Congratulations!
lol perform class balances as needed?
Sup THM.
I'll give you that one. lol
Actually... We knew theres going to be Auto Attack and a Job System going forward. :P
Oh, we know more than that!
Argued about a dozen times, and refuted every time. You don't wait and sit on problems. You don't wait for them to become problems before you fix imbalances. In fact, they probably haven't.
Thaumaturge and archer have probably already been nerfed, and that nerf will probably come before the player base starts really abusing them. There's a difference between what many of you all want, which is to wait for the problem to manifest itself overtly before acting on it, and what the devs may do, which is wait for an efficient time to balance two problem jobs.
Biggest mistake SE could ever do (again) is to let archer manifest as a problem before they actually nerf it. Then you not only have to balance the job, you have to choke allllll those players who flocked to archer to imbalance-get in the delay time when you could have fixed it BEFORE they became affected fanboys of it. Give them an inch, and suddenly you're dealing with a mob of players who are spoiled and think they deserve the imbalance because they're too biased to think about anyone who isn't an archer. They'll just argue that if the pug wants to be useful, no one is stopping him from levelling archer.
And at that point it's over. You already screwed up. You should have beaten that player months ago with a stick, before the pugilist quit the game.
Make no mistake...self-entitled ranged classes hurt the game. In XI, the devs screwed up royally. They lost both the close-DDs from 2002-2006 after their jobs weren't given the endgame respect and balance they deserve, AND they lost the spoiled brat blms and rangers from 2006 to 2008 after they finally realized their game was dying and thus beat the **** out of the players that caused it.
Save all that. Nerf em before they start leaving the close-DDs in town to go fight the Malboro NM in the dungeon. That way the other DDs don't get put in 2nd class citizen status and the ranged classes don't get morbidly obese off coddling imbalances to the point where they would ragequit en masse if touched.
The best way to not have a spoiled brat of a child is to never accidentally teach it to behave like that. Once you have a spoiled brat on your hands...it's hard to fix it.
Apparently nerfing a class is the only way to fix these problems... Cause you know, they couldn't possibly buff/rebalance the other classes to make them more competitive. That would make too much sense.
Archer isn't that strong - the other classes are just really weak. THM is the exception with its gamebreaking arsenal (cough*emulate*cough).