What job is the highest priority to fix?

[Makeda]

So SE has stated their priority as:
Ninja -> Samurai -> (if I remember right) Summoner.
I am trying to remember if #3 is summoner or red mage...

Outside of this list...
I hear a lot that dancer DPS is too low for the buff it gives. The invulnerability for dark knight is poorly designed due to needing healers to be ready for it and able to heal you up to 100%, and I hear Astrologian has bad MP management.

Then I just heard that every class except maybe black mage “feels wrong”...

If these concerns are correct then despite Shadowbringers 5.0 having the best story so far for any FF game, will this expac go down as a failure due to the class designs and /!or story content in 5.x (I dread 5.x being just Xenos part 2 in a half made Garlean city...)

That said...

I think SE’s priority list is right, with the exception of AST MP needing to be on the list sooner rather than later.

I thin Dancer is actually where it should be because they meed to lower its popularity... BUT this might still fail as frankly... it has one of the best playstyles right now. Is just packed full of fun. Gunbreaker is in the same position but a vocal segment is livid over the sound effects being too good, wanting them to return to sounding like a 1980s infomercial slicing tomatoes and tin cans...

Me... I would set it as Ninja -> Summoner -> Astrologian -> Samurai -> Dark Knight and not come back to dancer or gunbreaker until 6.0...

[RadicalPesto]

A very quick and dirty way to address the issues currently affecting the entire physical ranged role might be to just take the trait "Enhanced Action Damage II", which all of them have, and bump the percentage in it from 20% to 25%. Might be just enough to keep ranged physical DPS viable for more than just the passive 1% role buff. As far as gameplay goes, all physical rangeds can be best described as "mostly fine", with some finetuning required for MCH's ping issues and BRD's current lack of a strong enough support identity. RDM needs some very large DPS buffs to be a good class, and SMN needs both that and a large overhaul given that its current gameplay is highly unpopular.

In practice there really isn't a single individual highest priority job, simply because half of the DPS role is in a pretty bad state right now. Shame because some of the worse off classes are actually very fun, but the tight DPS checks Eden's Gate Savage was designed with and the huge disparities we're dealing with now mean people may get excluded from groups and pressured into not playing what they like.

[Brightshadow]

Blue Mage without a doubt

BLU is too overpowered:

1.) It has spells that are rng and never land in a game that focuses on killing trash by gathering them up and burning them down.
2.) It has White Wind which would ruin your DPS, eat your MP, and probably wouldn't be able to save the party if your HP is already low.
3.) It has a tank stance that lets it live for one more hit while lowering their DPS by 70% that's so horribly overpower think of all the tanks that will lose their raid positions.
4.) It has a majority of 120 potency spells making it almost on par with a scholar ruin spell, I guess.
5.) Oh and the primal spells, they are grossly overpowered acting like a BLM fire I at best and having a cooldown of 60-90s.

/sarcasm

seriously why was this job limited in the first place...

[HyoMinPark]

Not really... Summoner is the hardest dps to play right now it's damage does not reflect that at all, so top priority should be giving summoner quality of life improvements and buffs. Dancer does not need buffs at all. I would say samurai needs more quality of life improvements, followed by machinist who needs a slight buff and red mage.

DNC absolutely needs potency buffs—all of the physical ranged do. It’s better to bring 2 BLMs than it is to bring a physical ranged, even with you losing the 1% party buff from having a physical ranged in your party. I don’t think that SMN being more complicated is a good enough defense to ignore the role as a whole.

Back on the subject of DNC specifically, though: if you think it doesn’t need potency adjustments, I’d invite you to look at some of the lower percentiles of the Big 3 jobs and then find how high a DNC has to be to match them in rDPS—not aDPS, not pDPS, but rDPS. There was a post in another thread that was actually very interesting to consider:

Is it impossible to clear with X jobs or X comps?
No, you can clear with every 2 Tank / 2 Healers / 4 DPS comp

The problem is that some comps using BLM, MNK, DRG, NIN and/or SAM will have a much easier time clearing content.
Ranged DPS, SMN and RDM are taxed for utility/mobility that doesn't lives up to the cost.

The other problem is that a bad MNK, BLM, DRG will do as much DPS as a ranged DPS/RDM/SMN, not rewarding their skill and job optimisation.

You have the argument that since all jobs can clear so nobody should care, that the tax is deserved.
And you have the argument that ranged/SMN/RDM's effort should be rewarded as much as any melee effort.

For example about a "random" (One of the worst, I have to admit) FFLog Report on E4S:
Machinist - 71th percentile - 12.678 rDPS
Black Mage - 21th Percentile - 12.325 rDPS
Monk - 13th Percentile - 12.510 rDPS
Dragoon - 13th Percentile - 12.256 rDPS

In other words, if their Black mage was a SMN/RDM or their MNK/DRG was a SAM/NIN they wouldn't have cleared E4S.
Jobs DPS disparity is so big that if you can't do the mechanics right, shifting your comp to the highest DPS job becomes a pass for the clear.

I looked up DNC’s rDPS after reading this post, and under the All Bosses average metric, a DNC would have to be 90th percentile—so, almost orange percentile, since orange starts at 95th percentile—just to reach ~12,300 rDPS. Meanwhile, that’s something those 3 “big jobs” (BLM/MNK/DRG) can hit in a gray percentile. For E4S specifically, DNC still has to be purple to meet these rDPS thresholds: 80th percentile for the job is ~12,400 rDPS. For funnsies, a 10th percentile DNC on E4S is ~11,100 rDPS, over 1,100 rDPS less than the 13th percentile DRG in that log quoted above.



On topic, I think the jobs that need to be looked at first should be:
—The physical ranged: all three need potency buffs straight up. When it’s mathematically better to sacrifice the 1% and do triple melee or double BLM over bringing physical ranged, there’s a problem with the role as a whole.

Other jobs that could stand to be looked at soon:
—AST: something needs to be done with this job. It has to work harder to achieve less results than a WHM or SCH does. It’s still the lowest rDPS of the three healers, and its opener is one of the jankiest openers I’ve ever dealt with. The cards are also in need of TLC.
—SAM: It does need to be more on par with the other melee. It makes little sense to me why it’s so low still. I don’t think it’s as high of a priority as some jobs above, but it does need to be addressed.
—SMN: I don’t know much about it, but the gameplay is garbage from every SMN I’ve spoken to. It could also use potency buffs.
—RDM: Needs potency buffs. If SMN is buffed considerably in Patch 5.1, RDM is dead.

[Sebazy]

First priority for a fix is the job design team itself. I'm not going to bash the quality of their work, but rather my problem is that they've kept the team the same since the launch of ARR. In the meantime, the number of jobs and abilities has ballooned and the expectations of the player base have only ever gotten higher with each tier.

They just cannot keep up and their time is evidently stretched way too thinly across the various roles and classes with the last two expansion releases being particularly bad for certain jobs.

[Enla]

BLU is too overpowered:

1.) It has spells that are rng and never land in a game that focuses on killing trash by gathering them up and burning them down.
2.) It has White Wind which would ruin your DPS, eat your MP, and probably wouldn't be able to save the party if your HP is already low.
3.) It has a tank stance that lets it live for one more hit while lowering their DPS by 70% that's so horribly overpower think of all the tanks that will lose their raid positions.
4.) It has a majority of 120 potency spells making it almost on par with a scholar ruin spell, I guess.
5.) Oh and the primal spells, they are grossly overpowered acting like a BLM fire I at best and having a cooldown of 60-90s.

/sarcasm

seriously why was this job limited in the first place...

Probably because of the way BLU traditionally picks up spells, they wouldn't want someone queueing with it with only one spell for example, and the whole 'Death' spell simply existing to be frank. What I don't understand is why they didn't just omit said Death spell and lock BLU from joining any roulette's until it picks up a certain number of spells? That practically solves the issue right then and there. That or lock the more meme spells to map exploration only. There were a lot of ways they could have made it viable.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

SAM>NIN>SMN>AST in that order.

For SAM, it's just ridiculous to have a no utility job be weaker than those with utility. What's the point?

AST is last in the list because I feel it's actually really strong right now. It needs a buff to MP management but other than that it's very strong. What people are asking for is more along the lines of a rework for cards, and that won't happen till at least next expansion.

[Noshpan]

Based upon my observation I think AST, NIN, SAM need more tweaking. I've heard from plenty of former NIN players of their issues, but the job is getting better. Same with AST. GNB could at least have the issue with Superbolide addressed. Naturally, DNC will be receiving constant tweaking during the expansion.

As a RDM main, I will say that Reprise is terribly underwhelming, but it's a job that I've accepted as "used during progression but not during clears".

[ForteNightshade]

First priority for a fix is the job design team itself. I'm not going to bash the quality of their work, but rather my problem is that they've kept the team the same since the launch of ARR. In the meantime, the number of jobs and abilities has ballooned and the expectations of the player base have only ever gotten higher with each tier.

They just cannot keep up and their time is evidently stretched way too thinly across the various roles and classes with the last two expansion releases being particularly bad for certain jobs.

Talking with my friend the other night, we were discussing how uncreative a lot of the ShB changes were; in particular Delirium being a IR clone comes to mind. Even a lot of the jobs as a whole feel too simplified. Bard, Astro—though the healers as a whole suffer in this regard. And it all comes down to this. They desperately need some fresh ideas, and frankly, more people to help execute them. Shadowbringer has really highlighted this because I cannot recall a period where so many jobs have been hit or miss.

[Lalarrific]

Bard. Right now, it lacks an identity.