FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[Renathras]

I'm surprised RDM scored so high and SMN scored so low. I feel like RDM still needs a buff. As a RDM main, I can't ever join a static without being asked "Can you flex SMN?"

Many of the Jobs are pretty bi-modal. That is, some people love them and some people HATE them. The thing with SMN, specifically, is a lot of old SMNs were pissed they lost their Job, so they're ESPECIALLY salty about it. You have a lesser extent of that going on with Healers.

These are also the ones with the lowest average because the people that hate them are highly motivated to come out and speak against them.

Contrast BLM, where most of the people replying to that one are BLM mains or players that enjoy BLM, leading to a high satisfaction rating (the highest of all the Jobs surveyed, I think), even though by the community at a whole, BLM isn't very popular.

I'd say there's a bit of a selection bias problem that's two parts here:

1) People aren't answering for all the Jobs - that is, looking at the respondent numbers, we know that it's not 100% of the people going through and responding to all of them. People are picking and choosing which to respond to, meaning people are probably mostly responding to the ones they either like or hate, not ones they're neutral towards or don't play much. [EDIT: A way to have fixed this would have been to have a single survey for all Jobs where people could rate them all overall, as at least then we'd have a lot more 4-6 ratings where people are "neutral" on Jobs they don't like/play, leading to the numbers being far more normalized than they are. This would have reduced the election bias of people mainly sticking to Jobs they either love or hate.]

2) This has been posted here, in FFXIV and FFXIVDiscussion on Reddit - so the sample is already going to be leaning a bit because of those communities not QUITE representing the whole playerbase. The general playerbase doesn't frequent these discussion boards, so the field is a bit based. Still a useful proxy to try and see what the playerbase thinks, but with the caveat it will typically have a leaning that isn't necessarily as representative as the whole as it should be.

So those are just good things to keep in mind while looking through the data.

EDIT2:

It's not shocking at all to me. Of course the only job that has any form of lateral play and skill expression is rated the highest.

It's probably NOT that, though.

It's probably the people who like BLM are the only ones responding to BLM while the people that like AND dislike other Jobs are responding to their surveys. For example, a lot of people responding to the SMN one very clearly have a different main, many of which were prior SMN mains who swapped to something else like BLM or RDM, but they're still responding to the SMN survey with highly negative reviews. BLM doesn't have that, so it doesn't have its number being dragged down like other Jobs are.

This is also somewhat visible with all the more newly released Jobs. GNB, DNC, SGE, and RPR are all the most popular Jobs in their respective categories as of me posting this, I think. Likely because they've had no significant changes to really upset prior players or generate highly negative feelings. RDM is in a similar situation, with the one complaint there being it's relatively weak (undertuned) in its subrole (Caster) where the other four are not. (SAM suffers from the "bring back Kaiten" crowd, but is still performing well overall.)

I just used the challenging content and overall scores (the solo and casual content scores are not better, trust me). I mean SMN is just getting demolished here, meanwhile BLM is just rolling in perfect scores. The healers are a bit more weird. With the exception of SGE, for whatever reason, it seems outside of the staunch defenders and impassioned critics of the role, most players that are responding feel that the healers are mid (except in the solo scores, the healers are crumbling in their solo scores, which isn't surprising since they have nothing to heal in solo). Despite SGE having a higher average, I'd actually say SCH is doing the best because their scores do lean more positive for overall values despite still being fairly mid.

Looking at those charts, most of the Healers seem...tri-modal? o.O SGE is the clearest example of this with 1, 5, and 10 being their highest values. (I'm using the overall numbers since that's what I'm looking at as more key to how Jobs are doing - not everyone does "challenging" content). AST has peaks at 1, 5, and 7. SCH at 1, 3, 5/6, and 8. WHM is the most level, with "peaks" at 1/2, 4/5, 7, and 10; the only value less than 7 votes being 9, and the only ones higher than 10 being 1 and 5.

SGE seems to be that you either really love it, are entirely neutral towards it, or really hate it. WHM seems to be kind of neutral across the board. AST has no 10s, which is kind of interesting (and it also has not a single "no rework" vote), and SCH seems kind of like WHM, just shifted not quite as level and without that peak on the high end that WHM has.

whats shocking

What's shocking?

In most polls and data, BLM is one of the least played, least enjoyed Jobs in the game. It doesn't flow nice, it has a high skill ceiling (which a lot of players dislike), it has a high skill floor (which a lot of players dislike), and it isn't fun for a lot of people.

The answer is PROBABLY as I've said, most of the BLM responses are just from people that main and enjoy BLM and you aren't getting a lot of responses from the people that don't like it as they're just not answering that Job's survey. You can see that by the Job's bar graphs posted above.