not gonna quote Theytak, too long. I agree with most everything you said, EXCEPT the part about pup being designed with the 6-man party playstyle in mind. I think the vision from the get go was as another soloer job, using a different mechanism than bst. It was just poorly executed which is why we are only overcoming-to an extent-"lolpup" after all these years.

But you hit the nail on the head about the long memory of 1st impressions. To this day there are people still trying to claim an XP reduction if a beast has a pet. Seriously, that hasn't been the case since what, 2004 or so? So yeah, lolpup still exists in some people's minds. Drg, smn, same issues, their flaws are still in the forefront of players minds (if you want to call them that). the obvious example, any pet job's damage output, most can't seem to grasp that you have to add the pet's output to the player's output to figure out actual DPS-and that you are doing that for the non-pet jobs in any calculation, the difference is the value of their pet damage is 0, ours is not.

The other player issue is the one track mind. You know, the "official" strategy people. Yes, strategy x has been shown to work. Problem is, y-n also work, but noone will do them because they aren't x. And noone will try to make o-w work, even though they may very well work with a bit of fine-tuning. That's how jobs just die in this game. Example, could paladin tank in Aby? yeah-if the other players didn't try to break records on every swing/cast. But they did, so Zerg killed pld. That's why as much as I love my new rune I was kind of sorry to see it introduced-what's the use of a new tank when all content is Zerg Uber Alles? So yeah, it's levelled and I'm going to keep playing it because I like the style, but I'm resigned to its primary use being to solo beastman/mob mage types, and the few occasions I can talk my friends into letting me play something besides thf or brd.