The main reasons behind the dissatisfaction of job gameplay

[Valence]

I'll be honest, i think a lot of this dissstisfaction is in the heads of players. Yes, some thing could be better or diffrent, but its not that serious as some people in this game want it to be.

It definitely hits harder when you have played long enough to remember times where those issues were less present, or absolutely absent. I'll not deny it.

[Wildheaven182]

I think its not so much job design (though theyre working hard to ruin that) and is more the battle content design. The only existing gameplay mechanics in fights are attack the enemy, and dodge aoes.

Mana never needs to be managed, aggro never needs to be managed, there is nothing but different forms and inversions of avoiding aoes.
On top of that, nothing in the game deals even moderate damage. Or in the case of savage, there is no damage, only playing perfectly or being dead.
Hell, maybe even removing stamina a long time ago was a mistake xD

Boss auto attacks arent real and you cant convince me they are, they are juat a filler animation to keep the boss from looking like its just standing there watching as you play DDR with ground aoes.
Tankbusters are a single auto attack.

Heal or dps checks arent fun even if they can be hard. Because its just, you have to press your buttons now. You dont do anything out of the ordinary to interact with the mechanic, its more just a break from aoes tbh. Dps still dps normally, and healers actually press something other than their single attack button. Its not hard, its just, actually use your abilities rather than standing there looking dumb glaring at the boss.

They need to change the formula. All dungeons and alliance raids are add pulls up to each of three bosses, and everything else is a boss. Some alliance raids just dont have adds.

[Valence]

I still do think that this job design would still bore me to death even within a better and more varied encounter environment. Adjusting to chaos and surprises sure can come from encounters, I'll not deny it, but if the the mechanics of my job aren't intricate anyway, what's the point? It's just one example of course but how can you make it even more engaging for a warrior to play around their self sustain if it's just a stupid button to press every 25s and it puts you back to full life? That's the kind of job design we have right now.

On top of it, if you bring more varied encounters and whatnot, jobs will start feeling absolutely miserable because their rotations have been rigidified to sky high so much to play exactly like the devs want and no other way at all that any significant variation on a fight structure will just make everybody feel awful because nothing fits their stiff rotation anyway. It's just going to be a pain. Even downtime those days is a absolute pain for some jobs and it's getting worse and worse.

[Valence]

Bumping this thread, since DT released in the meantime and the first tier of endgame encounters as well.

I do think DT still unfortunately compounds all of the points I made in the OP, but with the exception of the very last one, which seems to have been addressed with the two new jobs in the roster: VPR and PCT. And while VPR doesn't meet unanimous criticism for other reasons, PCT is generally praised for the freedom it allows players to have agency on what they want to use and when, which is helped by the way its resources work and how its moving parts aren't scripted to a T.

What a shame other jobs couldn't get a similar treatment.

[TBerry]

Balance would still be an issue.

[BabyYoda]

Balance would still be an issue.

dude the game currently isn't balanced

[Raikai]

One thing that is inherently tied to job design rigidity is the actual encounter design. It's made with almost total uptime in mind and that restraints things a lot. For example, imagine if we had side platform to the arena, and by the end a priority add spawned. Obviously some GCDs would be lost for some people to get there - and it would probably feel horrible with the current job design.

As long as they keep with their formula of mirrored mechanics, always predictable raidwidess, boss self centering to have symmetrical danger zones - heck, in Endwalker you could literally use the floor tiles to gauge the AoEs - this structure potencializes the 'stiffness' of job design.

That's why so far I've been let down by what we got in High End raids (fights are great, don't get me wrong, but I expected more substantial novelties) and the prospects of job changes that we might get in 8.0. I'm waiting to see what's going to happen with 7.1's High End duties, because according to some people this was never meant to be heavily featured with 7.0 duties, and I hope that my impression changes.

[noumen0nn]

One thing that is inherently tied to job design rigidity is the actual encounter design. It's made with almost total uptime in mind and that restraints things a lot. For example, imagine if we had side platform to the arena, and by the end a priority add spawned. Obviously some GCDs would be lost for some people to get there - and it would probably feel horrible with the current job design.

As long as they keep with their formula of mirrored mechanics, always predictable raidwidess, boss self centering to have symmetrical danger zones - heck, in Endwalker you could literally use the floor tiles to gauge the AoEs - this structure potencializes the 'stiffness' of job design.

That's why so far I've been let down by what we got in High End raids (fights are great, don't get me wrong, but I expected more substantial novelties) and the prospects of job changes that we might get in 8.0. I'm waiting to see what's going to happen with 7.1's High End duties, because according to some people this was never meant to be heavily featured with 7.0 duties, and I hope that my impression changes.

It's 7.2 iirc, so next savage release. I'm kind of reserving my final judgement till then as well, DT definitely stepped things up in the normal mode encounters, but I think people are giving the first savage tier a little too much credit, when its more innovative mechanics are underused. We'll see what the next tier brings, but I'm also in agreement with the people saying that good encounter desing + boring job design is still a formula for failure.

[Supersnow845]

They’ve also boxed themselves in so badly with the structure of the burst window, savage basically requires full uptime at this point because if it doesn’t burst heavy jobs are always going to pull ahead because you will always dump filler to move the burst window around around downtime

100% uptime no cleave fights are severely restricted in their innovation potential

Can you imagine the modern jobs playing in coils, coils feels like a different game entirely

[Aravell]

Can you imagine the modern jobs playing in coils, coils feels like a different game entirely

You don't even have to go that far back to see that the design is very limiting.

Look at Thordan Unreal. If you did that fight on any gauge job, you'd see how broken they can get with any sort of downtime. You can see it in DSR too, remember how all the RPRs suffered a major damage loss unless the party held damage until close to enrage so the RPR can build their gauge.

The design they went for in EW and continued in DT is unsustainable for any job except ones that function off cooldowns. Gauge jobs just do not function with downtime when faced with their rigid design.