What do you feel is your job identity in flavour and gameplay?

[Gemina]

Everything doesn't have to be damage, people enjoy a engaging class than one that you can basically master within a few days.

[Kytrin]

Honestly, I think the biggest problem has more to do with this compulsion to release new job abilities every expansion than anything else. Everything they add is another button, and every new button (usually) has to find its way onto our hot bars SOMEWHERE. Too many buttons and we can't realistically do that. So they have to par things down so we can. That means getting rid of some things to make room and then balancing out the rest so the job still functions more or less as intended. Even more irritating is when they have to nerf existing abilities because of the new ones so the job in question isn't overpowered unfairly to the rest.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for having new abilities and skills. But honestly, I would have been perfectly happy for them to have merely buffed SAM's potencies to ShB level difficulty and spent my entire time leveling unlocking passive traits (like better kenki generation or something) and building up to unlocking one or two new skills instead of the... what... five or so we got?

I would have much preferred a quest driven journey to find ancient scrolls (or something) specifically so I could unlock Hissatsu:Senei and Tsubame-gaeshi or Iikishoten or whatever and have THAT be the sum total of my new abilities for ShB instead of going through the gyrations we have because they seem to have this fear that if they don't give us brand new abilities every other level we'll riot or something.

No, build up some excitement for the one or two new abilities we're going to get, and make the learning of them both a challenge and organic and we'll be fine guys. Really. Gutting Hagakure was unnecessary. Adding Ikishoten was unnecessary. Changing meditate was largely unnecessary (though Shoha is nice). We would have been fine with a questline to translate new moves to get our high damage single target hit and our double execute as long as the journey was interesting.

And I use SAM as an example simply because it's my main, but I see it on every job. Except where there are actual problems playing and there is a noticeable struggle for a particular job to do a thing it's meant to... we don't have to re-invent the wheel every expansion and then go back and try to fix it.

[TwiibieTwuu]

Monk. Because it's the only class that allows you to mix up different skills. Each form has 3 different attacks.

Has the best animations and the best melee LB3

Standing up to a dragon wearing heavily clad armour is a cool thing but square up punching a god in the jaw is a much cooler thing.

[Rasikko]

Not gonna say. Don't wanna trigger people here for not feeling the same way they do. Also, something is wrong with me.

[HyoMinPark]

Speaking of my favorite jobs:

BRD: Definitely Stormblood was the peak for this job. The gutting of its utility and removal of DoT management/manipulation really drove me away from the job—and I started FFXIV on BRD. I EVEN ENJOYED BOWMAGE DESPITE IT BEING UNIVERSALLY HATED. But I really dislike Shadowbringers BRD. Even the return of the song effects didn’t salvage it for me. I miss Foe’s and manipulating its management with Refresh. I miss having things like Palisade to assist my tanks. Nature’s Minne is still good; but idk. The job has just felt empty to me since ShB dropped.

DRK: Heavensward DRK was the best iteration of the job. I like some of the things introduced in Shadowbringers (I love Living Shadow because I can head-canon my character fighting alongside her Darkside every 2 minutes for a little bit), but I wish we could return some of the stuff in Heavensward. I miss having a second combo to maintain (OG Delirium); I miss the MP management OG Darkside gave you. I MISS SCOURGE. I miss when Salted Earth wasn’t a lul skill, and I really miss DA+Abyssal Drain in large dungeon pulls. Original Reprisal animation was also the best.

AST: Stormblood. While the devs needed to address Balance, I loved AST in Stormblood. 3.3 HW AST was good, too (before they broke Balance). The new card system killed my love for the job. I can only really enjoy it now if I basically ignore that job mechanic...which isn’t right lol. I miss the variety in the Arcana; I miss the Time Mage aspects of the job. I also miss HW AST’s MP economy but I’d take SB AST over ShB AST with HW MP.

[Payadopa]

But I think that the homogenisation is an inevitable consequence of having such a finely-tuned balance for high-end content (which I don't do), and even then we end up with patches where different jobs are 'in' or 'out' of the current meta.

That's my main gripe with the game. Everything gets sacrificed on the alter or end game only for the raiders to complain anyway.

Now we're not even allowed to have half-way interesting buffs anymore unless its DEEPS (I main AST; yes, I'm bitter),
all tanks feel the same... the list goes on.

And even if they revert back a little we most like have to wait till 6.0 to see it. Honestly, I'm quite bored with the direction SE are taking.

[Wolfsbane706]

I feel like BLM suits me best, even though I've never actually played it. I tend towards "move as little as possible while slinging as many spells as possible" which I've heard is the best way to play BLM anyway.

[Saefinn]

That's my main gripe with the game. Everything gets sacrificed on the alter or end game only for the raiders to complain anyway.

Now we're not even allowed to have half-way interesting buffs anymore unless its DEEPS (I main AST; yes, I'm bitter),
all tanks feel the same... the list goes on.

And even if they revert back a little we most like have to wait till 6.0 to see it. Honestly, I'm quite bored with the direction SE are taking.

I'm in the same boat. I don't like the homogenisation, whilst there are other ways to balance, homogenisation is an easier to manage way of doing it. But I don't think it has to be that way.

But I'm just starting to feel they need to do to high end raids what they did to PvP. Have a separate balance. You have your normal kit, your raid kit and your PvP kit. Your raid kit is where SE focuses balance more tightly, whereas other content, it can be less tight. IMO Blue Mage is proving that day-to-day non-competitive content doesn't need to be well balanced. And old content doesn't need to be well balanced either. It just has to be achievable.

IMO it's still not ideal, but at least they have a separation of concerns and have to worry less about whether a change that benefits raid content doesn't negatively impact non-raid content. It worked out quite nicely for PvP, because it has made the PvP experience feel more streamlined.

[HyoMinPark]

That's my main gripe with the game. Everything gets sacrificed on the alter or end game only for the raiders to complain anyway.

Now we're not even allowed to have half-way interesting buffs anymore unless its DEEPS (I main AST; yes, I'm bitter),
all tanks feel the same... the list goes on.

And even if they revert back a little we most like have to wait till 6.0 to see it. Honestly, I'm quite bored with the direction SE are taking.

Except jobs aren’t homogenized/simplified for the raiders. They’re simplified for the lowest common denominator in this game. The developers outright said BRD was being simplified in ShB to close the gap between top tier BRDs and lower tier ones. Heck, they said Straight Shot was removed because people had trouble keeping the buff up.

I’d say most raiders aren’t happy with how simple jobs have become. I know the top tier BRDs weren’t really fans of the ShB changes when they were announced. And I don’t think I need to explain the issues people (including raiders) have with healers to an AST main.

The focus on buffs and damage is simply a byproduct of content design. The devs have made content basically focus on damage only—because what else is there to focus on? Tanking/Aggro is a joke; healing is a joke; mitigative tools are so pervasive there’s usually overlap when there’s not outright overkill because they’re also really strong—so damage is what the community pushes.

[GhostXO]

Not gonna say. Don't wanna trigger people here for not feeling the same way they do. Also, something is wrong with me.

I know what you're upset about but you don't need validation on the forums to enjoy your class

Anyways yeah I felt Scholars identity was in poisons and poison cleansing but they took away Selenes aoe cleanse and got rid of all of our dots, so I feel like that class doesn't really have an identity anymore. Right now it feels like fairy god-summoner with the pretty fairy that is janky to control. And then there's like the tech stuff like the missiles and new animation for bio? Scholar feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be anymore and hey that makes me sad