Phantom Jobs are a step in the right direction but need iteration.

I personally feel like Phantom Jobs are one of the best things but also one of the worst things about occult crescent. Making them permanent fixtures that you don't have to repeatedly gather is an amazing improvement over logograms and lost actions. Farming those were the biggest barrier to participating in later content in Eureka and Bozja. It makes Phantom Jobs feel that much more desirable and impactful to recieve.

Unfortunately, they do other things worse. They aren't as flexible, and several of them don't do enough to change the way you play and only show the majority of their value inside of Forked Tower, which is almost impossible for the general player base to enter, and even less likely for a PUG that does, meaning most players will not ge tthe opportunity to appreciate these jobs entire toolkits.

Phantom jobs have the potential to be an amazing addition to the game, but they seem to be afraid to to be as outstandingly weird or powerful as older versions of this system, as well as afraid to step out of the box mechanically, they are, overwhelmingly, buffs, debuffs, or minor or expensive damage increases, of which only some few debuffs are usable in Critical Engagements. Much of what phantom jobs bring to the table is not interesting enough or not impactful enough to cause players to prefer them outside of forked tower, meaning the playerbase gravitates to the roles with damage based skills, or chemist, which would have been amazing had it not been a consumable based class. Rather than having consumables for Chemist and Samurai, Timed Consumables that enhance or alter certain aspects of phantom jobs would have been better options to encourage grinding, though that has the same problem as logograms and lost actions, it would be mitigated by the Jobs themselves already being permanent fixtures.

Please, Square Enix, do not be afraid to go big and bold in extra content. It won't unbalance the rest of your game, have fun with it, iterate, be wild and crazy. Make this Field operation memorable just for how it plays. Oracle's ability to sacrifice a ton of HP for a powerful attack makes for a very interesting risk reward factor, making most classes have to really learn mechanics of a fight to find a window big enough to ensure safe access to Starfall. Make just the idea of getting to use a phantom job fun and engaging enough to make people want to come back to forays like this. The sheer joy of raising people en masse as chemist alone is some of the most fun I've ever had in XIV, despite its other flaws.

I personally think outside of them being easy to use, it is extremely boring and uninspiring to have the phantom jobs currently as it is. There is no experimentation or change of pace as with the logograms of Eureka or Bozja that made them unique and fun to use. It seems they are afraid of things getting too powerful and have decided to tune down the system as a whole. What they should of done is improve the system they currently had and made it better but instead we got this system which feels kind of barebones.

I think they have pros and cons.

The way I see it, Phantom Jobs are just the gimmick this time round. They might turn them into some other gimmick in 8.0, such as Magical Companions who follow you around and do these actions.

they needed more passives that change your gameplay
they're too afraid of anything massively changing your rotation, for some reason, even though this is not end game raiding

I love them conceptually, but I also agree they shouldn't be afraid to experiment more. The moment I saw Chemist had infinite free revives, or knight having 90% damage mit I was blown away. It's cooperative, it's an isolated place, we're not competing with anyone to worry about balance!
I wish deep dungeons would do something similar aswell, just experiment, let us become for atleast short time in a restricted place be ridiculously powerful or make really fun combos! :)

i think how it is now its more designed for players to do OC to lvl up phantomjobs. but since they are only usable in OC it should be pretty much the other way around.
as it is now we switch from job to job in order to lvl them all up. not only to have the dmg buff but also to experience what these jobs can do.

but we should be encouraged to play with these jobs. acquiring them through different means is good. lvl them up needs too long though.

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Originally Posted by MitsukiKimura

I personally think outside of them being easy to use, it is extremely boring and uninspiring to have the phantom jobs currently as it is. There is no experimentation or change of pace as with the logograms of Eureka or Bozja that made them unique and fun to use.

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Yes, this is one of the issues with the current system. Them being framed as jobs is good, but they are not, as a whole, interesting or game changing enough to warrant being less flexible than Eureka or Bozja. I am hoping that, rather than just inserting additional jobs in North Horn or adding more levels/skills to existing jobs, they iterate on how jobs work in general. Perhaps you can wear two to experiment with synergies, or combine them to create powerful roles like with logograms.

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Originally Posted by Asari5

but we should be encouraged to play with these jobs. acquiring them through different means is good. lvl them up needs too long though.

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As someone who has maxed out all Phantom Jobs, I like playing with them, and Occult Crescent captures that great feeling of fighting epic conflicts with a bunch of other people that's so rare outside of alliance raiding, but I find that unless I am playing specific roles or doing a very specific Critical Engagement, I am not incentivized to switch the Phantom Jobs up much, when the best option for the content is usually just boring damage utility. Some of the jobs are more useful than others by, well, a lot, and the ones that aren't as useful sometimes aren't fun or interesting enough to warrant using regularly due to restrictive balance design. Thief for example, has a really great skill that makes you go nyoom! and even works in encounters, and it would be really fun to just be able to be really fast in CEs, but Occult Sprint is only available 1/3 of the time, so instead of feeling like you're having a lot of fun going fast, you feel like you're obligated to use it as a reactionary utility, which feels arguably worse than just using Samurai or Time Mage or Oracle or Berserker or Cannoneer for the funny numbers.

One Big problem with Phantom job skills is the Button bloat, i really have no space to keybind those abilities, and when i saw the controller instuction for them , i was truly sure that they are totaly indifferent when it comes to keyboard /mouse players.

Yeah , just click them i guess, or put them all in a macro somehow, works with grenadier at least.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

One Big problem with Phantom job skills is the Button bloat, i really have no space to keybind those abilities, and when i saw the controller instuction for them , i was truly sure that they are totaly indifferent when it comes to keyboard /mouse players.

Yeah , just click them i guess, or put them all in a macro somehow, works with grenadier at least.

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I personally don't click them, I set one function to Mouse Forward and the other to Mouse Back like I have in the other two Field Ops. In this case, one button rotates the job panel and the other uses the aligned skill. Fairly simple. No bar bloat. Not too much extra forethought needed. Easy enough to see and manage depending on where you put it.

Do people really have trouble with lost actions? I play bozja casually and along the way I got enough (relevant) lost actions for 3/4 of total relic weapons. I only needed to buy from MB about 3 or 4 times, and their prices were pretty cheap as well. Unless you're attempting to do delubrum savage, you don't really need to grind for those lost actions.

The problem with phantom jobs is that they aren’t actually a “system” per se. They are a few collections of vaguely related lost actions with the interaction carefully stripped out of them and called a system

None of the jobs really even synergise with themselves let alone synergise with your actual job or other phantom jobs. A few have semi interesting “core loops”; namely monks kick buff upkeep, oracles prediction and excog heal, beserkers big hit being linked to damage taken during rage or time mage using haste to remove the cast time on meteor. But even those jobs have other pointless skills thrown in there that really don’t do anything. Monks counter stance like oGCD has nothing to do with its buff, the doom or invuln on oracle have nothing to do with the prediction loop, the dispel, slow and addle have nothing to do with meteor on time mage etc

And that’s the jobs that I’d consider good. There are others that are just dumping grounds for pointless utility like bard or knight, jobs that are functionally fodder for forked tower like chemist ranger or thief and the remaining few like canoneer is just a few damage spells on CD, geo is basically a class only the MT can use and samurai may as well not even exist

So with this system you basically have only the most useful jobs actually doing anything and the rest being a collection of vaguely related utility you mostly don’t use and almost none of the jobs; again with the slight exception of the well designed ones; actually change how you play your actual job and most of the ones that do basically amount to “put yourself in damages to do a lot of damage” which really only benefits the tanks

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Originally Posted by Kozh

Do people really have trouble with lost actions? I play bozja casually and along the way I got enough (relevant) lost actions for 3/4 of total relic weapons. I only needed to buy from MB about 3 or 4 times, and their prices were pretty cheap as well. Unless you're attempting to do delubrum savage, you don't really need to grind for those lost actions.

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Believe it or not, yes. There was a time when a ton of people were having trouble with it. Certainly they weren't as nasty to get as some logograms, but they can be tough to farm alone, and for a while you had gil farmers monopolizing spawns in instances rendering people unable to acquire them except via gil. Some players don't do Adventurer in Need and have significantly less gil. Some spend their gil on cosmetics. Some help their FC mates by buying or making them gear. There are plenty of reasons a player might not have enough gil to feel comfortable spending it on a needlessly huge stack of lost actions.

More to the point, the way those items were set up triggered the very common Item Goblin Syndrome, where players felt they had to reserve their most ideal or most fun or rarest combinations of lost actions for content where it really mattered. The reality of how replenishable the supply is doesn't really factor into a person's hoarding instinct, and it diminishes the experience. This is why you don't see too many people playing Chemist or Samurai on Occult Crescent but see a TON of Cannoneers and Berserkers. The first two require an investment of consumables and there are other options with similar utility or damage for less constant investment.

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Originally Posted by Yamadronis

Believe it or not, yes. There was a time when a ton of people were having trouble with it. Certainly they weren't as nasty to get as some logograms, but they can be tough to farm alone, and for a while you had gil farmers monopolizing spawns in instances rendering people unable to acquire them except via gil. Some players don't do Adventurer in Need and have significantly less gil. Some spend their gil on cosmetics. Some help their FC mates by buying or making them gear. There are plenty of reasons a player might not have enough gil to feel comfortable spending it on a needlessly huge stack of lost actions.

More to the point, the way those items were set up triggered the very common Item Goblin Syndrome, where players felt they had to reserve their most ideal or most fun or rarest combinations of lost actions for content where it really mattered. The reality of how replenishable the supply is doesn't really factor into a person's hoarding instinct, and it diminishes the experience. This is why you don't see too many people playing Chemist or Samurai on Occult Crescent but see a TON of Cannoneers and Berserkers. The first two require an investment of consumables and there are other options with similar utility or damage for less constant investment.

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The reason you don’t see anyone playing chemist or samurai is because those jobs don’t do anything

If I wanted a class that couldn’t do anything but raise id play a healer and samurai decided “Gil toss” was enough to build a phantom job around

Like at least oracle kinda makes you think

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

None of the jobs really even synergise with themselves let alone synergise with your actual job or other phantom jobs. A few have semi interesting “core loops”; namely monks kick buff upkeep, oracles prediction and excog heal, beserkers big hit being linked to damage taken during rage or time mage using haste to remove the cast time on meteor. But even those jobs have other pointless skills thrown in there that really don’t do anything. Monks counter stance like oGCD has nothing to do with its buff, the doom or invuln on oracle have nothing to do with the prediction loop, the dispel, slow and addle have nothing to do with meteor on time mage etc

And that’s the jobs that I’d consider good. There are others that are just dumping grounds for pointless utility like bard or knight, jobs that are functionally fodder for forked tower like chemist ranger or thief and the remaining few like canoneer is just a few damage spells on CD, geo is basically a class only the MT can use and samurai may as well not even exist

So with this system you basically have only the most useful jobs actually doing anything and the rest being a collection of vaguely related utility you mostly don’t use and almost none of the jobs; again with the slight exception of the well designed ones; actually change how you play your actual job and most of the ones that do basically amount to “put yourself in damages to do a lot of damage” which really only benefits the tanks

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This is, very much a critical problem with them. One of the big reasons for this seems to be that they are afraid to give these jobs that synergy or uniqueness for balance reasons. Some of the jobs could be made pretty amazing just by tweaking some durations, values or targets. The jobs really feel like they wanted to put in a bunch of quirky ideas that they didn't feel would fit in the main game, balance wise, but then decided it all had to be balanced anyway, so there aren't any ridiculous in job synergies outside of Geomancer, and, as you mentioned, that job certainly has skills that primarily benefit tanks because two of them require you to be hit regularly to do anything. They legitimately added an invulnerability skill to a class with a self-damage nuke and made it not self targeting. It's blatantly obvious that they're avoiding it on purpose. If you are adding a system to standalone content, if should first and foremost be "fun" and "interesting" before it is "balanced".

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

The reason you don’t see anyone playing chemist or samurai is because those jobs don’t do anything

If I wanted a class that couldn’t do anything but raise id play a healer and samurai decided “Gil toss” was enough to build a phantom job around

Like at least oracle kinda makes you think

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I strongly disagree in some respects. I think playing around with the Chemist rez on With Extreme Prejudice is some of the most fun I've had in occult crescent, and if it didn't cost a tremendous amount of resources and grind to do so, I'd openly spend encounters looking for people to spam potions and ethers at. Samurai is is a bit of a less clear case. Its cleave can be nice in a few critical engagements and its parry has some occasional fun use cases that can change how you engage with an encounter, like parrying the tentacles in scourge of the mind or the half room cleave in The Unbridled. Its stun, of course, does absolutely nothing to CE and fate bosses and might as well not exist.

I think those phantom jobs are the very image of their current pve job design.

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Originally Posted by Kozh

Do people really have trouble with lost actions? I play bozja casually and along the way I got enough (relevant) lost actions for 3/4 of total relic weapons. I only needed to buy from MB about 3 or 4 times, and their prices were pretty cheap as well. Unless you're attempting to do delubrum savage, you don't really need to grind for those lost actions.

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There was no issue with Lost Actions.

However, casual players were not smart enough to use them or understand them. So they went into DR without them and DR took 40-60 minutes instead of 20 minutes. The bosses took so long that it was miserable and made me not want to do it again. The fights themselves were really good, yet the lack of action usage was that bad.

A benefit of Phantom Jobs is it's something casual players are far more likely to grasp.

I like the system. It's nice that I can just drop out of the zone and then go back in and I haven't lost anything. I dislike consumables, though they are a reason to play when they're earned in the zone. But I don't like all the phantom jobs, some of them are clearly just dumping grounds for utility needed in Forked Tower, and completely useless otherwise.

Like Thief. Thief is a completely useless job. It adds nothing to the zone outside the Tower. You can steal gold! But it's the least efficient gold farming method. No one would use Bard or Time Mage over any alternative. Ranger's damage buff is the only button anyone would press outside of the Tower, and that's sad.

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Originally Posted by FuturePastNow

No one would use Bard or Time Mage over any alternative. Ranger's damage buff is the only button anyone would press outside of the Tower, and that's sad.

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I happen to really like time mage on PCT for the sole reason that Occult Quick lets me cast my motifs while moving in a CE. Swiftcast comet isn't the best available damage option overall, but it is the quickest way to generate credit if you're late for a fate out of all the options other than throwing money at it. Slowga is... less good since gold farming can be done easily with a cannons party, but if for some reason you can't get one of those together, it can make less efficient farms much less stressful.

Thief really got shafted by Occult Sprint not being 100% uptime. Pilfer Weapon is not terrible from a debuff standpoint as it stacks with the already existing reductions, but it's also unnecessary mitigation in current content. Not sure why you say that about ranger. Occult Featherfoot is great utility for any content and Occult Unicorn is basically Shake It Off on any class you want. Falcon is objectively pointless outside of Forked, though. It'd be nice if it could be used on static elements in CEs. I'd hoped it could be used on the rocks in On the Hunt or maybe the idols in from Times bygone, but nope.

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Originally Posted by XtremePrime

I wish deep dungeons would do something similar aswell, just experiment, let us become for atleast short time in a restricted place be ridiculously powerful or make really fun combos! :)

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I wholeheartedly agree that Deep Dungeons would really benefit from this.

I love all of them, but Orthos is a slog to get through the starting floors compared to its predecessors, and they're starting to test the limits of how they can innovate around the same gameplay style.

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Originally Posted by MitsukiKimura

I personally think outside of them being easy to use, it is extremely boring and uninspiring to have the phantom jobs currently as it is. There is no experimentation or change of pace as with the logograms of Eureka or Bozja that made them unique and fun to use. It seems they are afraid of things getting too powerful and have decided to tune down the system as a whole. What they should of done is improve the system they currently had and made it better but instead we got this system which feels kind of barebones.

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Man people really have rose-tinted glasses with Eureka and Bozja.
None of the actions were interesting. It was just passives or buffs to do silly damage, which is pretty much what phantom jobs are. There were some niche actions in Eureka that you used to level grind, but that's it.

I've said it in other thread but I'll say it here again:

Logos/Lost Actions felt like designed to be out of wack, imbalanced, experimental, and silly, perfect for a content that's supposed to be segregated from the rest of their 'safe' regular main content outside. Phantom Jobs felt like designed to be as inoffensive & not as much of an interference to EW/DT savage raiding practice, which amounts to combinations of: keep 1m/2m on cooldown, press and forget button, dump highest potency gcds/actions into raidbuff windows, and minimal consideration.

I mean, how dare I'm able to replace tanks as a drunkard DNC or rip aggro with 7m misery.. or god forbid scare my healer by being a paper, glass cannon tank, I guess... :P

They should've stopped at turning the system into one-time acquisition, instead they double down to make everything look more and more like the mainline content.

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Originally Posted by Kozh

Do people really have trouble with lost actions?

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Personally, I always found keeping myself supplied with a steady supply of Deep Aetherweaver/Deep Profane to be a total pain in the ass, and Becoming is one of the more costly fragments, at 20k gil-ish a pop, Masteries are cheaper at 4k-ish, but still a cost, this has always been a big frustration about Bozja and I have looked at Bozja with a "...not right now" mood before because I was running low, didn't feel like playing something else, and getting more is so costly/time-intensive.

Multiple threads for say the same things the same players, bit annoying...

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

There was no issue with Lost Actions.

However, casual players were not smart enough to use them or understand them. So they went into DR without them and DR took 40-60 minutes instead of 20 minutes. The bosses took so long that it was miserable and made me not want to do it again. The fights themselves were really good, yet the lack of action usage was that bad.

A benefit of Phantom Jobs is it's something casual players are far more likely to grasp.

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False.

The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates, and on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil only to appraise into useless garbage. If the droprate wasn't crap and there were more fragments in the economy than anyone needed then casuals would've been able to use them more. But some people are too greedy and wanted them to be rare and valuable so they could farm them and make money, and the content itself suffered and now the pendulum swung all the way in the other direction so there aren't logograms/fragments to worry about at all and we get less interesting actions to go with it.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

False.

The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates, and on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil only to appraise into useless garbage. If the droprate wasn't crap and there were more fragments in the economy than anyone needed then casuals would've been able to use them more. But some people are too greedy and wanted them to be rare and valuable so they could farm them and make money, and the content itself suffered and now the pendulum swung all the way in the other direction so there aren't logograms/fragments to worry about at all and we get less interesting actions to go with it.

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You say this, but in practise only top loadouts really required actual investment. Simple loadouts like essence of the skirmisher + banner of whoopdedoo already significantly increase your DPS. The required Awakening (dropped by 4 fates, the questline, and a stupid amount of mobs) and Resolve (dropped by questline and in packs of 10 from BSF z3 CEs) fragments really did not require much effort on the player's part to acquire. The fact that even such simple loadouts were already relatively uncommon despite the ease of acquisition shows that the problem was a mismatch between developer expectations and casual players. The moment you can click a subjob and immediately get buttons on your hotbar to press, there was no more problem at all.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates

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For the most part, certain mobs dropped certain fragments, so they were very easy to farm. You could form parties to do it or reflect farm. In fact some party members would do this while you were doing other things, giving you fragments in the process.

Another option was to get Lost Doom and spam it on a boss. Eventually it would 1 shot them and you'd get loads of fragments.

Of course, many other fragments could simply be bought with clusters or looted from CLL.

And finally, for the ones you couldn't get, you could simply go to the market board and buy them.

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on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil

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Maybe they could have not bothered with the Appraisal system and maybe they should avoid that if they do it again, but the rest was fine in my opinion. 100 billion is an exaggeration though. There were some rare ones, but at least when the content was current (pre-Echo where it was more useful), prices were lower.

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Originally Posted by Yamadronis

I happen to really like time mage on PCT for the sole reason that Occult Quick lets me cast my motifs while moving in a CE. Swiftcast comet isn't the best available damage option overall, but it is the quickest way to generate credit if you're late for a fate out of all the options other than throwing money at it. Slowga is... less good since gold farming can be done easily with a cannons party, but if for some reason you can't get one of those together, it can make less efficient farms much less stressful.

Thief really got shafted by Occult Sprint not being 100% uptime. Pilfer Weapon is not terrible from a debuff standpoint as it stacks with the already existing reductions, but it's also unnecessary mitigation in current content. Not sure why you say that about ranger. Occult Featherfoot is great utility for any content and Occult Unicorn is basically Shake It Off on any class you want. Falcon is objectively pointless outside of Forked, though. It'd be nice if it could be used on static elements in CEs. I'd hoped it could be used on the rocks in On the Hunt or maybe the idols in from Times bygone, but nope.

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Just a note here comet is the best damage option overall for any class using time mage, no class has an attack stronger than comet so it should always be prioritised

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

False.

The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates, and on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil only to appraise into useless garbage. If the droprate wasn't crap and there were more fragments in the economy than anyone needed then casuals would've been able to use them more. But some people are too greedy and wanted them to be rare and valuable so they could farm them and make money, and the content itself suffered and now the pendulum swung all the way in the other direction so there aren't logograms/fragments to worry about at all and we get less interesting actions to go with it.

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This was a common misconception. You didn’t need anything that was rare to do a significant amount of damage. People weren’t asking for excellence deep profane and lost font of magic to run a zone 1 skirmish. People were just saying when aetherweaver fragments cost 30 Gil on the marketboard you can afford to not use platebearer”

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Originally Posted by RaionKansen

Man people really have rose-tinted glasses with Eureka and Bozja.
None of the actions were interesting. It was just passives or buffs to do silly damage, which is pretty much what phantom jobs are. There were some niche actions in Eureka that you used to level grind, but that's it.

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The silly damage is the carrot, the stick is breakdancing and not hitting the boss or using your dashes as a gauge builder or using your mitigations on raidwides and praying that you don’t snag aggro or that the other 3 healers in your party who instantly activated an essence aren’t also all profane and so on. It’s about how the older iterations interacted with the kit and how insular the phantom subjobs are by comparison.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

This was a common misconception. You didn’t need anything that was rare to do a significant amount of damage. People weren’t asking for excellence deep profane and lost font of magic to run a zone 1 skirmish. People were just saying when aetherweaver fragments cost 30 Gil on the marketboard you can afford to not use platebearer”

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People were absolutely requiring the best DPS essences for PF DR runs, and blacklisting people who didn't use them. Because you had to run it FIFTEEN TIMES PER WEAPON, and there was almost an hour difference in completion time between people using them or not.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Just a note here comet is the best damage option overall for any class using time mage, no class has an attack stronger than comet so it should always be prioritised

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Yes, always use Comet on CD, I may have been unclear, I meant that there are other phantom jobs that have superior damage utility to time mage if you're willing to invest.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

People were absolutely requiring the best DPS essences for PF DR runs, and blacklisting people who didn't use them. Because you had to run it FIFTEEN TIMES PER WEAPON, and there was almost an hour difference in completion time between people using them or not.

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I didn't join a lot of these 'top dps setup only' PFs (because I cleared all relics before these PFs starts popping up), but from the ones that I did joined as a Glarebot WHM for fun, not once I've been blocked out of PF for merely using two mandatories: basic Aetherweaver (skill fragment, super easy to farm en masse), and Seraph Strike (a bit harder but not perishable until replaced). The 2nd duty actions was the 'whatever' slot. Can be banner (zone 3 BSF CEs) or Fonts (hardest to farm amongst 4 mentioned) for more DPS but I rarely use them myself. It was usually Bravery because not every run has Caster willing to run delubrum caster essence + Cure IV setup. When Zadnor came out, Chainspell could be subbed here thanks to how easy to farm them from sprite reflecting. With all that, it was pretty common to see myself holding myself on top 3 in the enmity list, or sometimes funnily ripping aggro when I did decide to run the funny high dps setups.

As an additional funny side note, those who did actually ran Profane coupled with banner/fonts usually ends up doing less overall because majority didn't farm their ether kits or helpless without their Phys Ranged being their running MP pots, or they didn't know stacking buffs yields more than trying to keep everything on cooldown, or struggle with basics like keeping uptime (buffs were 90s misery, 150s Pom, 120s font, 60s Seraph Strike, 90s Chainspell. Go figure). My gear? I didn't had any haste gears until they increase the coin reward from CLL.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

People were absolutely requiring the best DPS essences for PF DR runs, and blacklisting people who didn't use them. Because you had to run it FIFTEEN TIMES PER WEAPON, and there was almost an hour difference in completion time between people using them or not.

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I mean, people don't need to join such an extreme PF though. They can just queue into DR normally and get matched with randoms where most people won't really care if you have the best essences or not so long you pull your weight.

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Originally Posted by Kozh

I mean, people don't need to join such an extreme PF though. They can just queue into DR normally and get matched with randoms where most people won't really care if you have the best essences or not so long you pull your weight.

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The general sentiment back then, pretty much.

I do however want to add how antagonistic the RNG involved to acquire even the basic essences against player who do not necessarily levels all their jobs. I personally did not felt the impact as much because anytime I ran low of Aetherweaver, I'd switch to either Tank to burn Martialist or DPS to burn Skirmisher. People who do not 'omni-role' did not have this luxury and I think that's a bit unfair to place the blame solely on them.

I think it would be better if AT LEAST the essence acquisition system allows the player to choose which one they want to stockpile rather than selecting randomly from the loot pool. I.e., 2-3 fragments of awakening can be traded for 1 skirmisher.

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Originally Posted by Kozh

I mean, people don't need to join such an extreme PF though. They can just queue into DR normally and get matched with randoms where most people won't really care if you have the best essences or not so long you pull your weight.

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Well, I mean, you *used* to be able to do that, now you end up inside with maybe two or three other people after waiting for half an hour. It's better than not being able to get in at all, but not by much. Unless that has changed recently and DR has suddenly become popular to do just because, again.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

The general sentiment back then, pretty much.

I do however want to add how antagonistic the RNG involved to acquire even the basic essences against player who do not necessarily levels all their jobs. I personally did not felt the impact as much because anytime I ran low of Aetherweaver, I'd switch to either Tank to burn Martialist or DPS to burn Skirmisher. People who do not 'omni-role' did not have this luxury and I think that's a bit unfair to place the blame solely on them.

I think it would be better if AT LEAST the essence acquisition system allows the player to choose which one they want to stockpile rather than selecting randomly from the loot pool. I.e., 2-3 fragments of awakening can be traded for 1 skirmisher.

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Hmm okay yeah, fair point on the omni-role thing. I forgot not everyone do that.

I suppose that's the trade then, phantom jobs are more easily acquire, but you have to level grind them (and imho, currently feel less fun than lost actions/essence)

I'd be more okay with the phantom job system if they had permitted at least some degree of cross-classing so you aren't forced to start at square 1 every time you level a new job.

It's not helped by the fact that some jobs are mostly useless outside of forked tower and/or in CEs due to their abilities either only working on normal enemies or being designed around mechanics that only existed in the mentioned raid.

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Originally Posted by RaionKansen

Man people really have rose-tinted glasses with Eureka and Bozja.
None of the actions were interesting. It was just passives or buffs to do silly damage, which is pretty much what phantom jobs are. There were some niche actions in Eureka that you used to level grind, but that's it.

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Just silly damage? Far from it. Why don't you step into Bozja and take a look at the lost actions one more time.

As a Healer, one iteration I would love to have is having Healers be able to use the Phantom Jobs in regular content. It might actually put them on the same level as other roles.

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

As a Healer, one iteration I would love to have is having Healers be able to use the Phantom Jobs in regular content. It might actually put them on the same level as other roles.

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I'm going to act as if you are in here for good faith discussion. The state of healers is not the topic of this thread and never has been, but I will humor you. Adding phantom actions to healers would not make it better, it would make it worse because they'd be forced to care even less. Giving additional, silly tools to healers would further trivialize content, and make you all even MORE bored. Phantom jobs are for the most part not in a state that they require much of anything in the way of additional or complex thought to use, and that is clearly by design. Only Oracle's Prediction and Monk's Kick come anywhere close to requiring some engaging forethought, and only because kick can smash you into a wall that kills you.