Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Shurrikhan]

As for why players lock out jobs - it's based on emotion, not logic. If word gets out that a job is weak, players start feeling like they're held back when they hit those sub 1% wipes, especially on launch.

Sure, which can sometimes make briefly overpowering a previous underpowered job a reasonable approach (so long as we consider the main goal of balance to be freedom of choice). My point before, though, was simply that we don't need to nihilistically police all ways of even carefully observing the details of job design on the assumption that someone will prefer a given job as a package deal and then campaign for all others to then fall short of that favorite of theirs. While those players may exist, we needn't devolve discussions to that level.

Similarly, there are reasons that guides for some jobs, even at their most comprehensive and concise, will fall far shorter than others; jobs haven't been designed to take the same amount of effort to optimize -- quite the explicit opposite; while individual milage may very, summative realities are still... reality.

The problem is this community, and the dev team's inability to put their foot down on this.

Together, yes. But the problems the community feeds back into the game are, themselves, largely a result of how the devs have handled the game and its PR. Why wouldn't a community become increasingly DPS-obsessive, for instance, when the game's steadily devaluing/dropping all else?

Everything does devolve into 'my job first' politicking, though. There will always be a job that you level first. There will always be a job that you prog on. No matter how versatile of a player you are, there is always going to be a job that you're most comfortable on, because you've spent the most amount of time on it.

Across both this character and my main, I tend to level a different job first each expansion. I rarely even prog on the same job twice in a row. The same goes for like... half of anyone I've been in lasting statics with, swapping their mains at least per expansion. For many, too, the one they've spent the most time on is not the one they best understand or parse best with.

If you had an infinite amount of time to spend mastering the ins and outs of every job, then perhaps you could answer this question in a fair way. But often times 'easy' ends up being the same as 'unwanted'.

Why would it, if as often as not, easy jobs have been the top performers? Even if, again, actually balanced around difficulty, for all but the highest end of players or much deeper into prog (with time to adjust around one's BLM, to better leverage a late LotD for cleave, or the like), the "easier" jobs would still start off the safer choice.

The community tells you that a job is bad because it has a rDPS disadvantage. Players stop playing it and become out of touch with how it is optimized. Then it gets dismissed as easy.

That feedback loop is a good point and a reasonable concern, but does it actually pan out here? We've got plenty of people trying to theorycraft the shit out of the lowest-performing jobs, too, out of sheer curiosity. And what those kinds of theorists come up, where any such further extent is possible, with is rarely ever what would come naturally to those investing play-time alone into it would manage. Modern MCH isn't considered relatively simple, for instance, just because people stopped playing it, any more than Stormblood MCH was considered overly complex or downright arcane off of even lower numbers.

That's one of the reasons why I want to hear the dev team take back their comment about 'balancing jobs based on difficulty'. No, they've never actually done that. The most broken jobs have historically been very accessible, straightforward, and popular. These are not niche jobs where 1% of the playerbase retreats into a cave for ten years to emerge a master capable of playing it. The dev team only made that claim because that's what the forums have been shouting from the rooftops, and they hate standing up to the playerbase on anything.

Agreed. But I don't think a "difficulty should/will play no factor in our balancing decisions" would be at least as bad, both as for PR and as a sustainable philosophy, in part because if there is no reward for taking the time (weeks or days, instead of days or hours) to learn the harder job, just playing those harder jobs will end up treated as egotistic griefing; at least when it carries some consideration it's only treated as such when someone actually underperforms significantly (since it's understandable; they're learning a job that has a much longer time to pay off, but will at least eventually pay off).

The dev team balance primarily by mollifying player complaints. Job advantages have historically been proportional to the number of players crying over them.

I'm not sure that's true, at least without conflating complaints about damage with conflates about anything/everything else. Take Stormblood Warriors, for instance; their primarily complaint was that they did more for less (objectively true at the time), and that their lauded new skill was a cleanse that couldn't cleanse a majority of debuffs. They wanted a bit less finnicky a burst window (less sharp a punishment for a half-GCD's loss, relative at least to other tanks) and for their skill to actually work as stated. It's hard to look at the massive simplifications and buffs that the devs threw at those critiques and say they were mollifying the actual complaints in question.

I want to see them balance with an iron fist. Set an clear and transparent standard of fairness and refuse to waver from it. That will win significantly more respect.

Aye, that'd be preferable.

Same reason why I want to see them actually talk about game and job direction. Show me what your vision for this game is. Don't just react to complaints.

Same. The problem-placating approach has been both rife with Monkey's Paw solutions in the short-term and probably reductive for the game in the long-run.