What jobs do you consider well designed?

BLM. I don't even play BLM that much anymore but I'm glad it exists. It's one of the few jobs that fits a playstyle of planning, mapping and treating the player like they have a working brain.

Otherwise I'm just not a fan of FF14 jobs. I'm not saying my opinions are correct, they're just opinions, but personally I find ff14 jobs too safe, bland, often a little clunky and rarely designed to excite the player or with fun in mind.
The base design is the long 2.5s GCD with oGCD's to weave between each GCD to artificially make it feel fast paced. That suffers for a start at any windows where you don't have oGCD's to press. Then every class follows this more or less. Every class has a 2 minute burst window. They get a bit similar to play.
I also don't like how ff14 has so many buttons with an impact you can't feel. They're just there to flesh out the rotation and fill it. Small oGCD's that hit for noodle damage individually or small buffs of 5% or 10% here and there. You don't feel them, you just have to try and remember they're contributing to that overall number that you're banned from seeing or knowing about.
Then class updates have been poorly designed. We're basically playing ShB classes with one button and a few traits and while I understand they don't want to reinvent the wheel each expansion, it's hard to play a job for 2 years and feel excited about the prospect of playing almost the exact same thing for another 2 years. Many of the new abilities were things like "button you can press after pressing your big cooldown" or "one new big cooldown".

I understand why they do it. It works and it's safe. I also don't think they have the manpower to be really creative. The class design team is literally 4-5 people, with 20 jobs and more every expansion. So they've created a safe job design where it follows a straightforward formula and they can just tweak potencies and make it appear balanced on paper. Maybe it's for the best with this company. But I don't have to love it and I can't help finding ff14 jobs boring.

I'd say PLD. It has always been in my top 3 list since I started playing, and I truly hope they will never butcher it the way to did it to other jobs ( leveling SAM right now from 80 to 90 and wtf is that? Please SE, STOP !)
RPR flows pretty well too.
As for healers... yea, no. ZZzzzzzZZzzzz. /sadWoL

BLM and RDM I feel are really well designed. I feel like both have a very specific job identity and they play to it really well.

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Originally Posted by IdowhatIwant

Is that a list from best to worst or are you saying they all well designed? Just curious.

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In no particular order. They are all well-designed because they don't have useless and clunky abilities like in Heavensward. They don't have strange problems like not blocking magic, an ability which increases evasion on a DPS that never receives damage in the first place, a weaponskill that can only be used after evading an attack (so never), a dot with a duration and potency that makes it useless, not having any aoe attacks. Abilities like Reprisal can actually be used tactically now. These are the sort of problems they have learned from and when I think of all of these classes, they have their own unique rotations and they all work without lots of it being useless, redundant or clunky. Whatever you want to say about healers having one attack, their kits work together well and under pressure such as wall pulls, their abilities are not redundant. All of the classes can be played poorly, played well or played tactically so there is room for growth on all of them.

Ninja does not play like Dragoon and neither play like a Black Mage. Gunbreaker's explosion carnage doesn't compare to the other tanks at 90. Paladin's GCD rotation is something completely different to the other two tanks. I can't objectively say they that all of these classes have the same rotation and I can't objectively say that there are redundant or clunky parts of their rotation like in Heavensward, because they have gradually removed these problems every time an expansion releases.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

In no particular order. They are all well-designed because they don't have useless and clunky abilities like in Heavensward. They don't have strange problems like not blocking magic, an ability which increases evasion on a DPS that never receives damage in the first place, a weaponskill that can only be used after evading an attack (so never), a dot with a duration and potency that makes it useless, not having any aoe attacks. Abilities like Reprisal can actually be used tactically now. These are the sort of problems they have learned from and when I think of all of these classes, they have their own unique rotations and they all work without lots of it being useless, redundant or clunky. Whatever you want to say about healers having one attack, their kits work together well and under pressure such as wall pulls, their abilities are not redundant. All of the classes can be played poorly, played well or played tactically so there is room for growth on all of them.

Ninja does not play like Dragoon and neither play like a Black Mage. Gunbreaker's explosion carnage doesn't compare to the other tanks at 90. Paladin's GCD rotation is something completely different to the other two tanks. I can't objectively say they that all of these classes have the same rotation and I can't objectively say that there are redundant or clunky parts of their rotation like in Heavensward, because they have gradually removed these problems every time an expansion releases.

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Interesting. I can see that point of view though, things have definitely improved since ARR and HW, but I think some things have suffered as well. I would disagree with your shield swipe opinion from your first post though, I would love if they brought it back as a follow up to holy sheltron after you block with it, that would be sick.

I think if I had to give a critique to class design as a whole in its current iteration, I would really like classes to have more engagement with their gauges. Some do this well, but others it feels like the gauge functions as a fake CD for the one maybe two skills that are tied to it. Examples are Bards soul gauge, War gauge, Drk gauge, Plds gauge, Dnc gauge, Mch gauges, and with the recent changes Sams gauge. When it was first announced I remember being very excited about it, and it felt underwhelming for some classes in SB, and it feels like the gauges have been forgotten since and never expanded upon much. It would be cool to have multiple skills to give players more thought process on how to actively use the gauge vs how it functions for many classes now.

Outside of that some of the stuff I miss is like tank emnity management, which is more of a system mechanic not really a class mechanic. Emnity management, and shirk made me quit tanking.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

In no particular order. They are all well-designed because they don't have useless and clunky abilities like in Heavensward.

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How is Scholar on this list then?

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Originally Posted by Tlachtga

honestly, none. there's huge negatives for every job i play, ever since the horrible Shadowbringers job changes came and ruined them all.

they've not recovered from it. probably never will.

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...Feels like BLM, though perhaps uniquely, survived that pretty well (apart from, maybe, the significance of banked Firestarters decreasing with the changes to Flare use due to the opposite-element MP cost changes).

Paladin
Sage
Reaper

I've been playing this game for a long time now and have played a lot of the jobs at a high level, and i've been noticing that the job designs have been slipping ever since Shadowbringers release, it's almost as if they have run out of ideas so they are either removing skills (because of button bloat lol) or just slapping an extra charge on an old ability and calling it a day.

With that being said, there are only a few jobs that stand out as being well designed to me and those are all the tanks, RPR,BLM.RDM,DNC and DRG.

SAM used to be my #1 but now it's not on the list.

In their current state:

WAR / GNB / DRK / RPR / DNC