Request for Better Dev Communication Regarding Job Balancing and Adjustments

[Atelier-Bagur]

The kicker is that the devs actually have a Dev Blog. They occasionally post some neat articles, like this one where they talked with some artists on how they designed animations for swimming and underwater actions. That's some cool shit right there, hearing actual devs talk about what they do and the troubles they face designing stuff. Maybe, just maybe they could get some members of the Job Design team to communicate stuff there? Or maybe a Lodestone post? Something, anything, because Yoshi-P going "we don't have a lot of time this Live Letter to discuss changes" is getting real old, and as a player I feel like I don't understand what the hell his team is thinking. Yoshi-P once stated that it's important to have open and honest communication with the player base, and that no longer exists when it comes to Job design.

To be fair, they dont go over every single detail for job adjustments within the live letter because its indeed a very heavy load to cover something that is supposed to be a general expected content overview in a patch. That being said this is where they do need to have a separate stream for job adjustments so that they can dedicate focus on communicating those changes and getting feedback from players more, because yeah this stuff is important too.

[Lunalepsy]

It won't matter. Soon enough they'll all be the same job, just different animation/gear glams.

True this. Homogeneity>Uniqueness

[Faafetai]

Samurai's Iaijutsu range extension in 6.05 served almost no practical purpose, as a SAM main myself I have not encountered a single situation in the current Savage tier where this change was beneficial. On the other hand GNB has been drooling over this change for their Continuation skill.

I know this may not be a huge issue on teams who are use to playing together, but dear lord in prae, castrum and every dungeon I have Midare Setsugekka or Tenka Goken. Sometimes the tank will move just slightly backwards and it would cancel the cast of these two skills. Higibana was usually at the perfect time where they wouldn't move, but this honestly would make me pull my hair out. I know you have to move sometimes as a tank because I tank, but it would get so obnoxious. It could have also been an issue with mobs not being where they were for me as they were for the server. I have had many issues with other things ping related where the mobs will be farther away than they actually were or somehow behind me and my character would do a half spin to get to a mob that was way in front of me on my screen. I feel it was just a minor gripe honestly, but I could see how this change could have been one people wished for not playing with decent ping.

Mechanist has been getting the short end of the stick for really no reason. I agree with pretty much everything you are saying and would wish for them to be more open and communicate honestly with why they are making these changes and maybe hold some form of vote with the player base through the game. Steam does this for its census data to know what types of pc's people are playing on to better understand who has a potato pc and who is actually using their platform, so they know not to go through with changes that would needlessly increase performance. Though it was not very transparent that I could have a simplified steam until I did an extensive search about how to get the clutter from my steam library (streams playing in the back ground or random gifs just loading on the community pages, you can change it so you just have your library and nothing else) so I could play Pyre. This still stands though at least they ask. I would like for them to ask what changes not just go through with some or mention many and just I guess forget about them because someone higher up told them we need to change things for those use to mobile gaming because that is where the quick money is currently.

Ask everyone what they actually want. Even a poll on what classes everyone plays the most, how often they play in general, playing habits could also help. Knowing if many just do not jive with a class but wish to stick it out and they are who the devs are changing things for not the people who enjoy the classes for many hours a day or week or months. I do not mean to just listen to everyone and not have an idea for how they wish the game to be played, but to take into consideration the voices that maybe play the jobs more than they do such as healers. The devs do not play them so listen to people who actually do.

[Recon1o6]

+1 to this
The jobs are a heavy part of what you would call in development the primary gameplay loop. The core focus of the gameplay that everything revolves around. Naturally when unpopular changes are made to it, there's usually damn good reason. The worsening of this Primary loop is why some jobs go unplayed for years.

When yoshida decided some time ago he was refusing to discuss job changes further in live letters, it was pretty much unanimous the uproar. We have seen since then its because he refuses to have explainations for why things are changed, what the focus of each job is etc. All of this has resulted in worse and worse job design over the years, particularly since yoshida has very heavy biases as has been increasingly documented.

The sudden reappearance of jobs in the live letter was a good step in the right direction. As was the answering questions in letter 69 (the horrible dismissal of healer complaints aside)
We've had much fewer Q&A sessions over the years. We need more communication from the dev team

It will be better from the devs too in the long run. They can get better feedback and act upon it if they genuinely did miss issues such as drk's blood weapon needing stacks for YEARS on end.

[Nethereal]

Imagine having crazy overhead on things that don't need overhead at all and for things that do need overhead you just got: The bros
Yoshida having any major say in how jobs are balanced at all is a huge issue that has now fully bared its ugly teeth.
Kinda backwater shit is this? Pay someone to do the job properly.

[Xenon_S]

I know this may not be a huge issue on teams who are use to playing together, but dear lord in prae, castrum and every dungeon I have Midare Setsugekka or Tenka Goken. Sometimes the tank will move just slightly backwards and it would cancel the cast of these two skills.

I do concede that my main experience playing samurai is within the current savage tier, but it is nice to see that change being positive in lower level areas.

[Xenon_S]

Kinda backwater shit is this? Pay someone to do the job properly.

If the language barrier wasn't an issue, a lot of players (for better or worse) would probably volunteer to do it for free.

[Raoabolic]

but it is nice to see that change being positive in lower level areas.

This might be the silver lining in the LL. I'm a bit interested to see if I get more than one button to press if I roll a sub 50 dungeon.

[Wolwosh]

I really don't get the Ast button bloat complaint. Its actually fun because you have buttons to think about... Its the main reason why I find WHM and MCH so boring , but sure lets make everyone job boring as all hell

[baklava151]

I really don't get the Ast button bloat complaint. Its actually fun because you have buttons to think about... Its the main reason why I find WHM and MCH so boring , but sure lets make everyone job boring as all hell

From what I've seen it's not necessarily that people want buttons outright deleted (other than Undraw) but for them to be better consolidated and for the opener to not be so busy in terms of how much you're hitting.