much worse so that, what, even more people wouldn’t want to play it, or even fewer would want to take it with them to events? It boggles my mind.

The problem is further exacerbated by the quality of the new items we have received. The Heat Capacitor is next to worthless because it scrapes off the fire maneuvers that an automaton uses to actually deal decent damage with a weapon skill and, unless you’re one of the lucky people to have an item that suppresses overload, essentially ensures that you’ll have to spam water maneuvers with a Condenser to keep them up for the Heat Capacitor and the Flame Holder to activate, and water maneuvers aren’t all that exciting to use on a melee puppet. In addition, it makes it virtually impossible to keep a fire maneuver up to buff Tension Springs and increase periodic damage.

The Galvanizer is a good idea in theory, but in practice, will see little use. The Valoredge actually has to be tanking to get a counter attack, but it does so little damage (the new WS doing a decent chunk, but nothing compared to Stringing Pummel or Victory Smite) that it rarely, if ever, gets enmity, even when it’s using the strobe. Nevermind that now, without Burattinaios, on anything that the master can’t already tank, it would just die anyway because it can’t use Cannibal Blade often enough to heal itself while tanking. You’re left with deciding whether you want to use the Coiler paired with a Galvanizer that will never be useful or a Dynamo, which might actually cause a little extra damage, or something else entirely. The choice is pretty clear.

The other two attachments are feh at best because the Soulsoother STILL doesn’t have its AI fixed to the point where you want to have it out consistently (and, frankly, a 10% MP cost reduction when it’s spamming Cure VI on you even when your hit points aren’t low (and you’re not enfeebled) isn’t going to do squat, and Spiritreaver isn’t exactly needing to have MP given that you can just deactivate it and refill your MP pool. The Barrage Turbine, on the other hand, is okay for damage, giving some power to an occasional shot (or give an extra big shot), but only works well when you have multiple wind maneuvers up (will do about 1k with one wind maneuver in Abyssea on something with low defense), risking overload, and that means that Armor Shatterer, when it finally goes off, will likely do so with little accuracy due to lack of wind/thunder maneuvers (if you're using more than one wind) and end up doing pathetic damage. In total, if your Barrage Turbine does 1000 and your Armor Shatterer does 900, you've essentially used Armor Piercer, except now your wind maneuver falls off and you lose the haste from Turbo Charger for a while. There’s no reason not to just use Armor Piercer; however, if you do that, since Barrage Turbine uses wind and wind procs AS, using the Turbine will just trade off damage instead of actually increasing it at all because you'll want that wind maneuver up to get Barrage to proc. Unless you keep timers from an outside source on your screen to know when the cooldown is up, you're not going to want to leave wind off (also, Turbo Charger), so that just makes Barrage Turbine annoying in that case.

And speaking of the two new weapon skills, why are they so weak? String Shredder does decent damage in Abyssea and can be coupled with Stringing Pummel for Darkness, which is nice, but it doesn’t seem to work with the inhibitor and is laughably terrible outside of Abyssea to the point where the stun from Bone Crusher makes BC better. Amror Shatterer just sucks outright because either it has an extremely low damage coefficient or it has horrible accuracy. There is absolutely no reason, as it stands, to use it over Armor Piercer unless it has some fantastically useful skillchain property (but it should be well known how often people actually perform skillchains) or severely reduces defense enough to make the 1k –ish difference in damage worthwhile (the defense down it inflicts seems to be at least somewhat potent, but probably doesn't make up for not using AP).

Puppetmaster isn’t a terrible job; I think most of the people on the PUP forums know that. But what drove SE to make these decisions? Were they worried that more people would actually WANT TO PLAY the job or that it might suddenly become popular to greater than one percent of people? Were they worried that a job, which is pretty much relegated to soloing, would actually be strong in that or that, Altana forbid, people would voluntarily bring someone who played it with them to an event instead of whining that they could come on a more useful job? It is getting REALLY tiring to want to play PUP but ending up spending most of my time on other jobs trying to get gear for PUP and then play it only when I’m soloing because other jobs simply fit the bill better. Even if you get lucky and you have friends who think it’s fine to go on PUP, it still sucks knowing that you’d be helping everyone more if you came to proc yellow on your BLM or something.

What was so damaging, to the game or other players, about Burats that SE had to nerf them so hard? Did it really affect the game? Why couldn’t they have told us with Tactical Processor does or fixed automaton AI along with the nerf? How much more effort could either of those things really have taken? And then why the priority on the Burat nerf? Why did the make the attachments so apparently unthinkingly? Why are the new weapon skills just not that great? What ever happened to making the Valoredge “tank like a flesh and blood Paladin?”

It would be really nice to actually hear from a developer regarding this, but, well, I suppose the less than one percent of the population wouldn’t warrant a response even if responding were something the developers were in the habit of doing.

Well, maybe something surprising will come out of the update, something that hasn't been considered but . . . well, history has not been kind in that regard.

[Mezzopiano]

Look, just being able to outfit your automaton like a BLM doesn't make you one.