Job changes you'd like to see in Endwalker?

[Firework]

Like the Time-mages, they seem to be heavily inspired on. I would love a rework of the class that go me interested in (FfXiV) in the first place. After learning about Astrologian- back in Heavensward. I picked up a copy of ff14, and gave it a try. I have been playing it since then... until Shadowbringers.

Astrologian- is why I am in this community.

Here are my suggestions:

-Rework the card system for (some) utility-variability. Not just boring dmg-increase. Perhaps concentrate on the (Seals) rather than the 6xcards themselves. However its done. The cards should have mutability, rather than being static. They are core to its identity.

-Work in the flavour of a time mage. (ex. A preemptive-esuna spell; which absorbing a status effect, a Haste-movement speed increase spell, temporarily giving the equivalency of a Sprint to a target, A teleport-like Shukuchi as ff.Tactics Time mages had, to become one of the only healers to have a get-out-of-dodge option) etc...

-If Shields are being removed from Astrologians (alongside the Diurnal and Nocturnal Sects). Perhaps work a dmg.reduction element vs. dmg.increasing element - tied into their Cards to keep this flavour tied in.

Regardless of what is decided. I hope its status as a (Utility)-healer is what is considered.
I'm fine with;
WHM being the largest potency and instant heal regen-caster.
The Scholar being the Split target & Shield caster
The Sage being the Shield -whatever it is, dps?- caster.

But please for the LOVE of the Twelve!
The Astrologian should be known as a Utility Healer (thematically). The one that can flex and occupy (partially) the role of an absent theme on a team. Not just a dps-buffer. There are enough classes that give buffs Dragoons(Thrill of battle and Eyes), Bards/Dancers, Ninja-trick attackers etc...

It is high time, that the Astrologian re-gains its title as a Versatility Healer and re-spruce its own Identity.

I don't necessarily disagree with your point for letting AST have more utility, the problem is it already did and all the players cared about was the balance card. That's why they changed it into what it is now. Changing it back won't really do anything, people will still always go for the damage buff

[Shurrikhan]

the problem is it already did and all the players cared about was the balance card.

Because they failed to remotely balance it and all but two forms of that "utility" were just different, worse shades of damage contribution.

If there is literally no way for a card which usually does 60% the contribution of another to do more than 105% the other's, even under perfect play, why would anyone care about it?

That's a balance issue, not a fundamental design one.

Take Warriors gap closer off that meter.

So that it can be pigeonholed into damage-dealing, rather than functioning as a gap closer?

If it had two charges, Onslaught would be the best gap closer by miles; as is, it's still arguably the best.

"Free" oGCD potency isn't free; it factors into the ppm of the job as a whole and therefore always comes at cost to elsewhere in the kit. A job as a whole may be overtuned over a period a time, but it's not going to be because their gap closers had more potency or less resource cost attached to them. Design for the gameplay you want; the numbers assigned to a particular skill will be ultimately irrelevant except insofar as they influence said gameplay (e.g., through breakpoints by which they change what, optimally, should be prioritized in a given situation).

[Nyarlha]

So that it can be pigeonholed into damage-dealing, rather than functioning as a gap closer?

If it had two charges, Onslaught would be the best gap closer by miles; as is, it's still arguably the best.

"Free" oGCD potency isn't free; it factors into the ppm of the job as a whole and therefore always comes at cost to elsewhere in the kit. A job as a whole may be overtuned over a period a time, but it's not going to be because their gap closers had more potency or less resource cost attached to them. Design for the gameplay you want; the numbers assigned to a particular skill will be ultimately irrelevant except insofar as they influence said gameplay (e.g., through breakpoints by which they change what, optimally, should be prioritized in a given situation).

And the obvious solution to that as already pointed out in this thread is to finally remove potency from gap closers. Let them be what they are supposed to be : utility, and not damaging OGCDs.

[Shurrikhan]

And the obvious solution to that as already pointed out in this thread is to finally remove potency from gap closers. Let them be what they are supposed to be : utility, and not damaging OGCDs.

There's a place for different jobs having different advantages. The closest we get to a truly unfettered gap closer is one which has next to zero net potency change from its use, and such would therefore be advantageous to have in terms of mobility.

Unless we want even more homogeneity, however, there's no need to absolutely standardize all of them to each share that subtle mobility advantage. It's fine for some jobs to have their mobility tools be aimed more purely at mobility and others to offer, through their presence, offer a slightly higher proportion of burst damage to the overall kit or the job's damage profile.

Perhaps more importantly, it's fine for some jobs to have to gameplay through which they weigh the value of that mobility against its windowed potency bonus while others can keep the tool more situationally reserved and therefore straightforward.

My point was only that if Lubu was seeing the gauge cost as holding back Onslaught's mobility affordances, he's got it slightly backwards.

[Tracewood]

Semi-Fresh off of leveling all four tanks but want to main GNB come Endwalker, I feel GNB could use some mitigation tweaks.

Reduce Aurora's recast from 60s to 30s. Regen potency increase from 200-400, OR just have Aurora upgrade to Aurora II when you reach level 90 with a job trait "enhanced Aurora"
Camoflauge - Mmmm... maybe buff Parry or make it just reflect physical damage on the target for the duration of the skill while taking reduced damage.
Heart of Light increase the reduce magic damage taken from 10%-20%

The DPS kit is fine and dandy. If they get buffs, great!

[Firework]

Because they failed to remotely balance it and all but two forms of that "utility" were just different, worse shades of damage contribution.

If there is literally no way for a card which usually does 60% the contribution of another to do more than 105% the other's, even under perfect play, why would anyone care about it?

That's a balance issue, not a fundamental design one.

It had nothing to do with balance. Yes, Balance card was used over Arrow or Spear cards because the damage was just better, but those were the only damage buffs. Bole, Spire and Ewer were pure support cards and they rarely or never got used because they were situational. Even in situations they would be helpful, they aren't necessarily needed and damage buffs are more valuable to people, therefore Balance is chosen over them. It's similar to the gap closer situation, damage is valued over utility.

If AST is going to have more utility, it can't be tied to cards. That doesn't necessarily mean it'll be found useful though. AST used to have other utility such as Disable, but that was also removed. As to why it was, I don't know about that one

[Shurrikhan]

It had nothing to do with balance.

It had both primarily and ultimately to do with balance.

Bole, unless providing a unique or necessary affordance (at which point it becomes either broken good or one should have just been in Noct Sect instead), is ultimately a damage card; it merely allows for more healer offensive uptime. Because its affordances, however, were virtually never (i.e., outside of incredibly particular undergeared dungeon pulls) unique or necessary, it remained merely a lackluster card in the same vein as Balance, Arrow, and Spear, and generally inferior to them. it was not tuned strongly enough to be otherwise.

Arrow, meanwhile, could only barely surpass Balance under absolutely perfect conditions on two jobs. While it could improve healing throughput, no healing requirement would be uniquely met by a mere 10% increase to Spell Speed. Thus it, too, ended up merely an inferior Balance.

Spear is scarcely worth talking about. The first design was fundamentally flawed in its requiring all CDs to be readied to maximize its use. This had unique affordances (such as an extra Hallowed per run), but was too finnicky for typical use. This design, I'd argue, could have nonetheless been saved. The second design, however, was literally just a slap to AST players. A 10% increased chance to do some 40 to 60% more damage averages a mere half a Balance, and carries zero unique affordances. It was in every way just an inferior Balance.

To put it another way, balance doesn't just require parity in granular, on-paper strength; it also requires parity how useful the given increase in a given capacity is likely to be in context.

For instance, if there were both a "magic tank" and "physical tank" which were equally strong towards their types, but only the magic damage were likely otherwise to one-shot the eventually necessarily CD-empty tank, then it'd be by far the more useful in a given fight. If, however, magic were not so threatening and physical damage was instead, or if neither was and physical damage dealt a greater portion of the overall damage or damage events that must be immediately healed beyond scheduled oGCDs, then it'd be the more valuable. That's still with exact parity on paper.

Here, that parity runs instead between the different ways through which cards have contributed -- damage, healing, mitigation, increased ability refresh speed, mana, and TP. There is no threshold to the usefulness for a damage buff, since all fights in XIV are ultimately won through damage and, with zero regenerative phases or the like, no damage is ever wasted. But there are significant thresholds in buffs to all else and below those thresholds they amount solely to far less direct damage increases.

If the other card effects were nonetheless balanced for such in most situations (e.g., if a Bole placed on the MT before a particularly damage-dense 30-second period were to provide as much damage from extra healer GCDs available as would be produced from a Balance on your best 30-second period of DPS on any given ally or halved across the whole raid), that could have still been okay, as it'd at least reward game knowledge instead of simply remembering whether a BLM is (A) melee or (B) ranged. Ideally, though, they should have been balanced around a greater strength that'd allow those effects to cross a significant threshold, or, at minimum, a RR rework that didn't always favor Expand nor nerf Empower and thus could take advantage of strength enough to reach such a threshold where the opportunity arose.

But they didn't. The game increasingly moved to rewarding less healer action per %mitigation over time, through the increased portion of oGCD healing, devaluing Bole; RR remained painfully imbalanced in its favoring Expand, offering nothing of value to Extend by disallowing multiple cards on the same target, and by making Empower a mere trap; and no tuning polish was done at the level of all cards together (to better reach useful thresholds for more context-limited effects) nor between the individual cards in view of what those different effects would actually amount to in context. Both directly and indirectly, they failed to balance the cards.

[Jandor]

I'm not really a huge fan of abilities that are essentially just weaker AoE versions of ST abilities, they get used when walking between actual fights but other than that their purpose seems to be to just take up space.

I'd like to see jobs either get an "AoE mode" that switches their ST skills to AoE equivalents, or just roll the AoE effect into the ST skills. i.e. "Deals damage with a potency of 300 to target and 150 to all enemies nearby it."

[dvoraen]

The biggest change I want for Summoner is a rework that makes pets more integral to the rotation. This I would accomplish by establishing five primary abilities that interface with pets, as follows below. These abilities would transform into the appropriate pet's spell that the summoner casts. When I say integral, I generally mean that they have at most a minor cooldown or have a wow factor like Enkindle. In other words, make Egi Assaults be primary spells instead of two-charge cooldowns.

Ruin
Outburst
Egi Assault I
Egi Assault II
Enkindle

GAMEPLAY LOOP

• Summoner chooses a pet for current situation.
  - Garuda/Emerald = ae; Titan/Topaz = defense; Ifrit = single target[/indent]
• Transformed 'Ruin' spell is primary filler.
• Use Outburst and Enkindle on cooldown.
• Use Egi Assault I and II as needed or on cooldown (depends on ability they become).
• Use Aetherflow OGCDs as needed. (Later on, they help build Trance gauge.)
• Using pet spells builds up gauge towards a Trance. Trance duration depends on gauge.
• Enter a Trance for stronger transformed actions and a powerful summon.
  - Your pet disappears during a Trance. It's all about that advanced primal power, yo.
  - Trances initially give only two abilities, but once the summon is acquired the Egi Assaults and Enkindle become available as well, giving five Trance-summon specific actions. In essence, super pets!

AETHERFLOW
- Energy Drain
- Energy Siphon
- Fester
- Painflare

Below I submit the following just to illustrate the point. These are just made up ideas to showcase how I see it playing out:

Garuda-Egi
- Ruin -> Wind Blade		ae damage
- Outburst -> Aerial Slash 	stronger ae damage
- I -> Cutting Gale 		ae damage + dot
- II -> Slipstream		ground damage
- Enkindle -> Aerial Blast 	large ae damage

Titan-Egi
- Ruin -> Rock Buster		single damage
- Outburst -> Mountain Buster	ae damage
- I -> Stone Shock		damage + shields party member
- II -> Razed Earth		ground damage + damage down within effect
- Enkindle -> Earthen Fury	ae damage + shields party

Ifrit-Egi
- Ruin -> Burning Strike	single damage
- Outburst -> Flaming Crush	ae damage
- I -> Crimson Cyclone		single damage
- II -> Embers			single damage + dot
- Enkindle -> Inferno		ae damage + dot


Dreadwyrm Trance
- Resets the recast on Outburst, Egi Assaults, and Enkindle.
- Ruin -> Wyrmwave		instant cast
- Outburst -> Deathflare	ae damage - does not end Trance
- I -> Flatten			large single damage - requires Bahamut at 70
- II -> Ability			requires Bahamut at 70
- Enkindle -> Akh Morn		large ae damage - requires Bahamut at 70

Firebird Trance
- Resets the recast on Outburst, Egi Assaults, and Enkindle.
- Ruin -> Scarlet Flame		instant cast
- Outburst -> Fountain of Fire	ae damage
- I -> Ability			requires Phoenix at 80
- II -> Brand of Purgatory	explodes after X seconds - requires Phoenix at 80
- Enkindle - Revelation		large ae damage - requires Phoenix at 80

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

hmn... as far as changes to jobs made in EndWalker... I would like to see some of the old actions that were deleted by StormBlood release brought back, albeit brought back in a way where said actions will fit into current rotations with comfort, instead of being clunky or just a big oof.