Hello,

Lynn Nuvestrahl, the salty Machinist theorycrafter here. The highlight of yesterday was the Q&A where Machinist and White Mage job issues were recognized, thank you Square-Enix. Our voices were heard. Please hear me out again because the day was all downhill from there.

I wanted to bring attention to the concept of Limited Jobs from yesterday's LLP. TL;DR:

This is an extremely bad idea. Please cut your losses: adjust the new class for group play and never introduce another Limited Job.

Dear Square-Enix, yesterday you announced the concept of Limited Jobs and "the first" limited job Blue Mage. From the slides presented, the concept seems to imply that the job will exists "outside" of the normal jobs used group content, a solo job if you will, because it would break the balance or somehow not fit into the normal gameplay. The notion of "first" gives me the chills because that would imply there's others on the way.

The reasoning was that Blue Mage has many game breaking abilities that wouldn't work in an MMO and you couldn't have the class without those abilities in order for it to be fun. This is absolutely false. Many jobs have been greatly adjusted to fit into the FFXIV system, such as Summoner, which is nothing like its offline counterparts. You can absolutely balance Blue Mage for group play if you wanted to. Look at all the CC effects that don't work on bosses, for example.

Furthermore, just as you can't have balance breaking abilities in an MMO, you also can't have a solo-only class in an MMO, because it's literally pointless if you can't play the rest of game with it. The initial response from the raiding community has been overwhelmingly negative. While I'm sure a solo-oriented player here and there might be happy, personally I wasn't even looking forward to this class and I was still let down, because instead of fixing current job and balance issues, a massive amount of resources was spent on this elaborate... mini-game. FFXIV is an MMO, not a solo-player game. People want more options and aesthetics to challenge the content in game with. Making a job unable to participate in said content basically makes it dead-on-arrival for most people.

It also sets a dangerous precedent where great job concepts might get shoved into the Limited category, a category that nobody wanted. What about Puppetmaster? Beastmaster? Dancer? Suddenly we don't know if we'll ever get a working FFXIV version of interesting jobs from previous games. If you want to have unique leveling experience and skill acquiring mechanics, that sounds like a great idea, but please make sure all the jobs can be used in regular battle content.

Limited Jobs are a terrible concept. Please, reconsider. I'm saying this now so that we don't have another disaster like the current White Mage Lily system, a problem that was called out before Stormblood launch but has remained an issue with no solutions throughout the whole expansion.

This is that call out. Don't repeat history.