Please Stop saying Nerf ___

[Bourne_Endeavor]

SE still needs to make more jobs work well with others and buff skills from jobs that need it or they can remove slashing, peircing, blunt damage from all jobs and boost all jobs damage accordingly, something i fear they will do since so many jobs are left out from party compositions. we will never have jobs on a even playing field, either your bring DPS, Utility, or alittle of both. the problem is some jobs dont have enough to satisfy the group, or hardly anything helpful for the party. looking at MCH/BRD, their whole 3.0 toolkit was placed in Melee and casters role action and they never gave MCH compensation for its lose but BRD was greatly compensated. Hell the MCH/WHM got it the worse in 4.0. for losing their toolkit to help others fill role actions, the DRK is a bad design for what people have to endure just to push out damage. Hopefully they have been listening to people about WHM/MCH/DRK and what needs improving for these three jobs, i think the rest are in a good spot for now.

You fear they will remove slashing, blunt and piercing? I'm praying they finally do. Despite being a DRG main myself, I fancy bouncing jobs yet feel obligated to stay on DRG otherwise my group loses 400 damage for no damn reason. It more or less assures DRG will always be a meta lock because like I said, very few range DPS want anything to do with a group running without one.

And the jobs are in a decent spot at best. NIN/DRG still utterly dominates the melee scene because MNK and SAM simply lack any answer to Trick Attack, Litany and aggro management. If Piercing dies, this may open up the DRG spot but NIN's locked pretty tightly. On the caster side, RDM could use better support options as its still a noticeably inferior choice over BLM/SMN outside prog.

[Elamys]

I don't know that it's really that any one job needs to be nerfed, but rather that other jobs need to be buffed or have abilities/traits added or changed to make them an attractive choice over the same old. Mistaken player mindset certainly contributes a bit to under-representation (for the vast majority of a content's lifespan pretty much any party composition of skilled players will be able to clear it, so it's not like you NEED to lock out certain jobs, but people will do it anyways because they see the "pros" doing that and don't really consider why that's happening), but when you can get into content a lot easier as X instead of Y, and feel like you contribute a lot more to the group as X, a lot of people just end up choosing to play X instead of being turned away from party after party.

A few small adjustments to AST/SCH and giving WHM some utility is honestly all healers would need right now to be competitive, but this late in the expansion that's obviously not going to happen. Hopefully, with dancer being all but certain to be added, they completely re-approach how they approach healer balance. WHM with cards slapped on wasn't good for AST, so I'm hopping they don't just go SCH with some random twirls added to try and balance it.

[Seraphor]

SE could easily fix this by adding MCH to Blunt and having it work in conjuction with MNK, last time i checked Flint lock pistols and rifles are only leathal in close range, Ball projectiles cause more blunt damage over peircing damage from far ranged, the main reason the projectile was changed was to in crease the velocity of a round.

Not to mention Machinist has typically been a debuffing class in the past, aiming at different body parts or using different ammo to influct status.
So it woukdnt be at all out if place for it to inflict all the vulnerability down debuffs, perhaps cycling through them on cooldown like the bard does with songs.
But thats probably too much to change now.

[Risvertasashi]

There is no such thing as OP jobs, only OP players who know their job from top to bottom.

If the top 5% of one job significantly out perform the top 5% of another, there is a balance problem. Somewhere, a job is OP or UP. It's not a "git gud" issue.

[zuzu-bq]

Nerf indom though.

[Dualgunner]

People can be good at using an inefficient kit. That doesn't mean the kit isn't inefficient.

[Kabooa]

People can be good at using an inefficient kit. That doesn't mean the kit isn't inefficient.

Press F to pay respects.

[Lyth]

I don't see how you can make balance adjustments without nerfs. An upward balance of buffs leads to power creep. Tank mitigation cooldowns are a good example of this. Right now, the vast majority of tankbusters are either dealt with by invuln or supercooldown. It trivialises fights.

The ready availability of invulns also devalues all of your other cooldowns. 20% DR might have been a lot in ARR, but now it's definitely not enough. Damage has to rise to offset the sheer amount of defensives that we have. The solution is obviously not to buff every tank into having a 3 minute recast Holmgang or a 60 second Dark Mind. Nobody likes nerfs, but sometimes they're essential.

Shielding is another example. We've seen a steady rise in the amount of shielding available over the expansions. The problem with shields is that they don't really have diminishing returns in the same way that % DR does. They can also create some fairly sizeable windows in which there really isn't any outgoing damage. That's not even mentioning that silly LB cheese. The solution, unsurprisingly, doesn't involve handing out more shields. You need more checks.

Again, I'm going to go ahead and throw out a guess that the new shield resource bar that's coming is going to involve some restrictions and upper bounds on shields. The devs do like indirect nerfs.

Raises in prog are yet another example. Everyone wants a raise, and I'm not talking about gil. But it really should be a limited resource. The MP cost and cast times were presumably put in there to be prohibitive. But at the moment, we have tremendous potential to recover from mistakes. Again, the solution is not to give every dps their own personal raise. Limit access to it, either by recast or number of uses. Then you actually have to think twice about how it gets used.

Raid buffs are a fairly tricky issue. You can try and offset raid buffs against personal dps all you want, but all things being equal, most people prefer working with jobs that bring buffs because it makes their personal dps look better.

Once again, I think this is a problem of diminishing returns. I acknowledge the point about Trick's effectiveness dropping off in council fights (when they actually happen). However, most raid buffs sit on the player and tend to be multiplicative. Should there be some sort of diminishing return to stacking partywide raid buffs? I'm not sure what the answer is, but I don't think the answer lies in giving every healer buff cards.

Nerfs are not necessarily out there to crush your happiness and force you off your favourite jobs. Although it would be nice to raid with a comp that feels slightly different from 2014. Some jobs have been 'must' picks for what feels like forever. Also, slashing must be purged.

[Risvertasashi]

Raises in prog are yet another example. Everyone wants a raise, and I'm not talking about gil. But it really should be a limited resource.

While I agree with the overall spirit of your post, I don't agree with this particular point. Raise from healers is limited - it's costly and risky, both the act of casting it and the recovery followup.

Red mage obviously makes res highly available, but they're the less powerful mage exactly because they bring that asset to prog. And even a RDM will have MP problems with a few raises.

[Seraphor]

If you remove Slashing, Piercing and Blunt debuffs, they'd be replaced by a Trick Attack variant.
This would then be too OP to stack, so it would be useless without good party coordination.
You then have several jobs that can all provide the exact same but exclusive raid buff. The meta would simply change to include a couple of the jobs that have a version of Trick Attack, plus all of the hardest hitting jobs.
It would likely be something like (DRG/SAM/MNK)/BRD/(SMN/RDM)
All you've done is exclude NIN as dead weight because they're no longer necessary, everyone else has their ability and hits harder.