Job Adjustments for the Next Version Update

[Darkdragongers]

what about Corsair new rolls a Rune Fencer's roll and Geomancer's Roll?

[RAIST]

if they do go forward with grips for avatars...please, please, please do NOT bind them to elemental affinity like you did with the elemental grips. ONE grip that affects ALL avatars please....not 8 @#$@#$ grips that have to be swapped to match the pet's affinity.

Just the same though, like others here, I think the focus should still be on directly adjusting the pets FIRST. Adding gears to tweak them further could be a SECOND option--but only work on and add those AFTER fixing the pets native attributes first (or at least have player stats influence them somehow...be that a factor of skill or something like INT--however it's done, they need innate tweaks first and foremost).

[Alhanelem]

if you couldn't read the long posts on the first page... really, pets just need to be innately better at higher levels rather than compensating for their inferiority with macro gear. At low levels, pet jobs are very strong in general but as you reach the new levels the master very quickly outstrips the pet in power- and this is true of all pet jobs, including SMN. the pet should be able to keep up to some degree without having to use special gear.

At a bare minimum, if SE intends to solve this problem with gear, said gear needs to include stats for the master as well, otherwise it wont be worth using because you're just trading your power for the pet's power, and not getting stronger as a whole.

[Glamdring]

I didn't see anything in there to address pet's current hate issues. seriously, we REALLY need that fixed. I can't-well won't-gear to melee with my pet at SoA levels without a fix to my pet being able to hold hate on bst. The damage output needs to be fixed as well. Throughout the decade I've mained beast my pet has been able to consistently "tank" unless I geared myself "balls to the wall" to outdamage it, just not the case now. And I don't think gear is the way to address it. A 99 jug should hit as well as a 99 natural critter, they don't. I mean seriously, there are only 2 reasons to use a jug when you can charm that are non-situational: a. to use a pet with a certain trait when not available from the ambient pets and b. to control it's use of TP abilities. Just giving us new jugs doesn't solve those issues when the pet is still going to be understrength.

[Quetzacoatl]

what about Corsair new rolls a Rune Fencer's roll and Geomancer's Roll?

Rune Fencer's roll I would predict to be Magic Evasion Bonus (makes sense right?), and Geomancer's Roll...either probably Magic Crit Hit Bonus or Elemental Celerity+%

[Kristal]

Puppetmaster
Addition of animators that have stats to increase the parameters of automatons.

Such animators would have to compete with the (literal) godslayer of animators: the Alternator. Unless they are meant for lower levels, any new animators would have grant stats not found on the Alternator and with sufficient power.
Equipment for the Sub and Ammo slots might be a better suggestion. Grips that only work with H2H, or new kinds of oils to use with the Repair ability. Or perhaps even a non-consumable type of Animator Ammo that grants automaton stats as long as it's equipped.

[Chimerawizard]

I didn't see anything in there to address pet's current hate issues. seriously, we REALLY need that fixed. I can't-well won't-gear to melee with my pet at SoA levels without a fix to my pet being able to hold hate on bst. The damage output needs to be fixed as well. Throughout the decade I've mained beast my pet has been able to consistently "tank" unless I geared myself "balls to the wall" to outdamage it, just not the case now. And I don't think gear is the way to address it. A 99 jug should hit as well as a 99 natural critter, they don't. I mean seriously, there are only 2 reasons to use a jug when you can charm that are non-situational: a. to use a pet with a certain trait when not available from the ambient pets and b. to control it's use of TP abilities. Just giving us new jugs doesn't solve those issues when the pet is still going to be understrength.

That has always been the case for me. Either wait 15-20 seconds before I start to fight & do NOT weapon skill til I know said WS will kill it, or plan on tanking most of the fight. Was true at level 30-75: abyssea with jug pets after that. Yay snarl!

I fear this method of 'fixing' pet jobs for the same reason as all other posts...pets need to scale in some way with master's stats. Why does summoner from the get go have gear with lots of int and mind and lots of chr down?...getting off topic

Theytak's post x1,000,000!

EDIT: What is the formula that will govern magic damage from here on out? Be as detailed as possible.

[Umisame]

Camate,
1- Could you give us more info about grips for summoner?
2- Is SE working to fix summoner job or only grips?
3- When will we get new avatars and new special JA?

[Theytak]

Ok, I think the best way to do this is to get people who truly understand the core mechanics of the pet jobs to explain to the devs slowly and clearly what is wrong with said job, and how best to fix it. Thus, I have no place to speak for bst, smn, or drg, but pup? I live and breathe pup. That said, I can tell you right now that "we'll give you new gear that fixes it" is not the correct answer for any of the pet jobs.

So, as an example, let's look at pup.

Pup has come a long way from the completely unfinished job it was when it was released. It's strong in various areas, and in certain respects, it does have advantages over the other jobs. However, these advantages rarely ever come into play, because of the content the dev team has decided to focus on. Essentially, pup has four major problem areas: the devs, the other players, job abilities, and the automaton. Please note that equipment is not included. Our equipment issues are relatively minor these days, so they're not worth talking about atm.

Basically, what it works out to is that the dev team's understanding of what they think pup should be, what the players want pup to be , and what pup actually is are three very different things.

Now, let's look at these major problems in detail.

The Devs:

It's pretty clear from the way the puppet is designed, as well as pup's gear selection, that the devs seemed to intend for it to be a sort of hybrid job that can adjust to fill different party roles as the situation demands. Need someone to melee? Pup can melee. Need some magic damage? Pup can nuke. Need someone to heal the party? Pup can do that too. Pup is incredibly self-sufficient in design, and that has allowed it to become the soloing powerhouse it is today, but there is a major issue here:

Pup, by design, cannot fulfill any of the roles it's designed for as well as the other jobs focused on those roles. At a basic level, that makes sense, because if pup could nuke as well as a blm, melee as well as a mnk, and heal as well as whm, it would be incredibly OP. However, the issue is the scale of the difference.

To play any of pup's potential roles well, the player needs to be a lot more intelligent and aware of the job and its mechanics than other jobs, and even if they manage to achieve the best the job can hope for in a given role, it's not even remotely as helpful as another job designed solely for that role.

Basically, pup was designed with intentional limiters to keep it from overshadowing the jobs it can mimic, which is absolutely fine, but these limiters are far, far too effective, and thus leave pup as "Not even worth considering" in the eyes of most players. This leads in to our next issue.

The Other Players:

The fundamental flaw with SE's "Give the players a half finished job and see what they use it for" is that the players never forget that job's half-finished state, and it becomes stuck with that stigma for years. Pup, Dnc, Sch, and for a long time Blu and Cor all suffered from this, and though things have eased up some for blus and cors, pups, dncs, and schs are still feeiling the effects of ther initial horrible releases.

On top of that, SE still doesn't seem to grasp their players. Almost all FFXI players min/max to a noticeable degree, and they do so religiously, even if they don't realize it. If a job combination has been deemed useless by the playerbase, that job combination is not done, end of story. Anyone that does it, is laughed at and excluded. If one method of play is more efficient than another, the less efficient of the two falls out of favor and is left to rot by the players. SE doesn't get this.

Pup was designed to function in an old style of play, specifically the 6-man exp parties and lowman events where not having a certain role filled could completely screw you over. However, the very expansion that introduced pup also hammered the final nail in that play style's coffin, and buried it in favor of DDx4+BRD+healer steamrolling through everything, which favored efficiency, and the better a DD performed, the more likely they were to succeed. Pup does not shine in such events...

...yet that's the sort of event that all endgame has effectively become. Every new endgame event released quickly devolves into some variation of the same old "Buff the DDs to all hell and just let them murder the thing before it murders us." tactic, because SE refuses to, or simply can't, design events where such a tactic will result in failure absolutely 100% of the time. Because of this, how well a job performs in this one particular scenario is the only measure by which the players use to gauge a jobs worth anymore. Why is it that pup can't perform well in these scenarios? Well, that leads us to our other two issues.

The Job Abilities:

The single most universal trait of these Heavy-DD-Zerg events is that they emphasize Haste, or rather, melee delay reduction. The more haste you have, the more damage you deal, and the faster the NM dies. The longer this takes, the more the damage adds up, and thus, the more apparent the difference in potential damage output pup has relative to other melee DDs becomes readily apparent.

The core issue is a game function the players refer to as Job ability delay. This is the short 2-second period of time following the use of any job ability during which melee attacks are delayed. At first, 2 seconds doesn't seem like it should even be worth thinking about, but that's the fatal issue. 2 seconds when you're in a high-haste environment is a HUGE amount of time.

Player weapon delay is floored at 20% of it's original delay. This includes delay reductions from both haste itself, and from job traits like martial arts and dual wield. Delay translates into ~1 second between attacks for every 60 delay. Thus, if we take a standard pup h2h weapon (+51) and tack it on to the base h2h delay (480), we get a delay of 531, or one attack round every ~8.85 seconds. Now, of course, pup has martial arts, which significantly lowers their base delay (320 at 99), so that would actually be 371 delay, or one attack round every ~6.18 seconds. In this situation, JA delay is basically a non-issue.

However, when you get down to high-haste delays, the problem appears. With a +51 delay weapon, pup's delay cannot go lower than 106, but reaching that 106 delay is incredibly common in a high buff situation (Dual March, Haste spell, capped gear haste, and merited haste samba will do it for pup, due to the delay already reduced from martial arts). At 106 delay, we're looking at one attack round every 1.76 seconds.

This means that each time you use a job ability (in pup's case, the issue is caused by our need to use maneuvers every ~20 seconds if we want to maintain three of them at all times), you lose ~1.5-2 attack rounds, depending on timing. For pup, that number is doubled due to always attacking at least twice per round, and then further increased through the use of double attack, triple attack, quadruple attack, and kick attacks. Every attack you lose is TP you don't get, and with a low quality gear set, you're looking at losing about 1 WS every minute from using 3 maneuvers. This equates out to anywhere from 1000 to 4000 damage (depending on what you're fighting) every minute that you lose simply by using maneuvers, and that doesn't even account for the already large difference born solely from pup's lower stats, higher base delay, and higher gear quality requirements to achieve the same results.

Because of that, just the use of three maneuvers every minute ends up completely removing any value pup could add to the group as a melee damage dealer. However, the other roles it can play suffer just as badly for similar reasons. I would also like to emphasize that even if you gave pup's maneuvers a 2 hour duration, pup would still be behind other melees, but it would not be so drastic a gap. However, maneuvers are hardly our biggest issue. They're a significant one, don't get me wrong, but the core issue stems from the reason we need to use them.

The Automaton:

So, at the end of it all, our single great issue is the puppet itself. However, unlike the other issues, the automaton has several problems. Now, I don't mean to sound ungrateful. The automaton has come a long way from its initial stages, but it still isn't where it needs to be. For the puppet, the major issues are as follows: Stats, survivability, and most importantly AI & player control.

As far as stats go, you've definitely done some major improvements with the new delve animator, Alternator, and the be perfectly honest, I don't have a huge issue with animators being the fix for this particular issue. However, you should really at least allow us to equip non-throwable ammo items alongside the animator. It's really obnoxious that we can't, despite how you keep giving us ammo items with nice stats.

With survivability, the fundamental issue is that the devs seem to think the only puppet that should be at all durable is Valoredge. Valoredge is incredibly durable, but it can't hold a candle to Sharpshot in terms of damage, and using valoredge instead is basically like coming to a gun fight with a pair of underwear tied to a stick as your weapon. Either Valoredge needs some serious melee buffing, or sharpshot needs some serious defensive love.

Now, the main issue here is the AI, and the needlessly clunky player interface. Can you please explain to me why I have less fine control over my professionally built, artificially intelligent, programmable robot sidekick than a bst does over some wild animal they lured in with some yummy smelling broth, or smn has over a bemused god/dess that is lending the player their power for shits and giggles? I mean, sure, we have more control over our puppet than drgs do over their wyverns, but is that really the way it should be?

Bloodpacts as a system have not aged well at all, and neither did sic, which is why both of them have gotten updates and overhauls. On the other hand, I'm still forced to use maneuvers to suggest to my puppet what I want it to do, and even then, if I'm not careful, the puppet may just ignore me and do something else, and I have no way of specifying "I'm about to die! CURE ME NOW!" or "WS RIGHT NOW!", while both smn and bst, and even drg, CAN. The job that, logically, should have the most control over their pet, has the least.

What's worse, the "suggestion" system is clunky and forces us to choose between things we shouldn't have to choose between. If I want my puppet to use a particular ws, I have to make sure that ws's triggering maneuver is active, and for many of the ws, that means sacrificing the effectiveness of attachments linked to other maneuvers. There is absolutely no reason pup should not just be given our pets' WS as a pet command, and giving that to us would not make anything unbalanced in anyway.

It's not limited to WS, though. Spells suffer a lot, too. I should need to use an attachment for my puppet to know that a mob that doesn't cast any spells doesn't need to be silenced or addled. The puppet should just know that. I shouldn't need to use a maneuver for soulsoother to do a whm's job and prioritize cures and keeping people alive over status removal and enfeebling, and I shouldn't need a maneuver for it to be able to cast on party members. In fact, it shouldn't be unable to cast regen unless the monster engaged is DC+, given that regen is far more valuable to a pup against weaker monsters anyway, and it shouldn't cast buffs solely on whoever has hate, because that's a convoluted system. I shouldn't need to constantly deactivate spiritreaver to keep it from wasting precious casting time spamming aspir or drain when I don't want it to cast aspir or drain, and neither aspir nor drain should EVER take priority over nukes, especially when I have 3 Ice maneuvers up.

I should be able to tell stormwaker not to nuke at all without needing maneuvers; If I want it to focus on buffing me and keeping me alive, and save its MP solely for that, I shouldn't have to constantly deploy and retrieve it to do this, otherwise I'm forced to watch as the puppet burns 70% of its MP on nukes I didn't want it to cast but had no practical way to prevent.

For that matter, my puppet should not stop casting beneficial spells if the target it's deployed on dies. For nukes, sure, but if the target of the spell is a player, why would losing a the monster target suddenly interrupt casting?

Of course, aside from all this, there's also the fundamental issue that buffs do not apply to pets, which is absolutely absurd in many cases. Why can't pets benefit from sambas? That wouldn't unbalance anything. Why can't pets benefit from Geo's buffs even if they're standing in the right spot? Why should I, as a player, be forced to choose buffs for my puppet over buffs for myself if I'm getting buffs from a corsair, when it's obvious that the answer is "buff the players because pets suck." What is so wrong about giving pets access to buffs?

How to Fix it:

I don't know how you can fix the issues that stem from the dev team not understanding the job, or the players opinion of it, but I can tell you how to fix the issues with the puppet and with job abilities.

To fix abilities, it's simple. Make maneuvers last significantly longer than they do. You don't need to change anything about attachments that consume maneuvers, but aside from those, maneuvers should be treated as a sort of gambit/tactic system. "We're focusing on this method of play for the time being." This makes them a lot easier to use, and also makes overloading a bit more logical (repeatedly changing ones commands leading to the puppet becoming confused and overloading). Even if you significantly increased the frequency with which overloads occur.

I think the easiest method for this would be to simply introduce a second set of maneuvers, that function the same way as the original ones do relative to most attachments, but have much longer durations (and individual recasts), but are more likely to cause overload if used in succession, cannot be consumed by attachments, and still count towards the 3 maneuver cap. If you wanted to be a bit more forgiving, you could make these double-element maneuvers (a la the tier 2 skill chains; fire/light, wind/thunder, water/ice, earth/darkness).

As far as the AI goes, there are two basic things we need. First, better control over pet WS, through a pet command that allows us to choose a specific ws, or, hell, maybe an option in the automaton's menu that lets us pick its default WS.

Secondly, a lot of the issues with the AI can be cleaned up through one or two simple pet commands. Specifically, we need a means to force our puppet to stay in one place (the current ranging AI is unreliable), a "Stay" analogue, if you will, and we need a means to force the puppet to cast only defensive/supporting spells. Ideally, the latter could be used to, effectively, "deploy" our puppet on a player, rather than a monster, on whom the puppet would focus their attention.

Thus, we could have our puppet "deployed" on our tank, and the puppet would focus on curing and buffing the tank, then the master, then the puppet itself, then everyone else. However, we could also switch the target at will, thus allowing us far better control over who our puppet casts on than having to rely on the individual pulling hate. Ideally, we'd also get some degree over which spells the puppet casts. ie: if we have a wind maneuver, it'll prioritize haste, but earth maneuvers prioritize stoneskin/phalanx, and water maneuvers prioritize status removal. However, in such a system, stormwaker should still only be able to cast phalanx/stoneskin on a single target (ie: if stormwaker is deployed at another player, the puppet won't cast on the master at all), while soulsoother should always prioritize cures, no matter what maneuver is active.

Wow, this post was a lot longer than I really intended it to be...

[Motenten]

I would suggest grips for drg wyverns, rather than weapons. That could be useful without (potentially) crippling the main job just to boost the little bit of wyvern damage. There's not anything particularly 'wrong' with wyverns right now (except maybe magic accuracy for breaths), so that should allow a sufficient amount of flexibility.

Pup animators: This should have been done years ago. Unfortunately, now, no matter what you add, it will only be compared to the Alternator. Still, if they're relatively easy to get, it could allow some nice low- to mid-range options. Also: increase the duration of maneuvers.

Smn avatars: As said above, avatars and how they work need a ground-up rethink. There is way too much wrong with the job right now, and any new gear additions would only lock things in further. Fix the job first, then add new gear.