To The Devs, When Are Jobs Complete? Concerns About Frequency Of Job Changes.

I have one question that I would like to know the answer to, as it has been on my mind recently.

When are jobs actually considered "complete"?

I want to voice these concerns because as someone who mainly plays Ninja I am left confused about the future of job changes, as this is the 3rd iteration of the job that I'm playing in only a single major patch cycle, and the frequency of completely rotation-altering changes is driving a lot of players away as they are left unsure of what the job actually feels like at any given time.

I understand that due to the way skills are delivered with each new expansion, the additions to each job often need addressing after player feedback.

But how often does a job need to be changed to achieve a state that is comfortable to most players? If it takes multiple major patches to finalize a job, the balance will only last briefly until the next expansion comes around and throws everything out of balance once more.

I was content with the way Ninja was in 6.05, aside from the balance, which has been addressed very well.
But balance and the function of skills are two very different things, and now you gave us 6.1 Ninja, and told us on the same live letter that you will make even further changes in 6.2.

Am I the only one who does not feel comfortable with that frequency of changes? I believe the jobs skills and playstyle should be finalized within a reasonable timeframe after the expansions release and then only be adjusted through balance changes in potency numbers.

Please communicate with the players.

I think a lot of this back and forth, as well as the uncertainty between patches could be avoided if the developers communicated in a direct manner with us, the players about what is being targeted for change and why, so players can either agree or disagree whether they think it is a point to address or if they like it the way it is.
That does not mean to say ambiguously that the forums are being monitored carefully for player feedback...

I've finally come to a state with Ninja where I can once again enjoy the gameplay. But every time I discuss it with friends we inevitably come to the conclusion that this all might be thrown out the window with the next patch. Could it be better or worse, we don't know and it's an uncomfortable state to be in as the job you main carries a lot of meaning to players.

The job action trailers.

While thinking about this I often consider how pointless the job action trailers seem in terms of representing the job in an expansion, seeing as the jobs are often completely reworked midway through an expansion.
While job actions added in expansions are never entirely deleted, I feel as though these trailers sometimes do a poor job of representing the job to someone who may come late into the expansion.
But for the ease of mind I will assume that these trailers are mostly just designed for hype.

Timing.

I think the most frustrating part of the frequency of some job changes is that they so often happen on the release of major PvE content such as Savage or Ultimate. It is stressful to develop a sense of comfort in your job and have that reliability in your gameplay damaged and confused each time a rotation-altering change is made when PvE content releases.

Some final words.

Please consider slowing the amount of job changes (non balance) and finalize the jobs within a reasonable timeframe after the expansion launch.
I was perfectly content with the way jobs such as Nin, Drg and Sam played before patch 6.1.
I welcome changes such as reducing the animation lock on Drg, or improving the QoL of skills such as Living Dead or Inner Release otherwise, as they ease the playfeel without damaging the job identity.


Please let me know how you feel about the state of job changes in this thread.

I loved the way samurai played in 6.08 - I'm not sure if there was a single thing I would have changed about it - it was basically perfect in terms of what I want from a job. (and now I find it completely unenjoyable)

My Answer to your Question When are jobs actually considered "complete"? would be, Never.
Please don't take this Answer as an Insult!

But Jobs are never really complete, let me give you an example with Samurai:
You start Samurai at lvl50 and you get introduced to the Iaijutsu Mechanic.
with lvl52 you got Kaiten with the Kenki Resource to boost your damage output(which now in 6.1 is no longer possible and makes Kenki feel empty and useless)

..in Stormblood, we ended on an AoE Attack(Guren) and in Shadowbringers they added it's Single Target Alternative(Senei), and added another Single Target Attack(Shoha), where we got an AoE Alternative to that(Mumyo Shoha) and they added a New Attack that is AoE(Ogi Namikiri) in Endwalker

The Reason why they make those sweeping changes mid Expansion is because they had great successes with those The Ninja-Level rework of Shadowbringers is the best example to that.

The Job Action Trailers are there to Hype you up for the Launch of the Expansion, yes^^

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In my Opinion, there is a current/luring/lingering misconception with Button Bloat, me as Samurai Player, I feel ropped/disabled or soul sucked (in mortal kombat terms) and that because they removed just one skill! meanwhile I look at Blackmage and holy damn that's a lotta buttons in comparision! The Devs should prioritize Feel and Synergy of the Job, It's Kit/Resources and Goals (Samurai for example Kenki buffed Iaijutsu, a.k.a Kaiten) and that holds true with every Job.

I'm kind of on two minds for this sort of thing.


On one hand, yes, having your job changed out from under you absolutely sucks -- I'm probably one of if not the most vocal NIN players in this part of the forums, so if you've read even a few of the NIN threads I'm sure you've seen me complaining.

On the other hand, I do get that the devs need space to innovate. Sometimes, ideas just don't pan out. The 6.0 Raijus are one example of that idea. And while people complained about "the devs don't playtest!!" or whatnot, and yes, it was fairly egregious, the changes needed to NIN to fix that were not so dramatic as "change how Raijus work entirely". I think the changes were good overall, but they did bring with them other problems.

I don't think jobs can ever be considered complete, because the developers and this game are always going somewhere. Even now, they're preparing the jobs for whatever abilities they need to add to pad out the next 10 levels in 7.0. The upcoming reworks are likely a sounding board for those intended changes.

The developers at this stage of the game are in a sticky situation, because they've historically supported console players very well, enough so that PC players often prefer to use controllers, despite having access to a keyboard. This does come with limitations on the number of abilities they can cram into a job without, well.. running out of buttons. I play on keyboard, and I have small hands, so I can only comfortably reach 12345qer for abilities (I have Shift/Ctrl bound to my mouse keys). I'm grateful that Phantom was moved onto Bunshin to help make the Raiju changes in 6.05 button-neutral. I don't even have room to bind Huraijin to anything (I don't use it often, thankfully, so it's not a huge loss, but still).

So, you need to continually add new abilities to keep the job feeling fresh, but you're also approaching critical mass with the number of buttons you can have without screwing your players. It's not a situation I envy the developers of.


That said, the nature of the recent changes they've made feels pretty wretched. I can't think of any SAM players who enjoyed the changes, and the only NIN players I've seen enjoying the changes wanted Ninja to be a different job anyway, or just don't care. Everyone else is incredibly up in arms about the changes, or high on Doomium that nothing will ever be fixed (relatable... haha... surely they will restore Trick in 6.11... in time for the ultimate... haha....).

I think the main problem is that the wrong changes are being made. As far as I was aware, SAM players were entirely content with how their job played. Nothing but Ws from Endwalker until 6.1 gutted the job. For Ninja players, 6.05 finally restored the job to an okay playfeel, but it still felt objectively worse than Shadowbringers due to Ninki generation being absolutely awful. The Trick/Mug changes just made that worse, and took away a major part of what made Ninja, well, Ninja -- Trick's party buff.

What's more, Yoshi-P even acknowledged that nobody asked for these changes. When you have Healers begging for even just one more DPS button, Machinists coping about what ability next will get buffed by 10 potency for an overall DPS increase of 0.02%, why change jobs where people were mostly or entirely content?

There is some concern about crit in this game from the developers, and I welcome them to propose changes, but this is a problem to solve all at once, not to solve by neutering classes one by one. Autocrit isn't it, especially when crit-chance buffs exist in the game on multiple classes! DNCs & DRGs and WARs and SAMs mutually sigh when Duty Finder pairs them together.

That's not to say there haven't been good changes made. Dark Knight's invuln is finally less than dogshit, and White Mage's lilies are finally damage neutral. But these are all changes that have been asked for by the playerbase. I think the developers should be more open with their intentions about the problems they're trying to solve. Unsurprisingly, players who play these jobs every day at a high level are likely to have good suggestions about solving problems the developers identify!

But I just don't think we'll get that kind of clarity. It's been a long time since 1.0's explosion, and there's pockets to line by catering to... whoever it is they're catering to.

I mean, in the first few expansions, you were lucky to see anything outside of minor potency adjustments even on a major patch. If your job was broken at the start of the expansion, it was broken for the entirety of it. The playerbase demanded more frequent balance changes, and it's much healthier for the state of the game than seeing the same mandatory picks on every tier.

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Originally Posted by aloneatsea

I think the main problem is that the wrong changes are being made. As far as I was aware, SAM players were entirely content with how their job played.

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That's the problem with nerfs and power rebalancing though. No one asks for them. That's not a valid argument against power nerfs/rebalancing to be done however.

In this instance, there was a problem (raidwide job synergy with samurai was too swingy and made balancing synergy jobs in other roles--especially dancer and bard--too difficult).

So, let's examine that problem, because the game's had it before.

Back in ARR, HW, and SB, you had the Disembowel/Ranged problem. Ranged damage was balanced around Disembowel. This made a dragoon required for any content you wanted to run a Bard or Machinist in, and if you didn't, your damage was awful, just awful. This made the ranged role difficult to balance. If they buffed the ranged role so it was viable without a dragoon, suddenly with a dragoon its OP. But if they don't, without a dragoon, it feels awful. There's no win/win here, there's no happy medium that exists. So the problem had to be solved by doing the thing that no one 'asked for': They removed all damage specific debuffs from the game. Dragoons no longer buffed bards or machinists, samurais and warriors no longer buffed ninjas, and so on.

Bards and Dancers were getting close to the same point with Samurai. If Dancers or Bards had a samurai, they did amazing, but if they didn't, they just did ok. So how do you balance those jobs? Do you buff Bards and Dancers so that they feel good all the time? Great, now Dancer/Bard + Samurai is required content. This is bad. Do you nerf Dancers and Bards so that their RDPS is balanced around the ubiquity of Samurai? Great, now they feel like shit whenever there isn't a Samurai.

Ultimately, the solution, the only good solution, is to remove the problem itself: Samurai's burst. Unfortunately, no Samurai asked for this, and I doubt any samurai wanted this. No Dragoon wanted thier piercing synergy removed either. No warrior wanted their slashing debuff removed. Lots of times they've done the thing that 'no one wanted' but it turned out to be better for the game in the long run.

This is one of those changes. Samurai needed to take a hit in its burst, so that Dancer and Bard could get corralled in and the ranged role itself be buffed to where it should be and feels good.

They will never be complete, and that is just the reality of a subscription-based MMO video game. To keep players interested and not bored, the developers need to add or tweak content. As new content builds or old content is adjusted, the perception of each job will change and adaptations will be necessitated. You will not find consistency in these types of video games.

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

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I think you've misunderstood the intent of what I was speaking about.

Neither Samurai nor Ninja was 'nerfed' exactly with the changes -- and even if you feel they were, I'm not actually talking about strength at all. Who cares about the exact numbers a job does in relation to another, so long as they're fairly close? I'm talking about playfeel.

I was more referring to the removal of Kaiten, for which many players have offered alternative suggestions. Samurai's autocrit change wasn't really a nerf so much so as normalising the damage values at the cost of creating anti-synergy with specific classes. Despite that, though, I think "this class is much stronger when played with this class" is a better problem to have than "this class literally cannot take advantage of the party buffs of this class". That's just my opinion, however, and you may not share it.

I'm not trying to suggest I have a better solution for the problem at hand, but I wonder just how much of a problem this variance really was. Could it have been solved by just shifting some potency around, instead of removing SAM's ability to hit big criticals? Maybe, maybe not. I don't have the data the developers have.

But even if that all was as big of a problem as you're suggesting, I don't think removing Kaiten or gutting Trick Attack and moving the party buff to Mug were the play. Both have dramatically impacted the playfeel of each class, and few seem happy about the changes. It's all well and good to balance your game, but you need to make sure you're taking into account the feelings of players who enjoy those jobs.

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Originally Posted by aloneatsea

I'm not trying to suggest I have a better solution for the problem at hand

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The problem is they're avoiding the actual issue, which is the crit buffs themselves, not the jobs that benefit from them to varying degrees.

They could just make those raid buffs affect DH instead. Of course, then you'd have anti-synergy with stuff that auto-DH's, but I'd argue that none of those need to auto-DH since DH variance isn't really a concern.

They could even just make them flat damage % buffs - not as interesting, but trivial to design around, and a far better solution than gutting jobs for synergy sake or gutting comps due to anti-synergies.

Seems simple - they just need to approach the problem from a completely different angle.

We already have a plethora of flat damage buff jobs on almost every job in the game. This then leads to homogenization - every job should be equal. That's an answer, sure, but one that will cause animosity in a different way (job identity).

Game design is really hard. I say this as a new graduate in game dev. In all honesty, I don't have a solution that would tick people off the least while also giving the devs the flexibility to surprise and expand on new things in the game.

I don't think the players know everything, and players now are focused on how the game plays now and only the devs have to figure out 2, 4, 6, and 8 years from now how to expand on their combat system with worries like button bloat, crit variance and viability. I'm hoping there's an event at some point where the top job experts in terms of ultimate and savage raiding could be invited to speak with the devs and have a dialogue for the future of job design.