The problem with Tripling Down on Shadowbringers Job Design

[Mikey_R]

This wasn't directed at me, but I would love to answer it.

To me, job Identity is multiple things hence the confusion.

* Visual Identity - Does this job look like other jobs? Could you confuse its dress, style, or animations for another job?
* Thematic Identify - When describing this job to another person, (e.g., "Treasure Hunter", "Mage obsessed with destruction"), could it be confused for another job?
* Input Identity - How similar is the sequence of keys I have to press compared to another job? This is somewhat under the player's control, but mostly up to the job designers. Mudra input vs. Hypercharge vs. BRD procs all have different feel in how and when I press things.
* Mechanical Identity - If I were to describe the meters without visuals or names how easily confused could they be to another meter. E.g., meter that starts at 0 and goes to 100 in increases of 5, 10 or 15 based on user actions.

In all the above the sign of distinctness is how specific I can be and there still be confusion. This is our brain's attempt at grouping like things and removing distinctiveness in order to store the information more efficiently.

I think part of the issue is that there are jobs or parts of jobs that have gotten too close for some people in one or more of those areas. That's when they start to blend in their mind and feels same-y. The annoyance for the designers is that different jobs need to be distinct feeling in all those categories, not just one or two. The more jobs there are and the tighter the constraints around balance (more fights to balance around), the harder it becomes to maintain distinctness.

And here we have an example of someone who read and answered the question. We have different categories covering different aspects of a job and a brief description of what each category represents. This is fairly close to what I would also describe as Job identity.

As for the last paragraph, this is the problem with people at the moment. They have blurred the lines so much that everything looks the same. However, the miss the nuance associated with each individual thing that makes them unique. This is what I am trying to make people see. These things are not the same and they all have different considerations applied to each one. There is only so much you can do to make things feel distinct when everyone is looking at things from such a broad perspective. get in there, take in the nuance.