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

[brinn12]

Square Enix is stuck in a loop: they boost the DPS numbers of simplified jobs — be they new or reworked — which then boosts their popularity. This creates a feedback illusion where SE assumes that dumbing down jobs is healthy for the game. Of course, this is proven wrong when people move away from these jobs and the active player count drops.

Now the real question is: why is this policy being followed instead of listening to the community and creating a system where jobs are unique, rewarding and balanced? FFXIV needs a community manager addressing these concerns just as much as it needs an official translator for the Live Letters.

[Gwenkatsu]

why is this policy being followed instead of listening to the community

Just a quick reminder: the 20 people discussing all the nuts and bolts of job design on this forum are *not* the community as a whole, just a very small fraction.
I for one am ok with the jobs as they are. I press glowing buttons, and colorful things happen on my screen. When I get bored with a job, there are lots of others, with different buttons and different colorful things. I like that.
Of course I can only speak for myself, not for some mythical entity as "the community", or the fabled "we"

[Valence]

Or, and hear me out on this crazy idea, SE could design jobs to have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling

I've always been a supporter of accessibility + high ceiling across all the jobs, so you're preaching to the church.
However I do not like the idea of such a silly low gap in numbers, but that's just numbers. I do think that reaching a higher level on your rotation should be part of savage+ and have an incidence on the result, and the gaps you mentioned are irrelevant for this to happen. Jobs used to have a higher ceiling and micro complexities to manage especially in HW, and it was a system that worked, even in casual where DPS checks were virtually absent, allowing for lower skilled players to go by just fine. The real issue is that their new encounter designs are making this a pipe dream because they suck all the available air (aka brain power), which is why everything is dialed down to a bland soup with different skins depending on the job you pick, which isn't far from picking your icecream flavor of the day. You will never have higher skill ceilings with those encounters in the way, and I feel it's 1) the direction they're pushing in anyway so I feel like ultimately we're fighting against windmills and 2) the rabbit is out of the bag now anyway.

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.

You're okay with... what? I feel like I'm getting mixed signals.
With damage output being balanced around effort and complexity? Ew. I guess you'd see most PFs starting to lock out a lot of jobs unless they do bring something truly valuable and unique to buy in their place in a party, if they're braindead to play..

[CidHeiral]

You're okay with... what? I feel like I'm getting mixed signals.
With damage output being balanced around effort and complexity?

I was agreeing with you on damage being balanced evenly. My DRG comment was to illustrate that I don't care if I do superior damage for a complex job, I just want my favorite job to be fun again.

[brinn12]

Just a quick reminder: the 20 people discussing all the nuts and bolts of job design on this forum are *not* the community as a whole, just a very small fraction.
I for one am ok with the jobs as they are. I press glowing buttons, and colorful things happen on my screen. When I get bored with a job, there are lots of others, with different buttons and different colorful things. I like that.
Of course I can only speak for myself, not for some mythical entity as "the community", or the fabled "we"

I actually agree with you, SE should not listen to just 20 people. They should listen to this:

"Every expansion saw growth between x.0 and pre-x.1 censuses.

SB 663k -> 830k
ShB 943k -> 1.2m
EW 1.3m -> 1.7m
DT 1.4m -> 1.1m"

[localareanetwork]

Given how many people I've experienced who just flat out did not roll GCDs in M5S, I feel like they are never going to make the jobs "harder" or "more unique"

[Souljacker]

So, I picked up BLM again a bit and mind, this is my experience at level 90 where I left it, but I do feel like it plays more like classic BLM did. I see why folks are getting back on it.

These numbers might not be a mass exodus from the other jobs, it might be folks who always liked BLM better going back because it's more like what we're used to. The Enochian timer was absolutely, without a doubt, my least favorite nonsense timer to have to upkeep. I get it, a lot of higher end folks like challenge. Let's keep the challenges in the fights, not the job UI.

Someone else mentioned that jobs should have an accessible floor that can appropriately clear content, and then a ceiling that one may strive for in order to clear the hardest content. The changes to this job specifically feel like they were in this spirit. What I was able to work out after ten minutes with it got me through some trust dungeons with minimal issues. But, that's not going to get me into any hard content, I'll need to work out how to best use ley lines now, when to time triplecast, etc.

But gosh, I am definitely going to play this job again, so add one more to the tally. One more that was definitely not going to be interested in SMN or PCT at all.

[Supersnow845]

So, I picked up BLM again a bit and mind, this is my experience at level 90 where I left it, but I do feel like it plays more like classic BLM did. I see why folks are getting back on it.

These numbers might not be a mass exodus from the other jobs, it might be folks who always liked BLM better going back because it's more like what we're used to. The Enochian timer was absolutely, without a doubt, my least favorite nonsense timer to have to upkeep. I get it, a lot of higher end folks like challenge. Let's keep the challenges in the fights, not the job UI.

Someone else mentioned that jobs should have an accessible floor that can appropriately clear content, and then a ceiling that one may strive for in order to clear the hardest content. The changes to this job specifically feel like they were in this spirit. What I was able to work out after ten minutes with it got me through some trust dungeons with minimal issues. But, that's not going to get me into any hard content, I'll need to work out how to best use ley lines now, when to time triplecast, etc.

But gosh, I am definitely going to play this job again, so add one more to the tally. One more that was definitely not going to be interested in SMN or PCT at all.

Maintaining ABC is not a skill ceiling for a caster, that’s literally the floor in savage

These changes give a high skill ceiling…….if you consider ABC as the skill ceiling, which ironically is part of the reason new BLM feels so much like a healer

[FlorineC]

So explain to me why Picto was genuinely well received while being easy to play ;but then when black mage gets that buff, people are upset.
So do people want hard jobs or easy jobs?

Speaking for myself, I want interesting jobs, and Picto is an interesting job. I would personally say it's one of the more difficult jobs currently in the game so I guess take that for what you will, but it has a lot of flexibility and room for optimization that a lot of other jobs sorely lack while still requiring a good amount of planning for optimal play, and I find that engaging. I previously mained SMN from ARR through EW, and while I enjoyed the novelty of EW SMN for a bit, it got old fast for me not necessarily because it was easy, but because there was just so little decision making or skill expression in the class (whether there's a meaningful distinction between that and easiness there I'll let you decide), and it was/is extremely rigid on top of that. Your agency was boiled down to whether or not you could find ~6 seconds per minute to actually cast a spell, and then the class played itself otherwise. Conversely, I think you can have easy classes that are still interesting and engaging on some level, and have room for optimization. I think SB PLD was a good example of this. You followed a pretty simple rotation, but moves like Shield Swipe in conjunction with Sheltron and Bulwark gave you room to eek out some extra damage if you wanted to. Hell, Sheltron itself only covering a single hit made it a relatively small but skill testing move to fully take advantage of, and it felt really good when you timed it to catch a big hit and not the auto attack 1 second before that.

At the same time, there's classes like Bard which is imo the hardest class in the game right now, but that I don't find very fun just because I don't feel like its kit meshes together very well. The dots feel so vestigial because procs are no longer based off of them and you refresh them both with a single gcd, the way procs change between songs feels awkward to me (thank god they made pitch perfect aoe so your song order isn't constantly fucked in dungeons anymore at least), and there's just too many separate little things to juggle that it doesn't feel like a cohesive class to me. I don't think it's as simple as people either blanket like or dislike hard jobs so why did they like X which was easy but not Y which was also easy, there's a lot of other factors at play in what we find fun or not. Sure, there's some level of correlation where if you're looking for something more active or with more room for skill expression, you may tend to like harder jobs more, but difficulty isn't the only, or even the primary thing factor for a lot of people.

[Souljacker]

Maintaining ABC is not a skill ceiling for a caster, that’s literally the floor in savage

These changes give a high skill ceiling…….if you consider ABC as the skill ceiling, which ironically is part of the reason new BLM feels so much like a healer

It's almost like you didn't read a single word of what I wrote.

But again - this is all coming from folks who say the word "healer" but really mean DPS, because in this game we can't actually have a true healer that focuses on healing so I don't know what I was expecting.

I absolutely stand by my opinion that the challenge should be in the encounters, NOT in the UI by tracking x number of clocks. Somehow, we had crazy difficult boss fights in FFXI and we didn't need any of the button-y\timer-based\500+ skill optimal "rotation" stuff that's plagued this game to do it. Time will tell if they are going to give us anything very interesting like that. I have a feeling it's just going to be more dancing around the telegraphs, but that's a discussion for another thread.