Job balancing?

[Urthdigger]

Don't get me wrong, most of the BLUs I see are usually just whacking stuff with swords, but I just dislike seeing so many of us all the time...there is just hardly any diversity now.

This right here hits the nail on the head for why I hate the current state of the game. I've had people say that I might just be salty that I can't participate unless I level up X or Y. Well... that's partly it, but leveling up a new job isn't hard. No, what grinds my gears is simply that for a game with 22 jobs, you only ever see 7 or 8 used. It's not fair to say it's like those jobs don't exist: It'd be better off if they actually didn't. Having this whole sea of choice open before you and finding out your options are actually extremely limited... it's heartbreaking. There's all these cool themes, lore, abilities, possible strategies present within these multitude of jobs.

As it is, unless you boot up the game and one of the True Jobs is the one that jumps out at you as the one that appeals to you, the game simply raises your hopes up only to dash them against the ground.

I've had people complain against me in the past for being rather harsh in telling newbies and returning players to give up on their dreams of leveling whatever job they mentioned. The way I see it, better they find out now and step into line early than to find out several months down the line.

[Stompa]

I think it is wrong to say to new players that they can't play the main job they love.

For most normal mid-range players, especially today with the smaller worlds, the amount of time they spend in serious LS events and serious hardcore battles, is actually quite a small percentage of their game time.

For most people, including myself, we spend a lot of time on mid-range content, farming, soloing, just playing with friends in low-man mid-range events.

For these activities, we can play our favourite jobs. If you love playing a certain job, the modern game offers you the possibility of playing this job >90% of the time, if you are happy playing mid-range content, farming RME, just having fun with friends. Only occasionally do I need to dust off my non-favourite jobs to fit into a serious event.

This is quite different to the old game, where I spent my life pretty much on WHM, had a Nobles Tunic in my inventory for about six years, even though WHM is not my main job or my favourite job! In the old game, only <10% of my game time was on "favourite jobs" and most of my game time was on Utility jobs. So this is the complete opposite of today.