To The Devs, When Are Jobs Complete? Concerns About Frequency Of Job Changes.

[RaevusAstra]

We already have a plethora of flat damage buff jobs on almost every job in the game. This then leads to homogenization - every job should be equal. That's an answer, sure, but one that will cause animosity in a different way (job identity).

Game design is really hard. I say this as a new graduate in game dev. In all honesty, I don't have a solution that would tick people off the least while also giving the devs the flexibility to surprise and expand on new things in the game.

I don't think the players know everything, and players now are focused on how the game plays now and only the devs have to figure out 2, 4, 6, and 8 years from now how to expand on their combat system with worries like button bloat, crit variance and viability. I'm hoping there's an event at some point where the top job experts in terms of ultimate and savage raiding could be invited to speak with the devs and have a dialogue for the future of job design.

[cjbeagle]

We already have a plethora of flat damage buff jobs on almost every job in the game. This then leads to homogenization - every job should be equal. That's an answer, sure, but one that will cause animosity in a different way (job identity).

I doubt anyone really cares what their raid buff actually does - what's important to the job identity is that they have a raid buff at all.

As far as job identity goes in terms of raid buffs it's basically just Greedy DPS vs Normal DPS vs Support DPS - if a dancer's raid buffs and/or dance partner buff was changed to provide roughly the same benefit but was DH instead of crit or % dmg instead of whatever, I doubt they'd care - they're support dps, not "crit buff dps".

Game design can be hard, you're right, but it's a lot easier if you pick your fights and focus on what's important, and if you aren't careful it's really easy to make it a lot harder than it needs to be, which is exactly what they've done with their raid buffs.

Samurai and warriors are pariahs because of buffs that don't need to be as they are, and if they were changed, wouldn't really matter - they backed themselves into this corner and instead of making easy fixes that preserve what people actually do care about, they've opted to butcher actual job identity instead.

Dunno if you've heard this game design maxim, but it's probably the most important one I'm aware of: "Game design is 90% knowing what to cut." It's easy adding things atop systems atop mechanics - the hard part - and vital part - is knowing what to prune.

EDIT: btw, where'd you go to school, if you don't mind me asking?