Quote Originally Posted by Dale View Post
World of Warcraft if you want a more popular example. That game actually used to have class diversity and interesting and unique ways to play your class. But due to exactly this kind of mentality we are discussing I watched as that game was basically butchered and everything was nerfed and buffed to the point of boredom to appease these types of players.
I'm pretty sure WoW's classes changed so drastically more as an attempt to continually simplify the game than to keep everyone's DPS in line. FFXI doesn't require that sort of change. BST doesn't need to necessarily play differently. It simply needs more output. I'm not proposing that the pet be placed on auto-pilot or they do away with the need for pet aggro control and maintenance. Pets need to become uncapped, be un-neutered as far as abilities, and allowed to be buffed. Killer Instinct needs to become a buff that's more universally useful.

A perfect balance is never going to happen. Nor should it in my opinion. Imbalance is part of what makes the gameplay interesting and sets classes apart from each other to begin with.
I'm not asking for perfect. I'm not that stupid. But right now SE doesn't even care to try. This is still a group based game and if a job has nothing substantial to offer a group then what's even the point of it? I'm not even talking DPS at this point. There's literally nothing a BST can sell himself on to get into a group. Emergency tank isn't a selling point. You can blame player mentality all you want, but we can only work with what SE gives us. We can't take our lemons and make lemonade. No matter how hard we squeeze there's no juice to be had.

Of course no game is perfect, and improvements can always be made. And I'm not saying I wouldn't support improvements to the beastmaster. But these players who demand the most damage else they won't even group with you are just being completely unreasonable. And if you try to satisfy them, the game will suffer as a result. Because they will never be satisfied and they are always going to say certain jobs suck and not group with them no matter what SE does.

The game IS suffering now. Sure it's for a myriad of reasons, but I guarantee you that the lack of anything resembling class balance is one of them.