My message to DEVS about job balancing.

[SpeckledBurd]

Thank you for explaining me what happened in my absence! It seems that the most suffered from simplifiyng politic jobs are Drk, healers, smn and sam? Also i don't understand why ninja lost so many melee attacks. Its almost a mage now. And i think mch changed significantly since HW.

Summoner has had the problem of what amounts to development Schizophrenia. Every expansion has basically been an entirely new job at the top level while old mechanics accumulated and nothing really played well with each other.

Samurai's development history has actually been fairly smooth until recently. It was more or less perfect in Stormblood, and the only issues in SHB people had with it was that Shoha was kind of a niche skill for a capstone skill and that Tsubame Gaeshi locked the rotation into rigid 60 second loops rather than the more flexible Stormblood rotation (which is only something that high end raiders cared about). Shoha got fixed almost immediately (as a Monk player I can barely imagine it only taking one patch for feedback to be received and your problems addressed) but that fix set up Samurai for the problem it actually had in Endwalker, way too many buttons. The long and the short of the Kaiten removal issue is that Samurai does have substantial issues with button bloat because there's a glut of actions that are fundamentally identical down to the actions sharing a cooldown, but one action is only used in AOE and the other is only used in Single Target. The devs were coming from a place of trying to promptly address those complaints by removing Kaiten, but in practice they targeted the wrong skill. If the current level of anger keeps up then I imagine it'll see a fix in 6.2. Not quickly, but still faster than how most jobs get fixed which can be measured in years or expansions.


MCH had the problem of being reworked for Stormblood's broad design of adding Gauge's to every job, but the devs didn't actually think out how MCH's gauge would work. That was kinda true for the gauges for jobs not named Samurai/Redmage which were designed with their gauges in mind, but MCH got the shortest end of the stick with it because for the first I want to say 2 major patches MCH basically had no clear playstyle on how to engage with its Heat gauge. There was basically no difference between overheating vs not overheating. When they finally tweaked its numbers so that there was a definitive playstyle it was incredibly janky because of how it interfaced with the games pretty bad ping issues and it was the least popular job and sitting in the same tier of people not wanting to play them regardless of their actual performance, causing it to get reworked again in Shadowbringers. At that point, it changed pretty dramatically from a job where you cram everything you had into a Wildfire Window into a very simple job where you just use actions as they came off cooldown. It still wasn't popular, but it wasn't outlier levels of unpopular in the way that it and Monk were previously so the devs called it a success and that's essentially the current design for it now.

I actually can't speak much to DRK/Healers/Ninja, since I don't play Tank/Healers to any appreciable degree beyond just leveling them in my spare time and I just don't like playing Ninja so I've never paid it much attention.

[xAFROx]

Samurai's development history has actually been fairly smooth until recently. It was more or less perfect in Stormblood, and the only issues in SHB people had with it was that Shoha was kind of a niche skill for a capstone skill and that Tsubame Gaeshi locked the rotation into rigid 60 second loops rather than the more flexible Stormblood rotation. Shoha got fixed almost immediately (as a Monk player I can barely imagine it only taking one patch for feedback to be received and your problems addressed) but that fix set up Samurai for the problem it actually had in Endwalker, way too many buttons. The long and the short of the Kaiten removal issue is that Samurai does have substantial issues with button bloat because there's a glut of actions that are fundamentally identical down to the actions sharing a cooldown, but one action is only used in AOE and the other is only used in Single Target. The devs were coming from a place of trying to promptly address those complaints by removing Kaiten, but in practice they targeted the wrong skill. If the current level of anger keeps up then I imagine it'll see a fix in 6.2. Not quickly, but still faster than how most jobs get fixed which can be measured in years or expansions.

I actually can't speak much to DRK/Healers/Ninja, since I don't play Tank/Healers to any appreciable degree beyond just leveling them in my spare time and I just don't like playing Ninja so I've never paid it much attention.

You hit the nail on the head with these. That's basically what happened. As for the the DRK issues, it went from being a fairly busy job with how Dark Arts worked before, but it was still unique and every tank didn't play exactly the same. In ShB, they basically remade DRK to be diet WAR. It was weaker and lost all of its good self-sustain by making Abyssal Drain on a cooldown as long as Equilibrium. And Delirium was changed to be a watered down version of Inner Release, allowing the spam of gauge abilities freely for a short period of time, where you weave all the oGCDs it had to make up for damage as DRK had no such damage increase like Inner Release did with the dh/crit.

As for SAM, yes. If the issue was solely button bloat, there are at least 6 abilities that do the same thing but are for specific single target or aoe encounters, which in itself isn't bad, nor is it even actually all that bad of a bloat (i play on controller). With the rotation being what it is in EW, they could easily apply these redundant skills as transformed procs over Shinten/Kyuten. Senei/Guren to be more specific.

I personally think Meditation stacks should have it's own evolving button in the same vein as iaijutsu does with Sen. It just cleans up the bar without changing what's already in place to such an extent that players don't need to unlearn literal years of muscle memory.

[Fireon999]

You hit the nail on the head with these. That's basically what happened. As for the the DRK issues, it went from being a fairly busy job with how Dark Arts worked before, but it was still unique and every tank didn't play exactly the same. In ShB, they basically remade DRK to be diet WAR. It was weaker and lost all of its good self-sustain by making Abyssal Drain on a cooldown as long as Equilibrium. And Delirium was changed to be a watered down version of Inner Release, allowing the spam of gauge abilities freely for a short period of time, where you weave all the oGCDs it had to make up for damage as DRK had no such damage increase like Inner Release did with the dh/crit.

As for SAM, yes. If the issue was solely button bloat, there are at least 6 abilities that do the same thing but are for specific single target or aoe encounters, which in itself isn't bad, nor is it even actually all that bad of a bloat (i play on controller). With the rotation being what it is in EW, they could easily apply these redundant skills as transformed procs over Shinten/Kyuten. Senei/Guren to be more specific.

I personally think Meditation stacks should have it's own evolving button in the same vein as iaijutsu does with Sen. It just cleans up the bar without changing what's already in place to such an extent that players don't need to unlearn literal years of muscle memory.

I don't know how they find button bloat in SAM, when i have less buttons on my SAM then on my Drk and Ninja. I read some of your posts in another threads and think that your ideas are very good.

[AziraSyuren]

SAM has more DPS buttons than DRK and putting things on your cross-hotbar makes them harder to keep track of even if you set up your UI for it. For defensive cooldowns, you don't have to keep track of them as much as damaging ones so you can afford to put them in a place where they're more out of view.

It's a legitimate concern, but the solution has always been to consolidate more skills into AoEs rather than removing ones. Every time, AoEs are what causes the bloat. NIN has it worse than SAM in terms of button bloat, sure, but that is actually part of what makes the Kaiten removal so baffling. Both jobs have that problem.

[cjbeagle]

I never felt like samurai was bloated - maybe because the kit felt so clean before - everything had a purpose, but I got curious and decided to see how its button count compared to other jobs that I'd leveled to 90 and what I found surprised me.

35: Paladin

34: Dark Knight, Samurai (without Kaiten), Ninja

33: Gunbreaker, Black Mage

32: Warrior, Reaper, White Mage

31: Dancer, Red Mage, Sage

30: Dragoon, Monk

Ninja definitely feels bloated to me, but I was shocked that paladin has more buttons than samurai now that Kaiten is gone. I also would have guessed that Dragoon had more buttons than it apparently does and would have thought that Warrior and White Mage would have less.

Note that this "button count" tally includes all the role actions.

Here's a thought...why don't they prune some role actions to fight button bloat instead of whittling away at the abilities that actually make jobs unique?

Tanks: Any chance we could get by without Shirk? Is Provoke not sufficient for agro management? If it isn't, could it be made to be? Maybe we could even get rid of Rampart and just give each tank a second charge of their job's unique mitigation cooldown.

Melee: Do we really need Second Wind AND Bloodbath? Maybe they could be combined and perhaps have multiple charges to keep the effective cooldowns the same?

Ranged: Do we really need Foot Graze AND Leg Graze? Maybe we could even get rid of both of them?

Casters: Does anyone actually use Sleep?

Healers: Does anyone actually use Repose?

[aloneatsea]

I never felt like samurai was bloated - maybe because the kit felt so clean before - everything had a purpose, but I got curious and decided to see how its button count compared to other jobs that I'd leveled to 90 and what I found surprised me.

35: Paladin, Ninja

Where are you getting the 35 number for Ninja? Excluding role actions, I'm only counting 26. Even including the six role actions, that's still only 32.

[cjbeagle]

Where are you getting the 35 number for Ninja? Excluding role actions, I'm only counting 26. Even including the six role actions, that's still only 32.

Just recounted and verified 35 (also including Limit Break - probably should have noted that in the post - my bad).

Your profile says you're level 70 - maybe that's the disconnect? You get Meisui at 72, Bunshin at 80, Forked Raiju at 90, and Fleeting Raiju at 90.

Oh! But I counted Bunshin twice because I never removed it from the hotkey it originally was before they merged it with Phantom Kamaitachi - my bad! So Ninja was 35 before that merger but is now 34 - will update my post - apologies for the inaccuracy!

[Vencio]

I want to speak to job balancing team. Are u in captivity of your greedy superiors? If so give us a sign, because changes of classes is simply not smart. Man, who loves this game cannot think off nonsense, which you did to Samurais in 6.1. No one asked you about it and its saying a lot about your competence. I'm so angry, i can't find words for this changes. And now you ignoring my brothers and sisters Samurais for 2 week, pretending you don't see our suffering. I hope you will find strength inside you to change the direction of job balancing to a different path, wich will lead to receiving more fun from playing and learning a job. Im sorry for being rude, but it's what i feel, and i can't silence myself.

No,

I like SAM changes, and serious about it.

I hope more of the same happens to every other job.

Devs,

Please keep going! These people are reluctant for change & wish to remain staggered & stubborn

[ty_taurus]

What I'd like to see for all jobs is to unify single target and AoE actions. AoE is just not a prominent aspect of FFXIV's design and continuing the departmentalized stance on single target and AoE actions is just odd to me because you only ever need one or the other, never both.

An easy one that's been brought up a lot with Kaiten being talked about is simply merging Shoha and Shoha II as an AoE action with fall off. In other instances, we could instead keep certain AoE actions but give them a value in single target as well so that they are a part of the rotation, such as making Bio Blaster's DoT something you want to alternate with in. Hellfrog Medium could use some kind of use. It's a really cool animation and we never get to use it.

Even with GCD combos there's room to merge. For MNK, you could have Bootshine upgrade into Shadow of the Destroyer, Twin Snakes upgrade into Four-Point Fury, and Snap Punch upgrade into Rockbreaker--each of these has fall off damage, and thus you've pruned 3 buttons without actually taking anything away. You could still take the AoE route when there are multiple enemies, but it would really only need a small amount of tweaking to ensure that nothing actually changes.

I'd like to see something like this done sooner rather than later in hopes that this additional space deters the design team from feeling the need to prune tools that we like about our jobs.

[xAFROx]

I never felt like samurai was bloated - maybe because the kit felt so clean before - everything had a purpose, but I got curious and decided to see how its button count compared to other jobs that I'd leveled to 90 and what I found surprised me.

35: Paladin

34: Dark Knight, Samurai (without Kaiten), Ninja

33: Gunbreaker, Black Mage

32: Warrior, Reaper, White Mage

31: Red Mage, Sage

30: Dragoon, Monk, Dancer

Ninja definitely feels bloated to me, but I was shocked that paladin has more buttons than samurai now that Kaiten is gone. I also would have guessed that Dragoon had more buttons than it apparently does and would have thought that Warrior and White Mage would have less.

Note that this "button count" tally includes all the role actions.

My NIN is only in the 60s and it's always felt crowded for me. PLD too, but that was more the case when ShB happened. Everything else listed I don't have much of a problem with on controller with both toggle features on, I have plenty of space.

But yeah, things like that are why no one expected them to come for SAM with such an excuse.