"The Discourse is Dumb and Endwalker is FINE" - Wesk Alber

[Sebazy]

Sounds a lot worse than how it is today, despite some of the memes early on.

That depends IMO.

If you were dead set on playing a particular job and said job was a dumpster fire then that's a fair view to hold.

If you were flexible on what you played then IMO it actually wasn't a bad thing at all. I did Gordias as SCH then WHM, Midas as both WHM and AST, then Creator on AST. The shifting meta and balance gave me a firm push into mixing up what I played, that alone does wonders for preventing things getting too stale and I'd credit that as a healthy portion of why I have some 80 or so A12S clears logged alone, at least half of which were PF.

Meanwhile with the current status of balance above all, I generally just sit on WHM and leave it at that as there's little to nothing to be gained from playing a different healer. Thus things got stale fast I guess.

Sometimes you've got to save the playerbase from themselves, having jobs/classes that are inherently somewhat unbalanced but with a meta that is always evolving over time helps do just that whilst FFXIV's job system means that the 'penalty' for switching to a more flavour of the month job is relatively minuscule compared to what you used to see in WoW.

[Atelier-Bagur]

That depends IMO.

If you were dead set on playing a particular job and said job was a dumpster fire then that's a fair view to hold.

If you were flexible on what you played then IMO it actually wasn't a bad thing at all. I did Gordias as SCH then WHM, Midas as both WHM and AST, then Creator on AST. The shifting meta and balance gave me a firm push into mixing up what I played, that alone does wonders for preventing things getting too stale and I'd credit that as a healthy portion of why I have some 80 or so A12S clears logged alone, at least half of which were PF.

Meanwhile with the current status of balance above all, I generally just sit on WHM and leave it at that as there's little to nothing to be gained from playing a different healer. Thus things got stale fast I guess.

Sometimes you've got to save the playerbase from themselves, having jobs/classes that are inherently somewhat unbalanced but with a meta that is always evolving over time helps do just that whilst FFXIV's job system means that the 'penalty' for switching to a more flavour of the month job is relatively minuscule compared to what you used to see in WoW.

True but I dont think its a good mentality to be like "Oh this one job I like to play is actually super bad, guess I'm forced to play something else". Game shouldnt be the one to make that decision, the player does and if the balance was that awful, its not something that can be easily ignored. People like their jobs and if every job is viable then that should be the standard.

[Sebazy]

True but I dont think its a good mentality to be like "Oh this one job I like to play is actually super bad, guess I'm forced to play something else". Game shouldnt be the one to make that decision, the player does and if the balance was that awful, its not something that can be easily ignored. People like their jobs and if every job is viable then that should be the standard.

It really does depend on the mentality of the player.

In my main static from Midas to this day pretty much all of us were only really inflexible as so far as we wanted to stick within our preferred role. Outside of that, we'd just play whatever job within the role was needed for that Savage turn/tier. Heck, 3 of us would literally play just about anything as long as you gave enough notice or threw a set of crafted their way in time for prog.

In my eyes at least, players tend to be less likely to be as flexible as you move further from the hardcore extremes? Or at least it's a trend I've noticed when pugging or helping more midcore/casual teams over the years. In this case, a job being out of the meta isn't such a big deal no? Case in point, WHM was absolutely sub par for A12S and people made a big deal of that even occasionally going as far as excluding it from Zurvan PFs, yet ironically it was perfectly fine there and in the case of low level play could actually be easier to hit a decent standard with.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that 3.0 AST was a good thing by any stretch, rather I'm of the opinion that the WHM vs AST balance in Midas was something that SE would do well to explore. Both had advantages over each other depending on which turn you were tackling at the time and for that tier I actually ended up flip flopping between the two over the course of the night.

Tanks have had similar situations over the years too.

[SannaR]

It really does depend on the mentality of the player.

In my main static from Midas to this day pretty much all of us were only really inflexible as so far as we wanted to stick within our preferred role. Outside of that, we'd just play whatever job within the role was needed for that Savage turn/tier. Heck, 3 of us would literally play just about anything as long as you gave enough notice or threw a set of crafted their way in time for prog.

In my eyes at least, players tend to be less likely to be as flexible as you move further from the hardcore extremes? Or at least it's a trend I've noticed when pugging or helping more midcore/casual teams over the years. In this case, a job being out of the meta isn't such a big deal no? Case in point, WHM was absolutely sub par for A12S and people made a big deal of that even occasionally going as far as excluding it from Zurvan PFs, yet ironically it was perfectly fine there and in the case of low level play could actually be easier to hit a decent standard with.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that 3.0 AST was a good thing by any stretch, rather I'm of the opinion that the WHM vs AST balance in Midas was something that SE would do well to explore. Both had advantages over each other depending on which turn you were tackling at the time and for that tier I actually ended up flip flopping between the two over the course of the night.

Tanks have had similar situations over the years too.

And Wesk talks about all of that. Yet you'd think he was talking out of his ass or that stuff like excluding jobs didn't happen back then at all levels if you read some people's replies in this thread. And sure some people might have loved those systems and the jank. As there are some crafters who feel HW crafting was when it was at its peak and wished it would go back to that sort of thing. I remember getting my miner to 60 and wondering how in world was I supposed to get the needed amount of HQ Adamantite or for the lv 60 minner quest as I wasn't an established crafter. I also didn't understand how gathering back then worked and asking anyone got me silence. Still does today thb. I might not have been raiding back then but oh man was it very much not fun hearing a person stuck on A3S try to prog that fight for almost the entire time it was current. Or to hear the complaints from fellow FC mates.

Again sure it feels nice if your job feels like it has its own identity. But I don't know where the sweet spot is or even if there is one to where people don't have to gear up another job and prog on that job only to get "leftover scraps(the gear no one else wanted cause it wasn't their main)" for their main. To then only touch it on reclears cause everyone's gear is so good it doesn't matter if you took an unfavorable job. And having a fairly balanced or very balanced difference between the jobs.