Focus on fixing jobs for the people who already play them

[anhaato]

However I do like the current iteration of machinist since I can learn a simple rotation and go between jobs to keep my life interesting. The game shouldn't be about being stuck in one job because it requires all the energy in the world to run right, and that seems to be what people are actually advocating 90% of the time on the forums.

We're advocating that every job should take some level of thought to play. If you can switch between every job with little effort, turn your brain off, and expect close to top end play, that's not good design. We want jobs to be play differently, so people can choose a role and have something that fits their specific preferred playstyle. If all ranged are the same then what's the point of having 3 ranged? If jobs are braindead to learn and have little optimization what's the point of high end content? The issue you describe is more accurately phrased as the game not properly teaching jobs. Jobs should not be designed solely for casual play, because that makes high end content pointlessly easy and not "high end" at all.

[Colt47]

We're advocating that every job should take some level of thought to play. If you can switch between every job with little effort, turn your brain off, and expect close to top end play, that's not good design. We want jobs to be play differently, so people can choose a role and have something that fits their specific preferred playstyle. If all ranged are the same then what's the point of having 3 ranged? If jobs are braindead to learn and have little optimization what's the point of high end content? The issue you describe is more accurately phrased as the game not properly teaching jobs. Jobs should not be designed solely for casual play, because that makes high end content pointlessly easy and not "high end" at all.

Unless the intent is actually to let people master more than one job, and the selection of those jobs are the customization one should have. The game has to work for controller players and there are some jobs right now that still have a LOT of buttons that don't need to be there.

[Roeshel]

We're advocating that every job should take some level of thought to play. If you can switch between every job with little effort, turn your brain off, and expect close to top end play, that's not good design. We want jobs to be play differently...

What do you mean top end play? Even if you switch between healer jobs, which are homogenised quite a bit, in savage you won't be performing as good as your first healer class until you get some practice. At least that's how it was for me when I tried playing sch or ast. Even though all healers have one attack spell and one dot it's still complicated to execute things perfectly when you are starting out and IMO all healers heal differently right now. AST can heal constantly in between malefic casts, a very consistent healer, the best one I think. SCH has to maintain broil spam until they need to use ogcd and then they use Ruin II to weave heals and/or move. And then you have WHM, the only class which suffers dps loss from trying to heal. Healing gets in the way of being efficient in terms of dps so I'd say whm is more closely related to rdm than to ast and sch. Joke aside, you can't turn your brain off and expect close to top end play. There is some level of thought in the jobs, I don't know how it was before but right now there is.