Hypothetical: At Fanfest they announce all jobs are getting reworked.

And I don't mean they're adding an ability or two or tweaking a handful of cooldowns. Full blown, ground-up rework. What would be your reaction? What's your best case and worst case scenario for your main? Do you think most jobs would come out the other side better than they are?

I'm not so attached to any job that it would destroy me one way or the other. I generally trust Yoshi and crew to make the game fun.

I'd be disappointed because there would be a nigh 100% chance they all end up braindead like new summoner.

It'd essentially be the ultimate last hail mary for job design fanatics. If they're upfront about it, confirm that they have in fact hired staff to the job design team that actually play the jobs they are trying to design, and genuinely want to shake things up, I'd be tentatively optimistic. If they're as silent as they usually are, and triple down on EW philosophies ala SMN rework, but for everyone, then I might as well invest in the rope and ceiling fan stocks.

Either the game becomes significantly more fun across the board, or we seep so deep into the grey, featureless muck that the combat system becomes unsalvageable.

For my main? Best case, they make Heavensward/Stormblood clients so I can stop seeing Dark Knight get butchered every subsequent expansion. Worst case, they just do nothing, kinda like what they did in EW, where nothing functionally changes and I stay bored for the next three years.

Being realistic, you cannot get much worse than this. They'd have to actively do nothing or break even more jobs than they already have to accomplish an unfavorable result for me. I'm really interested in how they'll manage to disappoint me this time.

I remember when I said that if they remove tank stances, it gives them more room to make interesting tank gameplay. With how well that turned out for me, I think I'm skewed to a more skeptical lens.

Guess we'll see in eight months, lmao.

It would depend on the direction for the jobs.

If they were to double down on their current designs, then I'd rather just quit than see every job start going in the direction SMN is going.

If however, they wanted to rework every job using previous incarnations as inspiration, hone in on what makes that specific job fun, and legitimately come up with 20+ differing playstyles amongst the jobs, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, well I'd at least want to try them out first. Although I also like the playstyle of a lot of the current jobs, so I wouldn't really want EVERY job to be reworked.

This would be the best case scenario for me because jobs absolutely suck right now and there is no exception to that.

What they need to do is gather player feedback; they did in a survey about jobs recently via lodestone, compile that, look at past incarnations and what people liked about the jobs and make something that isn't completely homogenized and overly simplistic. They've claimed for two expansions now that they wouldn't go back to complexity, but also wouldn't make things easier and have failed both times to keep that promise. The game is easier than ever and still, still people struggle to play. They can't keep catering to people who will never care enough to learn their jobs or how to play the game in the first place, which is what they've been doing for several years now.

Only nightmare scenario would be if everything winds up like Summoner currently is, as that's simply going too far with the simplification of the battle system.

I want them to return to Stormblood job design, full stop. Where every job had something it was good at, something that made it viable in specific situations —but not outright required— and what was a 'draw' to play and learn it. There's no depth, nothing to sink your teeth into an learn and its incredibly unfortunate that this is the direction they've gone, as while it may attract new players now... there's not an infinite supply of new players and those who are new now will become veterans who will one day see all the issues and start leveraging the same complaints.

Depends. Are their plans to give everything the SMN/PLD treatment? Because jobs that are brain dead suck, but so do jobs that have to work four times harder than everyone else only to wind in the dumpster anyway.

That'd be a hard pass from me if their intention was to double down.

Depends on the rework direction. As a Bard main, I was happy about the rework in Stormblood. It was fantastic.

Then, they slowly took the fun out of it with Shadowbringers and Endwalker. If the direction of the rework is just simplifying Jobs even more, then I'm definitely not going to be happy. However, if they rework each job to bring back some type of identity like they used to have before the homogenization, then I'm all for it.

Hm...

...it would depend on how they reworked Jobs. For example, I love WHM right now. If the rework was "now all GCD heals generate blood lily so you are highly encouraged to use them, and encounter design now requires more consistent healing and MP management", I'd be cool with that. If it was "Now you have a bunch of DPS abilities and are a green support", I'd hate that and might outright quit.

Me personally, I think they need to diversify the Jobs more. For example, all 4 healers have basically the same damage rotation and, other than WHM using GCD (Lily) heals and AST with Cards, are similar on the healing side. SGE and SCH have a lot (not all, and they do play a bit differently, but a lot) of overlap and even 1-to-1 skills (e.g. Kerochole and Soil, Durochole and Lustrate, Pepsis and Emergency Tactics, etc), and AST other than the Cards plays a lot like them with oGCD healing tools. WHM is really the only distinct one in that regard at this point.

WAR and DRK are too similar, too.

And most Jobs have a builder/spender system and 2 min burst (some having a 1 min mini-burst like GNB and NIN), leading to a lot of very samey feeling.

If they announced they were getting rid of the 2 min meta, that would already be an improvement, but I'm not sure they're going to do that since they seem to feel that it makes balance easier.

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So it would depend on what the changes were and what the design goals, encounter design changes, etc that went along with it were.

Worst case scenario would be making all healers/tanks into DPS in truth rather than in meme, and making all DPS Jobs like BLM or MNK. That would just be obnoxious.

Yoshi-P did say he thinks a significant amount of jobs will get reworks or significant rotation changes in the expansion. Seeing as he was using the 7.0 version of the game in the live letter, it seems BLM is protected so far as usual.

I do not mind if jobs work like Summoner. I think that Summoner is fine and people exaggerate how simple it is as if it's like a healer rotation when it's not. On the contrary I think that people would love it if healers upgraded to a Summoner rotation.

I do hope that the rotations are better though and allow for more unique skill expression (such as aiming a cone on Warrior) and utility. For example, Rescue on healers is great and I have saved so many sprouts from dying to things with it, or taught them they are meant to be at a certain location for a mechanic using it. Reprisal reducing outgoing damage rather than mitigating it on the receiving end, cover, elusive jump or interrupts are some other examples. Abilities that do something other than damage like that.

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Originally Posted by Aniya_Estlihn

I want them to return to Stormblood job design, full stop. Where every job had something it was good at, something that made it viable in specific situations —but not outright required— and what was a 'draw' to play and learn it. There's no depth, nothing to sink your teeth into an learn and its incredibly unfortunate that this is the direction they've gone

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I agree with that. It is nice having some little things that you have got good at using because you actually main the job.

I don't think they need everything to be like Stormblood because there was still some jank remaining back then or things that were unnecessarily annoying, such as ranged attacks breaking combos for melee jobs, Heavy Thrust doing that as well, combos expiring extremely quickly, useless abilities that nobody used and just similar lack of quality of life stuff. But the idea of jobs being unique and having ways to express their own skill was nice. I also liked having to "keep up" something.

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Originally Posted by TheDustyOne

come up with 20+ differing playstyles amongst the jobs, each with their own strengths and weaknesses

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It would be nice if they did this, but the reason I can think against it is that the more playstyles there are, the more playstyles they have to balance content around and the more they have to think about potency adjustments to balance it. It seems like they are making 2 jobs in each gear category play similar so that adjusting things like potencies is as much work as in ARR. But even if two jobs have to play the same, it would be nice for there to be something unique still and unique things to each gear category as well.

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Originally Posted by splinter1545

As a Bard main, I was happy about the rework in Stormblood. It was fantastic.

Then, they slowly took the fun out of it with Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

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I felt the same way about Bard in Stormblood and I was playing it a lot. It does bother me the little changes such as DoTs not impacting Sidewinder and crits no longer impacting anything, but I think that functionally it still plays the same way so I can't objectively say it has changed much. There are just a lot of other jobs now even within the ranged physical category, whereas Bard was the only desirable option in Stormblood for ranged physicals.