Job balancing?

[Kensagaku]

Snipping this in pieces to address specific points.

Although I am excited to see SE finally looking at Hand-to-Hand users.... what they are considering is still just laughable. The issues with Hand-to-Hand users and mainly the job sets MNK/PUP/SAM/NIN totally lack any kind of Accuracy. To obtain the accuracy you have to sacrifice equipment bonus vital to the jobs to compete with other Melee, such as Blue Mage or Warrior etc, Like STP, Double Attack, Triple Attack, Dual Wield. But SE just said above they are working on that so we'll see...

That's not entirely true at all. Looking at MNK, NIN, and PUP, you can use Herculean gear with a good Acc augment and Triple Attack. SAM has Valorous for the same thing with Store TP. All but the body are T1 Reisenjima, so you can't argue accuracy issues here for gear, and until you get the bodies from T3s, you can use things like Rawhide for PUP and MNK (Still a middling chunk of accuracy, as well as a total of TA+4), certain AF job pieces (NIN RF2/+1 has acc, racc, and DW), and abjuration gear (like Ryou Domaru Path D for SAM; 27 Accuracy, 5 STP, 2 DA, -4% PDT or Adhemar body for the light armor jobs besides PUP with TA and DW along with Acc). All of these are entirely viable to include Accuracy AND the "vital equipment bonuses" that other jobs have. As a side note: even those jobs that have them natively have to give up most of their similar gear for accuracy. If I'm going to take my BLU to T3 Reisenjima (and I assure you, I'm not, because it'd still get slammed in a heartbeat), I'm going to be wearing nothing but pure accuracy gear, so unless something has incidental side stats on it like Herculean, I will only have the less-than-standard traits that I have set. Our DA and TA are lower than WAR and THF's respectively, and we can only set one, not both. Admittedly, the Accuracy Bonus we get gives us a notable advantage of about 70 extra acc (though at the cost of 6/20 spell slots and about 36% of our set points, reducing our utility spells considerably if we want to keep DW and STP), so I do get the point there, but I'm hoping with the upcoming changes as they listed above, this will become less necessary and allow other melee to close the gap.

Currently MNK already DPS's much slower due to having to equip for High end Accuracy (which btw if you want to obtain, cost so much gil in first place) that its not even worth inviting the job to take the place of a Melee that can run 20 circles around it before it can do 1. Also this Damage Boost to Auto-Attacks offers nothing... Monk can already push out decent auto-attack DPS as with other forgotten Melee Jobs, it's their Weapon Skills that hender them. When a decent geared Blue Mage can CDC on Average for 20k and spam that pretty much non stop, to the Best gear options available MNK/PUPs Weapon Skill avg of maybe 5~10k, and other Melee prolly around the same figure, becomes the problem. That may seem like a close gap, but most BLU's have a set standard to get into high lvl content, so averages for them are 30~50k CDC's all day every day, which just makes that Voodoo/Perfect Reisenjima Augmented MNK/Melee gear look like Sparks gear. Until all Melee jobs can perform at or very close to (with Support) to a Blue Mage no implement SE can do will ever make them relevant again.

This one is a bit more on base, and H2H Weaponskills definitely need an overhaul, something I've seen as I've played on my PUP and been working on JP. While I don't agree that BLUs are throwing 30-50k CDCs without the top of the top gear, extensive buffs bolstering them, and lower-level content going squish at a touch, BLU does have a consistently higher WS rate AND WS damage compared to most others thanks to a highly-modified WS that can crit, so I certainly agree that H2H WS need a buff to improve their viability. Increasing white damage is nice, but it won't do enough in the long run when a single bursted nuke does far more overall.

As for SE addressing the High End content and nerfing the AoE damage / Status Aliments will open the door to future Melee friendly content and helping players get into groups for Clears, that is still a long way off. Until SE truly balances the jobs evenly across the playing field there will still be no place for them even with a nerf to Monsters. The whole point of Escha/Reisenjima NMs is to kill them as efficiently and quickly as possible, before they kill you and even killing 1 sec quicker is the difference between possible wipe or win. This nerf just benefits currently play styles/groups only, doesn't help forgotten Melee all that much.
So for now, even with these notes we are only left with leveling WHM, BLU, PLD, BLM, SCH, GEO as the core jobs or SMN, RDM etc etc with situational... But no MNK/SAM/DRG/WAR/DRK/DNC/PUP (exception being R/E/M/A Users / Users with Hundreds of Millions of Gil to make it great) having any place.

That last little bit is where I'm going to make a point. Yes, it takes a lot of gil to really make a job great, but that's just how it functions. Your mages don't get good gear by just tossing together whatever gear they find, they're going to be buying and upgrading their own gear with the same "hundreds of millions of gil" that others do. HQ Amalric is a fantastic set for most nukers, as an example, in slots where you don't need Magic Burst Damage to cap. Not all of them ofc (head is more of an macc/buffing piece) but in general. With mages, you're working on maximizing your damage output while increasing your MP recovery, meaning you need good refresh sets to idle in, you need good macc to avoid your nukes resisting even on MBs (or a really good Geo-Languor, so they require buff help too), etc etc.

Spending gil to make a job great to include it in content is part of the norm, and it should completely be a reasonable benchmark to getting into endgame content. I'm not necessarily saying you have to have all HQ adjurations, etc and the like to be good, but you should still invest in some abjuration gear, good rings for WS damage, etc. You'd be surprised at how little you have to spend outside of abjuration gear, food, medicine, and augmentation items though; most of our equipment these days are ra/ex and directly dropped, rather than sold.

As it is, this next major update may definitely open the door for melee, especially if status ailments are toned back. Status ailments and accuracy are the two most crippling issues preventing melee, and both seem to be being toned back now. We'll have to see what happens.