Breaking the Majority’s Silence: A Job Criticism Thread

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

PVP shows you don't need complex rotations to have unique action identity.

*waits for people to realize that HP spender with limitations and using HP lifesteal as a way to fund them + get a small bonus on top is a way to design a job*

*looks at PvP Dark Knight*

Yeah.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Hot take: But I do not believe this game can no longer reasonably sustain job identity and job balance. It can only do one or the other and never both. One has to give. Pick your poison.

Job balance is numbers. Job identity is how the job produces the numbers and actually affects the gameplay. You can always tweak numbers, you can't change freely how a job fundamentally operates.

For simplicity's sake, look at healers - for pressing between 2-3 different damage buttons really well while dealing with mechanics, they can produce a surprising amount of damage rivalling tanks on occasion. That damage could ALSO be high if their damage kit was more nuanced and had more thought than pressing a DOT every 30s, fill the rest with filler or conditional damage button thats lighting up.

On the other hand, Red Mage while simple actually has a fair bit of nuance of how to optimize its gameplay and the melee-caster niche is a nice touch that resonates with many - but the numbers it produces is borderline insulting for the effort it takes even if we compare it only to Summoner.

Then we have jobs that HAVE nuance AND damage like Black Mage and Monk, where you clearly can have both balance and identity. So I am sorry, your hot take is kinda bad.

[Payadopa]

The problem is you are assuming you are part of the majority. Most people on these forums say the same thing as you just said and people on these forums are regarded as a minority. So what if you are actually part of the minority?

Either way, people on these forums are anything but "silent" so this isn't where you're going to find the silent people.

It's a feedback forum. It doesn't matter what anyone is assuming. Say your think and leave.

[SieyaM]

6% DPS is quite a boost in burst phases. Just because you can't see it in the content you do doesn't mean it has no impact. My AST main friend prefers current AST cards over the originals, because fishing for Balance was a terrible game mechanic.

people only fished for balance because world first savage raiders told them that was the way to do it. The highest parse at the time for BRD was when they were given spear cards which increased critical hit rates. This also means that I guess jobs should have no impact in any other content than savage or ultimate. Also Astrodyne is a 5% potency buff.

[Payadopa]

I do not care about job balance at all. I don't care if gunbreakers out dps paladin or if SCH out damages SGE. I could not care less. Job homogenization, uninteresting loot, the slow pace at which jobs gain skills (and by extension how boring they are when sync'd down and for new players) and recent fight design have made me all but quit the game. Jobs feeling fun and unique is infinitely more important than balance because balance effects only week 1/2 savage and ultimate raiders who are a fraction of the playerbase who does savage and ult. If Dawntrail needs to do anything at all, it is make jobs feel fun and unique again. That is all it takes. To hell with balance, I want to have fun.

That's my stance on it 100%. I couldn't care less if an ability drifts or a different job is better. If it's not fun it. Is. Not. Worth. It. And the current design isnt.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

people only fished for balance because world first savage raiders told them that was the way to do it. The highest parse at the time for BRD was when they were given spear cards which increased critical hit rates. This also means that I guess jobs should have no impact in any other content than savage or ultimate. Also Astrodyne is a 5% potency buff.

Balance was statistically better, thats why it was fished for. Not because world first raiders told them to. Also, the reason why Bard wanted crit back then was because its skills procced off of crit hits. That is gone, so that wouldn't be as effective now. We need less crit mechanics anyway, because crit is still too strong.


And the cards are 3% on the wrong jobs and 6% on the correct ones. I wasn't talking about astrodyne.


Old balance was 5% party spread or 10% on one person. That's why it was fished for.

[Payadopa]

6% DPS is quite a boost in burst phases. Just because you can't see it in the content you do doesn't mean it has no impact. My AST main friend prefers current AST cards over the originals, because fishing for Balance was a terrible game mechanic.

You cannot have highs without lows to put it into context. Thinking you need to fish for anything is the wrong mindset. The mechanics are perfectly fine.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

You cannot have highs without lows to put it into context. Thinking you need to fish for anything is the wrong mindset. The mechanics are perfectly fine.

So you agree current as is fine then? Great! lol

[Jojoya]

So I want to take a step forward and try and gather the people that are silent and get them to contribute their voice. An open thread only for people to send messages to the devs without fear of your fellow man talking smack for your opinions.

Those who are silent (whether part of some minority or majority) aren't going to see your message here because they don't visit the forums in the first place. Those who do come here are already speaking up with their feedback if they are interested in doing so.

You've got some hurdles to tackle to accomplish your goal:

Get your message to players in a place where they will pay attention to it.

Get them to decide that they need to stop being silent.

Figure out what sources the developers pay attention to when it comes to player feedback and in what languages (assuming they don't only pay attention to feedback in Japanese, which is starting to seem more and more likely considering recent responses).

Get the players to post their feedback in those places in the correct language.

[Ardeth]

That's actually a really great way to think about it. Could you expand on your thoughts with this? If we are comparing classes to simple things like doors, what exactly are you expecting to see when you look at specific classes?

I feel like Feanor with the Silmarils, lol. I've rewritten this a dozen times and can't recreate the sentiment that got me here.

But to me, what I look for in classes is simple systems that I can understand quickly. I find some classes have button bloat, but honestly, if a job works and there isn't a community uproar, why change it? I think by that metric, a job like Red Mage or Summoner is more up my alley. Something that, while easy and simple, allows me more freedom to do harder things.

So, for me, at least something being simple is a lot better than the alternative in almost every case. In life and in video games.