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.

I think that one of the main problems is the fact that these reworks, changes or tweaks often happen without any kind of previous notice. They are implemented on a specific patch and that's it. A PTR or test server would help receive player feedback more directly in order to avoid issues like the Mirage Dive change for DRG or the SAM/NIN changes. Another issue is that these changes are only reverted in scheduled patches or hotfixes, so if there's none planned for the short term, we need to wait and pray that the issue will be addressed in the next one.

I am personally concerned about the future "huge adjustments" to DRG in 6.2, especially now that the job is at its peak in smoothness and flow of play. No one ever complained about this, only animation locks and other minor things, so it's a wonder why DRG is being looked at and not other jobs in particular.

Indeed, there has to be clearer communication between the devs and the players. People often say that the developers don't read the English forums, and I wonder if that's the case. Devs don't have to do everything players ask or suggest, but player feedback should be taken into account for all aspects of the game, as we are the target audience after all, even though there can be conflicting opinions between the playerbase.

It has already been mentioned that jobs are not truly ever complete, and I agree with that. However, they should not get huge reworks in the middle of an expansion either unless a specific one is in a very broken state. I do think small reworks and tweaks are fine, either to test new things or fix specific problems, but not to fundamentally change the way a job works and especially not right when a new savage tier or ultimate is released, as players have no time to test and get used to the changes.

In regards to the direct hit/crit buffs discussion, there's been threads and posts about it (like this one https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5880390).

Buffs don't need to be homogenized to give flat % damage boosts. The solution is to change these buffs so that they behave like they do now with most attacks except those that have a 100% chance to (direct) crit, where they should provide a flat damage buff instead.

Crit buffs should provide a damage buff of half the chance. Therefore, Battle Litany and Chain Stratagem would give 5% damage to 100% crit attacks like Life Surge or Midare Setsugekka.

Direct hit buffs should provide a damage buff of a quarter of the chance. Battle Voice would then give 5% damage to a 100% direct hit attack.

If an attack has both a 100% chance to direct hit and crit, then it gets both bonuses if the relevant buffs are active.

There are a couple of outliers: Army's Paeon would have to give 1% in order to avoid having it give 0.75% damage, though this is negligible; Devilment would give 10% to automatic crits and 5% to automatic direct hits, but this makes sense due to Devilment's role as a strong single target buff.

This change would fix the weird anti-synergies between and within (DRG/DNC) jobs and benefits all jobs equally, since the damage buff would be similar to those provided by Trick Attack or Embolden, with Devilment being the main outlier. The numbers can always be tuned if needed, but this should hardly be an issue in most cases if we take into account that these buffs are only active for 15-20s every two minutes with the exception of BRD's songs.

Hopefully they will implement this instead of homogenizing all buffs, as it would make the game boring and stale as Raevus Astra has pointed out.

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Originally Posted by RaevusAstra

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).

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I doubt anyone really cares what their raid buff actually does - what's important to the job identity is that they have a raid buff at all.

As far as job identity goes in terms of raid buffs it's basically just Greedy DPS vs Normal DPS vs Support DPS - if a dancer's raid buffs and/or dance partner buff was changed to provide roughly the same benefit but was DH instead of crit or % dmg instead of whatever, I doubt they'd care - they're support dps, not "crit buff dps".

Game design can be hard, you're right, but it's a lot easier if you pick your fights and focus on what's important, and if you aren't careful it's really easy to make it a lot harder than it needs to be, which is exactly what they've done with their raid buffs.

Samurai and warriors are pariahs because of buffs that don't need to be as they are, and if they were changed, wouldn't really matter - they backed themselves into this corner and instead of making easy fixes that preserve what people actually do care about, they've opted to butcher actual job identity instead.

Dunno if you've heard this game design maxim, but it's probably the most important one I'm aware of: "Game design is 90% knowing what to cut." It's easy adding things atop systems atop mechanics - the hard part - and vital part - is knowing what to prune.

EDIT: btw, where'd you go to school, if you don't mind me asking?

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Originally Posted by Aco505

Hopefully they will implement this instead of homogenizing all buffs, as it would make the game boring and stale as Raevus Astra has pointed out.

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Flat damage buffs actually feel better than small increases to stats like crit or DH, and if you think about it, it makes perfect sense why - I'll explain.

Let's say you have a 20% chance to crit and someone buffs you with +5% crit chance for a bit. Every time you crit while buffed, do you think "thanks bud, there's a 20% chance that crit only happened because of that buff you gave me" or do you basically not notice because you're used to critting roughly 20% of the time anyway?

With small crit/DH style buffs, there's no tangible connection to what you see on the screen and the buff you received - you'd need to review the log and compare it to logs that didn't have such a buff to even see a difference - and due to the natural variance you have with crit anyway, you might need several logs to see it even at that.

Conversely, if someone buffs you for +5% damage and you normally crit with an ability for 20k damage but with the buff you see that ability crit for 21k, that's immediately recognizable as a direct consequence of the buff.

I love crit as a stat because I love variance, but it's effectively invisible as a buff unless it's a big enough difference that it's super noticeable.

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Originally Posted by Elena_Farron

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.

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I actually dread seeing big changes or job action trailers. When I watch them, I don't think "what are they gonna give us this time"- I think "oh god, what are they going to take away from us now". I think it says more about their job design when I'm fearful and not excited.

For as long as they insist that the bottom line needs to be happy (bad players who only want to play their way in an MMORPG).

Spite, typically MMO or "live-service" games will have new content every month, year and expansion.

Keeping jobs the same has done nothing but show their aging design philosophies (WHM, SCH, MNK, NIN). Devs tend to try to make QoL changes if the current design is fine but sometimes they like to make a drastic decision be it bad or good.

Even if a change is bad, at least they're doing something rather than nothing which isn't excusable mind you, but that's why feedback is important.

An example of a job that's good in most people's eyes is BLM. They've built on the foundation and for the most part have kept their mains happy.

MNK is an example of negligence with it being ignored until late ShB, same with NIN.

Tanks and healers have been ignored pretty badly for three expansions (more so healers).

It's the nature of having a class-based system where the devs need to decide which job is going have a bigger focus and which ones they'll inherently ignore (MCH in this case).

Samurai changes are mindless and don't really do anything successful. Kaiten hasn't reduced APM and autocrits doesn't make it more "satisfying" especially if it's guaranteed–which is the whole point of melding crit.

I've said this in multiple threads but the devs needs a seperate balance team. Them sitting around after making battle content and dealing with writing woes, is likely to lead to bad decisions. On top of that, not having members that actually play certain roles and having a different perspective only makes these changes easier to evoke ire from the community.

For example, as far as I know, the dev team plays dps and maybe tank when they need it. So changes made with healers or tanks will be met with anger. Because they're usually bad and people wonder why a DPS player is deciding what is better for a healer or tank when they're invested in DPS the most? Most DPS I meet barely understand any of the tank/healer skills.

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

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.

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Good post. You're one of the few people who seem to understand all the reasonings for the Samurai changes. The idea was good - I recognize, as a Samurai player, that the job's burst needed to be addressed.
The problem is they went about this is one of the worst possible ways they could have.

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Originally Posted by butchersblock

Good post. You're one of the few people who seem to understand all the reasonings for the Samurai changes. The idea was good - I recognize, as a Samurai player, that the job's burst needed to be addressed.
The problem is they went about this is one of the worst possible ways they could have.

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I have to disagree. The problem with piercing/Slashing is it was exclusive utility. Only certain classes could exploit those buffs at all. By contrast anyone can be a Dance Partner, and the ideal candidate is dictated by the context of that player’s performance alone. Blunt was also a strong counter example to that back in the day, since the only way anyone outside the Monk could use that buff was through rod/booksmacking and DRK provided int down as well as fitting fights better, it wasn’t something that kept Monk relevant.

Additionally the problems with Dancer/Bard still aren’t fixed, They just moved on to the next top DPS with high burst, Ninja.

Ironically, there is a better solution that actually involves Kaiten itself. Change the boost to be the auto crit/dhit effect and refund a portion of the Kenki if you would have landed the crit/dhit on that attack. This would require rebalancing the Kenki cost to 25 or 30 (so the refund would be 10 on a dhit and 15-20 on a crit) to keep the proportional gain intact but that would still reduce the number of Kaitens you get to use overall.

That kind of effect does suit a proc based job better but by using the data we know SE already calculates by default means it’s not nearly as expensive to implement as Gruntler’s suggestion. I could see a lot of auto-crit abilities getting this effect.

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

I have to disagree. The problem with piercing/Slashing is it was exclusive utility. Only certain classes could exploit those buffs at all. By contrast anyone can be a Dance Partner, and the ideal candidate is dictated by the context of that player’s performance alone.

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It's not just player performance though. There is almost no world where a Dancer would've considered DRG over a SAM given skill parity. What they did with Samurai did not fix this issue, as you've pointed out Dancer just moved on to the next biggest burst job - Ninja. It was a step in the right direction, albeit executed very poorly. There needs to be less emphasis on cramming everything onto 2 minute cooldowns, and the DPS shouldn't almost exclusively come from those raid buff windows.

To be fair, I find it that, every time they do change jobs in each expansion, it is insulting and disrespectful regardless. They make us play a job, learn it's core mechanics and fall in love with it for two years (look at 5.0 SMN, despite its issues), so they change it altogether, because a couple ne'er-do-wells (the devs) feel a certain tipe way, which is completely disjointed from reality and from what their playerbase mindset.

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Originally Posted by butchersblock

It's not just player performance though. There is almost no world where a Dancer would've considered DRG over a SAM given skill parity. What they did with Samurai did not fix this issue, as you've pointed out Dancer just moved on to the next biggest burst job - Ninja. It was a step in the right direction, albeit executed very poorly. There needs to be less emphasis on cramming everything onto 2 minute cooldowns, and the DPS shouldn't almost exclusively come from those raid buff windows.

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Jobs aren’t designed to perform similarly at parity for a reason. They would need to be even more homogeneous than they are now to reach that point. I have zero problems as a Ninja if someone else gets partnered as long as they’re actually doing better. In my static that could be my co-melee Reaper or me, depending on who handles that 2 minute window better or who has weakness from a previous mechanic. I have zero problems with that. The fact it changes mid-fight is a strength of the game, not a limitation. We just don’t see Dancers min-maxing partner uptime and there’s a good reason for that. Spot targeting sucks and generally the person getting higher DPS gets more uptime. Fixing that requires sustained DPS and burst DPS to lean into those roles MORE, not less.

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

Jobs aren’t designed to perform similarly at parity for a reason. They would need to be even more homogeneous than they are now to reach that point. I have zero problems as a Ninja if someone else gets partnered as long as they’re actually doing better. In my static that could be my co-melee Reaper or me, depending on who handles that 2 minute window better or who has weakness from a previous mechanic. I have zero problems with that. The fact it changes mid-fight is a strength of the game, not a limitation. We just don’t see Dancers min-maxing partner uptime and there’s a good reason for that. Spot targeting sucks and generally the person getting higher DPS gets more uptime. Fixing that requires sustained DPS and burst DPS to lean into those roles MORE, not less.

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Dancers never really swapped targets because there's no need to. Samurai's burst was a bit too much. From Shadowbringers onwards it's been getting more and more burst oriented, and while some people enjoy that, it created problems. I don't think Samurai hogging Dance Partner is inherently the end of the world, it's more like how Samurai was just completely dominating aDPS charts and padding buff windows because all of its damage came from the short windows. All I really wanted with 6.08 Samurai was a little bit of their burst taken out.

People keep going on about "controllers not having enough buttons" although this can be true, every job has a set of buttons you simply don't need most of the time.
Paladin for example, you rarely need Cover (never actually, used to be godlike since it was an build in rampart+shelltron ontop of taking the debuff on the Paladin aswel) now it only does the last part, so pretty much useless.
SAM has a lot of abilities as everyone has stated that could be either put onto 1 button (AOE/ST moves) or iki+ogi while also having that 1 button that converts your sen symbols into Kenki, you never use this, i only do in dungeons so i get more kenki since i need to reset my buffs anyways.

what they could do is give each job their core ability, sam is about setting up for big hits (was atleast) work around that, add onto that, instead of making giant changes, add traits.
like what they did for spirits within for Paladin, it turned into expacion (i think) which got rid of the "lower your HP, the lower the potency" shit and made it an AOE with dropoff after the 1st target.
add onto abilities, give them more purpose.

we don't need an entire new rotation added each expansion, they got plenty of skills they can either combine together, or add onto that button without needing to take another button.
sometimes i really feel like they need an PTS of sorts, sure people will be against that, but select a few players (maybe 1k players in total on each region, so like 4-5k in total, small number compared to the milions we have)
have them playtest these abilities, theory craft etc and give feedback.
this way we get the best of all worlds, hell, you can even mix it up and instead of just 1k randomly, make it 500 controller and 500 keyboard/mouse players. (they do have this metric, 100%)