Devs, please make job crystals in lv 31+ content mandatory.

[rainichan]

Please upvote this for better visibility if you agree so it has a better chance of the devs seeing this/it being passed on to them!

Hello there! Late last year I received a survey from the dev team for playing for a long time - 8 years! - and within, it asked for feedback regarding what they could do to make the game better. A sentiment I see often in social media platforms is job crystals not being equipped in content after they are available to you and how disliked it is across the board.

A lot of those same people feel, when done purposefully, that it is akin to griefing a party of random people. Those that forget to save it on their gear set usually realize in a dungeon and rectify the issue after they leave/after the dungeon, but if they leave it gives them an unfair 30min leaving penalty if they are not dismissed. Before I continue, I will say I understand there are some that want to do a No Job Stone Challenge and that's fine! However, please go in with a premade party/use party finder to do so, and no, I haven't forgotten you in my suggestion.

Now, something I suggested in my survey, among other things, was a mandatory job stone check to queue for dungeons starting with Brayflox's Longstop - it's the first dungeon you can go to after hitting level 30, and since you can hit lv30 while in Haukke Manor and therefore cannot equip a job stone, Brayflox is the ideal dungeon to begin requiring a job stone. Along with this, make how to get your job stone more obvious - while it does pop up under your MSQ tracker, not everyone looks there or knows to look there if they're a newer player. Putting it in a text box that appears once you hit level 30 and finish your level 30 quest much like it would be once you finish your level 50 job quests and needing to be in HW areas to continue past lv50: "In order to queue for dungeons and trials past level 30, you must have a job stone equipped. To receive your job stone, please talk to (class NPC) to begin the quest to receive your job stone and continue your adventure!" or something similar would make this easier. For when you forget to equip it into a slot and save it to a gear set and try to queue, an error popping up with "Cannot enter (queue). Reason: no job stone equipped." or similar would help in reminding that a stone needs to be equipped in order to continue.

As for those who want to run a No Job Stone Challenge, whether for an entire 1-90 run or "how far can we get in this raid with no job stone" challenges, enable a toggle in the party options, much like enabling an unsynced party or silencing the Echo, and only allow it to be used in a premade party. That way, those who want to see if they can level from 1-90 can still do so with a premade party through PF or friends who want to help out.

I know a lot of people have discussed this, along with the suggestion to auto-equip stones (which is good!) but I feel auto-equipping and having it be a permanent equipped item takes away from those who do want to try to be just a GLD from 1 to 90. If that's the way they want to play, more power to them! However, I do feel that subjecting a group of random people to that sort of challenge is unfair to the 3/7/23 random people in a group who are not expecting it - it is, in fact detrimental to the rest of your group, and you'll likely find yourself on the receiving end of a group dismissal. Hopefully, with this compromise, everyone can be happy and live out their 24 CNJ kills of current raid bosses or becoming a level 90 PGL working with Hamon Holyfist, but also by not making someone feel bad by not having their stone on when queueing for a duty and possibly having to take a 30min penalty if they leave to fix their gear set to have the stone on.

If anyone has any other ideas or a better way to alert players to do this, or any other suggestions, please add them in here!

[Kansene]

I don't get why the job stone isn't automatically equipped when you equip the proper weapon to be honest. It would make more sense if you had to manually remove it if you for some outlandish reason want to play as your base class post-30.

I play RDM, SCH, GNB and SMN, all of which auto-equip the job stone since they have no base class (actually I think smn but not sch defaults to ARC but don't quote me on that) but when I wanna do stuff on my BLM or PLD which I play way less, I routinely forget the stone and accidentally queue into stuff as the pleb base class.

[rainichan]

I don't get why the job stone isn't automatically equipped when you equip the proper weapon to be honest. It would make more sense if you had to manually remove it if you for some outlandish reason want to play as your base class post-30.

I play RDM, SCH, GNB and SMN, all of which auto-equip the job stone since they have no base class (actually I think smn but not sch defaults to ARC but don't quote me on that) but when I wanna do stuff on my BLM or PLD which I play way less, I routinely forget the stone and accidentally queue into stuff as the pleb base class.

Yeah, SCH doesn't have the ACN designation on their weapons like a SMN has, so they have to have a stone on to play, but the rest of the old jobs have the class designations on their gear otherwise at higher levels. I'm not sure why this hasn't been done yet after 8 years of updated game with a lot of other great QoL updates, but between this, no unification on markers (stack, tankbuster, etc. - looking at you, World of Darkness,) and an update to the Hall of Novice and making it mandatory, I feel these things would make the game even better, but this is something I see getting talked about a LOT elsewhere being a problem and an irritation to many people.

I think that this is very rare. I've done nearly 10,000 dungeons, trials and raids and not seen it done intentionally.

Even if it happens, it only affects the potency of their attacks. The gear is what really matters for calculating the base damage that this potency uses and the gear should be intact whether a stone is equipped or not. It's going to be akin to someone doing their rotation poorly.

I've seen it a few times, and the few times I've seen it myself it was "oh s[kupo]t i forgot my stone i'm so sorry" or "i didn't realize, i'm new", but others have had problems with it that I have seen of it being on purpose as well as accidental - and not just on That One Subreddit! It would at least address the problem of forgetting if an error pops up to remind you to equip it, but it would also help new players who may not realize they can get their job stone at 30 to continue on with bigger and better booms.

[NightHour]

I don't get why the job stone isn't automatically equipped when you equip the proper weapon to be honest. It would make more sense if you had to manually remove it if you for some outlandish reason want to play as your base class post-30.

I play RDM, SCH, GNB and SMN, all of which auto-equip the job stone since they have no base class (actually I think smn but not sch defaults to ARC but don't quote me on that) but when I wanna do stuff on my BLM or PLD which I play way less, I routinely forget the stone and accidentally queue into stuff as the pleb base class.

SMN does have a base class, It's Arcanist.

[Jeeqbit]

I think that this is very rare. I've done nearly 10,000 dungeons, trials and raids and not seen it done intentionally.

Even if it happens, it only affects the potency of their attacks. The gear is what really matters for calculating the base damage that this potency uses and the gear should be intact whether a stone is equipped or not. It's going to be akin to someone doing their rotation poorly.

[zcrash970]

I think that this is very rare. I've done nearly 10,000 dungeons, trials and raids and not seen it done intentionally.

Even if it happens, it only affects the potency of their attacks. The gear is what really matters for calculating the base damage that this potency uses and the gear should be intact whether a stone is equipped or not. It's going to be akin to someone doing their rotation poorly.

Happened to me 4 times since 6.0 launched.

A CNJ in Tower of Babel
GLD in the lvl85 dungeon
ACN in Zot
And a ARC in the atherical sea

I don't even run that many dungeons. Maybe roulettes every now and but I'll be the first to admit that my luck with DF group is absolute shit.

It's just not potency, it's literally more than 60% of your skills.

[Jijifli]

I think that this is very rare. I've done nearly 10,000 dungeons, trials and raids and not seen it done intentionally.

Even if it happens, it only affects the potency of their attacks. The gear is what really matters for calculating the base damage that this potency uses and the gear should be intact whether a stone is equipped or not. It's going to be akin to someone doing their rotation poorly.

It doesn't need to be 'common' to be a problem.

Originally leveling dungeons didn't have Ilvl checks for hw+ dungeons. What happened was you'd get people who queue'd in with heavily outdated gear and would do 0 dps and get 1 shotted by the first roomwide, even with shields. Nobody finds that fun to deal with, but it took Square an entire 4 years to do anything about it. Why? Because a bunch of people were responding to anything about it with "Well I never ever encountered this." Which, ya, great, you never did. I did. Quite a few times in fact. It really puts a sour taste in my mouth, and that includes people intentionally not wearing their job stone, gimping themself out of multiple skills, while not actually 'adding challenge' like most would say because you can just get carried through.

It's also that players who tend to do this intentionally are also players who, from my experience, are very self centered. A friend of mine even experienced this while doing ShB story, got a gld in the 73 trial who decided to throw a huge hissy fit and force pull the boss instantly, then make sure we wipe to ads, and pull asap again on wipe to avoid kick. It completely took him out of the immersion he had, and the difficulty of removing the problem became worse and worse. Could he acted like that as a PLD too? Sure, but like I said, it seems the vast majority of people running no job stone are also generally selfish and rude at any indication that they should be wearing it.

[hydralus]

They already have content requiring you to have a jobstone equipped so it's not like they have to reinvent the wheel.

That said they won't do it anyway. Hell they won't even put ilvl requirements on MSQ trials... for some reason. Why you can enter the dark inside with a level 1 sword and no other gear, I haven't a clue. Maybe they find it funny.

[rainichan]

They already have content requiring you to have a jobstone equipped so it's not like they have to reinvent the wheel.

That said they won't do it anyway. Hell they won't even put ilvl requirements on MSQ trials... for some reason. Why you can enter the dark inside with a level 1 sword and no other gear, I haven't a clue. Maybe they find it funny.

There's ilvl requirements on MSQ trials; my husband got to one of the more recent ones and is undergeared - only plays sometimes, isn't always on, etc. so getting to the one in 6.2, he was under the needed i585 by a little bit. As long as your items as a whole add up to it, or you go in as a premade group, you can hit or bypass the ilvl requirement. The requirements for trials start at Porta Decumana and it's i42 - just on par with your non-i90 job gear. The only 3 not needing an ilvl is the first 3 primal fights. It's on par with the dungeon requirements, which start at Castrum and Prae while the dungeons prior (Sastasha - Aurum Vale) have none. They were introduced in patch 2.1 for everything from before, and everything going forward, the patch notes reflect every duty's ilvl.

There's no reason for them not to make job stones mandatory, like they do in pvp the more traction it gets, the more seriously the devs will look at it. They do, on occasion, check these forums.

[VeyaAkemi]

There's ilvl requirements on MSQ trials;

There is a caveat to this, the first two trials of any given expansion don't have iLvl requirements, but the third and post-patch trials do, this is very consistent across all expansions, so Ravana and Bismark have no req, but Thordan does, so on, which means you can 100% que for Zodiark as a Gladiator without anything but an Weathered Shortsword and not a single other piece of gear, so long as your PLD is at least level 83.