What’s the point when BLM’s newfound success is PCT and SMN’s loss?

[Wasselin]

Do you there will ever be a situation where jobs of the same type will have equal representation in savage? Won't savage players congregate to the most powerful class even if there is a very small difference between them?

[CidHeiral]

Hopefully the devs are learning that dumbing down every job is futile. People who pick a job up because it's OP and braindead are obviously going to drop it immediately when something even more OP and braindead comes along. Then all you've accomplished is alienating everyone who liked it the way it was before. You're not gaining new players, you're losing players who were dedicated to those jobs while the same bucket of people play musical chairs. It's not a great long term strategy.

There are over twenty jobs in the game and counting. There should be a mix of different complexities and playstyles for everyone to choose from, every job doesn't need to appeal to everyone. Ryu is a very popular character throughout the Street Fighter series because he's generally pretty straightforward and easy to pick up and play, but would Street Fighter be a better game if every character was Ryu? Of course not. Some people like simple characters and some like technical characters and everything in between, so there's a mix of all of that in the roster. FFXIV shouldn't be any different.

[Eraden]

In Mao opinion, problems started when SE decided future was to be faster and faster DDR boss fights. Then thems created PCTs whats are BLMs specifically designed for these new fights. BUT....BLMs still existed so SE made second mistake and decided not to retire BLM job but to double down on it and make it even stronger than PCT job. If SE really wants to go this route and push for 2-dimensional super-fast DDR fights, then thems should has had the guts to tell players that game is changing and some jobs like BLM will no longer work and will be retired with current BLMs being converted over to PCTs. Yes, is many BLMs (Mao included) whats would quit game in disgust but at least SE would be being honest. SE nots done that though so now thems has two jobs whats will forever be competings in bad way. Mao nots sure why SE nots had guts to admit this and make changes buts this is situation game is in now.

[Sylvain]

Please stop saying dumb shit like how SCH has more healing than SGE. it's so damn wrong on so many levels. SGE has a LOT more healing in their kit by a damn mile.
What sch has over sge is more mit spells and a guaranteed huge fat shield on demand thanks to Recitation. Normally, you don't even use recitation with deployment tactics since it's better to use it with Indo. It's the reason why SCH received seraphism, to fix some of the lack of healing SCH was having.

That makes no sens, SGE got Philosophia so by your own logic SGE also lacked healing.
They simply gave the 2 mit healer, extra healing, and the 2 pure healer, extra mit.

[Aravell]

Can someone genuinely explain to me what square is hoping to achieve here? I get the idea behind “simplifying jobs makes them more accessible” even if I don’t agree with it but what does constantly making the recently reworked job the most powerful job to inflate its player numbers actually achieve. Like we all know if that in 7.3 they accidentally buff PCT back above BLM trying to fix its wonky muse potency that BLM’s population will crash and PCT’s will skyrocket again. The hat is actually being achieved in game

Based on how they've been making changes, I'd assume that their ultimate goal is to achieve total play rate parity across the role but doing a bad job at it. What they don't seem to understand is that making every job simple to pick up and play means that the job with a dps advantage (even if it's as small as 10 dps) will have a major spike in play rate due to being "meta".

The only way to disperse this major spike in play rate for "meta" jobs is to simply make it impossible for some people to play some jobs. Like how SCH was straight up just broken in HW but the play rate was still low because most people don't want to learn how to actually handle the job to the point where it's powerful and not an active detriment to the party.

[Valence]

There are over twenty jobs in the game and counting. There should be a mix of different complexities and playstyles for everyone to choose from, every job doesn't need to appeal to everyone. Ryu is a very popular character throughout the Street Fighter series because he's generally pretty straightforward and easy to pick up and play, but would Street Fighter be a better game if every character was Ryu? Of course not. Some people like simple characters and some like technical characters and everything in between, so there's a mix of all of that in the roster. FFXIV shouldn't be any different.

That would require SE to stop balancing jobs around difficulty and complexity (something they have said to be doing regularly in spite of recanting in early SB, only to double down on it later), and the community to accept that a job they see as "braindead" to be able to compete with a complicated one.

[Reimmi]

SMN also attracted a lot of new players after its redesign because it was incredibly easy while also being very overtuned. Now we have BLM after its rework, which is also much more popular while being incredibly easy and pretty overtuned, whereas SMN's DPS fell behind after EW and it's now dead in a ditch as the least played caster.

The problem you run into when you gut a job for ease of use so anyone that can put peanut butter on bread can play it
It'll be overplayed when its good cause path of least resistance, and nobody will play it when it's bad because the dedicated fans quit the job to play something that makes their brain actually function

[ForsakenRoe]

That would require SE to stop balancing jobs around difficulty and complexity (something they have said to be doing regularly in spite of recanting in early SB, only to double down on it later), and the community to accept that a job they see as "braindead" to be able to compete with a complicated one.

Or, and hear me out on this crazy idea, SE could design jobs to have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling, such that playing at the most basic level of a job (eg just smashing Broil over and over on SCH) is like, 90%+ of the damage output of the 'optimal rotation' (eg how you'd juggle 3 different DOTs with staggered timers in HW SCH). We have a system in the game called 'action potency', so it's incredibly easy to math out how much damage a certain rotation will do over a 2min loop. And because of that, it makes it very easy to make a rotation where 'playing at the most basic level' and 'playing 100% optimally' are very close in performance, or make tweaks to actions to close the performance gap as required.

Off the top of my head, an example for SCH:
Broil, 340p
Biolysis, 20p, plus 35p per tick for 30s (370p total)
Miasmalysis, 280p, plus 10p per tick for 24s (360p total, replaces Ruin2 hence the high on-cast potency)
Shadowflare, 100p, plus 50p per tick for 15s (350p total, drops an AOE puddle that damages enemies inside)

With these numbers, playing optimally would be '100% damage'. By comparison, playing 'Broil, and only Broil' would be about 98%, and playing 'Dawntrail SCH optimally' would be 99%. And I'm not SE, I'm just a random forum user with an arcane knowledge called 'basic mathematics'. There is not a single piece of content that does, or would, require a player to juggle these three example DOTs perfectly. A player could go into any content in the game, even Ultimates, and smash the example Broil over and over, and they would clear the DPS check. So the DOTs would be 'optional', to challenge yourself and your mastery of the Job. Alternatively, they could be used by a player specifically, and only, when mobility is required (IE instead of hitting Ruin2 3 times, applying each of the three DOTs so as not to waste part of their duration). Rather than adding difficulty for a 'casual'/'less practiced' player, there's ways to design Job kits to actually alleviate certain difficulties (ie 'How do I keep doing good damage, while needing to move for this mechanic?') that a newer player might face. Heck, with those example numbers, even if the hypothetical player were to press Miasmalysis 3 times for their movement, it'd STILL result in more damage than pressing 3 Ruin2's currently is!

Ironically, BLM already had this kind of thing, with Nonstandard, but SE has been adamant in removing those alternative rotations from the game in favour of 'you WILL press 6 F4s, a Despair and a FlareStar'. The BLM changes that facilitated 'increased mobility' to keep up with fights like M8S, weren't actually necessary at all, because Nonstandard was a potential solution to give the BLM mobility in those moments. SE had a solution to their problem already implemented, and instead went for an even more hamfisted 'solution', which introduced even more issues. Such as how Fire 1 is now a dead button for 30 whole levels (60-90, where you get Paradox) because you no longer need to press it to refresh the timer. Or how Scathe is now even more pointless because you have so much more mobility. Or how thanks to the potency changes, BLM's damage output might have been decreased in lower level content (like old Ultimates) because Fire4 got nerfed a bit, so they could hyper-buff FlareStar by 100p. Or how, thansk to Flare no longer having a cast time longer than the GCD, the Transpose-AF1 Flare-AF3 Flare-Transpose-Freeze-(Thunder4/Foul)-Transpose AOE rotation has potentially gotten even stronger, making High Fire and High Blizzard (which received no changes) even more of a waste to press. I've even heard that Flare-Flare-Flarestar, as a single-target line (presumably if the fight is about to end/boss jump away), might be a slight potency gain


Point is, we shouldn't be, as a community, accepting or rejecting the idea of 'braindead job competes with gigabrain job'. I think it'd be better if more jobs were designed in such a way that there's a 'braindead' way to play them, that does most of the work of clearing Enrages, and optional 'gigabrain' tech you can leverage, to further increase your output if you choose to challenge yourself. Melee is a good example of this mentality already existing: Not only with things like Optimal Drift MNK, or Double Communio on RPR, but a Role-wide system that applies to all 6 of the Melee Jobs: Positionals. Of course, there's a subset of players who want positionals removed. But this doesn't bring the floor up to the ceiling (which would be good), it brings the ceiling down to the floor (which is bad)

[Souljacker]

The blm changes were very calculated. They've seen that the playrate of blm was very low, so they made it more accessible but to truly make it played more they had to get rid of picto. I mean picto stayed the way it was for almost 10 months lol! And suddenly they realize that they need to do something? On the way even destroy picto's gameplay loop...
I still jope they buff picto and restore the rotation to how it was before. If you want to play optimally you want to slide cast as much as possible rather than use your mobility tools. That is just wrong in itself. They joy came from finding the time to paint your muses during mechanics. Also blm is a selfish job and still it puts out the highest rdps now. Picto is a buff job and they should excell at rdps but picto rdps fell quite a lot. Picto still shouldnt be behind all melees, if it is supposed to rival blm then it must be in the top 4 rdps jobs now otherwise you would just bring a blm. It is quite easy for the devs to manipulate playrates at this point. Just buff the jobs that are played the least, make them more accessible and easy to play and playrate goes up. It's almost like with gacha games. The new stuff is always broken and replaces the old stuff.

BLM went beyond buffing fixing it. I put it away around the time they introduced the third freaking clock to the ui and haven't picked it back up again. it was my main for many years. If they toned down some of the clock silliness, I might pick it up again, but I agree this didn't have to come at the expense of other jobs.

SE is really struggling with balance and innovation this cycle.

[CidHeiral]

That would require SE to stop balancing jobs around difficulty and complexity (something they have said to be doing regularly in spite of recanting in early SB, only to double down on it later), and the community to accept that a job they see as "braindead" to be able to compete with a complicated one.

I have no problem with that at all. In fact I would happily accept DRG's damage being in the dumpster if it meant I got to play EW DRG again.