They're thinking about job identities for 8.0

[ty_taurus]

I wasn't around for the event(s) I'm about to allude to, but…

If this were up to me, I'd take each job and work out its new tooltips. No worrying about writing code. No worrying about whether new sound and visual effects are needed. As soon as I'm happy with the new tooltips, I'll post them online, and let the feedback roll in for a bit. Then, I wipe my tears, suck it up, and make another pass at the tooltips. Another online posting. Another round of feedback. Another round of tweaks, and then I start the coding.

I actually did something like that in a previous life. The difference is that SE has to deal with a far more diverse audience than I did, so they would need to be willing to put their foot down and say, I don't know, "AST is about taking what fate would seem to have in store for you and learning to overcome it. The RNG stays."

The important thing is that this structured proposal-feedback loop is only necessary when your starting point is so… "lost"… that you can't be (or shouldn't be) confident in how to course correct.

Well, if we take what was said at face value and assume 8.0 is absolutely going to reboot job identity, then we have to ask who is that change serving? Let's say the catalyst for this decision is, in fact, the voices of disappointed players that we see here on the forums as well as in a few other places on occasion. If that's the case, and the goal is to create a future where everyone is happy with the state of their jobs, then would it not make sense to be open and transparent with that community to ensure the changes you are making do actually appeal to the people you're trying to satisfy?

But there is also the possibility that they are in fact "lost" with how to proceed with job design anyway. In which case this identity reboot might more be inspired by their own uncertainty with how to maintain the current direction otherwise. Because if we look at the job actions we just saw, what new things have we actually seen? Upgraded animations and finishers all over the place. And that's kind of what Endwalker was as well. They can't do that forever, just add a couple animation upgrades and a new finisher or two. So maybe they're just feeling like the jobs need a reboot so that future changes after 8.0 can actually feel like the jobs are changing and evolving, or that there's actually room to add new things anyway. Because you can't physically fit so many finishers into a rotation. At a certain point, the balloon will pop and it will stop working correctly, which we've already seen a little bit of in Endwalker. Gunbreaker says hi.