The trouble with Job redesigns

[LeonKeyh]

I think that there are a handful of "goals" that they have and keep in mind, some of these things have popped up more recently. I just don't think they're doing a great job at succeeding with those goals:


1. Keeping APM within a certain threshold - This is something that seemingly comes up every once in a while but holy crap have they been bad at actually successfully making changes that affect this. Kaiten is obviously the most recent change that they seem to claim was because of action bloat, but Kaiten was just replaced by Shinten at a nearly 1:1 ratio. It did absolutely nothing to lower actions per minute. Due to that, I suspect that 6.2 is going to raise the damage on Shinten (and the others) and lower Kenki generation to actually do what they seem to have wanted to do.

2. Planning for continued growth of the job - This is REALLY starting to hurt the game with how they've decided to do this. SMN is the big example of this. They work towards cutting down some of the job growth in order to prepare for further growth in the future. It's the equivalent of taking a job with a lower salary but a slightly higher pay ceiling. Sure, you have some room to improve, but some of that growth is artificial it's "growth" that you had already obtained. This is the reason why so many of the jobs that were reworked ultimately feel like they were neutered, it's because they reworked them with a plan to grow them further in later expansions. Given how they're stretching 50-60 levels worth of job growth over 90 levels though, people feel the slow growth and it's only going to get worse if they continue to do this incorrectly.

3. "Easy" to play at a reasonable level/Low performance variance - There's nothing INHERENTLY wrong with a low skill floor in SOME jobs. Hell, there's nothing wrong with a low skill floor in EVERY job; HOWEVER, you need to have jobs with a high skill ceiling or good skill expression. They have shown to not understand how to design something with a low skill floor and high skill ceiling (except maybe BLM; cue YoshiP hate). OR, maybe it's on purpose. Several recent changes could be related to reining in performance variance (e.g. autocrits on Iaijutsu). This is another place where they're half understanding the goal and are destroying other things while trying to accomplish what they think is "good" (i.e. low skill floors). This is especially done for roles that have lower player counts.

4. Getting rid of "silly" "efficiency" things - This seems to mostly be done. A lot of the work changing certain abilities to only be usable in combat seems to have been in order to stop from 60 second pull timers, also things like Doton going away whenever you hide was to get rid of "silly" little tricks that result in performance boosts. I'm sure there's something left here but they ultimately wanted to make sure that the "obvious" or perhaps "designed" game play of each job is the most efficient, so they have been closing these little loops.

[Hezhi]

2. Planning for continued growth of the job - This is REALLY starting to hurt the game with how they've decided to do this. SMN is the big example of this. They work towards cutting down some of the job growth in order to prepare for further growth in the future. It's the equivalent of taking a job with a lower salary but a slightly higher pay ceiling. Sure, you have some room to improve, but some of that growth is artificial it's "growth" that you had already obtained. This is the reason why so many of the jobs that were reworked ultimately feel like they were neutered, it's because they reworked them with a plan to grow them further in later expansions. Given how they're stretching 50-60 levels worth of job growth over 90 levels though, people feel the slow growth and it's only going to get worse if they continue to do this incorrectly.

And that'd be fine if they didn't demonstrate that they're incapable of providing satisfactory growth to jobs. We're being forced into lower pay labor with a lower pay ceiling! Look at the absolute state of healers since Stormblood, people assumed they'd build on the newly pruned jobs, they did nothing of the sort, we've been spamming Glare + Aero for 5 years, it's pathetic.
Also what you're saying about Shinten pisses me off because it's one of the likely changes they could be planning to make lol.