Keep overpower cone shaped!

[Shurrikhan]

You know what? I never actually looked at the listed radius, and I thought Tempest was visually bigger than that. Job fantasy further ruined.

I don't play a lot with WAR so I haven't had to get used to it yet, but I played it again last night and it still feels wrong and unsatisfying.

To be fair, I do feel like it makes plenty of sense (A) for Warrior to have bigger AoEs than most tanks (it's supposed to be the battlefield behemoth, after all), and (B) for later-step combo moves to have larger AoE radiuses befitting their larger, more powerful-looking animations.

Yes, the latter bonus will largely go to waste from having to engage with our first step (which... really just means making good use of Provoke and the healer not being late in pre-shielding/HoTing us), but that's fine. Our skills, though, should more closely match they're animations, and if that animation covers nearer to a 8-yalm range, go for it, especially if that capacity would fit the job it's on.

My main concern, again, is just this community's quickness (and I'm sure I've been a part of this) to demand overly specific parity, sometimes at cost to identity or without acknowledging what precedents they would set (or those precedent's implications in turn). How do we convince a frequently soured-to-Warrior tank population that, hey, Mythril Tempest really does deserve its flavor/fluff buff of an 8-yalm range while PLD's and GNB's circular AoE combos do not? And if we can't draw the line there... where does it end up?

They're already making most "friendly" abilities have a "whole arena" range, and if they really think positioning is too hard for most then making AoEs same range as Earthly Star seems the logical next step.

Would I like it. Nope, but it's clear most changes to jobs aren't made for those enjoying the jobs, but rater despite them and for those not playing the job.

I think we need to seriously question that latter trend, though. What does removing a presumed tiny part of a job's initial required investment (it's "fundamentals" to some, its "barrier to entry" to others) cost players' maximal enjoyment of that job?

In the end, we have finite time and interest, so we'll ultimately spend both across what jobs we like best. A job designer's goal, then, ought not to be how many or what portion of players can "enjoy" (threshold value to be determined, if such is even possible) each job, but rather what portion of players feel enjoyably engaged by/through the span of jobs available to them.

If, a few months or so after omni-leveling, I'd have ended up only fully enjoying myself on a handful of particular jobs anyways and my hours until the next expansion would mostly just be on them, those additional jobs aren't adding to the success of the job designers so much as to the success of pseudo-reiterative content: Though ultimately abandoned, those extra jobs got me to at least complacently (even if not enjoyably) play through leveling content more than I otherwise would have. But, in the end, my enjoyment of the current or more intrinsically enjoyable content will come primarily from my depth of engagement across those favored jobs more so than the breadth of engagement I have across all of them.

While we probably should replace mechanics that even the best users of a job don't particularly find "fun", but merely easily "dealt with", and which add far more to "barrier to entry" than to a job's ceiling, we need to be careful, too, of what effect even a more annoying or lackluster mechanic or consideration might have on those around it, as a sort of "keystone" element of the job's play.

Aside from the mere fact that the change was virtually unasked (and taken over the very frequent, very clear suggested alternatives), I think that was the largest failing of Kaiten's removal, for instance: Though worsened already by the changes to Ikishoten and Senei/Guren's costs before it, the removal of Kaiten finally allowed Kenki to work basically just as a Shinten charge counter. To some, perhaps that is a change for the better, but if the long-term benefit to them (i.e., from SAM then becoming one of their favored jobs, from which lens they come to better enjoy content) doesn't exceed the long-term cost to others (e.g., SAM mains), then the playerbase could only have lost job quality on the whole.