Focus on fixing jobs for the people who already play them

[Fland]

I think he was referring toward DPS, if you can buy a jump pot for any dps and go on lowpower mode and still perform very well somehow that’s a poorly designed job. And thus far I think only one job fits that bill, and perhaps more comming EW

It is still a generalized statement and definitely not applicable in every case. Not everyone can just switch from, for example, SAM to SMN and immediately perform at the same level.
People who are used to low APM job like BLM or RDM would find it harder to play a high APM job like MNK or NIN.

Also, just because a job is easier to get into than others, beginner-friendly, more straightforward and less complex, doesn't mean that it's poorly designed. Not every job need to have the same skill floor/ceiling.

[CKNovel]

It is still a generalized statement and definitely not applicable in every case. Not everyone can just switch from, for example, SAM to SMN and immediately perform at the same level.
People who are used to low APM job like BLM or RDM would find it harder to play a high APM job like MNK or NIN.

Also, just because a job is easier to get into than others, beginner-friendly, more straightforward and less complex, doesn't mean that it's poorly designed. Not every job need to have the same skill floor/ceiling.

No, jobs are quite simple if you grasp how their gauge works.
You won't be able to perform at top level but you'll definitely be able to perform at a good level if you already perform well on your main job.

When you change job, it doesn't go from 100 to 0 but more from 100 to 80. Experience on a job and the game in general reflects on other jobs.

[Fland]

No, jobs are quite simple if you grasp how their gauge works.
You won't be able to perform at top level but you'll definitely be able to perform at a good level if you already perform well on your main job.

When you change job, it doesn't go from 100 to 0 but more from 100 to 80. Experience on a job and the game in general reflects on other jobs.

First of all, again, it is not a general thing. Yes, good and experienced players will be able to perform decently when changing to a job they never or rarely play, but not everyone would.
Second, once again, it's not necessarily a poor design when you can perform decently on a new job that is easy to get into, pretty straightforward and less complex.

[anhaato]

And what did I say? I knew this was coming for brd but they almost had us believing that it wouldn't happen. The mediatour brd build seemed like they were giving brd mains everything they wanted, and then they went and ruined that at the eleventh hour making changes none of us wanted, drastically slowing it down and overall making it significantly less varied and interesting. If a job's changes have people saying "these changes finally made it enjoyable for me" meanwhile its longtime players feel completely alienated, then they're bad changes. Instead of listening to what longtime brd mains had to say about what it needed, they listened to lukewarm takes like "why cant we get our song buffs" or "too many button presses make me fingies hurt" or "rng bad me want consistency." And even then, most of the people who actually like the changes still don't plan on maining it. Instead of keeping its niche as a dot job with support, unless we get some fixes in 6.05, it's turning into a job for no one in particular. After all, if we wanted a support job that has a somewhat active opener and then becomes sleepy for the rest of the 2 minute cycle, we'd play dnc.

Some jobs were broken and needed heavy overhauls, like 5.x mnk and 4.x mch, but brd was doing just fine in terms of playstyle. The same could arguably be said for smn as well, in light of how simplistic its become, but I never really played it so I'll let smn players speak up on that instead. Though I must say, it's pretty ironic considering they made comments back in the job actions liveletter about how they didn't want to make jobs braindead, and then they turned around and did exactly that to brd and smn. Very disappointing.

[OtakuSempai]

Job changes should not be based on trying to get more people to play them. If people don't play them now, then it's because they don't enjoy the playstyle or they feel the effort put into it isn't worth it, and changing a job's playstyle to make more people enjoy it usually results in something extremely boring.

MCH and 5.4 MNK are the #1 examples of that. While it's easy to argue that they had self-detrimental mechanics that needed to be removed, to make them an empty shell of their old playstyles has been really awful for the people who mained them before the changes. Especially MCH, which has few buttons and no unique gimmick outside of spamming heat blast every now and then. It alienates the people who had already been actively playing it. People who have spent time learning it, perfecting it, taking it to harder content, gearing it, and optimizing to the best of their ability should not have that effort reduced to nothing on the turn of a new expansion now that they have to either relearn it or find that it's no longer the job they used to love.

Job changes should be made with its current dedicated players in mind. Make it more enjoyable for THEM. More people will come around naturally if that happens. That's why people enjoyed BRD back in 4.x; it wasn't any harder or easier to play than it is now, it just had good results for the effort that was put into it and therefore made people happy to play it.

Unfortunately I'm beyond afraid that this is what they plan to do to BRD and, to a lesser extent because of its current issues, SMN. Jobs should not be gutted or homogenized just to appeal to people who never liked them to begin with. If BRD is gutted then phys ranged as a whole becomes an extremely boring role. The way to make more people play a role is to make its current players enjoy playing it more. That way, they talk about how much fun it is and inspire others to try it out.

Hear hear! Unfortunately it seems like they don't have the resources or wherewithal to truly flesh out a job anymore. Either that or the incompetent suits at SE are trying to enforce a dumbing down of the game in the belief the game appeal wider.

Personally I refuse to believe the genius of Yoshi P and essentially his design of BLM is the same mind behind current healer/tank design and what is happening to SMN/BRD/NIN.

[Memoranda]

I always enjoy these threads because they're full of what certain posters want while generally not giving two damns about what other players who are enjoying the current iteration of the jobs think.

[anhaato]

You're right I don't give two damns about what people who hated 5.x brd think about these changes. Not even one damn, in fact. This isn't even an unpopular opinion, most brd players hate these changes.

[kejakalope]

You're right I don't give two damns about what people who hated 5.x brd think about these changes. Not even one damn, in fact. This isn't even an unpopular opinion, most brd players hate these changes.

all the bards I know love the new BRD

hey-o

[Kyrj]

More people play MCH now because the job is no longer a broken, needlessly complex mess with a RNG rotation and a bunch of abilities with no synergy in it. It’s not necessarily because they’re trying to get more people to play it, the job has needed help since the very beginning.

If a job doesn’t have many people playing it, that’s a symptom of a problem. It doesn’t mean that the few crazy people continuing to play the job should be rewarded for their loyalty. I have played MCH since HW early release and the job is much better now than it ever has been, though I think they still have work to do on it.

I may not speak for all MCH players, but you don’t either. I get that people don’t like change, and not all the changes they’ve done have been the best, but at least we can say all the jobs in the game are finally balanced, more or less, and they’re able to add new jobs to the game without completely busting others into oblivion like in other MMOs.

Yeah I'm gonna have to disagree with OP on this one. MCH was god awful to play before they tweaked it, so much learning and perfecting and for what? Mediocre damage if you played it 100% correctly?

[kejakalope]

Several factors weigh in on overhauls to any job and they all have to be considered.

Player satisfaction is one, certainly, but even it is a complex map of elements. What do players like about the job? What do they not like about the job? Why are people playing it? Why are people not playing it? What is stopping people who would like to play it from doing so? What is causing the people who do play it to do so? What frustrates them about that experience?

Just going "ah, our targets are people who like the current design enough to stick with it, even if that's a tiny number of people," is a huge mistake. Plenty of people wanted to like MNK but found it unrewarding and overly fiddly. Plenty of people USED to main MNK but jumped to another job because they got fed up with its various frustrations-- I'm one of them! I was a MNK main from ARR until the launch of Stormblood, at which point I jumped ship to Red Mage because the thing I liked about Monk (improvisational speed metal positionals) were buried under a fucking avalanche of fiddly Greased Lightning management tools and positional bypasses that made me feel like I was spending more time babysitting the job's flaws than enjoying its appealing parts. On top of that, it just had no crescendo or payoff moment, as I watched all my friends enjoying their burst phases around me while my numbers remained fast but individually sad.

So I switched to another job whose design I liked with a more satisfying rotation. So did most of the other Monks.

Dark Knight, same story-- they did an initial design, tons of people crowded in drawn by the cool style and attitude of the job, and just as fast they poured back out because it was just a fiddly mess. Ripe for redesign.