Breaking the Majority’s Silence: A Job Criticism Thread

[Straticus]

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far. The vast majority of the playerbase is "casual". There's nothing wrong with that. If you want complexity then go find it in difficult fight mechanics. Job rotations should stay relatively simple because they're what everyone has to use. Some jobs can be harder than others of course, but rotations shouldn't be too complicated. Black mage is a great example of this. It's one of the hardest jobs to play, but the rotation itself isn't hard at all. It's about adapting to the fights.

[Mayhemmer]

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far. The vast majority of the playerbase is "casual". There's nothing wrong with that. If you want complexity then go find it in difficult fight mechanics. Job rotations should stay relatively simple because they're what everyone has to use. Some jobs can be harder than others of course, but rotations shouldn't be too complicated. Black mage is a great example of this. It's one of the hardest jobs to play, but the rotation itself isn't hard at all. It's about adapting to the fights.

People are rightfully concerned that jobs will be further pruned of their complexity, as they have been gradually over the past few expansions. Another job pruned of complexity is another job people want reverted.

Job complexity and encounter complexity are not a binary choice. Why do people treat things in this game like they're binary choices...

You can have both job complexity and fight complexity. There's no justification for sacrificing one or both outside of that coveted "accessibility," and it doesn't take a deep dive to see how people tend to view that reason...

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far. The vast majority of the playerbase is "casual". There's nothing wrong with that. If you want complexity then go find it in difficult fight mechanics. Job rotations should stay relatively simple because they're what everyone has to use. Some jobs can be harder than others of course, but rotations shouldn't be too complicated. Black mage is a great example of this. It's one of the hardest jobs to play, but the rotation itself isn't hard at all. It's about adapting to the fights.

People asking for a degree of job complexity to return to some of their jobs aren't asking for skillsets that require a PhD on that subject to figure out, we kinda just want basic things like DRK's blood and MP interacting with each other again. Or them stopping to add abilities that are just gated by a cooldown and only do a potency number and thats it.

Love you citing BLM btw, you know what sets BLM's Thunder apart from many other jobs? It is a multi-purpose tool with an interesting management tied to it - it is the most well-designed DoT in all jobs because its more than a DoT.

I don't want every job to be BLM - I want jobs to have a meaningful minigame again, be it slinging DoTs with different durations (SB Whm + Sch, HW Sch + Smn), having resource gauges interacting with each other (StB Drk MP-Blood using TBN, Delirium, Quietus etc), actual resource management like keeping beast gauge high for more crit rate ...

...or at very least not have my job identity neutered each expansion and/or neutralized from a tradition of overbuffing a job until mine reaches "what do you even excel at" status and theirs becomes the best at everything (hello Warrior).

I want jobs to have meaning when playing, frankly they are doing a really good job at killing anything that may require an iota of thought because it is apparently too difficult to NOT design the game exclusively around the lowest common denominator.

[SargeTheSeagull]

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far.

No the hell we aren’t. Anyone who cares about 14’s gameplay at all and has any perspective at all thinks jobs are unreasonably boring and oversimplified.

[Kreyd]

I'm a casual and even I think a lot of jobs are too simple and way too homogenized. Especially tanks and healers, but also dd's like SMN or MCH.

[Absurdity]

People are rightfully concerned that jobs will be further pruned of their complexity, as they have been gradually over the past few expansions. Another job pruned of complexity is another job people want reverted.

Job complexity and encounter complexity are not a binary choice. Why do people treat things in this game like they're binary choices...

You can have both job complexity and fight complexity. There's no justification for sacrificing one or both outside of that coveted "accessibility," and it doesn't take a deep dive to see how people tend to view that reason...

There is a certain balance that needs to be struck between fight complexity and job complexity, make both too complex and barely anyone can complete the content.
Where our opinions probably start to deviate is where that balance should be.

I'm of the opinion that Stormblood struck a good balance. Most jobs were easy enough to get into but still had a lot of nuance to them if you wanted to really get into them and fight mechanics weren't a joke either.

But ever since Shadowbringers this has started to increasingly skew to one side. Jobs are almost on auto pilot and all the complexity nowadays comes from learning and then executing the mechanics dance, your actual gameplay outside of "where to move to resolve mechanic" is so utterly bland that it negatively affects all content that doesn't throw 10 different oneshot mechanics at you.

[Lynomin]

Well to be honest as someone who hasn't even finished ShB yet and has like 2-3 jobs levelled to 80 and like 5 unlocked in total, my opinion on job balance seems kind of not very important. I still find the game fun to play though. My only complaint I guess would be that WHM at and until 50 was not very fun from a damage rotation standpoint so I just put it down to get a dps class instead. I honestly don't know how many people are like me, but for me these issues people are talking about are not very relevant, mostly because I'm not at a point in the game yet when they would become apparent, and because I can just do lots of other stuff if I don't like something and that has been working well for the past ~1,5 years. So there you have it, one non-representative opinion/experience to contrast with your own.

[Yuella]

In a game where you can change your job whenever you want, balance shouldn't matter. Players who like to play jobs that do the most damage can play whichever job does the most damage that expansion.

[Calysto]

I didn't read the whole thread, but I want to say that communication and good faith from Y-P are needed for that to be possible.

Communication on the feedback they got and consulting the whole community instead of just listening to a few voices would have been possible. Instead they made these change without players ever knowing, dropped them with an expansion and told us it was too late to change anything.

The "Vocal minority" increased manifold since ShB design changes. some pro-changes, most against it.
These voices were lost into the void and not acknowledged for years, only to be dismissed without any compromise.

Now lately Y-P stated that they had requests to make theses changes, and that WE players must reach a consensus.
That seems like a cheap excuse for poor choices and avoiding fixing the issue. The game has a "huge" player-base, getting everyone to agree is impossible, and worse, the "silent majority argument" get misused to dismiss any change...

[xbahax92]

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far. The vast majority of the playerbase is "casual". There's nothing wrong with that. If you want complexity then go find it in difficult fight mechanics. Job rotations should stay relatively simple because they're what everyone has to use. Some jobs can be harder than others of course, but rotations shouldn't be too complicated. Black mage is a great example of this. It's one of the hardest jobs to play, but the rotation itself isn't hard at all. It's about adapting to the fights.

If jobs were fine, why do we have so many threads?
If roles were fine, why is it possible to clear ultimate without healers?
If healers were fine, why do people leave feedback for over 2 expansions?
If Machinist, Summoner, DRK, etc were fine, why do they feel incomplete?

Some actions and abilities do not work together, some do not make even any sense. Why do we have Flamethrower if it does nothing to the gauge? Why do we cast our summons back to back, but it still feels very monotonous? Why is DRK so restricted with it's MP management and abilities, wherein other tanks can use their skills anytime on cooldown.

A fight has literally no meaning, if the jobs are clunky as hell.