Quote Originally Posted by Nominous View Post
The immediate reaction to SAM numbers being so high, is that either they're too strong, or it's too easy. It's an assumption, and hardly a fair one. By that logic, I guess SMN and MCH were either too powerful, or too easy in Creator Savage's patch, since they topped most of the charts, right? It's about as baseless as can be.

And you should care about the identity of a Job vs. your own or others. That's the thing. As DPS, it's hard to really differentiate one from the other as far as identity goes, because the ultimate goal is to demolish everything, it's just how we go about it, right? It's easy to understand why PLD shouldn't do more than MCH. It's a tank, that's not it's goal. However, we've gotten to a point where some DPS have support (in differing ways), and others don't. That creates precedent for analyzing the identity of a Job, since that will better balance the sum of it's parts. Not to mention, sometimes the identity of the Job contributes to the ultimate balance of it. SAM, and BLM being the best examples of that (and BLM needing some love in that respect as well). If you don't care about that, then we should just play a game where no DPS Job has any identity, get rid of all support skills, and just press blank icons to see big numbers, because that's the only thing that matters on a damage dealer, apparently.

I'm only going to reply to these two points mostly because I think we can both agree that on SAM difficulty vs MNK difficulty we'll probably never agree and it's purely based on opinion. Albeit I don't find MNK difficult at all, I am mostly speaking from what I have heard from others or over the years of playing the game.

My only problem with the first point is the whole thing regarding MCH and SMN. Yes while they had high numbers and topped charts, the problem is how often and how many did so. No one can deny that there is a staggering amount of Samurai topping charts. I have never seen nearly as many machinists or summoners doing so during creator or any period of 3.x series. Yes they often did high numbers, but it was based on a small pool of extremely skilled players, whereas the Samurai numbers we are seeing have a much bigger pool. It is not baseless, or an assumption when it's very clear from the sheer amount of Samurai that exist with high parsing numbers compared to previous classes.

Let's not forget that Square's goal was to make classes easier than they were in HW, and you'd be hard pressed to convince anyone that SAM right now is harder if not just as difficult as playing Machinist or Summoner optimally in 3.x. I'd say they succeeded in making things easier, personally.


As for me not caring about balance because I don't care about identity. All I can say is, what? My statement was explicitly to display that my stake in Samurai's balance, and more importantly why I think it is too powerful, is not personal nor is it out of spite. Your statement implied that people with like-minded opinions to mine simply felt Samurai was overlapping them or replacing them. I was simply telling you in my case, that is not true. Pretty much everything you stated in this segment of your post is irrelevant to what I said. I said that Samurai does not directly influence Red Mage's identity, and I meant that it does not do so in a negative light, therefore I have no personal grudge with them.