Breaking the Majority’s Silence: A Job Criticism Thread

[Derio]

Really hoping they just get the jobs right with DT. EW was a complete disaster in terms of job balance in both high end and normal content.

[Rithy255]

I feel like EW was a step too far into SHB Design.

i think SHB did some things well like getting rid of certain things such as TP, but in a lot of areas it just took out a lot in terms of making balance easier, overall SHB was decent for job design but focused a bit too heavily on balance over identity, I personally think it's also fine to take things out such as Aggro management but I would have hoped they'd at least give tanks a little more interactive team styled gameplay.

EW feels like instead of taking a step back it took serval steps forward when it shouldn't of, as now Job Design is at its lowest (for me anyway). with arguably even less consistent balance then SHB, a lot of balance for EW feels like it's just getting rid of what makes a Job feel different so later it's easier to just adjust potency instead of actually "balancing" the game or being new player friendly. I think tanks/healers have it the worst right now because they've had even more things took from them in the past beyond all feeling the same now.

I'd argue that despite a lot of EW changes it hasn't really helped anyone on the casual side, while also not really being fun for midcore, fun for hardcore (job design wise), in reality theirs no way that jobs will have "perfect balance" and I'm not advocating to going back to HW job design, In reality I think somewhere around Shb/SB would be ideal in terms of having Jobs easy to pickup but harder to master at the higher end, that doesn't even have to be every job either... Some Jobs should be designed for different players.

[mallleable]

I don't hate that raid buffs, and burst windows have been standardized. However, I do think that damage rotations outside of burst windows could use a little spice -- like redistribute some potency, complexity from burst windows to filler damage. Players spend the majority of their rotation doing filler damage so there need to be more points of interest sprinkled though out.

[Rithy255]

I don't hate that raid buffs, and burst windows have been standardized. However, I do think that damage rotations outside of burst windows could use a little spice -- like redistribute some potency, complexity from burst windows to filler damage. Players spend the majority of their rotation doing filler damage so there need to be more points of interest sprinkled though out.

I wouldn't say I hate the concept but the general idea of all buffs being 120 all the time kind of hurts job design in itself with jobs like old Paladin not having a real place. I think the real issue is that jobs feel more "special" for Not having a raid buff at this point. It's really hard to design jobs around 120 strict raid buffs as all your filler will have to be lined up into that raid buff timer, which can lead to worse job design overall.

I'd be interested in seeing more consistent raid buffs that last longer, 60 raid buffs old trick attack I don't know why it was removed... more partner raid buffs, Not to say 120 raid buffs should all go, but I hope theirs a bit more creativity with it, instead of just "press the 120 button during burst!"

[SieyaM]

Right, but when people talk about the job design team, they are talking about the job design team, not the programming team. So this piece of information is relevant.

Even so, the only jobs that get 30 new actions are new ones. The old ones get 3-5 new actions/traits, with hardly any changes usually, unless they are being completely revamped. That on its own would reduce this estimated time to a fraction of what I put and then if you split in half between 2-4 people it would become even more fractional than that to design them.

So when people say a few people isn't enough for the job design team, even the most extreme estimate I come up with doesn't fit the 2 and half year span between expansions.

This is also assuming that the only thing people on the job design team do is come up with new actions for jobs, they could have other tasks and they could be called to come back and make changes to actions or redesign if these actions don't play out very well when testing begins. This also assumes that there is no planning or creative period before actions are submitted for review. The example you laid out has 30 new job actions just ready to go at day 1 and new actions for each existing job as well.

[Jeeqbit]

I don't recall DRK as being "broken" on initial release.

DRK was full of jank on release. Reprisal and stuns, which you now have full control over, had to be unlocked by putting up Dark Dance and waiting for Parry procs, which was the case for many other abilities. Of course, many bosses dealt mostly magic damage so these parry procs wouldn't always happen either. Then there was the ability to spam Scourge for 100 potency when you already had so much to weave already in addition to a lot of other things to focus on (it should have had a proper cooldown).

That wasn't unique to DRK. Everything was full of jank like that in Heavensward.

Now- if we are talking AST- I would say that it's Square's worst case of a job rework

I think the 5.0 rework of AST was great and I enjoyed it a lot. However, it has gone downhill from there. The card frequency reduced and Minor Arcana no longer acts as a Royal Road replacement for useless cards, which makes it less fun to play for me.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I wouldn't say I hate the concept but the general idea of all buffs being 120 all the time kind of hurts job design in itself with jobs like old Paladin not having a real place. I think the real issue is that jobs feel more "special" for Not having a raid buff at this point. It's really hard to design jobs around 120 strict raid buffs as all your filler will have to be lined up into that raid buff timer, which can lead to worse job design overall.

I'd be interested in seeing more consistent raid buffs that last longer, 60 raid buffs old trick attack I don't know why it was removed... more partner raid buffs, Not to say 120 raid buffs should all go, but I hope theirs a bit more creativity with it, instead of just "press the 120 button during burst!"

Personally I don't care for the whole reworking everything into a single burst window they did. It just further pigeonholes overall job design. DPS need to come in different flavors that are more than simply aesthetics. Some jobs were better known for sustained output vs dumping the entire kit in 30 seconds and then just doing your basic combo while waiting for everything to come off cooldown. Rather than attempt catering to a meta in hopes that every job will be equally popular, I'd rather they give each job a unique feel a personality while making sure they are simply just viable in all content.